Deadlands--Thunder Moon Rising

by Jeffrey Mariotte

  “Not like I had anything else to do. Or mebbe I did, after all.”

  “You work for me, remember? You do what I tell you to.”

  Kanouse furiously scratched his left armpit. “Yeah, so I hear.”

  “Listen, Mo. I was reading about some killings in the area, over the past year. Usually more than one person murdered. The victims were always torn into shreds. Sometimes a killer was seen, and if he was, he was always described as having skin as black as a raven feather and burning yellow eyes. You remember hearing about any of those?”

  “Boss, the Epitaph ain’t exactly the most reliable source of information. The folks who write that usually have rotgut poisonin’, or they’re just plumb crazy.”

  “That might be, but those stories match what I saw when Hank Turville and I fought Daisie’s murderer. That was no human being. Neither was what killed people behind Soto’s last night.”

  “You been sippin’ the rotgut, too?”

  “I’m just asking if you remember anything about those killings.”

  “And I’m tellin’ you if you keep talkin’ that way, folks are gonna think you’re a lunatic. Like I already do.”

  Tuck had had enough. He had never liked Kanouse, but Turville had kept him on, which made Tuck think the deputy must have had some good qualities he just wasn’t seeing. But Kanouse had been scornful, rude, and antagonistic ever since Tuck had taken the job. The only thing he’d done that was remotely helpful was pick up some newspapers, and Tuck figured with a little training, a monkey could do that.

  “Hand me that badge,” he said. He pushed himself to his feet and extended his right hand.

  Kanouse looked at him as if he’d completely lost his mind. Tuck supposed there was a slender possibility that he had—that everything he believed about the dark creatures was the result of his own insanity.

  But he didn’t think so.

  “Why?” Kanouse asked.

  “Because you’re obviously not interested in being my deputy. Maybe you worked well with Hank, but I’ve had all the guff from you I care to take. Hand it over.”

  Kanouse puffed out his chest and thrust his chin toward Tuck, as if prepared to fight for it. But then, perhaps realizing how foolish that would be, he reached to his chest and unpinned it. Instead of handing it to Tuck, he tossed it to the desk. It bounced once and skidded, dropping to the floor. Tuck left it there.

  “That gun yours, or the department’s? Don’t lie, because if it belongs to us there’ll be paper on it.”

  The deputy—former deputy—glared at him, but then lowered his eyes and pulled the weapon from its holster. “Don’t throw that,” Tuck warned.

  Kanouse held it by the butt and set it gently on the desk. “How’s that?” he asked. He obviously didn’t care what the answer was. Tuck reached for it and slid it closer to his side.

  “Now the key to the office.”

  Kanouse swore, but dug into his pocket. He came out with a key, which he flipped at the desk. It bounced once, then hit the floor. “Anythin’ else? My gold tooth?”

  “You can keep that,” Tuck said. “Now get out of here. I don’t want to see you here again unless it’s in chains.”

  “Don’t worry, Bringloe. I got no interest in keepin’ company with you.”

  “That’s two of us. Get gone.”

  Kanouse paused in the doorway. “Men who think like you don’t live long around here,” he said.

  “Is that a threat, Mo?”

  “Take it however you like, rummy.” Kanouse showed Tuck his back and stepped into the street.

  After his former deputy left, Tuck settled back into his office chair. Instead of opening another newspaper, he put the new hat Missy had given him carefully on a stack of them and patted down his hair. Then he folded his hands on his chest, leaned back, and closed his eyes.

  He wasn’t there long before the door opened again. Tuck opened his eyes, half-expecting to see Kanouse back for more, perhaps with another gun in his hand.

  Instead, it was the girl known as Little Wing, and the Apache scout who always seemed to be trailing around after her. Kuruk, Tuck remembered. He lowered his hands to the desktop and sat up straight. “Morning, Miss,” he said.

  “Good morning, Marshal,” Little Wing replied.

  “Have a seat, if you can find one that’s not buried in newspapers.”

  “A lot of words,” she said, her gaze wandering about the cluttered office. “Is there wisdom in them?”

  “A lot of nonsense in these, I think.” Tuck got up and cleared off a chair for her, then one for Kuruk. The Apache thanked him and sat. “If there’s much wisdom, it’s hidden pretty well.”

  “Isn’t that always the way?” Little Wing asked.

  “I reckon it is.”

  She fluttered a hand toward the southwest. “The wisdom this world contains amounts to a few pebbles in those mountains. A few leaves in the deepest forest. Hard to find, harder to recognize.”

  “Don’t you want to sit, Miss? Little Wing?” he asked.

  She eyed the chair as if she had never seen one before. Kuruk gestured toward it, palm up. Finally, she nodded her head once and lowered herself onto it. “Thank you,” she said.

  Kuruk edged forward in his seat, until he was perched right on the edge. “Little Wing wanted to talk to you,” he explained. “She said it was important. So here we are.”

  “Talk about what?”

  Little Wing looked at the scout and took a deep breath. Her hands moved constantly, and her gaze rarely settled in any one place for more than an instant. Still, she seemed more solid, somehow, than when Tuck had first met her. It was almost as if part of her had been missing, and she’d been as insubstantial as steam. The more time she spent in town, the more substance she took on. He no longer felt like he could see through her, if the light was just right.

  “About me,” she said. Even her words carried more weight than they had. Once they had seemed like they would float away on the lightest of breezes, and they’d made no sense to Tuck. “Who I am.”

  “Who are you?” Tuck asked. “Little Wing isn’t your name?”

  “It is the name Kuruk gave me,” she said. “It does what a name needs to do. If someone speaks it, I answer. If someone wants to talk about me, they know what name to use.”

  “But your original name—”

  “I do not remember that. Little Wing works. I like it.”

  “Then what do you mean, who you are?”

  She touched her breast, but then her hand flitted away again, as they both did. “Who I am. What I am, where I came from. Why I am here.”

  “And you want to tell me? Why me?”

  “Because you matter.”

  Tuck felt his cheeks start to warm. “Matter how?”

  “In what is to come,” she said. “You are part of it. Central to it.”

  She was veering into confusing territory again, saying things he couldn’t parse. “What’s to come? What is that?”

  “I cannot say.”

  “You don’t know, or you can’t say?”

  “I … cannot say.”

  “Well, what can you tell me?”

  She glanced over at Kuruk, and got an almost imperceptible nod. “There was a Catholic order called the Sisters of Charity. The sisters helped run a field hospital at Cemetery Ridge.”

  “Cemetery Ridge.”

  “I believe so, yes.”

  “And what’s that got to do with you?”

  “I was…” She paused, and then closed her mouth. The pause went on for a minute.

  “Go on,” Tuck urged.

  “I … I do not remember much after that. Until the mule train.”

  The jump surprised Tuck, but the whole story, such as it was, didn’t hang together in any coherent way. “The one where the army found you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You remember what happened?”

  Those always-moving hands stopped at her throat, and she looked as if she might cry. “I
do not care to. But I do.”

  “Can you tell me?”

  “It was … horrible. We were almost ready to make camp. The sun was low and our shadows were long before us. I remember being hungry, and thinking about biscuits and beans. And then … then they came out of the hills. Dozens of them.”

  Tuck looked at Kuruk, but the scout just gave him a blank stare. “Who did?” Tuck asked. “Came out of the hills?”

  “Not-men,” she said.

  Tuck’s blood chilled. “If they weren’t men, what were they?”

  “Shards of night. They came and they … and they—”

  “You don’t have to say it,” Tuck said. “I’ve heard as much as I need to.”

  “It was bad,” Kuruk said. “Real bad. I was there when we found them. Found her.”

  “And you survived? You were the only one, right?”

  “She was.”

  “I … I do not know how. They were … they were tearing, rending. Everybody. Everything, even the animals. I … I fell asleep. Unconscious. When I awoke, Kuruk was over me.”

  “And that’s all you remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you come to be with the train?”

  “I do not remember.”

  Something about the quickness with which she’d answered caught Tuck’s notice. “Don’t remember, or don’t want to say?”

  “I … I was walking.”

  “Where?”

  “I do not know. In the desert.”

  “Where were you before that?”

  Sweat filmed her brow, and she was clutching her left hand with her right, holding it so tight her fingers were white. “I do not remember.”

  Her story didn’t make any more sense than the things she usually said. He supposed she could have been so injured, or frightened, that any memories of what came before had been lost. Her mind seemed less able to hold thoughts in than most people’s, as if it were a net and her thoughts and memories liquid. “Then what?”

  “I was thirsty. Lost. I heard animals, voices. I found them, spoke with them, and they took me in. I walked with them, or rode in a wagon, until the … the attack.”

  Tuck opened his desk drawer and brought out the bandanna with the claws wrapped inside it. “I don’t want to upset you, Miss. But I wonder if you could look at these and tell me if they came from the—what’d you call them? Not-men?”

  She sucked in a deep, stuttering breath, then swallowed hard. “I will try.”

  He set it on the desktop and unrolled the cloth. The claws were as black and shiny as obsidian.

  Little Wing gave a frightened yelp and jerked back in her chair. Tuck quickly covered the claws again.

  “Y-yes,” she said. She was quaking with fear, pressed against the chair’s rungs, as far from the desk as she could get without standing up. From the looks of her, her legs wouldn’t hold her anyway. “Please, put them away!”

  He took them off the desk and shoved them back into the drawer. “I’m sorry. I had to know.”

  “Th-they are,” she said. He had seen soldiers under fire who weren’t as frightened as she was. “I … I wish I could tell you more, about that day. I do remember the not-men, and their claws. They were terrible. But I cannot … there is more, but I cannot recall it.”

  Tuck waved his hand at her. “It’s all right, Miss. Don’t try. It’s not that important.”

  “I believe that it is. Very important.”

  “Not right this second. It appears things are coming back to you a little at a time. That’ll work. Let it come, and if you think of something else you think I should know, I’ll be here.”

  “Yes,” she said. She looked relieved, as if he had given her license to not force memories to come that she wasn’t ready to face. “Yes, I will. You will need to know everything, before it is over.”

  “Before what’s over?” he asked. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he regretted them. He had just given her leave not to think about whatever was troubling her, and then demanded to know more.

  Her mouth opened and closed a few times. She met his gaze and held it. “I cannot say, exactly. Not that I do not want to. I almost know, but not quite. The image will not become clear for me. I can almost see it, but as if through a smoky haze. All I know is that it is getting worse, fast.”

  “What is?”

  “That is what I cannot tell you yet.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying, Miss. Are you telling me you see things that haven’t happened yet?”

  She smiled for the first time since entering the office. “So it appears.”

  Tuck wasn’t about to ask for more clarification. “When you can see it, let me know.”

  “I will. And I will do what I can to help. I pray that it will be enough.”

  She rose and walked out the door without another word. Kuruk stood, and started to follow, but he stopped just inside the doorway.

  “Cemetery Ridge,” he said. “Do you know what that is?”

  Tuck had known it the moment she’d said it. “It’s Gettysburg.”

  “She said something about it before. She was incoherent. Delirious. But I thought she said Cemetery Ridge, and something about a devil’s deck, and something about mead. I asked around, and finally an old soldier told me it sounded like somebody talking about the battle at Gettysburg. Devil’s Den. Meade was a Union general. And Pickett’s Charge was against the Union line at Cemetery Ridge. Casualties were—”

  “I know how they were.”

  “Were you there?”

  “No. But you didn’t fight in the war without hearing about it.”

  “Anyway, this old fella said they were there. The Sisters of Charity. A Catholic order, like she said, helping tend to the wounded.”

  “But what does that have to do with her? She wasn’t there. That was 1863. Eighteen years ago. She might be eighteen, but no more than.”

  “Who can say, Marshal? This world is a much stranger place than most people ever know. I wouldn’t want to be the one to say what’s possible and what isn’t. Would you?”

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Reconsidering his initial reaction, Tuck went to the fort to see Colonel Cuttrell. What the man’s wife did was no business of Tuck’s, and she had seemingly climbed onto Montclair’s wagon of her own free will. But maybe that impression had been mistaken. There were all kinds of pressures one person could use against another, and physical force was only one of them. Some of the others were worse, because they could break down a person’s spirit, and that was a wound that healed more slowly than the kind caused by violence.

  Cuttrell would probably hear about it from others, maybe from several. But Tuck had been a witness, and however ill-suited he felt for the job, he was an officer of the law. The encounter had taken place in his town. He bore a responsibility to make sure Sadie Cuttrell was safe, and that she had gone with Montclair willingly.

  A dark-haired, muscular lieutenant named McKenna was Cuttrell’s aide-de-camp. Tuck told him what he wanted, and after about five minutes, McKenna ushered him into the colonel’s office. It was a big space with a map-covered table on one end, surrounded by chairs, and a desk at the other, with a bookcase beside it. The walls were bare, but a couple of braided rugs covered some of the floorboards. Cuttrell sat at the desk with a big ledger book before him. When the men entered, he set his pen down on a blotter next to the book and capped his inkwell. He didn’t stand. “Welcome, Marshal,” he said. “It isn’t often we see the law from town on our fort. Something I can do for you?”

  Cuttrell was a lean man, his face weathered by hard duty. His golden hair was tinged with silver. It curled off his ears and around his collar. His chin sported a neat, graying beard, and his eyes were brown and small. His most prominent feature was a thin nose that jutted forward as if it carried a grudge and wanted everyone to know it. His ears were small, almost without lobes, but they stood away from his head like half-open doors.

  Tuck crossed the o
ffice and extended his hand. At that prompting, Cuttrell rose briefly from his seat, gave Tuck’s hand a single, perfunctory shake, then sat again. Tuck remained standing. “I’m here about your wife,” he said.

  McKenna’s boot scraped the floor, as if he’d been caught off-guard by Tuck’s statement. That made Tuck curious, but the lieutenant was behind him, by the door, and Tuck wanted to watch the colonel’s reaction.

  As it happened, Cuttrell barely reacted at all. He scanned the ledger book, wet his thumb, and turned the page. “Sadie? What about her?”

  “I saw her get into a wagon with Jasper Montclair. They left town together. I thought you should know.”

  At that, Cuttrell looked up at Tuck, regarding him as one might a busker with a traveling medicine show. “You’re confused. She barely knows the man. I’m not sure she does at all, for that matter. I barely know him.”

  “I’m sorry, Colonel, but I’m not. I have made her acquaintance, and his.” He gave a brief account of the heated conversation he had interrupted before.

  “Jimmy?” Cuttrell said. “You often accompany her into town. Have you seen any such encounters?”

  McKenna cleared his throat. “No, sir, I have not.”

  “To your knowledge, is my wife familiar with Mr. Montclair?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know, sir. As you’re aware, I’ve been on duty, here with you all morning.”

  “Yes, quite.” Cuttrell returned his attention to Tuck. “I’m not casting doubt on your powers of observation, Marshal Bringloe. I’m merely saying that you must have been mistaken. Perhaps the sun was in your eyes.”

  Tuck remembered the glare from the windows across the street. “It may have been, Colonel.”

  “As I thought. Jimmy, show the Marshal to the front gate, and then locate Mrs. Cuttrell.”

  “The front gate, sir?”

  Cuttrell uncapped the inkwell, dipped his pen, and looked down at the ledger book. “The marshal has no jurisdiction on this post, and therefore no reason to be here. Ever again, Marshal Bringloe. I make myself clear, do I not?”

  That was an extreme reaction—civilians went into the fort all the time, and troopers visited the town. He had done something to anger Cuttrell. He just wasn’t sure quite what it had been. “Thanks for your time, Colonel,” Tuck said. Cuttrell didn’t answer.