“I’ll ante up and reckon you’re the one they call Red.” My voice was shaky but I reined it tight. I shifted my aim to him. He had six inches on the next tallest man there and more gristle than the rest combined and was the easiest to hit.
His eyes barely lit on me before shifting to Roper. They were coal black with no red in them, at least not there in the light.
“You fed.” His voice was rainbarrel deep and hard.
“I had to.” Now, there was a quaver for you. “It was a long ride into town.”
“And a long ride back. For you, almost an eternity. I told you what happens after the first time. The sun won’t hurt you until then. The effect may be delayed but not avoided. An hour this way or that can make a difference, and you wouldn’t have survived a second dawn. You put us all at risk.”
“He came through, Red.” Cora sounded timid. I hadn’t known her three minutes, but it seemed out of character.
“Don’t take his part unless you want to have horse instead.”
That silenced her. Red didn’t yell, but his words rang like a hammer on an anvil. He seemed to have some kind of accent—Mexican, maybe, despite hair color and pallor—but it might just have been his careful way with the language I noticed, as if he was borrowing it and wanted to give it back just as he found it.
I cracked back the hammer. The Colt was a double-action but I wanted his attention.
“I come here for gold,” I said, “but I’ll just take my horse and go. Nobody’s eating it tonight or any other.”
The big man looked at me full on for the first time. “It wasn’t your horse I was talking about. Roper’s has served his purpose. Do you want to see the gold?”
“I seen it. I figure what I seen is all of it. If I wasn’t hung over I never would’ve fell for no bank out in the middle of nowhere begging to be robbed.”
“Hernando.”
He barked the name without taking his eyes off me. A man with two little triangles of black moustache at the corners of his wide mouth turned and shuffled out. He was back in a couple of minutes dragging an army footlocker. At Red’s direction he scraped it into the middle of the room and lifted the lid. It was filled to the top with yellow fire. The coins matched the one Roper had given me. The sight pretty near disarmed me, but I tightened my grip on the pistol.
“Go ahead, fill your pockets,” Red said. “You’ll need an explanation for how they came into your possession, but I’ve found gold has a way of evaporating suspicion. It makes partners out of strangers and friends out of enemies.”
“Talk sensible. Roper said your job was to protect it from road agents.”
“Admirable. Inspired, no doubt, by this star I made from a coin. The appearance of authority quiets newcomers long enough to hear my proposition.”
“I knew you wasn’t no law.”
“But I am. Hundreds of men and women were slaughtered on my word alone, many years ago. Pardon my ill manners. Out in this waste one comes to neglect the proprieties. I am General Alejandro Rojas, late in the service of Charles, King of Spain and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. That’s his likeness.” He gestured toward the coins.
I laughed high and harsh. “You fried your brains in the heat. Them coins are three hundred years old.”
“Three hundred thirty-three. I had the pressing equipment shipped from Gibraltar in 1537 and supervised the first run. Of course, that was before the curse.”
I let him jabber. I couldn’t get my mind off that footlocker. I’d raised my goal to include survival and making away with all it contained. I’d bluffed folks less simple.
“We drafted native labor to transport the gold from Tenochtitlan,” he said. “We weren’t subtle about it, and many of our prospects resented the whip and thumbscrew. One was a priest, who when we dragged him from the pagan temple said something in his savage tongue and spat in my face. Naturally I had him dismembered. I did not learn the significance of his action until the Hunger.”
That distracted me from the gold. I remembered I hadn’t had a bite in twenty-four hours. That rum on an empty stomach had commenced to make me hear things he couldn’t be saying.
“Chupador de sangre.” He seemed to enjoy the taste of the foreign words; which weren’t foreign to him. “Bloodsucker; a fresh title for my string. I was voracious, but the sight of solid food sickened me. Upon impulse I preyed on an Aztec slave. I was fortunate in that our expedition was only hours from home. I felt the weakness in the sun that Roper knows so well. I slept, satiated, but when the orb rose the following morning the first shaft burned me where I lay on my pallet. I fled for the darkness of the mission, where I avoided immolation, but the burn would not heal. Later I had all the religious iconography stripped away and buried. Once the building was desanctified I recovered. I am, as I said, cursed.”
I kept my mouth shut. He was loco sure enough. I hoped he wasn’t so far gone he’d try to jump an armed man. I’d drop him, but if the others joined in I’d have a fight on my hands.
He seemed to know what I was thinking. “Gentlemen. Lady.”
The men wore bandannas around their necks, all except Red, whose throat was bare. Now they drew them down and advanced into the light. Each had two tiny craters three or four inches below the left ear, as if they’d tangled with barbed wire. Cora’s showed when she swept back her mass of shoulder-length hair. Roper’s looked redder and rawer than the others.
“I alone am unmarked,” confirmed Red. “My condition was caused by black magic, not by having been fed upon. I am like Adam, who alone among men has no navel.
“We subsist on blood. When humans are unavailable—a chronic condition here—we make do with stray horses and other creatures that are barely sensate and so have no souls to animate them when they perish. Their remains go into the well, as the spectacle of a pile of bones might frighten away the intelligent bipeds we prefer. Do you know now why you’ve been summoned?”
I was feeling as pale as the rest, but I kept my grip tight on the Colt. “You got particular bedbugs is all; they favor necks. Now go fetch some sacks and get to work emptying that there box. I’m fixing to ride out of this crazy house a rich thief.”
Roper said, “You always was slow, Syke. When you ride out, it’ll be to fetch someone back to take the taste of horse and Gila out of our mouths. All the towns close enough to ride to and back are too far away for them that’s fed to make it home before we burn up like ants in a skillet. I took my turn; now it’s yours.”
“Don’t forget them coins for bait.” This was the man with the patch on one eye. “See can you interest more than one in our little old bank. We’ll be hungry an hour after you’re sucked dry, scrawny fella like you. Roper’s horse won’t hold us nor yours neither, once you got your use out of it.”
I laughed again, making out like I was enjoying myself. Truth was they had me jumpy as beans in Chihuahua, and half believing what they said there in the night. Come sunup I’d be laughing for real, by which time I’d be well on my way back to civilization, rich as Pharaoh. In another minute Red would be claiming him as a personal acquaintance.
“So you’re all desperadoes,” I said, “stuck in a trap set with money. What’s that make Cora, one of them bandit queens you read about in dime novels?”
“She came with Perkins there, fleecing their way across the West with cards and the old badger game.” Red indicated the last member of the party, with big ears and what must’ve been a honey of a pair of handlebars before the wax run out. “She was a windfall; although keeping her in clothes is a challenge. Some of our citizens come with changes in their bedrolls, but she’s our only woman. Fortunately she’s handy with a needle and thread. What she’s wearing used to be a nightshirt.”
“You like it?” She spun around on a bare foot, letting the dress billow. “I made the spots with dye from a deck of cards. I’m partial to patterns.”
Red said, “Look for yard goods while you’re about it. Cora let out these rag-bag items Patch brought back, but
they want mending again. Think of it as a trip to town for supplies—and provisions.”
“That’s a right smart ghost story, but it’s smoke. What keeps ’em from just riding on?”
The big man smiled, the teeth in the red beard as long as Roper’s and as sharp as Cora’s. “We would be more than six if that did not occur from time to time. Not much news reaches us, but I assume some got caught in the sun after they fed and then returned to the earth as dust. I can’t imagine even a few others surviving long once townspeople started dying and coming back as one of us. There is always a wise padre or an immigrant from a European village versed in the old methods of destruction.
“It is not as tragic as you think,” he continued. “You will exist without fear of age, illness, or death, and we are an entertaining crowd. I can tell you stories of the conquest, and Hernando knows all the gossip from the old Spanish court; he was a viceroy as well as a colonel under my command. He was also my first companion in this condition, after the Aztec slave I fed on passed the seed to him, then fled into the desert, roasting himself to a crisp. All the other soldiers deserted, which was a pity. What a mighty band of immortals they would have made!”
“Don’t forget you’re rolling in gold.” Patch’s sneer climbed one side of his face to his ruined eye.
“Quite right. You will have an equal share, and you can amuse yourself betting at cards or throwing coins at Cora’s feet when she performs. She knows all the songs that were popular in St. Louis before she came to us thirty years ago.”
“Red, you charmer,” she said.
I’d had my fill of his charm. I shot him point blank.
When the smoke cleared he was still grinning. “That takes me back. You can have no concept of the relief I felt when a frightened corporal fired his matchlock in my face. Spanish armor was not designed for this climate. I let him run away with the others and took off the breastplate for good.”
I fired again, with the same result, and tried my luck with the rest of the chambers. Roper was the only one rattled, but when he checked for holes and come up dry he blew a stinking blast of air my way and uncovered his horse choppers, which had grown pointy since the last time.
I stumbled back against the bar, knocking over the bottle of rum and fumbling at my belt for fresh cartridges.
Red seemed to lose patience. He pointed his shaggy chin at the one called Hernando, who lunged and seized my gun arm with cast-iron fingers. It went numb and the pistol thumped the ground. Roper got me on the other side, and although his grip wasn’t nothing next to the foreigner’s it was stronger than I remembered from arm-wrestling him. Patch and Perkins squatted and grabbed my ankles. I was pinned like a bug.
“Ladies first.” Cora’s face blurred as it came close, leaving only eyes red now in the light and those teeth.
I woke up in dead dog darkness and knew it was the mission where we all slept, though there were no sounds of breathing or any of the little stirrings that people make in their beds. They’d fed and were resting contentedly. I lay on straw scattered on hard earth.
They built those adobes to last in the old days—Red’s time—with walls two feet thick and not a window or even a chink to let in light and heat, but I knew it was daytime just the same; I could track the sun across the sky by the throbbing in the holes in my neck. In a little while it would let up and I’d have the strength to sit a saddle. I hoped I could hold out longer than Roper without feeding, but I hadn’t had anything but rum in so long I knew what it was like to be a gaunt wolf when game’s scarce. I didn’t want to make a mistake and burn up, and I didn’t want to let anybody down. It was my turn.
About the Author
An authority on both criminal history and the American West, Loren D. Estleman has been called the most critically acclaimed author of his generation. He has been nominated for the National Book Award and the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award.
Desperate Detroit and Stories of Other Dire Places Page 20
