South

by Frank Owen

  What were you expecting? I told you he’s too young. Green, I said. And what did you say? ‘Mama, I love him!’ Agh.

  Vida breathed deep and damped it down. There must be some other way of letting Horse Head know about the attack before it happened.

  When he first heard the man moving through the bushes, Dyce had his whole head out in the sun, the light blinding him. He ducked back into the dark so that he could see better – and saw Tye Callahan start making his slow descent to the camp, where the celebrations would be going on for some time. Even if he hadn’t been able to see him, Dyce would have caught the whiff of fish and blood and burnt leaves.

  He watched as Tye was confronted by a man with a rifle, who clapped him on the shoulder soon enough. He was duly welcomed in, and all of Dyce’s suspicions about the old man were confirmed: Tye Callahan was a traitor.

  A goateed soldier was presenting Tye with a box. The old guy opened it. From where Dyce had worked his way out of the tunnel a little way, it looked like a pen – the fancy kind, for signing certificates. But then the soldier took it out of its case and held it up to the sun. Dyce saw what it really was: a syringe.

  ‘Motherfucker,’ he said in wonder.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘Have a look. See that syringe?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘That there is the fabled vaccine, I’ll warrant.’ The antidote to the winds and whatever they brought with them: Renard’s secret weapon. Tye’s betrayal was being rewarded with immunity. Dyce could see that he’d live another forty years – and not only because of what was in that needle, but because of the honor they were showing him. He’d roam the land with his chest puffed out, and his aching back and arthritic fingers wouldn’t bother him a whit. The soldier flicked the plastic and then approached Tye. The old man rolled his sleeve up, the way he might have done for a shot of penicillin after a night in a cathouse.

  The bearded man held Tye’s arm and found a vein. He pushed the plunger.

  Tye was still grinning, showing off the cotton wool taped in the crook of his elbow, when a soldier collapsed some way off. Dyce saw the man drop beside his tent, his body convulsing, his heels drumming the ground like a tantrum.

  The others rushed to help him. All they could do was hold him down, keep his head back and his airway clear, and stop him from wriggling his way into the campfire.

  ‘That boy okay?’ asked Tye. ‘Looks like he’s frothing at the mouth.’

  And he was. The foamy green spittle plopped beside him in the dirt, like a cat who’d been eating grass – or a rabid dog. After that it was over pretty quick.

  The men stepped back and looked at each another. Then the ones who had touched the dead man began running to the river to wash their hands, shoving at each other. It would have been funny in another time: in a silent movie, maybe, when Stan and Ollie stood a chance against the odds.

  Near the river another man dropped as if he’d been pole-axed. The bucket of water he’d been carrying fell with him and sloshed into the dirt. The man lay in the mud of his clumsiness and squirmed in it. Jesus, thought Dyce. Looks like he shat himself. The sense memory of his own sickness washed over him, and he shivered but couldn’t look away.

  Next to fall was Malison, right there beside Tye – the regal composure turned to thrashing face-down in the dirt until he had grazed his face and mussed the manicured goatee with blood and foam. The old man hunkered down beside him. Malison’s chest was rising and falling so hard that Tye expected to hear his ribs popping in their joints. Sounded as if his throat was closing; some of the Callahans got that way near nuts. His eyes rolled back until the whites were showing. His back arched and then he lay still. Around him his subordinates mimicked him to the last, curled like unborn babies, vomiting as their hands turned to claws.

  Tye got up from his haunches and made his way over to the first row of tents. He put his gloves on and found a canteen. He opened it and sniffed the brew inside. He scrunched his face and pulled away. Then he smelt again.

  He knew that odor – indistinct, hiding beneath the pungency of the hooch: winter grass. Water hemlock. He’d used it before, so he ought to have recognized the effects. Tye shook his head at himself. Getting old.

  He looked up into the hills around the camp, and Dyce thought for a second that he’d seen his head poking out from the hole, but the eyes moved on, squinting and suspicious.

  Tye turned to a box crate that had once held cutlery, and set it upside down. Then he stood on it like a street preacher. He cleared his throat and began – and he left his gloves on.

  ‘Boys! You’ve been poisoned. Can’t say how many of you, but it got into your canteens. It’s water hemlock. That’s bad news. You should be able to tell that by now.’ He swept his arm out over the plain. The white cotton wool ball taped there was ludicrous.

  The leaderless soldiers began to congregate, looking for instruction.

  ‘And mark me: every man here has been exposed. Now, I can help you folks. I know who did this – trouble-makers from the ghost colony they call Horse Head.’

  More men were moving in, and even in his horror Dyce reveled in the looks on their faces. They had been forced to look to this charismatic Southern snake for guidance. Jeez, Garrett. If only you’d hung around long enough to see this.

  ‘If you got some of that poison, you saw for yourselves how that ends. But perhaps, before you die, you’d like to make sure the people who did this pay for it. I have no remedy to save you from what might already be inside you, but while you live, let’s fight. What do you say?’

  There was a murmur from the soldiers. Dyce had to admit: Tye’s speech made sense, as much as any call to arms ever did. Now even the sick soldiers were rallying. This was what they knew – taking orders from a man who looked as if he knew what he was doing.

  Tye stepped down from the box and walked through the men, hoping that these soft-bellied Northerners had more fight than his own Callahan men. They donned their battle dress for the second time that day, but this time it was quicker. They grabbed their guns and mounted their horses. Tye looked back.

  Even as they rode, some men were falling from their saddles, shaking themselves to death beneath the birches.

  54

  There was only one man in Horse Head who was watching the horizon when the high-flying harrier came into view. From his bed he saw the bird swooping low with rage, shrilling its skree-skree-skree. In the two days since Felix Callahan had joined the ghost colony, it was the first time he’d felt under threat.

  When he’d stumbled over the ridge, they had taken him in, ignoring his pleas for a gun and a bullet. Suicide was bad for morale, a bald man told him. Felix realized his mistake in coming, and kicked up a stink as they led him into the camp till they found him a place to sit and rest, when he went down and could not get back up. His skin was still coming up in the purple-red welts that itched more than bed fleas and hurt worse than bee stings. The stitches on his head felt as if they would split open with the force of the headache that descended, washed in red.

  A woman brought him food and some mashed herb he thought might be yarrow. When she came back she brought another, older, woman with her and then left them alone to parley. The gray-haired woman didn’t flinch even when the sputum sprayed out of his mouth. He coughed and apologized in turns. She sat there with a battered blue notebook and asked him what he thought was wrong with him, and how long he had had those stitches in his scalp. She looked a little familiar, but Felix had other things to worry about: keeping his lungs from jumping out of his chest like bullfrogs, for one.

  When she left he tried to set his hot head back to what he did best. From the makeshift bed he had a view of the horizon. He forced his eyes open though the light pierced his thin skull like a machete. Watching for clouds helped some to take the edge off the urge to scratch his skin raw. And off the fact that he had lost the name of his old cat. Was it Dancer or Danny or Danger? None of those seemed right. Felix gave himself over, and w
aited.

  Over the next days he watched the predictable weather systems changing, the clouds outside a mirror of the confusion in his skull. We’re not talking just a change of underwear, either, Felix realized. If his old theory was right, right about now there would be a great wall of warm air rising from the Atlantic like the Kraken. When it swirled inland, they would be fucked – and there’d be no need for a gun in his hand after all. He squinted. The clouds looked like distant sheep. Then, as Felix watched, they billowed up in puffy pillars with heads that flattened as they met the thin air of the higher currents.

  The hundred-year storm was here.

  ‘You’d better believe it,’ he whispered with a grin. There was some comfort in knowing that he had been right. The skyscrapers rose like an angel city, crossed over from another realm, and for the first time Felix gave some serious thought to all that jazz about the home of the ancestors. He shivered in the bed: the fevers and the chills and something else too, that was deeper than weather. Brother, have you heard the Good News?

  The bird was a speck of black against the cumulonimbus. It was not behaving the way other birds did. Before a storm they all hunkered down somewhere sensible, and one way to tell how bad it was going to be was how quiet the air was. If there was complete silence, the way there was now, you might as well lay down and die.

  The harrier was upset. It wasn’t flying from tree to tree or circling a patch of earth for an ordinary blood sacrifice. This bird flew fast and straight and purposeful.

  Felix watched it grow bigger, aiming directly for Horse Head. At this rate it would fly right over his head and he’d have a good chance to see the pattern on the underside of its wings. The females were tawny brown, mostly, and she might be nesting somewhere close by.

  But as the bird approached, Felix saw the pall of dust beneath her – and then he felt the ground vibrate. A herd of something, he reckoned, bison and bears and deer all spooked by the coming weather. Animals were smarter than humans a lot of the time. Felix had kept a red-spotted toad in a box in his shack for some months, correlating its behavior with the changes in weather outside. A day before the rains came, Hopkins would get excited and try to escape the box. But she had been no good at predicting wind. When she died in the winter, Felix sat a while, looking at her. He had ended up cutting out the parotid glands, and boiling the body up. The French did it, right?

  What he saw now as the stampede grew nearer made him choke on his own spit. A herd of horses!

  Felix called out for the people in the shelters nearest him to look, and the camp came to a standstill.

  At the head of the stampede, crouched low on the back of the lead horse, was Tye Callahan, kicking his heels into the beast’s ribs as he came.

  ‘Mother fuck,’ said Felix. ‘Cain’t even let me die in peace.’

  The other horses followed. They were all saddled, but there were only a handful of riders amongst them, and those few that remained were toppling off as though shot down by distant snipers.

  Felix checked the hills for gunsmoke, but there was none. Still the stampede came on, and Felix saw that Tye did not need soldiers to eradicate Horse Head: four hundred panicked hooves would do the trick.

  Felix heaved himself up. He began to hobble down the slope. ‘Anyone got a rifle?’ He called out.

  ‘Pete. Pete’s got one.’

  ‘Where’s he? He the one that looks like an Indian?’

  He found Pete outside his tent, watching, shocked.

  ‘Shut your mouth, son. No time for gawping.’ He leant over and coughed a blob of bloody phlegm into the dirt at Pete’s feet. Felix straightened up again. Damn! He hadn’t felt this good in days! ‘You got a gun? Got to take that lead rider down. Maybe them horses will disperse. Otherwise he’s going to run this place flat.’

  Pete dodged inside his tent. When he came back he was holding an ancient musket, like something from a museum display.

  ‘Fuck me! Who was the last owner? Blackbeard? Does it even work?’

  ‘On and off. It’s loaded, but I don’t have the aim for that shot.’

  Felix took the gun and knelt beside a rock and rested the muzzle in a cleft. The warmth of the sun-baked stone made his forearms burn and itch. When this was over he was going to dunk himself in a river, like a bear with fleas.

  Felix lined up the sights, factored in the very slight cross-wind, aimed a little high to compensate for the humidity, and a little higher still for the age of the gun. There’d be no leading necessary. Tye was coming straight on.

  ‘Well, let’s hope the last ten years spent measuring my dick have paid off.’

  Felix breathed in nice and slow. He pushed the air back out from his lungs, willing himself not to cough, and pulled the trigger.

  55

  Dyce and Vida scrambled out of the tunnel and rolled down the talus, all call for quiet unnecessary now that the riders of the apocalypse were upon them. They got back up, intending to merge with the main body of the stampede and head off a couple of the horses driven mad with the smell of blood.

  Dyce made Vida get over into the birches after the group of escaped horses, who were still trying to force their way through the foliage, white-eyed and frothing with fear. The hair of their dead riders caught on the bushes as they went, the twigs snagging at their flesh like crowns of thorns. Vida caught the bridle of a little painted pony whose rider’s ankles were bent like ballet shoes. The man swung in his sorry pendulum. She found herself shuddering in pity, but it didn’t stop her from lifting the rifle and bandolier from his twitching torso. They struggled to release the dead men from the horses, but the corpses fell at last to their resting places on the ground under the birches. Their horses tossed their heads but otherwise let their replacements remain.

  Vida looked over at Dyce, who had managed to catch and hold his own mount, a bay with a white star on her forehead who in another time would have had a kindly face. He was tying the shirt with the mushrooms in it over the saddle.

  They raced behind the stampede, past the blurred buildings of the abandoned town, covering two days of hiking in minutes. Vida said it into the air as it whipped past, cold, the harmless wind of high-speed travel: Fuck Renard!

  Dyce and Vida tried to stay on, clenching with their knees, but it was impossible to do that and shoot at the same time. Their bullets aimed at Tye flew high and wide.

  They heard another gunshot ring out from the slopes of Horse Head, and saw the puff of smoke that was swept aside by the hand of the rising wind. More horses in their terror scattered from the sides of the stampede, heading for the trees.

  The bullet had hit Tye Callahan in the right shoulder. He jolted sideways and fell out of the saddle, but his good arm thought for him and he managed to wrap his limp hand in the reins and hang on. Others were not so lucky, and those men were dragged after their mounts, the skin being scraped from their senseless faces.

  On the ground, Felix was shoving the ancient gun back at Pete. ‘Reload. Reload!’

  Pete took the gun and found another bullet as fast as his shaking fingers allowed. He pulled the bolt and ejected the spent cartridge. Felix checked the progress of the stampede. The horses were charging up the slope, past the muck-green pond, and over the boundary markers.

  Pete handed back the loaded gun and Felix lined the shot up again. This time Tye was hidden behind the flank of the horse as it turned, adjusting its balance to compensate for the man hanging from its side. Felix didn’t need to consider the wind or the humidity: it was a straight shot at a growing target, not more than forty yards away. But there was no good shot to take – leastways, none that would spare the horse.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, and he pulled the trigger, but at the last his eye flickered. Something metallic glinted up from beyond the graves and his aim was off.

  There was no time to reload: the horses would be upon them.

  Felix jabbed the gun at Pete again, though he knew it was no use. He had to be doing something other than just watching his d
eath come towards him.

  The metal creature seemed to leap up from the dirt and grab hold of Tye’s horse by its foreleg. As Felix watched, with his lungs burning and his heart on fire, the horse tripped and then fell to its knees. And as it was felled it rolled on Tye, the weight of its giant ribcage crushing him into the dirt, horse and rider fused into a satyr.

  They slid to a stop. The horses that followed had seen their leader fall, and it set off some kind of slackness in them. The creatures at the front reared up, and the ones behind them fell back or skipped sideways to avoid being sent under the killing hooves of their companions. They had lost their momentum.

  Now they came to a stop in a swirl of dust, and stood and stamped, whinnying in outrage and fright, about seventy all told. Some still had the cargo of their dead owners caught in their stirrups or dragging at their reins. The missing horses would lose themselves in the hills, trailing their terrible treasure.

  Tye’s horse lay on the ground, panting and groaning and trying to get up. Each time the animal moved, the man trapped beneath it screamed. The shrieks had a whistle to them, and Vida knew that Tye’s lungs had been shredded by his own splintered ribs – the syringe and its immunity gone to waste. He had meant to go with a brave face, but now that his death was imminent, the Callahan pride was revealed as the artifice it was.

  Felix made his slow way over to his kinsman. He had to hobble to do it, but he was determined to finish the job.

  He fired a round into the horse’s head to end its suffering, and it was still.

  Then he knelt beside Tye, resting a hand on the battle-warm body of the dead horse for the support it gave him.

  ‘Hey there, cuz.’

  Tye wheezed. The blood ran from his mouth. It kept coming, thick and bright as venom, as he spoke. ‘Fuck. You.’

  ‘We say “Fuck Renard” around here.’

  ‘Fuck. You.’ Tye managed to gather the bloody clots in his mouth. Then he spat them up into the lined face of his cousin.