I heard something then, louder than the chugging of the engine: a long shrill splitting noise and a rush of leaves and branches, like a tree lashed by howling wind.
A tree.
Without consulting the engineer I reached up and hauled on the brake handle. Again came the high-pitched cry of locked wheels against the rails, and the sickening lurch of the engine fighting inertia; I’d set my feet so I couldn’t be thrown off them in my crouching position, but Joseph had had no warning, and fell back against me; I wobbled, but kept my footing. He fell hard on his buttocks, but his grasp of the throttle prevented him from sprawling all the way onto his back.
A train doesn’t stop on the instant, especially with slickum on the wheels. We struck hard enough to shatter branches and send them spinning end over end past the cab, carrying with them the sharp sweet scent of green wood. Another party had stationed itself behind us, and had to have had their axes swinging while we were still slipping on the grade.
I didn’t wait for what was coming next. I stuck the muzzle of the rifle through the cab opening on the side of the mountains and squeezed the trigger. Once again I had no hope of hitting anyone or anything; I was gambling for time.
A gamble I lost. When I turned my head to see how Joseph was getting along, the Indian’s hand came out of a recess inside the tender on his side of the cab. An ugly pistol pointed at me. The muzzle was as big around as a drainpipe.
I let the rifle fall butt-first to the floor—I’d never clear the barrel through the opening in time—and scooped out the Deane-Adams; but I knew that was just as futile. Long before I could level it, a sheet of white flame blinded me and I fell as hard as the tree and a lot faster.
* * *
I keep a pistol in the cab. Not even Joseph knows about it.
Hector Cansado, the dead engineer, hadn’t invented the hidden weapon, but he’d misjudged his fireman. He’d thought to keep it secret by concealing it on the side of the tender opposite the Indian’s post, but either Joseph had discovered it earlier or stumbled across it after he took Cansado’s place at the throttle.
The glimpse I’d had of it before I blacked out had suggested early manufacture, nearly ancient; percussion arms were a scarce commodity in a nation racked with revolution every few years and in the control of nervous governors with seasoned troops and no laws against search and seizure. This one reflected none of the grace of its era. Built simply of thick steel and all of one piece, the frame curved to fit a man’s hand, it was equally effective as a firearm or a bludgeon. As I lay in a watery half-world lanced with splinters of white-hot pain, I didn’t know whether I’d been shot or struck over the head.
When I came far enough around to choke back a sudden sharp flash of bitter vomit, I felt the earth moving beneath me. This was nothing new since Montana Territory, but the rhythm was different, less regular; when whatever I was traveling in lurched, sending a burning bolt of agony straight to the top of my skull, I recognized the feel of a wooden wheel plunging into a rut in hard soil. I smelled green wood then, fresh-sawn, heard the hollow plop of shod hooves, and knew I was in a wagon.
And I knew without opening my eyes that I was being watched.
I raised my lids a crack, fighting the urge to flutter them; God alone knew what awaited me when whoever had me realized I was awake. What I saw through a haze of pain and green-tinged sunlight made me think I was still out and dreaming. The face staring into mine was only remotely human. In the shadow of a broad raddled straw brim with green dappling it through the holes, it looked as if someone had gripped it between the jaws of an enormous pair of pliers and squeezed.
I lowered my lids. The eyes in that pinched face, as black and dull as crabapple seeds and nearly as small, seemed to be studying me closely for any sign of awareness. But my sense of smell was more acute than usual. The owner of the face gave off an odor of cedar smoke and something less pleasant: It made me think of the moldy rags swaddling the bones of the Pinkerton in the dank dugout where he’d died. It seemed to have less to do with the clothes the creature wore—shapeless coverings only—than with an inner corruption. It was too strong to have come from just one source. The thing—I supposed it was human—had companions as redolent.
We were moving up, I could tell. My lungs strained to filter oxygen from the thinning air and my head throbbed, partly from the blow, but as much from the pressure of breathing at that altitude. My tongue was wrapped in a cotton stocking. Involuntarily I licked my lips. They were as cracked as dried clay.
A hand made of sinew wrapped around bone slid behind my head and raised it. I gasped in surprise, and before I could close my mouth something splashed into it, tasting of moss and iron and limestone. I nearly choked, but I swallowed. It tasted better than Judge Blackthorne’s aged Scotch whisky.
The hand withdrew and my head hit the wagonbed. Light burst again, nausea flashed, and I blacked out a second time. When I felt again the rocking motion of the bed, I suspected I hadn’t been out long, but there was no telling how far we were traveling from sea level. A great weight seemed to be pressing against my chest. The air was getting rarer. Only two types of creature lived so high above the earth: One was Joseph’s pumas.
The posters offering reward for joining with Childress had gotten to the Indian finally. He’d come to the realization that as the man who knew how to operate the train he was more valuable than his passenger; but why I was still alive and worth the effort of transporting over that steep terrain eluded me.
When at length I grew weary of pretending to be insensate, I opened my eyes and propped myself up on my elbows. My companion in the wagon was no longer staring at me; he was crumpled in the corner opposite me, one arm dangling over the tailgate and his ragged straw hat tipped over his face. I was grateful for that. Something about those squeezed-together features made me think of a photograph of a shrunken head I’d seen in one of the Judge’s travel books. The man wore a bandoleer with heavy-caliber brass cartridges in the loops, but no weapon that I could see, possibly because he was guarding a prisoner who might be tempted to try to disarm him.
A few yards behind the wagon, a pair of mules with gray muzzles towed another vehicle, a two-wheeled oxcart piloted by my keeper’s twin brother: At least I hoped there wasn’t an entire race of such nightmare creatures living in those mountains. (That hope would be dashed quickly enough.) This one had on a pair of bandoleers crossed on his chest and a machete like the one I’d taken off the guard in Alamos in an open sheath on his belt, the abbreviated blade hanging off the edge of his narrow seat and banging against the side of the footboard.
In the bed behind him sat a man with his back to me, wearing a decrepit straw hat like the others and more ammunition. Past his shoulder, Joseph faced forward with a stout pinon limb across his shoulders, his wrists bound to it with thick hemp and his arms stretched out on both sides, a seated Christ figure with his face twisted into an expression of indescribable agony.
TWENTY-ONE
My head hurt worse trying to work it out.
It was like one of those cruel games adults play with children: Is the penny in the right fist or the left? It was in the left last time, but that doesn’t mean this time it will be in the right. It might be in the same fist ten times in a row; but wasn’t that too much to expect? So you bit your lip and pointed, and you were wrong most of the time because you haven’t learned to think outside of a straight line. That came with growing up.
And then there was that rare diabolical adult who pocketed the penny, presenting you with two empty fists.
I’d gone out too abruptly to see where the blow had come from; if it was a blow. I located the pulpy spot on my scalp, but just touching it sent a thrill of pain out in all directions, so I couldn’t probe it thoroughly enough to decide if it was a bullet crease or if I’d been struck by a buttstock. Joseph had aimed the pistol in my direction, but whether he pulled the trigger or used it as a bludgeon, or was aiming at something through the opening in the cab—a man t
rying to board, who managed to shoot or crack me over the head before the Indian fired, if he’d managed to fire at all—was lost.
There were two possible explanations: Either he’d acted in my defense and been taken, or he’d betrayed me and then been betrayed by those he was in league with. Had they, too, decided that a man who would turn against another—Hector Cansado, myself—wasn’t worthy of their trust? But in either case, why not kill him outright?
Childress.
I’d said it myself: If the Ghost was what he was after, it was useless without a man who knew how to run it. They would have their orders to bring back the engineer alive at whatever cost.
Which left the problem of why they hadn’t killed me or left me for dead at the train.
Sitting up enough to look around, I found the craziest theory to be the most plausible. The man guarding me, the man driving the wagon carrying Joseph, and—when he stirred to stretch himself and turned his head my way to work the kinks out of his neck—the man guarding him might have been identical triplets, born to a family of marked ugliness and, if their vapid eyes and slack mouths were any indication of what lay behind, brute stupidity. The same was true of others riding mules and gaunt horses behind and alongside the wagons: two-legged beasts with pinched-in skulls, displaying no more intelligence than the cartridges in their belts. The obvious conclusion chilled me there in the thick, sopping atmosphere of the Sierras. They were all related, or nearly so, bred for generations in the same small community, doubling and redoubling family strengths—force and ruthlessness—and faults—lack of reasoning—until what was left was a race of vicious idiots.
Oscar Childress, it seemed, had given instructions to spare my life as he had with Joseph. Probably he wanted to know what I’d learned and reported home; or—crazy even to consider it—maybe he was as starved for intelligent conversation as I was.
* * *
Why wasn’t I trussed as well? On the evidence of appearances, our escorts were incapable of deciding I was in too much misery to attempt escape, which I was: Just the thought of crawling over the side of the wagon and taking off on foot through that wild country made the scenery spin around me. More likely it was a tribal thing, and I was immune. There must be Indian blood in anyone living that long so far from villages, but there had been hatred and rivalry between peoples in the New World for hundreds of years before Columbus. With so many guards and in that landscape, the chances of freedom were next to nothing, but it would be only natural to make the journey as painful as possible for a traditional enemy like Joseph.
I didn’t ask my throbbing head to explore the situation further just then.
Tethered to the back of the wagon carrying Joseph was my bay. I heard a gurgling, caught a sharp whiff of ferment, and turned to see my driver lowering one of the Judge’s bottles, drawing a sleeve across his lips. He hadn’t bothered to uncork it, had just knocked off the neck, and a smear of blood on his sleeve told me he hadn’t the sense to predict what a jagged shard of glass could do to his mouth. Maybe his brain was too weak to record pain.
Looking around once again, I saw others guzzling from bottles broken the same way, and knew they’d have looted the train of everything they could use: the firearms along with my hip guns, the tins of food, certainly the gold I’d drawn from the bank; but I’d gladly have traded the money to separate these half-humans from the combination of weapons and liquor. They rode spavined, grass-fed mounts with faces as stupid as theirs. Some of the men were singing—humming—moaning—an approximation of some bawdyhouse song or songs, their voices ranging from guttural growls to nasal whines, and the mix of tones, melodies, and off-key renditions of tunes imperfectly remembered fell somewhere between madhouse wails and cats fighting in an alley, or worse: cats and rats tearing at one another for meat. The wheels of the wagons cried out for grease. The din was hellish.
The animals weren’t in charge of the zoo, however.
I’d been reluctant to crank my head far enough around to see very much up ahead—it was hurting fine on its own without that, and my guard was still sleeping; passed out, most likely. I didn’t want to find out what he was like with a skull full of drunk’s regret. But when a rider came trotting back to smack a dozing idiot’s thigh with a leather crop, I saw a man with regular features and fierce black muttonchops wearing a campaign hat stained black with sweat and a gray tunic with the cuffs buttoned back to expose a yellow lining: the contrasting colors were faded almost to the same shade, the fabric darned and patched all over, but the stovepipe boots gleamed black above dusty insteps. Gold braid, faded also, made loops on his sleeves, and on his collar glittered the insignia of a captain of the Confederacy, the engraving worn nearly smooth, but the brass highly polished. The left side of his face was white and shiny, in sharp relief to his deep sunburn, cutting a bare patch from his whiskers, and the eye that belonged on that side lay on some old battleground, leaving behind an empty socket, the flesh around it shrunken to the bone.
I remembered that the nucleus of Childress’ private army comprised members of his old command. This one, whose burnsides were tipped with gray like the coat of the dead grizzly, drew back his hand with lightning reflexes to avoid being bitten by the man he’d jolted out of sleep, but I heard his teeth snap together inches from the flesh. The captain responded with a backhand swipe, striping the man’s face with a red welt. He blinked, but apart from laying his own hand on the machete on his belt showed no other physical reaction. If he’d had a tail (and I wouldn’t have bet against it), he’d have tucked it between his legs.
The officer cantered back another hundred yards, casting his one-eyed iron gaze along the procession, then wheeled his mount—a muscular sorrel fattened on grain, unlike the others’, with sleek haunches—and galloped the other direction to resume his post in the lead.
The parade wasn’t heavily populated, but it was strung out for a quarter-mile. As we climbed, the vehicle bringing up the rear rose into view from below a grade. It rolled on tall, iron-felloed wheels, a bundle of ten blue-steel barrels mounted on a wooden crosspiece. As a weapon of wholesale slaughter the Gatling should have been ugly, but it had been hand-crafted by masters, the weight and balance of its wheels allowing it to roll smoothly, almost gracefully over the rude terrain, its brass fittings flashing in the sun. Some of the deadliest vipers are among the most beautiful things in creation.
Joseph, whose own groans of pain had subsided, swayed and pitched with the motion of his wagon, his eyes closed and his chin on his chest. He’d either passed out or died.
Just then his guard cocked a leg and dealt him a blow that left the clear outline of a bootheel on his temple. He snapped to. Pink-tinged drool dripped off his chin, but the whites of his eyes showed briefly before they closed again.
A toad had climbed into my mouth, bloated and sluggish. It was my tongue. My guard had shifted again in his sleep, exposing the stiletto-sharp neck of a bottle sagging in the side pocket of his threadbare canvas coat. There was no sign of the water vessel he’d let me drink from before. Had I dreamt it? The whole trip, it seemed, had been the product of bad whisky and tainted oysters. But liquid was liquid.
I leaned over until my shoulder touched the wagonbed, stretched my arm across the boards until my fingers just touched the neck. I didn’t want to slide closer. Animals have instincts, and what he lacked in brainpower he might make up for in the physical senses. I teased the bottle loose slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, until I could grasp it firmly and slide it free of the pocket.
As I did so, my shirtcuff snagged something. The guard stirred, whimpered. I caught my breath and held it. He opened his mouth, smacked his lips, and snored so rackingly I felt it in my own torn gullet. I let out a bellyful of air and concentrated my attention on freeing the cuff without dropping the bottle. When I pulled gently, something gave: One of the fifty-caliber Gatling shells had come loose from a loop on his belt. I turned my wrist, still holding the bottle by its neck, and curled my little finger a
round the flanged receiver. With that grip secure I lifted away bottle and round of ammunition in one movement.
I turned the cartridge around in my fingers. The brass shell alone was four inches long and an inch across the base, with the conical lead bullet adding another two and a half inches to its length. Just holding it made me shudder. One of those slugs had come within a handspan of taking my head off.
I put it in a pocket. I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but its weight was reassuring. It was as heavy as a roll of quarters.
There was only a trickle left in the bottle, and just then I’d have traded a carload of the Judge’s aged Scotch for as much water as could be wrung from a sponge; but it was all I had available. I closed my cracked lips gingerly around the broken neck and tipped the contents over my tongue. They burned like acid, but I lapped up every drop, stuck my finger as far inside as I dared, wiped it along the glass, and licked it. I lowered the bottle to the boards and let it roll to a stop against the sleeping guard’s hip. I lay back, as exhausted as if I’d been pulling the wagon myself.
I dozed, woke; dozed again, and dreamed I was back in Virginia, desperate for rest but bombarded by mosquitoes the size of gypsy moths, whining like mortar shells and stinging like the dull needles military orderlies used to prevent smallpox, wallowing in a puddle of my own sweat in a tent rank with mildew. We were on our way to a place called Cold Harbor, as poorly named a destination as ever there was. I’d been born in the high chill dry air of the Bitterroots, and would never accustom myself to inhaling oxygen as through a moldy bandanna. I jerked myself awake by sheer will—and started shivering. My teeth chattered so loudly I wanted to clasp my hand over my mouth to avoid drawing the attention of my witless beast of a guard; wanted to, but hadn’t the strength to lift my arm from the wagonbed.
Cape Hell Page 12
