Ghostwalkers

by Jonathan Maberry

  Grey looked and now he saw how much it had all changed. The two shelves were gone, the jutting shoulder of rock was gone, and much of the big outcrop was shattered. Chunks of it were strewn across the desert floor. Only a small patch of ground lay mostly undisturbed and in the middle of it stood a placid Mrs. Pickles munching her grass. All around her were massive fragments of sandstone. Close to where Grey sat was a slab of stone as big as a chuck wagon. Beneath the stone, reaching out from one ponderous corner, torn and flattened, was a wrist in a denim sleeve and canvas gloves with no fingers. A thin trickle of blood had pooled out beneath the flaccid wrist and the pale fingers were curled upward like the legs of a dead tarantula.

  “Oh,” said Grey. “Well … damn.”

  “The men who were climbing up after me were blown to bits,” said Looks Away, and to emphasize the grizzly point he nodded toward some red and shapeless chunks that were being swarmed by blowflies. Grey felt his stomach turn over. “The other two, the ones you tied,” continued the strange Sioux, “could not get up and run, and so … well, you see what happened to them.”

  “So why the hell are you still alive?” demanded Grey. “And for that matter, why am I? And my horse?”

  “Why I’m alive is something we may or may not get around to. A lot depends on who and what you turn out to be. You don’t have the look of a cowhand. Your gear suggests a condottieri of some kind.”

  “A con-what-er-what?”

  “A free companion, a mercenary, if you will.”

  “Hired gun is the phrase you’re fishing for.” Grey climbed very slowly and carefully to his feet. He was positive that even his shadow was bruised.

  “Hired gun will do,” said Looks Away. Then in an overly casual tone, added, “And did you come to rescue me in hopes of my hiring you for services rendered?”

  Grey got it now. This crazy Sioux thought that Grey had been attempting to rescue him from the posse and was caught in the explosion. This act of charity in helping Grey was less altruistic than it appeared and more of a fishing expedition for information.

  It was an interesting problem.

  Did he play along in the hopes that the man would share his secrets? And would there be some gold attached to the deal? Or, was it better to come right out and tell him the truth?

  The third option, under other circumstances, would have been to hogtie the Indian and use a little muscle to open him up. Grey had done that sort of thing before, but he dismissed it. He wasn’t really that kind of person.

  Not anymore.

  He stalled by stretching his aching muscles and inspecting his horse. The Sioux waited him out. Grey noticed that there were several pistols and two rifles laid in a row on a flat stone. Within Looks Away’s reach. Not at all close to Grey.

  Fair enough.

  In the end, Grey blew out his cheeks and exhaled a great sigh and decided to be straight with this man. He owed him something for dragging him clear and giving him water. The Indian could have cut his throat and made off with Mrs. Pickles. Or simply stolen the horse and left him here to burn in the desert sun.

  So, he turned back to Looks Away.

  “Truth is, I’m not a gun for hire. Not at the moment,” he said. “And I didn’t step into this mess to make a buck. Not that I haven’t done that sort of thing before.”

  Looks Away was not smiling now, and he edged closer to the guns. “Then why did you interfere?”

  “Six against one,” said Grey.

  “Uh huh. Six white men against one red savage. Is that the kind of math you want to sell? That the unfairness and intolerance sparked your inner nobility to take action?”

  “Something like that.”

  Looks Away studied him.

  “And,” said Grey, “there was that blue flash.”

  Now the Indian smiled.

  “Oh yes,” said Looks Away. “There was that.”

  Grey said, “I heard something when whatever it was blew up.”

  “Did you?”

  “Sounded like all the devils in hell screaming at once.”

  Looks Away said nothing.

  Grey said, “This is about ghost rock, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Looks Away. “And … no. It’s not as simple as that.”

  “In my experience,” said Grey, “it never is.”

  Chapter Six

  “Which is it?”

  Looks Away cleared his throat. “How much do you know about ghost rock?”

  “A bit, same as most folks. Some kind of rare stone. Burns like coal, but hotter. With more oomph.”

  “An understatement.”

  “Lot of folks want it,” said Grey. “Lot of folks been killed over it.”

  “In my experience,” said Looks Away, “people will kill each other over almost any damn thing. In England, in Limehouse, I saw two men slash each other to red ribbons over a slut with venereal disease and a face like the south end of a donkey. People kill over scraps of food. And, as a member of the Sioux, I can tell you what you white folks have been willing to kill for.”

  “Okay, so people are a mess. Not exactly telegraph news. But I’ve seen ghost rock up close. Twice. It’s black with white veins running through it. It doesn’t burn with a blue light, at least not that I’ve ever heard of.”

  “Yes, well there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.”

  “That’s from that fellow Shakespeare,” said Grey.

  Looks Away laughed. “A literate cowboy. I am in awe.”

  “A funny Indian,” said Grey. “I’m … I’m…” He stopped and rubbed his eyes. “There was a joke there but my head hurts too much to go looking for it.”

  They stood for a moment, looking at the smoking pile of rocks. The only sound was Picky munching quietly.

  “So,” said Grey, “care to tell me about all this? Posse. Ghost rock. Explosion. Start anywhere.”

  Grey walked over to one of the boulders, reached behind it, and came out with two heavy saddlebags. “These no longer have owners.”

  He placed them on the ground, squatted down, opened them, and began removing tin cooking pans, a sack of beans, smoked beef, and a silver flask that sloshed when he shook it.

  “It’s a long story that shouldn’t be shared when either hungry or sober,” said Looks Away.

  Grey smiled. “Fair enough.”

  They worked together to build a fire on the side of the rock pile farthest from the corpses. From the surviving horses of the posse they found enough water to cook beans and soften the beef, and even enough to make pan biscuits. As the sun tumbled behind the far mountains they settled down to wash badly cooked food down with even worse back-alley whiskey. As he drank, Thomas Looks Away told his story.

  “I grew up in the Sioux Nation, of course,” he said. “Learned all of the traditional skills from my father and grandfather, and from more uncles than I can count. Hunting, fishing, stalking, fighting. I even did some fighting with patrols along our borders. I’m sure you know how it is, old chap—in this world there’s always someone who wants what you have and is willing to take it rather than buy it or earn it.”

  “So I’ve heard,” agreed Grey with a laugh. They tapped tin cups and washed that truth down with whiskey.

  “When I was about twenty, two things happened,” said Looks Away, drifting back into his tale. He removed his bowler hat and as he spoke, slowly turned it like a wheel, running the brim between thumb and forefinger. “First, I had a wee bit of a dispute with one of my cousins. An irascible fellow named Big Water. Hard words were exchanged, then there was a spot of violence, and, well…”

  “What was the dispute about?”

  “What else?” said Looks Away. “What do men always go crazy and fight about?”

  “Gold?”

  “Women,” corrected the Sioux.

  “Fair enough.”

  “We both liked the same girl. Big Water had land, horses, lots to offer.”

  “And you—?”

  “Not to be too indeli
cate, but I helped her get into the family way, as they say.”

  “Helped?”

  Looks Away gave him a roguish grin. “She was a very lovely and painfully naïve little thing.”

  “And—?”

  “Big Water took it amiss.”

  “Amiss. Is that where the violence came in?” asked Grey.

  “It was. I left Big Water a tad dented and felt it was a prime opportunity to see the world. Which I did. I drifted east and in Philadelphia I met a chap who was putting together a Wild West show to take to England. Splendid little fellow by the name of Barnum. He made me a rather enticing offer and before I could say ‘heap big wampum’ I was on a ship to London. Spent many happy years there playing everything from the Noble Savage to the Wild Savage to the Last of the Red Men. Often in the same show. Along the way I took the opportunity to better myself and even got a degree from Exeter.”

  “A degree in what?”

  “Natural philosophy, with an emphasis on chemistry and geological studies.”

  Grey sipped his whiskey. “You’re a scientist?”

  “Amateur natural philosopher I believe is the correct phrase.”

  “Well … holy shit.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Let me guess,” mused Grey, “that’s what brought you back to America. Chemistry and geological studies, I mean. You’re prospecting?”

  “Correct.”

  “For ghost rock?”

  “Also correct,” said Looks Away.

  Night had fallen around them like a blanket, leeching away the heat of the day and leaving in its place a moistureless cold. Somewhere out in the blackness something scuttled across the dry sand. Above them the sky was littered with ten billion stars, but even these burning suns looked like chips of ice scattered on a piece of black basalt. Grey got up and took a blanket from his saddle, wrapped it around his shoulders and sat back down. As an afterthought, he walked over to the rock on which Looks Away had arranged all of the guns. He retrieved his own, examined the barrel by firelight, blew through it, dumped out the bullets, and thumbed them back in after inspecting them for grit. Then he slid the gun into its holster. He did not do it with any of the fancy flourishes some men use. Grey was a skilled gunman but he wasn’t a showman. He picked up Riley’s little derringer and slipped that into his pants pocket. His knives were there, too, and he returned them to belt and boot sheaths. Then he went and sat back down. He was aware of Looks Away watching him with intelligent dark eyes. The Sioux made no comment about Grey taking back his weapons, and that told him a lot about their relationship. Maybe not yet friends, maybe not allies, but definitely two men at peace with one another. Fair enough.

  “That explosion,” said Grey as he picked up his tin cup, “wasn’t ghost rock.”

  “It was and it wasn’t.”

  “You deliberately beating around the bush, or is that a British thing you came back with?”

  Starlight sparkled from Looks Away’s white teeth. “A bit of both, I dare say.” He poured more whiskey into their cups, stared into his for a moment, sipped, sighed, and began speaking. “A lot of people are studying ghost rock, you know. Not just here in America, but all around the world. It’s not unfair to say that it is the most significant scientific discovery of the nineteenth century. It’s potentially one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time, and I am not exaggerating when I say that. Of all time.”

  He let that hang in the air between them. Grey waited.

  “Ever since ghost rock was discovered in the Maze out in California,” continued the Sioux, “everyone has been looking for it. Men have actually left gold and silver mines in order to search for the ore. Think of that. Abandoning a working gold mine in order to find that damnable black rock.”

  “Why shouldn’t they? Gold can’t make a ship sail faster than the wind,” said Grey. “It can’t make a gun fire twenty times faster than a man can work a rifle lever. It can’t make a carriage run without horses.”

  “Exactly,” said Looks Away, nodding. “Ghost rock is all of that and more.”

  “Hard stuff to find, though. Nowadays, I mean. After the big Quake of ’68, folks were finding bits of it everywhere including their own backyards; the supply seems to have dried up.”

  Looks Away shook his head. “That’s not precisely true. A lot of people went to great—very great, I dare say—effort to collect as many pieces of it as they could. Much of that sundry supply was begged, borrowed, bought, or stolen.”

  Grey nodded. “Mm. I’ve heard tales. I also heard they found a crapload of it in the Black Hills. Why aren’t you looking for it there?”

  “Would that I could,” said Looks Away glumly. “But for reasons I’ve already explained I am persona non grata there. There is a considerable price on my head.”

  “Really? Exactly how badly ‘dented’ was this Big Water fellow?”

  “Mmmm … let’s just say that he won’t be fathering any children.”

  Grey winced. “Ouch.”

  “In my own defense, he did start that fight.”

  “Uh huh.” Grey sipped some whiskey. “You can’t get Sioux ghost rock. And…?”

  “And it doesn’t entirely matter,” said Looks Away. “As it turns out it isn’t necessarily how much ghost rock one has … but how you use it.”

  “Does this get us around to a big blue explosion?”

  “It does.”

  “Will I like the explanation once we get there?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Are you going to tell me anyway?”

  “It seems likely.” Looks Away poured the last of the whiskey into their cups.

  “Guess I’d better hear it.”

  Looks Away nodded and took a breath to tell the rest of his tale.

  But suddenly he jerked erect, stared past Grey with huge, terrified eyes, and uttered a scream that split the desert darkness into a thousand jagged pieces.

  A moment later pale, blood-streaked hands reached out of the shadows and grabbed Grey Torrance and jerked him backward into the night.

  Chapter Seven

  Grey was dragged down and pulled across the rough ground by hands that were as cold as ice. He bellowed in rage and fear and punched upward over his head, trying to hit whoever had him. He felt his knuckles strike home, felt flesh and bone yield to his blows, heard the thud of each punch, but there was no cry of pain, no release from those hands.

  His hand flashed toward the handle of his pistol but his fingers only brushed the wood grips as the Colt fell into the dirt.

  Grey could hear Looks Away shrieking in terror behind him. Awful growls filled the air.

  Desperate and frightened, Grey flung himself backward from the hands that held him, trying to use force and dead weight to stop the pull, and for a moment he saw two figures bent over him. They were silhouetted against the stars but the firelight glowed on the edges of their features. Men. Two of them, dressed in torn clothes, hatless, their hair stringy, their faces dead pale in the bad light.

  Their eyes …

  Empty.

  Totally empty.

  Not like the hollowed sockets of skulls, but empty of all human light, all knowing, all intelligence. Looking into those eyes was like looking into polished glass.

  Their skin was ruined. Slashed and torn. Blood was caked on their cheeks and jaws.

  But the wounds did not bleed.

  The blood looked old. Dried.

  Their flesh hung in streamers and it should have bled.

  Should have.

  Should have.

  Fear stabbed itself through the front of Grey’s chest and clamped icy fingers around his heart.

  He knew these men.

  For one terrible, fractured moment Grey was somewhere else entirely. For a stalled heartbeat of time he was not in the Nevada desert at all, but on the muddy banks of Sunder’s Ford, deep in the heart of the Confederacy. In that moment the faces leaning over him were those of Corporal James and Sergeant Howell. />
  They were the faces of dead men.

  Of men Grey had failed long ago and left behind.

  The ghostly faces of the spirits who dogged his backtrail. The accusing faces of the specters he saw in dreams every night of his life. The ones a fortune teller in Abilene warned him were following and who would haunt him until they caught up with him and dragged him down to Hell.

  That’s what he saw in one dreadful moment.

  And then the moment passed.

  He was instantly back in the desert and these were different men. Not James and Howell. Not old friends whose blood was on Grey’s soul.

  No.

  This wasn’t them.

  But Grey knew them just the same.

  Yes, he did.

  Not five hours ago he had seen one of these men try to climb a tumble of rocks and do it badly, holding a gun in one hand and reaching for handholds with the other. And he’d seen the other man stand at the bottom of that rock pile and yell curses and taunts up at his friends.

  Their names floated through shock and horror to his mind.

  The man who held his left arm was Big Curley.

  The man who held his right was Riley Jones.

  They stared at him with empty eyes.

  The eyes of men who could not be doing this. The eyes of men who should be nothing more than buzzard meat. Feasts for the worms.

  But they held him and they bent toward him, their mouths filled with broken teeth.

  Open mouths.

  Hungry mouths.

  Dead mouths in dead faces.

  Bending down toward him.

  Chapter Eight

  Something snapped in Grey Torrance’s mind.

  It was like the chain between handcuffs yielding to inexorable force. It was like a worn piece of rope breaking when a bull jerks his head with absolute defiance.

  Like that.

  Big.

  Sudden.

  And all at once Grey felt his muscles release from the frigid rigidity of terror and become loose, become his own again. As the biting mouths of the two dead men dipped down toward his face and throat, Grey moved.

  With a howl of fury he rolled onto his shoulders, bending his knees, bringing his feet up, forcing them between those cold hands and his own flesh. Then with a savage grunt he kicked up with all his force. His boot heels smashed into the face of Riley Jones and burst it apart. Shoe leather and hobnailed heels obliterated the chin and sent the remaining teeth flying. The steel spurs ripped bloodless flesh from the raw gray muscle. One eye popped like a grape.