Ghostwalkers

by Jonathan Maberry

  The thing that had been Riley Jones merely staggered back, his neck tilted backward at a curious ankle.

  The other one kept coming, though.

  Grey bashed aside Big Curley’s hands, fell over onto his hip, and hammered at the man’s knees and calves with a brutal one-two-one-two. Bone cracked like gunshots and the big deputy canted sideways on a leg that looked like it now had two knees, both of which were bent the wrong way. His big body fell hard, and Grey had to roll sideways to keep from having it land on him.

  But even as Big Curley crashed to the ground, his hands kept snatching and trying to grab. So did Riley, despite his smashed face. As if pain meant nothing at all.

  Nothing.

  Grey kicked himself backward, got to heels and palms and scuttled away from the two men.

  If “men” was even the right word.

  Over the course of a hard life Grey Torrance had been shot, stabbed, slashed, kicked by a horse, and thrown from a moving wagon. He’d broken bones and torn his flesh, and though he was a tough and stoic man, he knew for certain that he could not have endured this kind of damage and not reacted to it.

  No one could.

  No man could.

  The two things crept and thrashed along the ground toward him.

  Grey dug frantically into his pocket and came out with the two-shot derringer. He thumbed the hammer back and as Big Curley lunged at him Grey fired. The bullet caught the dead man dead center in the chest.

  Big Curley twitched.

  That was it.

  As the bullet punched through his sternum and into his heart, the man merely twitched and grunted.

  And kept coming.

  Now the world seemed to be completely falling off its hinges. Grey had one round left and he jammed the barrel into the big man’s eye socket.

  “Die, you son of a bitch!”

  He fired.

  The close contact muffled the sound of the shot, rendering it soft and wet. The gun was low-caliber and the bullet did not have enough force to crack its way out of the back of Big Curley’s skull. Instead it bounced around inside the vault of hard bone, plowing trenches and tunnels through the man’s brain.

  All at once the hungry mouth fell into slackness, the body instantly flopped down. There was no intermediary process. One moment Big Curley was trying to grab and bite, and in the next he was limp meat.

  Grey stared at the corpse, his relief momentary and polluted by confusion and doubt.

  Then Riley Jones flung himself at Grey, ripping and tearing with his claws like a wildcat. From between the torn lips and past the broken teeth came a steady screech like an enraged mountain lion. That scream was not born in any human soul, Grey knew that at once. This was something else.

  Something worse even than a dead man who didn’t want to stay dead.

  This was a monster.

  Monster.

  The word was jammed sideways into Grey’s head as he fired the empty gun over and over again as if will and need could put fresh cartridges into the chambers. Riley swatted it out of his hand and began scrabbling at Grey’s throat, trying to tear through the skin with cracked and torn fingernails.

  “Get off!” cried Grey as he began punching the man in the face.

  Over and over again.

  He could feel bones grind and break. He saw the man’s face lose what little shape it had. He could feel his own hand beginning to ache, to swell.

  With a savage grunt he brought his knee up into Riley’s crotch. The blow must have done damage, but it did not stop the thing. Grey grabbed him by the wrists and kicked upward again. Harder. Faster. And as he did so he heaved and twisted.

  Riley went up and over and down spine-first onto a slender piece of rock that stood up like the spine of a sailfish.

  There was a horrible wet crack as the impact bent him nearly in half the wrong way.

  Grey scrambled around to his knees and stared.

  Riley kept thrashing.

  With a shattered face, with a broken back, with the injuries from the blue explosion still marking every inch of his body, the man kept thrashing.

  “Why won’t you die, you son of a bitch?” snarled Grey. He snatched up a stone as big as a bread loaf, raised it over his head and with both hands slammed it down on Riley’s head.

  Again.

  And again.

  And again.

  Until there was no more head to hit.

  The kicking legs and whipping arms flopped down and the insane little man lay like a fallen scarecrow. Limbs and body bent in all the wrong ways.

  Dead.

  Dead at last.

  Grey knelt there, chest heaving, sweat running in lines down his face, the bloody rock still clutched in his hands.

  He heard a sound, a scuff, and he turned, fearing what was coming for him out of the shadows.

  He raised the rock.

  His mouth formed the words of a prayer he’d learned long ago and thought he’d forgotten.

  A prayer to Mary. Something sinners say when they know they’re about to die.

  “… be with us now and at the moment of our deaths…”

  The figure lurched from shadows into a spill of starlight.

  Staggering, torn, pale, and gasping.

  A long dagger hung from one hand. Blood, black as oil in the bad light, dripped from the wicked blade.

  “Are you alive…?” whispered Grey. “Or have the doorways to hell been kicked open for all times?”

  The face that looked down at Grey was filled with shock and horror.

  But there was light in those eyes.

  Human light.

  “Hell?” murmured the man. “I think we’re both in hell.”

  The knife fell from his hand as Thomas Looks Away sank to his knees and vomited onto the desert sand.

  Around them the night was vast and black and it loomed above them like the ceiling of some great temple of death.

  Chapter Nine

  For three long minutes the two of them did nothing. Said nothing.

  Grey was barely able to think.

  Breathing was difficult enough to manage.

  Looks Away fell over onto his side and rolled away from the mess on the ground. He lay gasping like a fish and staring up, his hands clamped to the side of his head.

  It took a long time, but Grey finally climbed to his feet. It required about as much strength and engineering as hoisting a freight train out of a gully. He tottered over to his Colt and picked it up. The barrel was clogged with sand, so he thrust it into the holster and walked painfully past Looks Away to the rock where the other guns had been laid out. He paused, looking down at the two corpses that were sprawled at the edges of the campfire light. Two more of the posse. One was missing his arm at the shoulder, but the wound was bloodless. A souvenir of the explosion? Grey thought so. The man had a knife buried to the hilt in his right eye socket. The other man’s head was crushed by a stone, almost exactly like Riley. The sight was sickening, and Grey turned away.

  He picked up the Manhattan pistol, opened it to inspect the barrel and loads, closed it, walked over to where Looks Away was struggling to sit up.

  The Sioux looked up and gave Grey a weary, troubled smile. He half laughed and shook his head. “By the queen’s lacy garters…”

  Grey did not smile.

  Instead he kicked Looks Away in the face.

  Very hard.

  The man flopped backward and Grey swarmed atop him, stepping on Looks Away’s right bicep and pinning him down with a knee to the chest.

  “What the bloody hell are you—?” began Looks Away, but Grey placed the barrel of the big Manhattan right between the Indian’s dark eyebrows. Right at the bottom edge of the red lace bandana.

  “No more bullshit,” he said in a deadly whisper. “I have been half blown up and attacked by men who all sense and logic tell me are already dead. I don’t know what’s going on but I believe you do. And by God and all His angels, Mr. Looks Away, you are going to tell me ri
ght damn now.”

  Chapter Ten

  Looks Away told him.

  They sat on opposite sides of the campfire. All of the guns were arranged around Grey. He’d patted the Sioux down and taken everything he had except his clothes.

  “This is about ghost rock,” said Looks Away, rubbing at the heel-shaped bruise on his face. “I was about to explain it all to you when we were attacked. You didn’t have to kick me.”

  “If you are waiting for me to apologize, then I hope you have a comfortable seat,” said Grey. “Besides, it made me feel good. Tell me how this is about ghost rock.”

  Looks Away grunted. “It’s complicated.”

  “Uncomplicate it for me.”

  “Have you ever heard of the word ‘metallurgy’?”

  “Sure. Something to do with metals and such. Making alloys, all that.”

  “All that, correct. The term was originally used by alchemists because some of the properties of various metals and ores were believed to be magical.”

  “I don’t believe in magic,” said Grey, but his comment sounded false even to his own ears. He saw the expression his tone put on Looks Away’s face, so he amended. “I believe in God and suchlike. And … ghosts. I believe in ghosts. Not sure about a lot of the rest of it. Witches and like that. Met a couple of fortunetellers who were fakes. Maybe one who had something.” He shrugged. “I met a whole lot of people who think ghost rock is spooky. The sounds it makes when it burns. Like the screams of the damned.”

  The Sioux nodded. “Do you think that’s what it is?”

  “Don’t know. Only heard it burned twice. Sounds weird, sure, but if I’d never heard a kettle boil or a steam engine scream I’d have thought that was the sound of the Devil, too.”

  “There is perhaps a stronger connection between ghost rock and the spirit world than you might think,” said Looks Away slowly. “You see, inventors, industrialists, and natural philosophers the world over have been experimenting with the ore to harness its power. There’s really nothing like it anywhere.”

  “So I’ve heard. So what?”

  “So, just as scientists are exploring its potential, so are alchemists.”

  “How’s that work? I thought all that alchemy stuff was hokum that it died out a hundred or so years ago.”

  Looks Away laughed. “Died out? Not even close. It was largely discredited, to be sure, and fairly so because most alchemists were charlatans. Like most fortune-tellers and other snake oil salesmen.”

  “Con men,” suggested Grey.

  “Con men,” agreed Looks Away. “However, just as you’ve met one fortune-teller who you thought might have something, there are a precious few among the world’s remaining alchemists who also ‘have’ something. I refer, of course, to those who have made a serious study of what some call ‘the larger world.’”

  “The spirit world, you mean?”

  “Yes and no. For most people the spirit world is a label they slap on everything from ghosts to demons to, say, vampires and werewolves. Most of it is fairy stories for gullible children. Gullible adults, too, I suppose.”

  “But—?”

  “The larger world, as viewed by those select wiser alchemists, refers to a universe where science and magic may well be two sides of the same coin. After all, our science of this modern age would look like magic to someone a century ago.” He touched his chest. “Imagine what the first peoples here in America thought of the Europeans with their great wooden ships and muskets. Think about it. Imagine that a red man who is a skilled hunter and tracker, one of the best of his tribe, who is deadly with a bow and arrow, encounters a man in a metal chestplate and helmet who can point a stick and with thunder and lightning, strike down a great elk a hundred yards away. Tell me that red man did not believe he was witnessing true magic.”

  Grey thought about it, nodded.

  “To the settlers who crossed this continent in covered wagons barely half a century ago,” continued Looks Away, “what would the steam locomotive have been like? Twenty years ago the thought of a horseless carriage was an impossible pipe dream, and now, with the power of ghost rock, you can see them on the streets of New York and Philadelphia and Boston.”

  “I see where you’re going with that.”

  “Now, step back and look at ghost rock through the same telescope. It screams when it’s burned. Sure, we all see that and it’s rather shocking. The weak-minded always want to ascribe something supernatural to the things they don’t understand. History tells us that. But what if all we’re witnessing is merely an aspect of science that has not yet been measured and quantified.”

  Grey thought about it, but he slowly shook his head. “I’ll buy that as an explanation for why ghost rock sounds like the screaming damned. Chemicals hiss and pop and make all sorts of sounds. Everyone knows that. But that?” He stabbed a finger toward the corpses that were now laid in a row and weighted down with rocks. “Tell me how your science—or alchemy, for that matter—explains dead men getting up and getting rowdy? I shot one of those fellows in the heart and he didn’t blink. You hear me? He did not even blink. He just kept grabbing at me, trying to bite me. If that’s science and not magic, then everyone’s been calling it by the wrong damn name all these years. Maybe it’s all magic. That or this is a madhouse and we’re all inmates.”

  Looks Away nodded. “And now you get to my problem.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Until tonight I was fully invested in the camp of people who believed that the qualities of ghost rock were nothing more than science that was not yet understood.” He paused and regarded the corpses, then shuddered. “Now I don’t know what I believe.”

  “Welcome to the rodeo,” said Grey. “We’re both riding the same bucking bronco here. Want to tell me what was the blue flash, and could it have caused this?”

  “That’s the point where all of my beliefs trip and fall on their face, old chap,” said Looks Away. “You see there was a man I met while at university in England. An American scientist and inventor. Rather a brilliant fellow by the name of Percival Saint.”

  Grey frowned. “Why’s that name so familiar?”

  “He was an advisor to President Grant,” said Looks Away.

  “Oh, hell yes. He was a slave as a kid, but he escaped. Took a bunch of other slaves with him and went north.”

  “That’s the man.”

  “The papers said he went to college and got himself a degree. Went back down South after the Confederate States of America abolished slavery and helped build some factories and design some new farm equipment. I heard that he’s been making weapons, that he’s a gun maker.”

  Looks Away sniffed. “Calling Percival Saint a ‘gun maker,’” he said with asperity, “is like calling Michelangelo a ‘house painter.’ Doctor Saint has more doctorates and degrees than you’ve had hot dinners. He is a great, great man.”

  “Well pardon the living hell out of me.”

  “I met Doctor Saint when our Wild West show visited Sweden. We gave a special performance in October for the birthday of his friend and colleague Alfred Nobel.”

  “Dynamite Nobel?”

  “The same. Our show was held at the Bofers Ironworks factory in Kariskoga where they make the steel for certain types of cannons. The factory used several of Nobel’s metallurgic techniques there, and there is a rumor that he plans to buy the company. We gave a show for the staff and several hundred guests. I had arranged with Doctor Saint and Mr. Nobel to use some of their experimental chemical combinations to create a fireworks display that served as our finale. It was all quite exciting.”

  “And you’re drifting away from getting to the damn point,” growled Grey.

  “Not really. It was during my discussions with Doctor Saint and Nobel that the subject of ghost rock came up. This was a few years ago, mind you, during that big surge to find the stuff. Naturally both men had a great interest in the rock and its potential. They both saw it as a great weapon of war. They had each done some, shall
we say, casual experiments with it.”

  “Casual?”

  “Did you hear about the big fire in Chicago some years back?”

  “Who hasn’t? The Great Fire they call it. Back in ’71.”

  “The very one.”

  “What about it?” asked Grey. “I thought a cow started it. Kicked over a lantern…”

  “Balderdash. There was no cow in the story at all. At least not one that mattered.”

  “I don’t—.”

  “All of the reports by those who witnessed the start of the fire,” continued Looks Away, “described a great flash of light that was like nothing they’d ever seen.” He smiled. “Care to guess what color that flash was?”

  Chapter Eleven

  Grey narrowed his eyes. “Now we’re getting somewhere. This blue flash … it’s some kind of ghost rock weapon? Is that what I’m pulling from your mosey-round-the-mountain way of getting to a goddamn point?”

  “In a word,” said Looks Away, “yes.”

  “Shit. A weapon that raises the dead?”

  “Ah, no … that would be what Doctor Saint and Mr. Nobel refer to as an unfortunate and unforeseen side effect.”

  “Unfortunate hardly seems to come close to it.”

  “No,” said the Sioux, cutting another uneasy look at the corpses, “it does not.”

  Grey got the fixings for coffee from his saddlebag. “Might as well have something to keep us up while we talk this through,” he said. “I sure as hell don’t plan to get any shut-eye while the sun’s down.”

  The Sioux made a face. “I seriously doubt I will ever sleep soundly again.”

  “Blue light,” prompted Grey.

  “Depending on how pure a sample of ghost rock is, it can burn with different colors,” explained Looks Away. “If there are trace amounts of calcium chloride the fire will burn orange, if lithium, it will burn red, and so on. What Saint and Nobel did was combine ghost rock with chalcanthite, which is a copper mineral. They found that by compressing tiny bits of ghost rock in a ball of cupric chloride, they get a burn of very short duration but with an exceptionally high energetic output. This discharge of energy can be directed through a metal tube such as a rifle barrel lined with copper to make a projectile. It can also be super-condensed within a sphere made of alternating layers of copper and steel to create a high-impact aerial grenade. Are … are you following any of this?”