Ghostwalkers

by Jonathan Maberry

  A set of new-looking steel railroad tracks ran past the gates and then curved away to run along the distant underground sea, heading opposite to where Chesterfield’s house lay. Halfway to the black waters sat a still and silent locomotive to which was coupled ten hopper cars laden with some cargo they could not identify and then twenty empty flatbed cars. No steam rose from the train’s chimney.

  Grey ducked down behind a boulder and pulled Looks Away into the shadows beside him.

  The crystal gates stood open.

  But the gateway itself was not empty.

  A line of men were walking in orderly lines from beyond the gate. Dozens and dozens of them.

  No. Hundreds.

  “Who are they?” whispered Looks Away.

  Grey shook his head because the men were too far away to see clearly. He gestured to a spill of rocks to their right, and they moved off, keeping low and being careful to make no sound. The rocks were the debris from a fallen natural pillar, and they offered excellent cover as the two men drew close. Then Grey pulled his companion down again as the first rank of marching men went past them at no more than a stone’s easy throw away.

  The men wore uniforms. They were soldiers. That much had been clear from a distance. But up close it was evident that they were not Americans.

  The men in the front ranks wore dark blue jackets set with red trim and brass buttons. Dark trousers were tucked into gleaming black boots, and on their heads they wore tapered leather helmets topped with spikes.

  Looks Away grunted in surprise, then very quietly observed, “Dunkelblau waffenrock.”

  “What?”

  “Those are the uniforms of Prussian infantry.”

  “But…,” Grey let the rest hang as more of the soldiers passed by. He estimated that there were at least a hundred of the Prussians. Behind them came other soldiers, and as they passed, Looks Away identified them.

  “Polish … French … Italian … Swedish…”

  The men marched in precise lines, with resplendent officers riding horses and sergeants barking out commands. On the chest of each officer were medals and ribbons from the many wars of their several nations. Grey had seen pictures of some, but most were unknown to him.

  When the foreign soldiers had all marched out, a different group followed them. They were hard-faced men dressed in a uniform unlike any Grey had ever seen. Black trousers and jackets, with bloodred sashes embroidered with some kind of strange magical symbols—swirling stars and planets, mathematical notations, and the stylized gears like those inside a clock. Deray’s bodyguard, perhaps, mused Grey. Or … his private army?

  Most had Winchester ’73s laid against their shoulders. The sergeants, however, carried guns of a kind Grey had only recently come to know. Weapons he did not expect to encounter down here. These were exotic-looking long guns with wide-barrels made from brass and mirrored steel, with gemstones set into frameworks from which coils of copper seemed to loop and feed back into themselves. Strange guns.

  And strangely familiar.

  Grey turned to face Looks Away, to accuse him, to demand answers, but from the look of shocked horror on Looks Away’s face it was evident that his friend was as startled as he was.

  “Those are…,” began Looks Away, then tripped over the words. “Those are … Kingdom rifles.”

  Grey nodded, feeling a hollow space open up in his chest. He grabbed a fistful of Looks Away’s shirt and pulled him close. In a fierce, tight whisper he hissed, “How?”

  But all Looks Away could do was shake his head.

  They crouched there and watched as the soldiers marched past. The strange blue light of the fungi gleamed on the polished brass and rare jewels of those deadly guns.

  Then Grey noticed something and he looked closer still. The guns were very similar to the Kingdom Rifles, but they were not exactly the same. He glanced back and forth from them to the weapon slung over his companion’s shoulder. The same materials and a decidedly familiar design. And yet … the gun designed by Doctor Saint had a cylinder for the compressed ghost rock gas and a magazine for the oversized bullets, but the guns carried by the sergeants did not. Instead they had ratcheted dials on the sides of slightly longer magazines. And the glowing jewels set into the frames were of different sizes and cuts.

  Grey bent close and said all this to Looks Away, and somehow that helped the Sioux shake off his shock. He narrowed his eyes and bent closer to study the weapons as Grey had.

  “Are they Doctor Saint’s stolen weapons?”

  “No. There are too many of them. And I’ve never seen this design. There’s no gas capsule. Besides, it would make no sense for Deray to arm his people with weapons that could destroy the souls of his own undead servants. Mind you, he may have used ghost rock’s energetic properties for some other purpose, perhaps to increase rate of fire or perhaps to achieve greater range but—”

  He didn’t finish because a sound made them both start and then turn.

  It was the cry of a man in terror.

  Not one man.

  Many. A dozen at least.

  They came running and staggering through the gates, their hands bound before them, their shirts torn away to reveal bodies crisscrossed by the red marks of the whip. The men stumbled into each other, they fell and staggered, and crawled away from the gate, fleeing in mad, blind terror.

  As they ran onto the broad plain, the ranks of soldiers—Confederate and foreign—split apart and at the bellowed orders of sergeants, they trotted left and right to form a large ring around the prisoners. In perfect unison the soldiers drew bayonets and fitted them to the ends of their rifles and within minutes had formed a ring of needlepoint blades and the black mouths of gun barrels. The prisoners wailed and collapsed into a huddle, most of them begging and weeping. One man buried his face in the dirt and cried out for his mother to come and rescue him.

  The soldiers stood their line, faces hard, mouths hard, eyes harder yet. Even from a distance Grey could tell that there was no trace of mercy on any face that wasn’t holding a gun.

  Not a trace.

  Then there was a great rumbling and for a moment Grey thought that he was hearing the sound of a locomotive. But it was something far stranger. From the shadows beyond the gate came a machine that Grey had once seen demonstrated on a military base in upstate New York. It was a carriage made entirely of metal but it was not pulled by horses, nor did it have wheels. Instead it rumbled forward on bands of linked metal plates that squeaked and clanked. Steam rose from twin pipes mounted aft of a kind of crow’s nest, and from the center of this structure sprouted a long cannon barrel.

  It was what his old commanders had called a “tank,” and it thundered across the plain. Grey saw that the flag of Prussia was painted on the side of the cannon turret.

  A second machine followed that one out through the gates, this one marked with the flag of Denmark. A third came. A fourth. For each ground of foreign military there was one of these monstrous tanks. The stink of their engines filled the air and beneath the weight of their clanking treads and grinding gears Grey could hear the tormented shriek of ghost rock.

  “Are you seeing this?” whispered Looks Away.

  “Yes,” answered Grey.

  “Deray is arming them for war. Good lord, Grey, Deray isn’t merely experimenting with these forces, he’s selling his goods to the madmen of this world. He’s an arms dealer on a level I’ve never seen before.”

  When the last of the tanks was in position, a sergeant in the livery of Deray’s private army raised his saber, let it stand glittering above him, and then swept it down. The engine roars and their accompanying screams died away.

  Then the sergeant nodded to his colleagues among the various armies, and the foot soldiers stepped forward and raised their rifles to their shoulders, all barrels facing the prisoners.

  Looks Away muttered, “Damn poor positioning for a firing squad. They’ll bloody well shoot each other.”

  But Grey shook his head. “No …
I think they’re going to—.”

  His theory died on his tongue as another sound made them turn once more toward the gate.

  A man walked slowly out of the shadows, and his feet made no sound. However behind him, still cloaked in darkness, something else moved. There was the hiss of a steam engine and the clank of metal, but whatever it was did not yet follow the man out onto the plain.

  The man was very tall and very thin. He wore a suit of the finest cut and quality. Black pants and a jacket of such a dark purple that the color could only be seen in the bulges of creases as he walked. His waistcoat was gray with moon-colored silver traceries embroidered onto it. The stitchery flowed in the same pattern of planets, mathematical symbols, and gears as on the sashes of his troops. In another place, on another man, Grey would have thought it too posh and even silly. Not, however, on this man.

  No, there was nothing silly about this one.

  He wore a low top hat with a silk band that matched his waistcoat. His shoes were polished to a gleaming finish.

  The man walked with a decided limp, though somehow this infirmity did not suggest weakness. Rather it seemed to mark him as one who had been through Hell and walked out, likely alone. He leaned on a slender walking stick whose copper head was fashioned into the snarling face of a kraken—a creature Grey had seen in his books. The tentacles of the beast curled downward and wrapped around the shaft of the stick.

  Grey did not need Looks Away to tell him who this was. Who it had to be.

  His mouth formed the name but he did not dare speak it aloud.

  Aleksander Deray.

  A hush fell over the entire plain and the mechanical sound from within the gates likewise ceased. Even the weeping prisoners held their pleas.

  Except for the man who still cried for his mother.

  The weeping man was fat and lacked muscle; his blubbery skin was covered with coarse hair but his flesh was pale and unhealthy. He clawed at the ground and banged his forehead on it until his skin broke and blood fell like tears.

  Looks Away suddenly gasped.

  “What is it?” demanded Grey.

  “By the Queen’s garters—that’s Nolan Chesterfield.”

  Deray approached the circle of soldiers and they parted without hesitation to let him through.

  As Deray entered the circle the soldiers closed ranks once more.

  The prisoners recoiled from Deray and tried to back away, to flee, but no matter where they turned they encountered a wall of bayonets in the hands of merciless soldiers. In helpless defeat they stopped and stood their ground, chests heaving, faces streaked with tears, eyes empty of all hope.

  Deray walked in a slow circle around the men, and they cowered back from him, clustering into a tight knot, their eyes following every movement, every step. The man’s path took him to within a dozen feet of where Grey and Looks Away crouched, and it gave Grey his first chance to study their enemy.

  And enemy seemed to be a perfect word for him.

  Aleksander Deray had a thin, aquiline face, with the full lips of a sensualist but the narrow nose and hooded eyes of an ascetic. He could have been a monk from some remote monastery, or a composer of dark and dangerous music. His hands were large, the fingers long and white. Grey noted that he wore a star sapphire ring on the index finger of his right hand and an emerald on the other. Both stones were as large as robins’ eggs.

  The expression of his face was not haughty or arrogant, which Grey expected to see on so powerful a man. Instead he appeared to be calm, introspective. His eyes roved over the prisoners without apparent animosity, his lips did not curl into a sneer. They were before him and he observed them, nothing more.

  Somehow that chilled Grey all the more. For someone to command such power and to have both science and sorcery at his fingertips it would have been more comforting to see the gleam of madness. Instead Grey saw intelligence and insight. This was not a man who could be provoked into some foolish action. Here was a man who calculated the odds and took chances only when the cards were falling his way. Grey had played poker and faro with such men, and he invariably lost.

  “Where is he from?” asked Grey, who doubted the man was American.

  However Looks Away shook his head. “He claims to be a descendant of Egyptian pharaohs, which I very much doubt. Doctor Saint thought he might be a bastard son of Italian nobility, or maybe a legitimate nobleman who fell out of favor and changed his name. There are a hundred stories about him, and all of them contradict.”

  “Not an American putting on an act?”

  “Not a chance.”

  Deray walked past where they hid and stopped in front of Nolan Chesterfield.

  “Look at me,” he said in a cultured voice and Grey could hear the cultured European accent. It didn’t sound Italian, though. More like someone from Eastern Europe. Grey had met a Balkan once. Similar accent, similar cold and imperious bearing.

  The quivering man did not respond to Deray’s command.

  “Nolan!” said Deray sharply. “Do as I say. Look at me.”

  Chesterfield flinched back from the sound of his name. Sobs racked his body, shuddering through his pale skin. He did not raise his head.

  With a sigh of disappointment, Deray turned away and looked around him. The officers attached to each foreign army bowed to him from the saddles of their horses. Mounted, they towered above him but everyone there knew that it was he who was the giant here. Everyone was tense, waiting, watching, listening.

  “My friends,” said Deray, pitching his voice to address the crowd but not shouting. The spectators who could not hear leaned forward. The effort was theirs to do, not Deray’s. Another sign of the man’s subtle power. “The land that was once America was not born on a quiet bed. It was born in fire and blood. As all great nations are.”

  The officers nodded. The soldiers remained stock-still.

  “When war split this nation, first in half and then into many parts, the weak were consumed while the strong were forged in those fires. Those who rule earn that right. It was true of Alexander and Genghis Khan. It was true of Alaric the Visigoth and Attila the Hun. Greatness is earned through conquest. Hannibal knew this as did Scipio Africanus. Read the histories of Cyrus the Great and Sun Tzu, of Julius Caesar and Thutmose III.”

  The officers kept nodding. These were clearly the saints of their church. The warlords and conquerors.

  “And for our generation? How many of us here will write our histories in the blood of those we conquer? Who among us has that greatness burning in their hearts? Who here will ascend to their throne on a stairway of corpses? Tell me, my brothers, who?”

  A dozen swords instantly flashed from scabbards as every officer cried out his own name, bellowing loud enough to imprint their arrogance like a tattoo on the flesh of destiny. Every soldier echoed the name of his general. They crashed their rifle butts onto the hard ground and they all spoke with the thunderous voice of conquest.

  Deray let it go on and on until fragments of crystal and rock fell like rain from the ceiling. Then he raised his hand. A simple gesture, palm out, at shoulder height. Silence crashed down around them.

  Grey heard Looks Away very softly say, “By the Queen’s perfumed knickers.”

  The silence held for ten long seconds before Deray broke it.

  “Ghost rock,” he said, putting the words onto the humid air. They seemed to hang there, burning. “Earth herself tore open her flesh and vomited it into our world. A stone, ugly and useless to the unenlightened. But to those with vision, to those who dare—?” He paused so that his next word would eclipse what he had already said. A simple word, filled with so much meaning. “Power.”

  On the ground, Nolan Chesterfield whimpered.

  “Since it was discovered, the wisest, the most devious of our engineers and scientists have labored to unlock its secrets, and much have they discovered. Much have we been able to accomplish. Weapons capable of mass destruction. Machines that will work day and night, and at speeds neve
r before imagined. Warships that can sink any wooden fleet without risking the lives of their own crews. Mechanical wagons with cannons that can chase down mounted cavalry and grind them into the dirt.” He paused and repeated the word. “Power.”

  He began walking again, circling the prisoners without looking at them.

  “My brothers,” he continued, “you have come thousands of miles and traveled deep beneath the earth to join me on this propitious day. You have already seen many of the weapons that I am willing to share with you. The new generation of small arms that will let a few conquer many. As you travel home with your purchases, I will watch the news with interest as the houses of the weak fall to the guns of the mighty.”

  Once more the generals and their soldiers bellowed, and once more the cavern shook.

  And once more Deray held up his hand for the silence that fell immediately.

  “Now I want to show you more. So. Much. More.” He spaced the words out. “Now I will show you the new age of warfare.” He held a hand theatrically to his ear. “Listen. Can you hear the future coming? Can you hear the gears of this world grind into a different gear? Can you hear it?”

  They could all hear it.

  Everyone there could hear it.

  From beyond the gates came the machine sound Grey had heard earlier, and in the shadow he could see something move.

  Some.

  Thing.

  It walked like a man.

  Tall, on long legs, with its head held high.

  But it was not a man.

  No.

  With clanking footsteps that struck the stone like artillery shells, it strode out from between the gates. The generals’ mouths dropped open as something came out through those crystal gates. This was not a soldier, nor was it one of the ghost rock-suborned dinosaurs or pterosaurs, nor even one of the undead or a Harrowed. This was something much bigger, vastly more frightening. Thirty feet high. Gleaming. Steel and copper, bronze and platinum. Jewels the size of Grey’s fists were set into its metal skin. Thick bundles of armored wire ran along its flanks and up into sockets on its neck. A massive chunk of ghost rock was half buried in its chest, and the stone seemed to throb, the white lines writhed and twisted. And the eyes …