Ghostwalkers

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Not to bring us all down,” said Looks Away, “but there was a considerable span of time between most of its uses. I don’t know what would have happened if I’d fired shot upon shot.”

  “Damn,” repeated Grey. “How many of those guns do you have?”

  “Including the one you ‘borrowed’?” asked Saint.

  “Yes.”

  “Two. The other needs some work, but I think I can get it operational in under an hour.”

  “Good, that’s better than—.

  “That is not the issue,” said Saint. “I have a number of other weapons in various stages of assembly and function. Even a handgun that you might find quite comfortable.”

  “Still sounds good to me.”

  “However we don’t have enough ammunition,” said Saint. “More precisely, I don’t have enough ghost rock to make the guns work.”

  For the first time since he’d awakened, Grey smiled. “Tell me, Doc,” he said quietly, “have you looked in my saddlebag?”

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Jenny took Saint outside to where Picky and Queenie were being groomed. Grey said he’d join them as soon as he was dressed. He asked Looks Away to stay behind for a moment.

  “There are some big gaps in my memory,” Grey admitted as he pulled on the clothes Jenny had laid out for him. “And there’s also some gaps in your side of the story.”

  “Ah,” said Looks Away, nodding. “You’re wondering why I didn’t mention Lucky Bob.”

  “No, I pretty much get why you didn’t mention him. What I want to know is what happened to him?”

  But the Sioux shook his head. “You were knocked out,” he said. “I wasn’t. After Doctor Saint killed the worm, I went looking for Lucky Bob. I was hoping to find him alive but injured. I thought it might be useful for us to interrogate one of the more powerful undead. Or, maybe drag him back to see if Brother Joe could work some kind of white man religious mojo on him. Exorcise his demons, so to speak.”

  “And—?”

  “And he was gone. I found blood but no body.”

  Grey began buttoning his shirt. “Shit.”

  “I know. If Brother Joe is correct, then Lucky Bob’s body was possessed at the point of death. The body is apparently able to heal itself.”

  Grey shook his head. “This is all so damn complicated. A week ago dead was dead, now there’s all kinds of different death? Corpses that try to eat you. Demons stealing bodies. Why can’t the world be the world again?”

  The Sioux’s face was sad. “Believe me, old chap, I dearly wish we could roll back the clock to the way things were. You’d like to roll it back a week. My people would like to roll it back four hundred years.”

  “Ouch,” said Grey, wincing as if actually punched. Looks Away spread his hands.

  “However the world is the world, old fellow,” he said. “If it’s moved on, then surely we need to dig in with our spurs and ride to catch up.”

  “A cowboy metaphor,” said Grey. “Nice.”

  “Apt, though.”

  “I guess.” He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on his boots. They had been brushed, but there were lingering stains on them. The blood of monsters. He paused, holding the second boot between his fingers and letting it dangle. “I should tell Jenny about her dad.”

  “It’ll hurt her. He seems to have embraced his new nature. Maybe all that was Lucky Bob is gone now and only the manitou remains. Either way…”

  “I know, but it doesn’t feel right to lie to her. Even lying by omission.”

  Looks Away cocked his head and appraised Grey. “You’re a strange man, my friend.”

  Grey said nothing.

  “Down in the cavern, Veronica said some things…”

  “I know,” said Grey as he pulled on the second boot. He stood up. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  But Looks Away shifted to stand in front of the door. “I rather think the time is past to be coy. If we have to accept that we’re in a world where demons and monsters are a fact of life, then I suppose we need to be open to other possibilities. Prophecies come to mind. Mircalla and then Veronica. What is it exactly that they are talking about?”

  Grey sighed and turned away. “It’s nothing. Ghost stories and bullshit. Let it go.”

  “Really?” Looks Away said, stretching the word out. “A vampire-witch and a ghost take the time to make cryptic pronouncements about you and I’m supposed to dismiss it out of hand? Sorry, old chap, but we’ve come too far together for that to be possible anymore. The woman I loved was killed. The woman you seem to be falling for was very nearly killed. We’re preparing to go into battle against a necromancer who can raise the dead and arm them with the world’s most advanced weaponry. You—or perhaps your ‘destiny’—seems to be tied to all this. So, no, I will not let it go. Bollocks to that. There’s not one chance in ten trillion that I am going to let it go.”

  “We don’t have time for—.”

  The Sioux scientist leaned back against the closed door. “Make time.”

  Grey sighed and sat back down. For nearly a full minute he said nothing, but instead stared mutely at his callused hands, watching his fingers knot and unknot. Finally he sighed out the ball of tension that had formed in his chest.

  “It was the Battle of Ballard Creek. No, don’t worry, you won’t have heard of it. No one has. It wasn’t what historians would call an ‘important’ battle. It wasn’t even an important massacre.” Grey shook his head. “Except to me. It’s real damn important to me. You see I was leading a platoon of Union soldiers on a reconnaissance mission in Mississippi. We’d had intelligence reports that Confederate troops were building some kind of super cannon. It was supposed to be able to fire shells twice as far as anything we had in the north. The brass in Washington were afraid that it was something that could change the course of the war. My platoon was one of a dozen that were sent to find the testing ground.”

  “Ah. I heard those rumors, too. It was a lie, as I understand.”

  “Sure. It was a deliberate leak. The CSA intelligence division leaked a dozen different versions of the story and then monitored who reacted and how. It was all a pretty sophisticated plan to identify double-agents in their own network and to ferret out our spies. They put a lot of scalps on the walls with it, too.”

  “So, what was Ballard Creek?”

  “We were following one of the leads, but because of some local flooding we took a different route than the one I’d been ordered to take. That meant that we slipped past the ambush that was waiting for us without ever knowing we were stepping out of the trap.”

  “Lucky break,” said Looks Away.

  Grey gave a sour grunt. “That’s what we all thought. The Rebs knew they’d missed one of the teams—my team—and they put a lot of men in the field looking for us. My commanding officer managed to get word to me and told me to get my platoon the hell out of there. Easier said than done, though. The wood and swamps were alive with search parties. So, I decided it was safer to go to ground. By that point in the war there were a lot of abandoned and burned out farms. We found one way back in the bayous and we moved in. We were very careful to hide all traces. Wiped out our footprints with leafy branches, ate everything cold so there was no cooking smoke. We did it all the right way. We hunkered down and waited. And waited. I sent scouts out every couple of days. Two came back, two didn’t. When our supplies started getting low, I decided to see if I could finagle something. We were all in civilian clothes, and I can do as good a New Orleans’ accent as you’d want to hear. So I went riding to a local town to buy some supplies. My men had enough food for two weeks, and I hoped to be back with a wagonload of supplies in ten days at the most. I wore an eye patch and kept one arm in a sling, and I was able to spin a good story about being with one of the CSA divisions that had been nearly wiped out a few years back. It was convincing enough because there are a lot of wounded soldiers around and I fit right in.” He paused and sighed. “And that’s when things
started going too well. I met a widow woman, a beautiful young lady who was running the general store in a small town near Ballard Creek. I had to play my role, so I acted the part of a battle-weary officer. All courtly manners. Understand, I needed to win her confidence because I wanted to buy supplies in bulk, and I couldn’t risk too many questions. She was such a lovely person. Gentle and beautiful and sad. Her father and two brothers had been killed in battle. Her husband had died at Manassas, and their only child, a little girl, had died of a fever. She was all alone in the world. Her name was Annabelle Sampson.”

  “Ah. What happened?”

  “Ah, what do you think happened? We became close. We, um…”

  “You fell in love with her?”

  Grey sighed. “I don’t think I realized until then how lonely I was. There had been girls here and there, but there was never time for anything that mattered. Nothing deep. And she’d lost so much…”

  “I’m not judging you, Grey. I can’t think of a more perfect formula for love. Loss and hurt, loneliness and an uncertain future. That’s fertile ground for passion.”

  “It went deeper than passion, Looks. I loved her. Really. Like they talk about in books. You can mock but it was real.”

  Looks Away’s eyes were filled with ghosts. “I will never mock love, my friend. I may be many things, but a fool is not one of them.”

  “Thanks for that,” said Grey.

  “How did you lose her?”

  “I lost her because I’m a goddamn fool,” admitted Grey. “I stayed in town for every one of the ten days that I told my men it would take me to get the supplies and get back. On the eighth night with Annabelle I told her the truth. By then we were already living together. It was like that. Fast for both of us, but right for both of us.”

  Looks Away nodded.

  “I expected her to be shocked, but she confessed that she knew it almost from the start. She said that there were little things. That was pretty damned disturbing, as you might expect, but Annabelle said that she was sure no one else knew or even suspected. Even so, it brought me to my senses. I realized that I was wasting time in that town when I had hungry soldiers waiting on me to get back. So that night we packed up her wagon and I set out at first light. I promised to come back for her as soon as I’d gotten my men out of the area. I swore to her that I’d be back.”

  Out in the yard he heard a dog barking. It was so normal a sound for a day and a place that would never be normal again.

  “It all went wrong from there,” said Grey. “I was still two miles from the abandoned farmhouse when I saw the smoke and heard the gunshots.”

  “God.”

  “I had my own horse trailing the wagon, and I left the supplies and rode hard for the farm. When I got there, though, the place was on fire and there had to be two hundred Confederate soldiers in the woods. My men were putting up a fight, but they had no chance. They even had a white flag hung out of the front window. A sheet tied to a musket. They were trying to surrender.”

  “Were they taken?”

  “No,” said Grey, “they were slaughtered. The soldiers kept firing and firing. I wanted to help them, but there were so many of them. I could hear my men screaming inside the house. Screaming and begging and praying to God. I heard them calling my name, too. Shouting it out and damning me. If I’d gotten back sooner I might have saved them. We might have gotten out and gotten away. Instead, I watched them die. I watched from some coward’s hole in the ground and saw those soldiers drag the last of my men out and cut them to pieces. They heaped the bodies in the yard and some of the soldiers pissed on them. They didn’t even bury the dead. They left them all to rot. And it’s all my fault, because I didn’t get back in time.”

  “No,” said Looks Away. “If you’d gotten back sooner you’d have died with them.”

  “You don’t know that. They were my men, damn it. They counted on me, relied on me. Instead of bringing them back the supplies they needed, I was dallying with a woman. I let what I wanted be more important than what they needed. That makes me a disgrace as an officer and a failure as a man. Don’t try to tell me I’m wrong.”

  Silence washed back and forth between them.

  “What about the woman?” asked Looks Away after a time. “What about Annabelle?”

  Grey had a hard time answering that. “I … I … ah … God.”

  Looks Away came over and sat down on the bed next to him. He placed his hand on Grey’s back. “She died?”

  Grey nodded. “The people in town … they figured it out. With Union soldiers hiding out in the bayou and a stranger in town to buy supplies … they figured it out. I thought I was being so clever, but I was just a clumsy, arrogant fool.”

  “What happened?”

  “They came for her the next day. They dragged her out of her house. A dozen men.” He wiped at his eyes. “You know what they did. You know what men do.”

  They sat together as the sunlight burned through the windows and threw their shadows on the wall.

  “I found her after. After…” Grey sniffed and hung his head. “Since then I’ve felt them. Following me. Hunting me.”

  “Who? The soldiers?”

  “No—my soldiers. My men. And … Annabelle.”

  “Following you?”

  “Haunting me. That’s why I left. That’s why I keep moving. They’re always there on my backtrail. At first I thought it was just me being crazy, that I’d lost my mind when I found her that day. But then we met Mircalla.”

  “And Veronica.”

  “And Veronica.”

  “I read enough books about spirits and hauntings since then,” said Grey. “I’m being followed by what they call ‘vengeance ghosts.’ They want revenge for what I did to them.”

  “Dear lord,” breathed Looks Away. “But, wait, that’s not all Veronica’s spirit said to you, old chap. She said that ‘not all who walk in shadows are evil.’ That ‘not all of the lonely spirits of the dead wish you harm.’”

  “Don’t ask me what she meant by that,” said Grey bitterly. “I know that I’m doomed and probably damned. If I wasn’t such a coward I’ve had stopped and let them catch up to me.”

  “You’re no coward, Grey.”

  “Really? Tell that to Annabelle and my men.”

  “You could be wrong about why they’re following you.”

  “I’m not.” Grey stood up. “Come on, Jenny and Doctor Saint are waiting for us. We have a war to fight.”

  “You don’t have to fight,” said Looks Away, glancing up at him. “You’ve done your part. You saved lives here in town. You saved Jenny a couple of times. Let that be enough.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “If you’re afraid of ghosts, old boy, then bugger off. Ride away. Put half a world between you and the dead. Go.”

  Grey picked up his gunbelt and strapped it on. “No,” he said heavily. “I’m done running.”

  “But—.”

  “A man can only be afraid for so long,” said Grey. “A man can only be ashamed so much and then he hits a point. I’m there. If it’s my destiny to die and let my ghosts drag me down to hell, then so be it. If it helps them, if that’s what will give them rest, then okay. I want them to rest. I can’t be the cause of their pain anymore.”

  He crossed to the door and stood with his hand on the knob, then turned to Looks Away.

  “We probably can’t win this fight,” he said quietly. “You know that, right?”

  Looks Away sighed and nodded.

  “But I promise you this … I won’t die easy and I won’t die alone. If we’re all going to hell, then let’s take as many of these bastards with us as possible.”

  The Sioux stood up. “Just remember that Deray is mine.”

  Grey smiled. “No promises.”

  “As long as he dies,” said Looks Away.

  “As long as he dies,” agreed Grey.

  They shook hands and went out to prepare for war.

  Chapter Seventy-Six

>   They all met in the barn Percival Saint used for a lab.

  Grey was surprised to find that Brother Joe had joined Jenny and Saint, but not surprised to find that the monk was haranguing them about the possibility of violence.

  “We need to find another way,” implored the monk.

  Doctor Saint wore a kindly smile and he patted Brother Joe’s shoulder in a tolerant way. “I appreciate and even respect your compassion, my friend. I admire you for it, and believe me when I tell you that if there was any other way to resolve this, I would be the first to volunteer to lead a peace delegation. But Lord Deray is not a reasonable person. He is not offering or asking for terms. He is a conqueror. He is very possibly a madman. And he is, by any practical definition of the word, evil.”

  “Even so, we must practice tolerance and—.”

  “And what, padre?” asked Grey as he and Looks Away walked over to where the others stood around a big table. “And martyrdom? Sorry, but as noble as that seems when saints do it, none of us here are saints. And I don’t recall a single case, even in the Bible, where martyrdom stopped a war from happening. Can’t recall when it saved innocent lives.”

  “Jesus Christ gave his life for—.”

  “Let me stop you right there, padre,” said Grey. “You can preach about turning the other cheek until you’re blue in the face, but in this instance you are not preaching to the choir. We’re going to war. We’re here in this room to talk about going to war. We are going to talk about how we’re going to try our absolute damndest to kill Aleksander Deray. That’s what we’re going to do. If you don’t want to hear that conversation, there’s the door. If you want to help us, then by all means go and pray. We could use the help, although at the risk of getting another black mark on my soul, I got to tell you that I haven’t seen much of what you’d call divine protection. Not feeling the love of God right now. So, either help us or hush up.”

  If Grey had slapped the monk he could not have shut him up more completely or put a deeper hurt into the man’s eyes. Brother Joe backed away from Grey as if he was a leper, but the monk lingered at the doorway and drew the sign of the cross in the air between them. Whether it was a blessing or if he was warding off the darkness inside Grey was up for interpretation. The monk turned and banged the door shut behind him.