Now something in the back of their minds reminded the humans in the room of another plain, of another time when wild dogs herded—or hunted— humans instead of sheep, and they grew silent.
Anthony waved to Coyote. “Come over. Have a drink.”
Coyote’s yellow and grey eyes looked at the black man. She slowly walked to the table as Anthony called for beer. Coyote pulled a chair through the sawdust, sat, and began to drink the beer placed before her. Lao-shu looked at Coyote, then to Anthony. Anthony shook his head slightly, and Lao-shu pushed her chair back.
“I go to check on my women,” she said. “Sometimes men seek power instead of comfort.” Lao-shu kissed Anthony dn the cheek before she headed upstairs. Coyote’s eyes focused on the kiss, then on Anthony’s face. They waited a long while, until Coyote finally spoke.
“Leave her.”
Anthony’s brow furrowed. “Ain’t neither of us offended you, seeing as we’re both guests in your land, and—”
Coyote shook her head. “To keep her safe. To keep her from being a target.” She took another drink. “Spider, she’s not like us.”
“Close enough. She ain’t human like—”
“She can die.”
Anthony shrugged. “It’d only be a dozen years.”
“She. Can. Die.” The left side of Coyote’s mouth twitched, whites of teeth glinting through thin lips. “Just like Robert.”
Anthony felt the goosebumps travel up his back. “Robert?”
Coyote nodded, drained the rest of the beer. A bit of foam rested on her lips. It reminded Anthony of the mouth of a frothing dog. “I’m sorry,” Anthony said.
The yellow and grey of Coyote’s eyes shimmered in the light from the gas lamp. Coyote’s voice came out in a low rumbling growl. “Murdered. By something old. Something that smells dead.”
Anthony drained his glass. “No stranger than anything else. So what are we waiting for? Huntin’ with the First Anger can’t be any worse than riding on a crocodile’s snout, right?” He looked to the bartender. “Tell my mouse I’ll be back soon ‘nuff.”
They stepped out of the saloon, mounted their horses, and rode toward the ruins of Coyote’s home.
That was not the end of that second day.
~ * ~
It slid from building to building in the darkness. It was of the darkness, yet pale as the sliver of moon high in the clear winter sky. With a soft clattering of fingernails against wood it scaled the general store, then collapsed upon the roof. Its emaciated limbs lay naked against the freezing air, but no involuntary shiver shook its frame.
It stretched under the sky, joints still creaking from the months in the ship’s hold. It stretched muscles still weak from the long fast of the ocean voyage, and then the paltry food of bilge rat blood afterward. It had expected to hunt, to feed after the ocean, but had miscalculated.
When it had woken after the weeks at sea, it heard voices from its homeland. Not the smooth voices of the hereditary idiots too smart to listen to the tales of old women, but the coarse peasant voices. The voices of prey that had learned to fight back. It had panicked, not expecting to find the same thing that drove it from Europe in this new land. It had fled, leaving injured dockworkers with a story no educated American would yet believe. And like so many of the prey in this land, it continued traveling west.
The man had been a good start. He had lain with a Name. A Name that had been gone. A Name that was not there with its mate. Even in its weakened state, the man had filled its belly and given it more strength than a thousand prairie dogs, a hundred cattle, or a dozen of the normal prey.
Its nostrils flared. One building still had lamps burning, and the scent came from there. One—no, two Names had been there. Another remained—not a Name, but more than any of the normal prey. And this prey did not know the power of the cross, of garlic, of a Eucharist. Sharp fangs stretched from its mouth in anticipation of warm blood.
It leapt from one roof to the next, an ungainly tangle of pale limbs, leaping toward the saloon.
~ * ~
Lao-shu dipped her brush in the inkwell, then wrote the day’s totals on the scroll. The pictograms flowed, a functional form of art. Perhaps Confucius would have approved of that aspect of her work, if not the work itself.
She turned at the knock on her door. “Yes?”
The door creaked open and Sally poked her head in. “Do you have a minute, Miss Mouse?”
Lao-shu smiled at her name, and Sally glowed a little more beautiful under her influence. This was her year; she delighted in giving what favors were hers to grant. “Yes, Sally?”
Sally continued in her Texas drawl. “I was just checking that you got the message about Mister Anthony.” The girl wrapped her arms around herself and shivered slightly. “We ain’t seen you downstairs since.”
Lao-shu nodded and set down her brush. “I did, dear. Would you like an extra blanket?”
“Yes’m. It’s a sight colder here than—did you see that?” The girl pointed at Lao-shu’s window.
Lao-shu looked. “No, I don’t see anything.” She handed a blanket to Sally. “Everyone treat you well?”
“Yes’m.” A blush colored Sally’s cheeks. “Thank you for asking. I ain’t never worked for someone who asked before, just so long as they didn’t mark ...” Her lip quivered as she fell silent.
Lao-shu drew the girl into a hug. “Shush. You work for me now. I keep telling you girls that I won’t let anything happen to you all.”
A gunshot sounded from below, then two more with a chorus of screams, and a final echo of a short, choked shout. Silence settled over the saloon for just a moment before the women upstairs began to scream. Lao-shu pushed Sally down onto the bed, then pulled the cord-wrapped hilt of her dao from underneath. Sally’s eyes widened as Lao-shu drew the sword, its curved blade reflecting the firelight.
“Stay here,” Lao-shu said, barely able to hear herself over the rapid pounding of her heart. She opened the door, then heard the creak of the mattress ropes. She turned back to Sally. “Stay.”
A white hand, streaked with blood, slid around her left shoulder and neck, pulling her off-balance. The other hand—she could see its fingernails, curved and sharper than even her dao—slice across the tendons of her wrist. Hot fetid breath blew across her cheek as Sally started to scream and scream.
As the fangs pierced her neck, her blood spurting into the thing’s mouth, Lao-shu remembered that even in its year, a mouse was still a prey animal.
And so ended that second day.
~ * ~
In the first moments of that third day, Anthony noticed the fire before Coyote. Coyote smelt the change in Anthony’s scent and looked to his friend. His skin had gone ashen gray, and he did not move in the saddle.
“Town’s burning,” Anthony said. “Eyes in the back of my head.”
Coyote sniffed, then nodded. After a moment, her features softened. “Mouse.”
“Yeah, well. Sometimes rat, depends on how you say it. Crazy language.”
Coyote guided her horse next to Anthony’s. “Will Mouse—”
Anthony shook his head. “No. I can already feel the year going to hell for her people. Probably the whole damn decade at this point. Figure the rest of ‘em will probably stay clear for a while, too. Screw all their luck something fierce.”
The tear tracks shone in the silver light of the moon. “Anthony ... I’m ...”
The black man shook his head. “S’okay. I was thinking ‘bout heading back to the ocean myself, being Spider again instead of Anthony. Those folks pay good heed, unlike them that get out here.” He wiped the salt water from his cheek, then licked it from his hand. “Good salt water. Tastes like off the coast of Grenada.”
Coyote bit her lip, trying to still the roiling in her stomach. “Good speed, then—”
Spider looked at Coyote again with a small smile. “Damn, you stupid or something? I ain’t leaving until after we kill that sonofabitch.”
The left
side of Coyote’s mouth curled in a half grin, Spider smiled wide showing all his teeth, and soon their laughter echoed across the prairie.
And all the animals who heard that laughter in the deep dark of the early morning curled in their holes and nests, hoping that mad laughter would pass them by.
~ * ~
It ate flesh and power and blood, changing the townsfolk from people into meat with brutal efficiency. The blood was first, and with blood came power. With power came thought, with thought came planning.
As the sun rose over the bloody charred wreck of the town on that third day, it walked—not scampered, but walked—back to its sheltering hole.
The sun lifted itself into the sky that third day. Antelope and buffalo did not move, grazing nervously in place. Prairie dogs huddled silent in their dens. No hawks screeched across the sky, not a single buzzard drew a lazy circle in the sky.
High noon came and went; there were no men who fought at that bright time.
Different predators would fight on the plains this day.
The sun set on that third day.
~ * ~
Coyote sharpened her long knife while Spider looked out from the cave mouth. “Don’t like this place,” she said, sliding the blade into its sheath.
Spider did not turn to look at her. “Hush. You wait for it to come to you. Time and place of your choosing.”
“That spider nature talking?”
Spider turned that time. “Sun-Tzu. Mouse gave me a copy to read while we were still in San Francisco.”
Coyote huffed. “Fair.”
~ * ~
Spider turned back to the opening in the rock. “It’s coming.” When Coyote cocked her head to the side, Spider opened his side eyes, just above the human ears. “You ain’t the only one with little brothers and sisters.”
The thing scrambled up the rocky slope toward the two figures hunched around a campfire, pale skin glowing in the nighttime dark. It closed to within fifty feet, then bared its fangs. Both held their breath as its muscles coiled and it leapt—only to twist in midair, landing between the two figures. Each toppled onto its side, stiff and lifeless. The thing turned to face the cave.
“Dammit, that trick fooled me back when,” said Spider. “Coyote, why don’t you ...” but Coyote was nowhere to be seen. “Dammit,” said Spider. He ran into the cave as the thing loped toward him. He leaned forward, arms and legs splitting to give him sure footing across the pitch-black interior of the cave. He ran on all eight legs, rock sliding under his feet with the sound of the creature gaining on him. A hundred feet to the trap, fifty, twenty-five, then Spider was on the far side of the hole, turning to face the thing that pursued him.
The thing had once been a man, or able to pass as one, staring at him across the pit. Slowly cooling blood circulated through its veins, its eyes glowing like a cat’s. It hissed at him.
Spider’s webs covered the opening, but the creature did not fall into either his webs or the hole. It bared its fangs, and the part of Spider that thought like a man shook with a deep instinctual fear. Spider showed his own fangs, but it did not comfort him.
The creature’s voice rasped, sandpaper across chafed skin. “We are many, old Name.”
Spider managed a laugh at that. “An’ I have many a name, though there’s but the one of me. So that makes us a right fair match, don’t it?” Even his sensitive eyes strained to see in the darkness, the hairs on his legs signaling the thing’s every small motion. And it wasn’t taking the bait.
“This land will be my land,” it rasped, a European accent to its words as it shifted forward, inching around the pit. “I can create an army from those I feed from. This will not be your land, it will not be your stories they tell, but mine.”
“I like Spider’s stories,” Coyote said, rushing from the shadows. The creature swung its arm toward Coyote, sharp claw aimed at her heart, but the fur-lined coat turned the blow. Coyote’s knife slid through the dark air, a hard chunk as its sharpness slid through the thing’s spine. Its head and body fell backward, thrashing the webs into a straitjacket as it fell to the cavern floor far below.
Spider walked around the pit. “Waited long ‘nuff, didn’tcha?”
~ * ~
That third day ended quietly, as Coyote and Spider sat at the mouth of the cave under the moonlight, passing a hand-rolled cigarette between them.
Spider looked at Coyote, not commenting on the new silver streaks in Coyote’s hair. “Think it was telling the truth?”
Coyote nodded. “There will be more. Just like the white man. It was one of them once, after all.”
Spider choked on the cigarette. “S’all we need, innit?”
Coyote looked out into the sky for a long moment. Spider broke the silence. “I’m still headin’ back to the islands. You’re welcome to travel with.”
Coyote shook her head. “There is a river that flows near here. I will flood these caverns, seal them off from humans.”
The two did not speak after that, though they held each other’s hands warmly before they parted ways under the moon.
All this happened in that three days, that decade, that hundred years. Eventually, the tales of the blood-draining monsters came to be told again and again, but they will not last forever. And in such a wild place, where time flows and ebbs, who can determine the lifespan of a spider or a coyote?
<>
~ * ~
MAYBE ANOTHER TIME
Dean Wesley Smith
T he day we dug out the coffins, the miners were fighting again.
The battle had finally stopped outside the two gold mines on the hill above Silver City, Idaho, but underground the sounds of an occasional shot could be heard echoing out of the mines themselves. I couldn’t imagine firing a gun inside a shaft of a gold mine, but the men who built the mines didn’t seem to have any trouble doing just that.
A dozen men stood guard on the tailings of both mines not more than a hundred paces apart, barricades of upturned wagons and spare mine timbers their only protection.
From across the valley, the heat waves rippling off the sagebrush-covered hills made the crouched men look like they were dancing on very short legs.
Only a couple hundred steps below the mines was the main downtown area of Silver City. At this moment in time, 1870, the town was one of the great mining towns in the western United States. By the year 2016, the year we left to come back to 1870, Silver City was mostly forgotten even by history because of its remoteness.
I would have never known about the ghost town if my family didn’t own an old mine here that hadn’t produced anything in almost one-hundred-and-fifty years.
I stood just inside the Last Time Mine, leaning against a rough timber, drinking from a bottle of water I had brought with me from the future, watching the gunfight play out. The Last Time was a thousand feet up the side of Florida Mountain, directly across the valley from War Eagle Mountain and the two warring mines.
The sunny, warm afternoon in September hadn’t started out to be a gunfight afternoon, but something inside one of the mines on War Eagle had triggered the battle. Some of those shafts over there crossed from one mine to another and there were always fights over who owned what underground.
And from the historical records, the two mine owners hated each other and eventually, in one fight, one of them got killed. I could never remember which one and actually didn’t much care.
The town below showed no movement at all, closer to what I was used to back in 2016, when there were no year-round residents here and only a few buildings left standing.
The 1870 eight-plus-thousand residents of Silver City, Idaho, were more than likely going to stay in their shacks and mines and saloons until it was clear the fighting was finished. When you get the two biggest mining crews in the valley going at each other right up the hill from the town, even though not a miner in the bunch could shoot straight, it got dangerous.
In fact, because they couldn’t shoot straight made it even m
ore dangerous for the locals. The bars were going to do a good business today.
I had read in history books about the area, the old ghost town, and how the mining and union battles had happened. I just hadn’t expected to be back in time and watching when a fight actually broke out.
The fight wasn’t like what you would see in a movie. Mostly just men shooting over protection without standing or even looking where they were shooting.
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