Westward Weird

by Martin H. Greenberg

  He looked at me, eyes wide and crazy, but he said nothing as he climbed on his horse and rode off, looking back over his shoulder the whole way, till he was lost in the trees beyond the quarry.

  ~ * ~

  I left my spread to Rusty, who promised to pay market value for my stock when he had the money. He said I should send him a telegram from wherever I ended up. I packed up the few things I had left in my saddle bags, mounted up old Piston and headed west.

  I thought of the way Rusty and Ben and the rest had looked at me after the fight, not as their rescuer and benefactor, but as something to be feared, or at best, pitied.

  I knew that there was no way I could have stayed, even if I hadn’t made myself a hunted automaton. As I thought this over, my governor moaned slightly, and I looked down at my hands.

  I thought of my commanding officer laying dead, his neck snapped, along that blood-spattered battlefield road. I remembered his body lying in a ditch next to two small graves I had dug with my own hands.

  I thought of him and I wondered if he had always been a monster, or if, like me, he had ended up scarred and broken by the madness of war.

  I rode west, thinking about the fight, and wondering who had won, and who had truly lost.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  BLACK TRAIN

  Jeff Mariotte

  O n the third day out, the cat had turned away from the high country.

  The men had been expecting him—for they believed it to be a male cat, a mountain lion with tracks bigger than any Evan had ever seen—to head for the rocky upper reaches of the Chiricahuas. Instead, he had skirted the edge of the range and then struck westward.

  There were two men on the cat’s trail. There had been three, but the third, a hand from the Sierra Bonita, had been summoned home because of a family illness, one of his sons riding out with the news.

  “You’d think Hooker would have sent another hand to help out,” Charlie said when they were gone. “Bonita’s the biggest spread in the territory.”

  “Might be why.” Evan was watching the men ride south, the late afternoon sun rimming them with golden light. “You and me, we can’t spare the beeves. Hooker loses ten or fifteen to this damn cat, he barely feels it.”

  “Reckon it’s just us, then.”

  Evan hadn’t answered. There was nothing to be said to something so obvious, and Evan was a man who had never been much for talking except when it was necessary. Lucinda complained about that sometimes. Since they had wed, she seemed not to lack for things to complain about. She was a fine wife otherwise, fair of skin, helpful around the ranch, and not much afraid of Indians since Geronimo’s surrender two years ago.

  The men stopped for the night in a canyon, which provided shelter from the chill late-winter wind and plenty of downed mesquite branches for the fire. They cooked up three rabbits they had taken that afternoon, and as Evan sat eating his, burned skin flaking under his fingers, meat falling off the bone, fat sizzling fragrantly on the flames, he watched glowing sparks drifting skyward. He didn’t believe it to be true, but at that moment it wouldn’t have taken much to convince him that all the stars above were nothing more than sparks from every fire ever lit on Earth, trapped in the sky.

  “We’ll get him tomorrow,” Charlie said.

  “Could be.”

  “We’re closer.”

  “He’s probably not stopping for the night.”

  “We have to.”

  “I know. Just saying he’s not.”

  “He has to sleep sometime.”

  Charlie unscrewed the lid of a flask and took a couple of swallows. Lucinda had said that he drank. Everybody drank sometimes, just about, but Charlie did it too much, and when he did he got mean.

  Charlie and Lucinda had never been church-wed, the way Evan and Lucinda were, but they had been together just the same, common law, for a few years. Luanda’s father had died suddenly. She had needed a man, she said, or else would have had to go to St. Joe and live with a maiden aunt whom she despised. Or take up whoring. She had settled for Charlie, who was tall and handsome and had a good-sized ranch that bordered on Evan’s. Then she and Evan had fallen in love, and she had moved from one ranch to the next.

  Charlie had lost four head to the cat over the past two weeks, Evan six.

  There was something wrong with the animal, Evan thought. He didn’t eat much of the cattle he killed. He didn’t act like a lion should. Maybe he was sick. Either way, he had to be killed, and he was leading Evan and Charlie a merry hell of a chase.

  While Charlie stared at his flask, Evan looked at Charlie, at the curve of the back of his head, and wondered what it would look like with a bullet in it.

  He would have to do it tonight or tomorrow. He could take the cat himself, he wasn’t worried about that. But if they did catch it tomorrow then he would lose his last, best chance to get it done out here, where no one would witness it. A hunting accident, that’s what he had decided.

  He thought: probably Charlie is thinking the same thing about me.

  That night, he hardly slept.

  ~ * ~

  The next morning, they saw the train.

  The winter had been a dry one, and the grasslands they crossed were a dull gray color. The wind had subsided during the night, but the morning air was cold and brittle. Evan rode with his barn coat buttoned all the way up, his hat tugged down as far as it would go on his head.

  The cat had turned north, as if making for the Sierra Bonita again. Evan and Charlie followed, and when they started down off a swell toward the valley through which the tracks rain, the train was sitting there. They expected it to start up again, but it didn’t. No smoke issued from it, or sound.

  As they got nearer, Charlie said, “It looks burned.”

  He was right.

  The train couldn’t have been there for more than a day or two. Others would have come along, stacked up behind it or pushed it out of the way. There were no side tracks here to park it on. Its sides were coated with black, like scorch marks. There were some passenger cars, and the black licked up from the windows; the freight cars behind those were covered in it. At the front of the locomotive a couple of American flags were mounted; the black even coated most of those, just a few stars and a couple of stripes visible at the top.

  But if flags had burned, they would not still be flag-shaped, Evan thought. They would be in tatters.

  “Something’s not right,” he said. “I don’t think there was a fire.”

  “Well, it’s black. Something happened.”

  “Something,” Evan said.

  They rode closer. The black still looked like the streaks made by fire, and yet it didn’t. The edges of things were softer, blurred somehow. Fire hadn’t done that.

  Evan counted nine cars plus the engine and the coal tender. Four were passenger cars, lined up behind the locomotive, boxcars behind those. The train just ended with the last boxcar. It looked unfinished, like a sentence begun but then forgotten halfway through.

  The men rode even closer, right up to the train, and around it. The cat had come this way, too; they saw his tracks approach it, then he had gone underneath. For the moment, they didn’t look for the trail to continue on the other side. Instead, they looked at the black coating the train. It was some kind of black fuzz, as if the train had skipped shaving for days on end.

  Trains, however, did not shave.

  “What do you think?” Charlie asked.

  “It looks like mold.”

  “What I thought too. But I’ve never seen so much.”

  “No.” Evan dismounted, tied Goldie to a yucca far enough from the train that Goldie wouldn’t be drawn to it. She put her head down and munched on grass, content. One of the tall yucca stalks had fallen, and Evan picked it up. It was about seven feet long, thick as a man’s wrist at the end that grew from the plant, thin and branching out into twigs that held seed pods at the other end. He raked his hand across the thin end, breaking off the twigs and pods. H
olding it by the thick end, he scraped the other against the train.

  It left a red mark, the color of the boxcar’s paint, where it touched. He scraped away more of the black fuzz. Some of it clung to the end of the stalk, but the rest just fell to the gravel patch beside the tracks.

  “I don’t like the way it smells,” Charlie said. He had tied his mount by Evan’s. “It’s sour. Tart. Like mildew.”

  Evan hadn’t known how to describe it, but Charlie’s words were true enough. He dropped the yucca stalk and went to one of the passenger cars. Black mold carpeted the stairs, but he figured it wouldn’t hurt the soles of his boots. He stepped up, careful not to touch anything with his hands.

  A moment later, he stepped down again. “Charlie ...”

  “Yeah?”

  “You ought to take a look.”

  “At what?”

  Evan had to spit. Bile had risen up inside his throat. “There’re soldiers inside.”

  “Soldiers?”

  Evan jumped down to the ground and got three steps from the train before he lurched forward, bent over double, retching until his gut was empty.

  When he looked back, Charlie was stepping down from the car. His face had a greenish tint to it. “What in the hell happened here?” he asked.

  Evan knew he had to look again. Someone had to. If any of those soldiers were still alive, they needed help. He forced himself up the steps again, back into the car.

  They were in seats. One soldier had his head thrown back, mouth open. Black fuzz came from inside his mouth, or had traveled down into it. It linked mouth and nose in bushy trails of black. It climbed his cheeks, grew thick in his eye sockets. The man’s hair, reddish brown and cut short, was hardly touched. But the stuff went into his ears, and down his neck and under his shirt.

  And they were on the floor. A soldier had one arm thrown out in front of him, the other at his side, as if he were swimming. The spaces between his fingers were covered in it, and the floor on which he lay. It coated his arms and disappeared into his sleeves and came out again at the collar, and like the other one, had entered and become thicker, more lush, in his eyes and ears and mouth and nose. The soldier’s shirttail had pulled out from his trousers, and it was there too, in the gap, extending up his spine and down toward his buttocks.

  Evan counted the men in the train and got nineteen. One, in the seat closest to the back, to the boxcars, he had to simply assume had been human, because he had been entirely covered in the stuff, the way a stone sitting near a creek can become encased in moss.

  Outside, Charlie gave a squeaky whimper. Then: “Evan!”

  Evan turned and started for the stairs, accidentally forgetting himself for an instant and touching the corner of a seat. His bare hand felt the soft, furry growth, and he swore and spat again and wiped it on his trousers. Charlie called him again. “I’m coming!” Evan shouted.

  He clattered down the stairs, hearing something else, muffled cries from somewhere down the line, back in the boxcars. Outside, he found Charlie dragging his Henry rifle from a saddle scabbard. Charlie stared at a soldier who had evidently come down from one of the other passenger cars. He, too, was covered in the mold: face, neck, hands. It came down from his pants legs and covered his boots, outside and likely in as well. A shock of blond hair was visible above the black, but there was no flesh showing anywhere.

  But he was walking. His mouth moved, and his hands were held out in front of him, reaching.

  Reaching for Charlie, who raised the rifle.

  “Charlie, don’t!” Evan cried.

  Charlie settled the stock against his shoulder and fired. The bullet slammed into the soldier, staggering him, but not knocking him down. Charlie fired again, with a similar result. The smell of gunpowder wafted through the air, a light gray cloud that Evan sucked in greedily, since for the moment it blocked the stink of mold.

  “Evan, hell—” Charlie said.

  The soldier was still reaching for him, closer now. Evan wore an old Remington .44 Army when he was hunting, mostly for rattlers and the like, and he drew it. For an instant, he hesitated and remembered.

  When Charlie had come to collect him for this trip, Evan had been out in the barn, saddling Goldie and stowing his gear. Leading her back to the house, he had come upon Charlie and Lucinda, standing close. She dropped her hand to her side, and Evan couldn’t tell, but it might have been touching Charlie. When she bade him farewell, there was a distant coolness to her kiss, and she couldn’t meet his eyes for long.

  She had been with Charlie before, and swore it was over when she took up with Evan. But was it? Did such a flame ever die out, or did it remain a spark that could be kindled, under the right circumstance, to blossom as fire once again?

  “Evan, for God’s sake!” Charlie had turned the Henry around in his hands, ready to use it as a club. Motion from another car caught Evan’s attention, and another soldier, almost invisible inside his casing of black fuzz, climbed down the stairs.

  Evan took aim at the first soldier’s right knee, thumbed back the Remington’s hammer, and fired. Black fuzz and flesh and blood and bone flew and the soldier went down, not making a sound but continuing to writhe and reach on the ground. Then Evan trained the revolver on the new soldier and fired again, hitting this one in the upper thigh. Another shot, also to the knee, dropped that one. Both soldiers writhed on the ground, clutching at the earth with blackened hands, but with their knees blown out they could not rise.

  “What the hell is it, Evan?” Charlie asked. His eyes were huge and liquid, and ribbons of spit joined his teeth. “What is it?”

  “The hell should I know,” Evan said. “Listen.”

  He heard it again, the cries coming from a boxcar. The soldiers hadn’t made a sound. “Back there. Someone’s alive.” Saying it, he realized what he meant—that the soldiers weren’t alive, despite the fact that they were up and moving around.

  Another came from the first passenger car he had looked in. He recognized this one, the auburn-haired soldier who had been sitting up in a seat with his head tilted back. He didn’t even wait for the soldier to get to the stairs, but shot him in the knee. When the soldier lurched forward and tumbled out, he went as close as he dared and shot the blackened figure in the head. The soldier pawed at the earth a few times, then was still.

  “The brain,” Evan said. “We got to get their brains.”

  Charlie had rushed back to his horse and was grabbing ammunition from a saddlebag, fumbling it into the rifle with shaking hands. “Evan, let’s get out of here,” he said. “Let’s just ride for all we’re worth.”

  “There’s someone alive in there,” Evan reminded him. “We got to help him.”

  “Oh, Jesus God,” Charlie said. He was near panic. Bits of white foam flecked the corners of his mouth and glistened on his chin. Another soldier stepped awkwardly down from a passenger car, and Evan fired a single shot into his head. He flopped backward and was still.

  “Hello!” Evan called. He went to the boxcars. “Where are you?”

  “In here!” a voice returned.

  “Keep calling!” Evan said.

  The man in the boxcar did as he was told. Evan listened, and determined that the man was in the second of the five boxcars. He picked up a rock to hit the latch with, so he didn’t have to touch it with his hands. When it was released, he used the rock to push open the door.

  Inside the car, there was little of the black mold, just a faint coating on the walls. Toward the front of the car was cargo of some kind, wooden cases stacked and tied in place. Rifles, Evan guessed. Then there was an open space, and at the back of the car, by himself, was a man.

  He was short and wiry and he had long dark hair. He wore black trousers, a white shirt with a black vest, and a black topcoat over it all, but there didn’t appear to be any mold on him. He had a high forehead and bushy eyebrows and a mouth that seemed somehow too big for his face. His neck was scrawny and his Adam’s apple pronounced. He was a singularly una
ttractive man, Evan thought. But he was alive, and he was not covered in black fuzz.

  Behind Evan, Charlie’s rifle boomed. “Christ, Evan, there’s more!” he cried. “Let’s go!”

  “Come on,” Evan said to the man.

  “Believe me, I would love to oblige, sir,” the man said. He shook his right leg. That was when Evan noticed the manacle around the man’s ankle, the short length of chain looped around a ring set into the boxcar wall and locked with a brass padlock.

  “What are you, some kind of prisoner?”

  “It’s not how it looks,” the man said. Evan didn’t see how it could fail to be how it looked. “I’ll happily explain, but for the moment, we’ve got to get out of here, sir.”