Westward Weird

by Martin H. Greenberg

  “Reckon so,” Evan said. “Don’t suppose you know where the key is.”

  “Last I saw it, Lieutenant Montgomery was putting it into his shirt pocket. I don’t imagine you’d like to go find him.”

  “Do you know what—”

  “I said I can explain!” The man’s voice conveyed urgency. “First get me loose of this!”

  Evan didn’t see much choice. He stepped into the boxcar and stood close to the man, trying to shield him with his body in case shrapnel flew. He aimed the Remington at the padlock and fired. In the enclosed car it sounded loud, but the lock broke and the man was able to free himself from the train car. The manacle and length of chain remained connected to his ankle. “We’ll have to take care of that later,” Evan said. “After we get away from this train.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” the man said. “And thank you, sir. You’re a true gentleman.”

  “Not hardly,” Evan said. An image of Charlie on the ground, his brains leaking from his head, flashed in his mind. “Nothing like it.”

  The man hopped down from the boxcar, and Evan followed. “You can double up with me,” Evan said.

  “Yes, yes,” the dark little man said. “In a moment. First, though ...” he started toward the last boxcar in the line.

  “Mister, we got to get out of here!”

  Charlie’s Henry boomed again. “Ev,” he said. “Now!”

  “Mister,” Evan said.

  The little man whirled on him, fury animated his homely countenance. “In a minute, I said. Do you want to put a stop to this, or don’t you?”

  “You know how to—”

  “I know everything about it,” the man replied. “Open that car.”

  Evan had dropped his stone in the other boxcar. He found a suitable substitute and opened this car the same way. This boxcar held even less than the first one, and what it did hold, Evan didn’t understand.

  There were crates of something, but amid the crates was a device like none he had ever seen. Parts of it were black, but not with fuzz. It was cast iron, he thought, or something like it. Other parts were brass, and there was copper tubing and a wooden box attached to the front. “What in blazes?” Evan asked.

  “It runs on steam, and we haven’t time to get it going,” the man said. “But for the moment we don’t need it.” He climbed up into the car, the chain dangling and scraping behind him. He tugged open one crate and then the next, and then he brought out a smaller device, hand-held, made of polished wood and brass and copper. It looked like some sort of wand, except it had a handle shaped to fit a man’s grasp on one end and was wider on the other, where it split into a Y shape. Between the two outer ends of the Y was a thin coil of copper.

  Evan had never seen anything like it. He had heard that there had been all sorts of marvelous devices shown at the International Exhibition of Inventions in London back in ‘85, but he had not been there and didn’t know anybody who had. “What does that do?”

  “It’s my demoldificator. It’ll do what we need it to,” the man said.

  He hopped down from the boxcar, holding it in his hands. Charlie had three soldiers around him now, moving stiffly, arms out to grasp him, and he was trying to reload the Henry. Evan raised his Remington, but he should have reloaded already and hadn’t. There were two more soldiers coming off of passenger cars.

  Almost calmly, the little man turned a small dial on his device, pushed a couple of buttons, and the copper coil between the two tines of the Y began to glow and spark. He held it out toward the nearest soldier, aiming it like some sort of weapon, and when he pushed yet another button, a bright flash, earthbound lightning, streaked out toward the soldier. The soldier fell instantly, and the black fuzz coating him began to smolder and dissipate, showing patches of flesh beneath it.

  “I told them I could control it,” the man said. “But they wouldn’t let me have my instruments. I told them I needed it, needed it all, but they said no.” As he groused, he repeated the process twice more, and the three soldiers who had penned Charlie in went down, the mold drying out and fading away with a thin blackish smoke.

  “Can that thing bring them back?” Evan asked.

  The little man shook his head. “Oh, they’re quite dead. Quite dead. Nothing to be done about that.”

  “But—they’re up and moving around.”

  “Quite dead, just the same.”

  “What—?”

  “Oh, your hand!” the man said. Evan looked at his right hand, the one that had brushed the train seat. Black mold grew over his palm, between the fingers, and was threading back toward his wrist and arm.

  “God!”

  “This’ll burn,” the man said. He pointed his device at Evan and pushed the button. The brilliant light flared and Evan felt a pain as if he had plunged his hand into a roaring fire. But it lasted only a moment, and when it was gone, the mold had turned to dry dust. He shook it off.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “The big machine you saw?” the man said. “That’s a full-size demoldificator. It’ll clean up this whole train, and more, if I can get enough water to it. As long as we have time. You’re the first people I’ve heard since we stopped, sometime during the night. Do you know if anyone else has been here?”

  “I don’t know,” Evan said. Charlie was barely listening, watching the train cars for more soldiers.

  “Because if they have, then we might not have time to spend on the train.”

  Evan remembered something, from what seemed like days ago. “Does it have to be a person?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “That damn cat.”

  “What cat?”

  “Charlie, find his tracks!” Evan shouted. “The cat!” He ran around the train. Charlie and the little man joined him, the chain clanking in the man’s grip.

  Sure enough, on the far side of the train, the cat’s big tracks continued.

  Only this time, each track had a trace of black mold in it, growing thicker and heavier the farther the cat got from the train. “What’s over that way?” the man asked. The cat was moving west again.

  “Willcox. A few miles out.”

  “That’s a town?”

  “Yes, a town.”

  “Then,” the man said, “we had better hurry, hadn’t we?”

  ~ * ~

  The man, who gave his name as Franklin, rode behind Evan. They had bashed the manacle off his leg with a shovel from the coal tender, after the man had cleared the mold from it. He swore that he could wipe the mold out from the whole train, but not just now. The mountain lion, he said, was the bigger danger. If it reached the town...

  Evan got the picture. He wondered about the traces of mold left in the cat’s trail. If a snake slithered across one, or a coyote, a bird. Anything. Franklin shrugged. He could not, he said, guarantee the safety of the whole world. Not since the Army had interfered.

  “I went to Washington, to show the generals there,” he said. “I knew how formidable a weapon it could be, given the right circumstances. I offered to teach them how to control it.”

  “What’d they do?” Evan asked.

  Franklin’s grip around his middle tightened. Evan wished he would relax. “Treated me as if I were insane,” he said. “Separated me from my devices, put me on this train. They were taking me to the territorial prison, in Yuma, because I had told them that it grew more slowly in an arid climate.”

  “What is it?”

  “In layman’s terms, it’s a mold,” the man said. “A sort of fungus. Spores form in a moist environment and spread. Mine just spreads more quickly than most. It likes warm, wet things.”

  “Like people.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who die, and then get back up—”

  “It goes in through every opening it can find. When it reaches the brain, the filaments encircle it and compress. They essentially squeeze the brain to death. But then they meld with it, and they can make the body move again. They aren’t truly bringing a per
son back to life—it doesn’t think, doesn’t feel. But it can move.”

  “But... why does it do that?”

  “Because it wants to spread itself.”

  “So you made some kind of smart mold, that’s what you’re saying?”

  “Yes!” Franklin said. He sounded proud. “That’s it exactly.”

  They rode hard, and soon Willcox lay before them, a flat valley town with a rail line cutting right through it. All the way, they followed the cat’s tracks. Closer to town, the mold was thicker in the cat’s pawprints, spreading out slowly beyond them, to the grasses and weeds the animal walked on. “That going to be a problem?” Evan asked.

  “We’ll take care of it on the way back,” Franklin said. He sounded sure of himself.

  Evan started to ask him why, or how, this had all come about, but then he caught himself. He didn’t want to know how Franklin had come to experiment with mold, to turn it into a weapon that could be controlled with bizarre instruments. He wished he had never encountered the man or his inventions.

  When they reached the town, the first person they saw was a butcher wearing a bloodstained apron and carrying a cleaver. But he was blackened from the hairline down, and walking with the jerking, awkward steps Evan had come to recognize, down the middle of the main street.

  Evan stopped Goldie so Franklin could dismount and use his machine on the man. “No, not yet,” Franklin said. “Keep riding.”

  “But what about that guy?”

  “He’s already dead. Don’t stop until we’re at the bank.”

  “The bank?”

  “Do what I say!” Franklin snapped.

  For the first time, Evan wondered if they had done the right thing in unchaining him.

  From his horse, Charlie drew his Henry and shot the butcher in the head. He hadn’t said much since the train, but Evan noticed his hands weren’t nearly as shaky as they had been. The butcher collapsed in the street.

  On the way to the bank, a brick building with white wooden trim standing in the middle of a block, they passed several more dead people. Franklin refused to use his machine, so Evan and Charlie took turns, trying to hit each one in the head with the first shot. Evan didn’t figure a dead man could feel pain, but just in case he wanted to spare them that agony.

  When they drew up outside the bank, Franklin slid off the horse before she even came to a full stop. There was more to this than he had said—he rushed for the front door with real enthusiasm, threw it open, and dashed inside. Evan dismounted, looped Goldie’s reins around a hitching rail, and followed. “Keep an eye out,” he told Charlie.

  Charlie just nodded, holding that Henry rifle in his hands with something like religious devotion.

  Inside, Franklin had gone around behind the counter and was pounding on the vault door. “I know you’re in there! Come on out! I told you I’d be back! I told you!”

  “Franklin?” Evan said. “What is—?”

  Before Franklin could answer, the vault door started to open. Two men stood inside it with rifles, and there were three women behind them. The man in front was wearing an expensive suit. He had gray hair, and he was a little taller, but his resemblance to Franklin was unmistakable. “Son? What are you ... you can’t be responsible for ...”

  “What do you care?” Franklin asked. “I gave you a chance to be part of it all. You just threw me into the street and slammed the door, didn’t you? Your own kin. Laughed in my face!”

  “It wasn’t like that, Franklin ...”

  “You remember it your way, but I remember the truth. The humiliation, the sorrow. All I ever did was love you, and all you ever did was hurt me and torment me and then throw me out like a dying dog!”

  “Franklin,” Evan said. “This is a touching reunion and all, but that cat—”

  “Hang the cat!” Franklin shouted over his shoulder. “This is why we’re here!”

  “You, maybe,” Evan said. He was not the world’s smartest man, but it was dawning on him that Franklin had used him—used them all, even the Army. He didn’t know where Franklin had gone after his father had tossed him out of the house, but wherever that had been, he had used the time to create his weapon—his mold, which he somehow controlled with his machines. It was no coincidence that the train had been overtaken and stopped just a couple of miles from Willcox.

  “You think you’re safe in that vault?” Franklin asked. “Maybe you are, for now. But you can’t stay in there forever. How much food you got in there? How much water? Whenever you come out, it’ll get you. It’s already in town, and spreading fast.”

  “Franklin, you said that thing you have can kill it,” Evan said.

  “Kill it? Sure. But it does more than that, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know what it does.”

  “Trust me. It does a lot more.”

  “I don’t know who you are, sir,” Franklin’s father said. “But I’m afraid my son is quite mad. Brilliant, but completely beyond my control. Anyone’s control.”

  “Hope you don’t think that comes as a surprise to me, mister,” Evan said. “Tell you the truth, I’m sorry you threw him out instead of chucking him down a well or something.”

  Franklin shot a vicious glare at Evan. “Now you’re turning on me, too?”

  “I was never with you, amigo. I thought you could do something to help, that’s all. You did all this just to get back at your pa?”

  From outside, Evan heard the crack of Charlie’s Henry, twice. Then the bank’s front door opened and Charlie put his head in. “You’d best come quick, Evan,” he said.

  Any excuse to get away from Franklin and his father was a good one. Evan joined Charlie at the door.

  “This stuff is bad,” Charlie said. He moved aside, letting Evan out.

  The street was full of the dead.

  Evan saw men and women and children and dogs and even the mountain lion. There must have been a hundred of them, more, coming from every direction. They were all moving with seeming purpose toward the bank, toward the only living things in sight. The black mold had taken hold, not just of them, but of the town. It scaled buildings, coated walkways, dripped from hanging signs.

  Evan shoved the door open. “Franklin! Get that machine of yours working!”

  Franklin threw back his head and laughed. He held the device up in both hands, and then he brought it down, fast and hard, over his lifted knee. It snapped in two pieces, the ends splintered and jagged.

  “Damn you to hell!” Evan said.

  “I told you,” Franklin’s father said. He slammed the vault door again. Evan could hear a whirring sound as he spun a wheel on the inside. Franklin pounded on it a couple of times, then turned back to Evan, the sides of his fists red.

  “Now what?” Evan asked. “You got a plan for this, Franklin?”

  “I suppose I do,” Franklin said. “It won’t take long. The mold. It’s over fast. A couple of minutes, maybe, as you feel it snaking into your nose and your ears, fingering its way into your mouth, coating your tongue. The worst part might be the eyes, because it has to burst those to get past. But then all the feeling goes away, the shame, the betrayals, they’re all left in the past, and then—” He stopped, staring at Evan.

  Evan thumbed the hammer and pulled the Remington’s trigger twice. He had taken care of the old gun, and it took care of him. When he put it away, Franklin was sliding down the vault door, leaving a wide streak of red behind him.

  Charlie barged through the front door with his rifle at the ready. “What happened?”

  “I did him a favor.”

  Charlie looked at Franklin. His left foot was still moving, tapping out an unheard beat, but it went still a moment later. “Might be the best way out of this.”

  “Are the horses all right?” Evan asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Let’s get back to the train. He said that machine there, the big one, could take care of a whole lot of this stuff.”

  “You know how to work it?” />
  “Don’t reckon I do, but I’d rather die trying than not.”

  “Well, hell, let’s ride, then.”

  They burst from the bank and ran toward the horses. There was a little mold on Goldie’s left leg, just surrounding her hoof. She only had to go a few miles, though, and Evan figured it would take a while to get to her brain.

  The dead tried to stop them. They lurched in front of the horses. The cat tried to pounce, but Charlie got off a shot—from the saddle, at a trot, Evan was impressed—that took off the back of the cat’s head and dropped it in its tracks. Evan had never been so glad to see a damn dead lion in his whole life. He emptied the Remington and reloaded, kicking the horse on to greater speeds, and hoped Charlie was impressed by that.