Westward Weird

by Martin H. Greenberg

  Then they were out of town, riding hard.

  The mold left in the cat’s pawprints had spread. The mold on Goldie’s leg was spreading fast, too, up past her hock and still climbing. She gave what she could, though, and Evan had never known a horse like Goldie for pushing herself when it counted. His hat blew off and he let it go, feeling the wind in his hair and his face, clean and alive, and looking out at the countryside, the grasslands he loved, the mountains standing brown and firm and solid to the east, his country, and he knew then that everything would be all right.

  ~ * ~

  The train was a solid black mass.

  The mold had grown to twice the train’s original dimensions. It still had an essentially train-like shape, long and rectangular and close to the earth. But it was massive, impenetrable.

  “Now what?” Charlie said.

  Evan stared at it for a long while, unwilling to admit defeat.

  Goldie nickered, stamped the ground.

  “You got any of that stuff on your horse?” Evan asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Evan got off Goldie’s back, petted her muzzle. “You got to shoot her,” he said. “I can’t do it. But I don’t want her to go that way, neither.”

  “Step away from her, then,” Charlie said.

  Evan did.

  ~ * ~

  “Now what?” Charlie asked when it was done.

  Evan wiped his left eye. A cinder, he told himself, that’s all. Damned horse. “We need to get to that demoldi... whatever. That machine.”

  “But—” Charlie gestured toward the shape that contained an unseen train.

  “We know it’s in the last car,” Evan said. It occurred to him at that moment that only he and Franklin had seen it there. And he had shot Franklin.

  If someone had to go in after it, it would be him.

  “Let’s start a fire,” he said. “We’ll need steam to run the thing.”

  “A fire with what?” Charlie asked. “Grass?”

  “Start it with grass, I reckon, but then we’ll need coal, from the tender,” Evan said. “Got to fetch water from there as well.”

  Charlie spat into the grass. “Damn waste of time,” he said. But he squatted and started pulling handfuls of grass.

  When they had the fire going with grass and the few branches and dried yucca stalks they could find, Evan got one of the larger stalks burning. Putting things off would serve no purpose.

  He held the torch up, trying to prepare himself. “I’m going in there, there’s one thing I got to know first.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you love her?”

  “Who?”

  “You know what I’m talking about, Charlie. Don’t play dumb now.”

  Charlie was quiet for a while. Then: “I’ll allow as how I just might.”

  “You think she loves you?”

  “I know she loves you.”

  “That ain’t what I asked.”

  “Might be.”

  “Good enough,” Evan said. If he lived through the next few minutes, they could talk again. If they needed to.

  He tried to guess about where the open boxcar door was, and with the torch in his hand, he plunged into the black.

  It was cloying, gagging. He was as blind as a man with no eyes out on a moonless night. Filaments clung to his whiskered cheeks, his hair, his hands, writhing atop his flesh like the tiny feet of a million ants. When he sucked for air he felt some climbing down his throat, imagined it slithering into his lungs. Nausea roiled his gut. Wherever the flame from his torch touched, the mold retreated, sizzling and melting, and dropped around him in moist, heavy clumps.

  He slammed into the boxcar wall, but an outflung hand found air. He shoved the torch through, illuminating space inside that the mold had not filled. He hoisted himself up, found the machine. It was remarkably free of mold, as if the horrible growth recognized an enemy it could not defeat. The thing was big, but he could skid it across the floor. Laying the torch on the boxcar floor, he muscled it to the doorway. There would be no gentle lifting the machine down, and it would crush Charlie if he tried to catch it. If it didn’t survive the drop, then they were dead anyway.

  Evan pushed. The machine balanced on the boxcar’s lip for a moment, then tumbled out, ripping through shreds of mold as it went. Seeing daylight, Evan grabbed the torch and jumped.

  ~ * ~

  Evan cleared out the tender and the locomotive as best he could, figuring he was already exposed to the stuff, and no matter what, someone had to survive to take care of Lucinda. They had hauled the machine up next to the death train’s locomotive. Tubes uncoiled from inside the thing’s belly, and they found a way to connect those to the boiler. Once they had the fire raging, steam ran through its pipes and issued from a slender iron chimney with a whistling sound. There was a big wheel at the machine’s center with a brass knob for turning it with, and that wheel turned a smaller wheel, which turned one that was still smaller. When all three were going, a shade slid open, and light glimmered through. The beam could be directed by turning it with a brass handle.

  “You reckon that’s all there is to it?” Charlie asked. “Spin that thing?”

  “Worth a try.”

  Evan cranked the big wheel a few times. As he did, the steam engine took over, and he had to let go quick, lest it tear his arm off. The wheel spun faster and faster, but the light remained dim, showing the barest flicker.

  “Evan?” Charlie said.

  “Yeah?” Evan couldn’t tear his gaze from the spinning wheels.

  “It ain’t working.”

  “What?”

  “Look.”

  Charlie was right. Not only was the mold not diminishing, it was growing thicker, quickly marching across the grassland toward Willcox and spreading out in every direction from the patches left in the cat’s tracks.

  “That rummy lied?”

  “Or we’re doin’ it wrong.”

  The wheel! Evan tried to catch the brass knob when it came around. It slapped his fingers away, then punched hard against the palm of his hand. Finally, he got a grip on it, slowed it down. “Other way, mebbe,” he said. With a great heave, he got the wheel moving in the opposite direction. Again, after a few turns, the steam took over, propelling it faster and faster.

  This time, the light glowed brilliantly, beaming through the little window like a captive sun.

  And where light fell, mold smoked and crisped and evaporated in wisps of grayish smoke.

  Evan ran around front and bathed in the light. Mold had reached his ears. He tasted it on his lips. It caked his limbs and trunk. He had been trying to ready himself for death, working out when he should ask Charlie to shoot him as he had Goldie. But now he let the light burn it off. For the first time in hours, he thought he would survive. He laughed, and Charlie joined him, and their laughter wafted into the sky along with the smoke.

  As the wheel spun ever faster, the beam widened and reached out farther. They cleared the train, the grass, the high desert plants. Then, carefully mounting the machine on the train itself, making sure they didn’t divert too much steam from the device, they got the engine going and chugged slowly toward Willcox.

  They had almost reached the station when the machine began to vibrate. Its whistle had gone from loud to piercing and most of the way to deafening. “Thing’s spinnin’ too fast,” Charlie said. By this time, the beam had spread even more, blocking evening’s dusk from reaching the landscape. Above, the sky was dark, but daylight washed the earth. “Think we can slow ‘er down?”

  Evan had been afraid to touch it for some time. “Might cut off the steam.”

  “But the town. That stuff’s...”

  Charlie was right. They had to clear Willcox or all their efforts would have been wasted. “Speed up the train,” Evan said. “Let’s hurry.”

  The machine wouldn’t wait. It coughed and shuddered and barked and then it flew apart in a blast of steam that seared the skin of Evan’
s face. Pieces flew this way and that, and the light—before it extinguished itself for good—flooded the plain and the town and the desert beyond in a blinding flash, as if that captive sun had broken free and for just an instant, unleashed its full fury on the landscape.

  The men sat on hard wooden benches inside the train station, speaking little, sipping from a flask once in a while. They waited until morning before they entered the empty town. In the sun’s first glow, they saw no traces of the mold. Bodies were scattered everywhere, human and animal alike. The only living people they found were those who had holed up inside the blood-streaked vault, and it took some convincing before they would emerge.

  “You men did this?” Franklin’s father asked when they led him, blinking against the light, into the street.

  “If you mean stopping what your boy started,” Evan said, “then yes.”

  Tears slid from the man’s narrowed eyes. “But... this town...”

  “You can start over,” Evan said. “Sometimes a man’s got to reconsider things.”

  He had been doing some reconsidering of his own.

  When the hunt began, he had been planning to kill Charlie. But things changed. Sometimes they changed faster and more dramatically than a man could account for. He and Charlie had been thrown together in a new and different world than they had started in. After what they had gone through, he couldn’t just put a gun to the man’s head.

  As for Lucinda, she was a fine wife, and he would miss her something fierce. But things being what they were, he thought the choice should be left up to her.

  He started to say something else, to try to soothe the sobbing man and the other people who slowly stepped into the light, but his attention was caught by a dove, descending from the sky and coming to an awkward, fluttering landing on a balcony rail across the street.

  He couldn’t have said for sure, not from this distance, but it appeared there might have been a black patch on the bird’s breast, where the shadow should not have been so dark. Maybe a little something around its eyes, as well. He felt a chill on his neck, as if someone had draped a wet string over it and then yanked it away.

  He watched the dove for a minute, but he didn’t say anything. Pointing it out would only upset the survivors. And Evan wasn’t a man who put much stock in words anyway, in talking just for the sake of it.

  Not when there was nothing left to say.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  LONE WOLF

  Jody Lynn Nye

  A yoooooooo!”

  The cry chilled Duncan Hopkin’s blood, but he kept on walking behind Carson McCreary and cranking the dynamo hanging around his neck on a strap. The pair of them was heading right for the sound, instead of going back home to their warm beds in their nice, safe houses on the edge of Kansas City. Couldn’t blame Carson, really. Josephine had been the girl he wanted to marry. And she was Duncan’s kid sister, which is why he was out under the moon in the middle of the night on the prairie. The grass hissed beneath his heavy work boots. He wished he had on a suit of armor instead of work pants and his heavy canvas coat.

  “I will kill that damned wolf if it takes the rest of my life,” Carson had vowed. Duncan, his true friend from childhood, knew he meant what he said. It had been nearly a month since Josie had gotten dragged out of the farmhouse in the dead of night. At least that was the tale the marks on the ground had told— that and the inexplicable behavior of their hound dog. Nelson had been found in the morning hiding underneath the chicken coop, shaking like he had been dipped in an icy river. He had been no use as a guard dog ever since. Little noises made him jump to the sky, and a howl set him running in the opposite direction. Duncan might have shot Nelson for failing to do his job, but he felt so sorry for him he just couldn’t do that. The dog had a bite mark on the back of his neck from a much bigger animal with long, sharp teeth. A wolf. He’d be all right, but his ma’s poodle had taken over protecting the family.

  Duncan stumbled on a stone and heard the scrabbling of claws as small animals fled the noise. At least they had a full moon to see by. That set them and this wolf on an even basis—sightwise, that was. The world was all silver and black, with the moist, rich scent of the earth rising around him. It would have been a pretty nice night for a walk, if it wasn’t for the reason.

  For a thriving city, Kansas City was still troubled by wild things roaming around. Shawnee Indians came and went as they damned well pleased as if it was all still their territory. Duncan had a friend who was a famous hunter and tracker who also worked for his family’s mineral springs business. Owl Feather sometimes turned up at five in the morning sitting next to the fire in the Hopkin family kitchen, scaring Duncan’s ma half to death when she came in to get breakfast going. Deer ate the hen feed. The biggest problem was varmints. They had to lock up the hens and lambs at night so they had any in the morning.

  Owl Feather ought to have been out there with them hunting this wolf. Carson and Duncan had asked him, but he gave them a flat no.

  “Ain’t no wolf,” he said. “You’re looking for two critters with one soul. And they don’t want to be found.”

  Carson scorned Owl’s advice. No one had ever been able to tell him what to do. On the other hand, he was plenty good at convincing other people. So, every night for three weeks, Duncan had accompanied him, and every day after he finished his job in Argentine for the railway, he had been in his workshop laboring away at his wolf-detector. It took him two solid weeks and almost seven dollars worth of new parts, but he did it. If tracks weren’t going to lead them to the wolf, this would.

  Duncan had what his granddaddy called a mechanical bent. Pieces of wire and horsehair and old bits of glass turned into useful devices in his hands. He made a pin-collector for his ma so she didn’t lose no more straight pins down between the floor boards. You wound up the little clockwork gizmo that looked like a cross between a spider and a pillbox and let it go. Saved her a lot of money when she made clothes. His best invention had been inspired from when he saw lightning strike a tree and split it in half. He was currently waiting for word from the United States Patent Office on the Duncan Hopkin Log Chopper. It could turn out a cord of wood in twenty minutes. Some people laughed at his inventions, but his ma and pa were proud of him. They hoped he would find Jo’s body, but they didn’t hold out much hope for it. They had already mourned her.

  The wolf detector worked by sniffing out the scent of the tufts of long gray fur that had been left in Jo’s bedroom and on the window-sash. It drew air in with a miniature bellows and weighed it for similarities with the samples. At least that was how it was supposed to work. They hadn’t had much luck with it the first few nights. Tonight, though, it was going like wildfire. The gauge, made out of an old part from the engine of a locomotive, whistled softly and more insistently than usual.

  “We’re on the trail now!” Carson said hoarsely. He carried the detector. The dynamo that powered it was kind of fragile and touchy. Duncan didn’t trust him with it. Carson broke almost everything. Jo had sent him home a dozen times because he was too rough in his courting. She had several other beaus, including Tim Pettigrew, whose family lived in a huge mansion in the fashionable neighborhood near the river and who had been to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Duncan wished he could afford to go to college. He felt wasted in Kansas City. Maybe once he became a famous inventor, like Mr. Thomas Edison, he could move to a big city on the east coast.

  “Ayoooooo!”

  The howl came so close that Duncan jumped halfway to the moon. He stopped cranking. The detector’s whistle died away. Carson rounded on him angrily his face a pale blob in the moonlight.

  “Start ‘er up! Do you want us to lose him?”

  Duncan seized the handle and wound it up. The whistle rose from a murmur to a shriek. They must be almost on top of the wolf. He leaned his head toward the comforting length of his rifle barrel. The gun hung over his shoulder on top of the dynamo strap.

  The detector shr
illed like a frantic train. A dark figure not ten yards ahead of them shot across the silverlit landscape. It made for a thicket of jumbled shade. Neither of them could miss the long, shaggy brush wagging behind the fourlegged shape.

  “There it goes!” Carson bellowed. He dropped the detector. Whipping his rifle off his shoulder, he pounded after the figure. Duncan slung the dynamo out of his way. He fumbled for his own gun and followed. They crashed into the brush, thrusting branches and twigs out of their way.

  In the daylight, the thicket was an ordinary blackberry patch. At night, with moonlight lancing through the tangles, it was a nightmare of clawed hands tearing at his face and clothes. Thorns clutched at his trouser legs.