Fury From the Tomb

by S. A. Sidor

  She shook her head. “No. But we have a map.”

  “All right, Miss. We’ll sleep now under that canopy over yonder. There’s enough shelter for the horses, too. Give us all a rest. Let them eat more of this grass and flowers. I’ve got hardtack. We ride out at sunset. Get to the mine by first light. Take a survey.”

  “And if we determine they’re inside the goldmine?” I asked.

  “We seal the sumbitch. Go home early.”

  “Sooner said than done,” I said.

  “Ain’t it always though?” His gold tooth shined. He folded and pocketed the map.

  38

  Dos Mummies

  I woke with a start. Night had fallen. Stars salted the heavenly dome. I left my blanket and stood stretching and yawning by the horses. Penny and Neptune were hobbled. I untied their ropes and saddled them. They nickered softly. I checked the immediate vicinity outside the rocky overhang. Moonlight was not there. I rushed back to the campsite. My heart was thudding in my chest. Evangeline and Wu were still asleep, side-by-side where I left them. I lit the bull’s eye lantern and checked over our provisions.

  I shook Evangeline’s shoulder.

  “Wake up,” I said. “McTroy is gone. He’s taken his horse, all of his gear. At least he’s left us food and water.”

  Evangeline’s eyes were puffy. She twisted at the waist to inspect the empty sweep of cool, hard-packed dirt where hours earlier McTroy had lain with his bedroll.

  “This must be a mistake,” she said groggily. But the panic was creeping in.

  “It’s no mistake, Evangeline. He took the map. I should have said something. Damn it! It’s the gold he’s after. He has a fever for it. Remember how worried he was about being paid for his services? Well, you won’t need to sell your mother’s jewelry. He’s off to steal all the gold from Resurrección.”

  “One man alone against the mummies?”

  “Oh, but you forget. He’s the great McTroy. He’ll probably get himself killed. But he’s not the one I’m concerned about. We have food and some water, but I don’t know the way out of the Gila. We go north, obviously. Try to find El Camino del Diablo. But without a guide, without a map, it may very well be hopeless…”

  Wu had risen and was standing silently behind me. I turned to look over the provisions again and I saw him.

  “McTroy would not leave us,” he said.

  “I am sorry, Wu. You have learned many tough lessons on this trip. I’m afraid this is yet another. Never trust a drunkard.”

  Evangeline rolled her blanket. I passed her the lantern.

  “Make sure we don’t leave anything,” I said.

  Wu had not moved.

  “McTroy is a good man,” he said.

  “Wu, pack your things. We must ride out now. If we’re lucky, we’ll come across some vaqueros or maybe a prospector or two. If we make the Tinajas Atlas Mountains, we’ll have a chance at a waterhole.”

  “Maybe Rojo knows the way?” Evangeline asked.

  “I wouldn’t want to trust my life to a corpse-eater. He could likely make himself whole again if he fed off the three of us.”

  Wu said, “But he is our friend. He helped us.”

  “He’s a parasite. If it is advantageous to him, he keeps his host alive. And if it is more advantageous, he kills his host. Law of the jungle and the desert as well. Survival.”

  Evangeline had finished with her things and was helping Wu.

  “We will talk to Rojo,” she told the boy. “I think it is worth talking to him. He went to sleep in those rocks right there.” She lifted the light to show him the spot. “See if he’s awake.”

  “Hand me that lantern,” I said. “I’m going to make sure the horses are ready.” I started walking away but looked over my shoulder to add a point. “Rojo is only following his nature. McTroy is the one you should be angry at. He is our Judas.”

  I turned, raised the lantern, and walked away from the shelter.

  As I emerged from under the stone awning, I saw movement at the edge of my field of vision. An oscillation like a flag stirring against its flagpole in the gentlest of breezes – but there was no breeze. Behind the swaying motion, a column of smoke rose off the gully floor in a low, thick V shape. But we had built our fire elsewhere, and I could smell nothing burning. These vague, gauzy images appeared at the same rocks where Rojo had bedded down. I switched my direction, needing to investigate, wondering if the ghoul had seen our guide vacate the campsite, if he knew more of this sunset desertion than the rest of us. My anger at McTroy filled me. I was arguing with him in my head. Telling him he had no right to abandon us, cursing his name, accusing him of being no less than a murderer for leaving a woman and child behind in the desert. Because I was preoccupied with making these charges, I failed to register fully what I was seeing coalesce before me. The flag – not a flag at all – but more like a large, grease-stained, untidy puppet, suspended by what means I knew not, dangling in space a few feet above the rocks. I marched toward it, wanting satisfaction for my curiosity.

  I slowed.

  El Rojo faced me, afloat in midair, as if attached to invisible wires. The smoke behind him revealed its solidity and my mistake: a man-shape, but not any normal man.

  A giant stood partly concealed behind the graverobber.

  My steps faltered. The lantern shine trembled like a golden pool of poison. The handle creak-creaked shrilly in the steep-sided gulch, but despite my efforts I could not steady my arm. Rojo had a claw digging into his sinewy shoulder, clasping him. The claw was the giant’s knotty, fuzzy-knuckled hand. He twisted Rojo’s limp body this way and that, as one would a string over a kitten; toying, luring me out here, alone.

  “Stop,” a voice I knew said. “That’s far enough.”

  He moved Rojo to one side so I could see the two of them. Kek, grinning in the lamp shadows, his jaw muscle clenched like a rubber egg. His skin glistened, new-looking, and clean. I smelled black licorice, recognized it as myrrh, coming from him. It was as if he had risen from a perfumed bath into our dirty little desert camp.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Enjoying the night and all it offers. I stepped on your dog.” He shook Rojo.

  “Where’s McTroy?”

  “Dead. I ate his heart.” Kek delivered the words with frosty flatness.

  McTroy dead? Cannibalized? Was that how Odji-Kek gained his newfound strength? I saw no body anywhere on the ground, no Moonlight either, and surely she would be wherever McTroy was. Yet where had they gone? Fled into the night, I feared.

  “I expected him to taste like a lion but his flavor was more like duck,” Kek said.

  “He’s lying to you, amigo,” El Rojo said. “He has no eaten McTroy–”

  Kek’s hand dashed like a spider from Rojo’s shoulder to the crown of his head, where it paused. He squeezed Rojo’s skull until it gave a pop. Under the skin, sharp pieces were scraping. The hand curled tighter. Gurgling, a modicum of liquid escaped.

  “Bark, bark, little dog,” Kek said.

  Rojo blinked but stopped talking. His eyes rolled up ivory in their sockets then came down too far, trying to find me, rotating in different orbits, eyelids fluttering, widening, only to repeat the cycle. His mouth worked as if he were choking on a bone.

  I tried to swallow. All my spit had dried. I wanted to run, run, run…

  “What do you want?” I asked Kek. It seemed a strange, rather weak query, an effort to buy myself time to think of a way out of this situation, but the sorcerer’s eyes lit up with clear excitement. It was as if I had finally discovered the right question. Like a teacher waiting for his not-too-bright pupil to learn the lesson, Kek’s approval shined through anticipating my once-and-for-all following the assignment.

  “Go kill the woman and the boy. Join me. You will live forever in my service.”

  “Why don’t you kill them yourself?”

  My question met with a sour, rebuking stare. “Perhaps, in time… I ask for obedience first. Goo
d servants are hard to find. Blood is easy. Bring me some.” He flicked his long fingers at me to speed me along in my task.

  “Is Waterston here? Is that why you won’t kill his daughter?”

  Kek lowered both arms. Rojo’s truncated extremities brushed in the dirt. Kek seemed to have forgotten about him, although he not had released him. He took several paces away from the rocks. He lifted his hand – the ghoul-free one – and gestured past me, over and beyond the steep edges of the arroyo. “Waterston is ahead on the trail traveling fast with the black horses. I am with him, asleep. I am also here with you. I sense the carriage is rocking. Moonlight drops pearls on the sand.” Kek rolled his neck from side to side, slitting his eyes, seeing things I could not. I could tell that he was speaking the truth. He was present in two places at once – as he had been on the ship crossing the deep, frigid Atlantic, at our first campfire, and now again in this dark arroyo. Paying me these visits of his – social calls conducted on the underside of the day. Our little talks.

  “Is this magic?” I asked, marveling despite his evilness, awestruck by his talents.

  “I died thousands of years ago and I’m here with you. Everything I do is magic.”

  I fell to my knees. I felt him pressing me down, not physically, but the contact was just as strong. There was no room for the two of us in this arroyo. His size dwarfed me.

  “Will you kill them for me now?” He had grown impatient with my questions.

  “I will not.” It was a struggle to utter these words when their opposite would have been much simpler. I might have submitted, acquiesced to his power. Yet I fought like a drowning man yoked in chains and with more chains piling on. I sunk down farther than my knees, sinking inside myself. He hated me for resisting. My last chances to give in to him vanished like breaking bubbles. Then the pressure around me stopped.

  “Others will pay for your refusal. In the end, you all will die,” he said.

  “Afterward there is nothing,” I said. “I make my peace with that.”

  “But this never ends, fool. Time and pain are forever, I promise you. Like this dog you will be ripped apart for eternity.” He spoke calmly, as one might to an idiot.

  With both hands he stretched El Rojo out. Air wheezed from the flattened sack of Rojo’s skinny, birdcage chest, and the clicking of billiard balls I detected was his spinal column, wrenched and overtaxed.

  “Migo, my guitar, please–”

  Red, off-kilter eyes pleaded with me. For what? To play a last request? To save him from this fate? Maybe to pass along his cherished, dead man’s guitar?

  I don’t know.

  He had no time to finish before Odji-Kek tore him to pieces. The sorcerer beat the shredded ghoul flesh against the rocks and scattered it into the crags that ran between.

  Kek wiped his palms.

  Unsteadily, I climbed to my feet. My gaze strayed over the rubble strewn with bits of El Rojo. Even an eater of the dead did not deserve such a fate. Rojo had been more than his nature. I experienced a hollowness that felt like being carved out, having all my organs and juices sucked from me in a single gulp. Like an automaton I moved stiffly, surveying the rocks, keeping my light over them. Did I think he would climb back out?

  Kek spotted something lodged against a wedge of sandstone.

  He bent and picked it up.

  El Rojo’s guitar. The lacquered wood was curved, milky blonde glass under the bull’s-eye. Kek ran his thumb lightly over the strings. The tuning pegs winked at me as he rotated the instrument in his grip, bringing it high over his head…

  “No!” I shouted.

  He smashed the body against the stone. Splinters flew. He tossed the neck away.

  I did not want him to see me at that moment so I found the moon to stare at.

  When I looked again I was alone.

  “I take it you didn’t find McTroy?” Evangeline asked upon my return to the shelter.

  I had debated with myself about what to tell her and Wu concerning Kek’s intrusion into our camp and Rojo’s destruction. I was having trouble finding words that would do the least amount of damage. We were in dire circumstances. Our attitude going forward might very well determine whether or not we survived and returned to civilization. A report of Kek’s visit would only scare them. Knowledge that he had tempted me to murder them would do worse. I would be receiving wary sidelong glances for the rest of the journey. Our morale was low enough. It did not occur to me that Evangeline’s first question would be about McTroy. She was doing her best to put on a good face, but I could tell his forsaking of us had struck her at her core. She appeared close to panic, which was something I did not like to witness. Her smile was forced and fragile, as if she were holding a razor in her mouth. Her manner turned awkward and self-conscious. She’s acting, I told myself. And she knows it’s not very believable. I touched her elbow, feeling tremors flowing through her like electricity.

  “I saw no sign of him,” I said.

  “Who’re you going after, Doc?” McTroy walked into our circle of light.

  I jumped at his voice. Evangeline did too. I cocked the lantern back against my shoulder defensively, prepared to strike him with it if necessary. That glittery, chilled gaze settled on me. I knew then the fear that outlaws with money on their heads had felt when they saw them. Looking at the last man they would ever see. I had no gun. My walking stick was stuck in Penny’s saddle. But even if I had a proper weapon, I was no match for an experienced, coldblooded mankiller like Rex McTroy.

  “I was searching for El Rojo. He seems to have… left us.”

  “You all look like you seen a ghost,” he said, cheerfully.

  “Where were you?” I asked.

  “I was scratching up a fire to put some coffee on. Spied something stalking out there in the rocks. Moonlight and I rode out to take a look-see. Lobos. Probably the same pack we heard from before. They was curious is all. Run off when they saw me. You say the sawed-off cemetery defiler has parted ways with our cozy posse?”

  I looked at Evangeline who was staring at me with quizzical eyes. I nodded confidently as I answered. “I am sure he wishes us nothing but the best. I noted before turning in this afternoon that his legs were longer. He did not want to slow us down. Mexico is his home. Plenty of things die around here. Other ghouls will come along soon. Scavengers always reunite. I, for one, will remember him fondly, and his guitar.”

  I wondered if my lies were working. McTroy seemed to grow more skeptical in his expression as I talked, while the reverse was true for Evangeline. She gave her attention over to our bounty hunter. Her panic had subsided, what replaced it was cautious relief.

  “You have the map?” Evangeline asked.

  “Right here.” McTroy patted his breast pocket. “I never been up that way. You’re paying for a guide. You oughta get where you’re going.”

  Wu ran to McTroy and hugged him. The boy had remained out of sight until that moment. No doubt he was sizing up the shifting moods that had my own head spinning. My assortment of half-truths made me queasy. McTroy was surprised at the tightness of the boy’s embrace but clearly not bothered by the display of affection. Hugging back would have been asking too much. He looked upon the boy with genuine tenderness, as he did in quiet pauses with Moonlight, which is no insult to Yong Wu, for McTroy valued four-legged creatures, particularly of the equine variety, more than people.

  “You ready for action, Wu?” he asked. “It’s a good night for a ride.”

  Evangeline and I left them and went to load our horses. “Here, you take the lantern,” I said. “It’s dark out there. You don’t want to run Neptune into a saguaro.”

  “Is Rojo really gone as you said?” she asked.

  “Oh, don’t worry. He’s an old scrounger. He can look after himself. He’ll gobble a few deceased snakes and lizards and be playing his guitar under a desert willow in a fortnight. Good and whole again. It wouldn’t surprise me to meet him in the future.”

  “I suppose you’re right,�
� she said.

  “I know I am.” I looked off in the direction of the rocks, though it was too dark to make out anything. I was glad for it.

  Wu brought us coffee from McTroy’s newly kindled fire.

  Together we drank. I was a damned heel and I felt every inch of it.

  McTroy was right about the night though. It was beautiful and clean. Not blacks and whites, but a wash of lunar grays. It served no purpose to dwell on what might happen when we ran into Kek and his servants again: an ultimate confrontation in every sense. We might end up dismembered in the rocks like poor Rojo or a prisoner of some occult, other-dimensional torture chamber, if Kek’s threats proved to be real.

  Tonight we were alive. Tomorrow, together, we still had a chance.

  I left the ugly thoughts of treachery and betrayal behind me in the dust. None of us was alone. Four rode out against los mummies.

  We rode through the desert to La Mina Resurrección.

  Friday April 13th, 1888

  Resurrección Mine

  Arizona Territory

  At sunup we reached the outskirts of the former mining camp. Warm sunlight poured pastels over the rugged, rock-strewn landscape. The wind mixed the colors. Pinks and mauves flowed snakily on the ground, crisscrossing like streams of watered-down pigment spilled by beautiful accident from a painter’s cup. Lilacs, roses bloomed above us. Fat peaches hung in the cloudy sky. It was as peaceful a vista as I had ever beheld. I could hardly imagine the evil men and death’s head tombstones that lay hidden within.

  But I knew better, didn’t I?

  So, as we rode in silence, I pretended the bloody violence didn’t exist, that this wind-lashed land contained only raw, wild power and nothing else – no gold barons or monsters – simply a museum of natural wonders, geological and timeless. I was but a small creature in a big universe. My heart ached. I tasted the ashy bitterness of one who knows he may die in the coming day.

  I put these feelings away.

  Instead I watched the stones around me catch fire and glow like gems thrown up from the very center of the earth just for me to marvel at their sparkling. Realizing my insignificance made me brave; perhaps it made me a fool too. I was ready for the day. I felt lightheaded, almost giddy. My melancholy young man’s heart bobbed in my chest like a cork at sea.