Riders on the Storm

by Rob Blackwell

  But in his ramblings, it was clear he’d gone with someone else. He kept talking about a “he.” Was that her father? Had Pete gone with her dad when he left for the Maelstrom three years ago?

  But that didn’t fit. Her father had held Pete in contempt, as if he blamed the man for going crazy. She couldn’t see why he would take Pete along.

  “Who was with you, Pete?” Jules asked, trying to keep her tone calm. “Did you open the box?”

  Pete shook his head. Again, it was so vigorous, she worried it might come off.

  “Not me, not me, not me,” he said. “I just turned the keys. Then I took them.”

  Jules wondered if that was true. If so, how had they ended up in three different places? But that wasn’t what she needed to know right now. She took hold of Pete’s shoulders gently, looking him in the eyes.

  “Who opened the box, Pete?” she asked. “Can you tell me that? Who opened the box?”

  Pete’s eyes focused on hers for just a moment, staring at her.

  “The Kid,” Pete said. “The Kid opened the box.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “The U.S. Army never gave an official explanation for what the Vipers were up to. But from my vantage point, it seems perfectly clear. For one, every time a storm came back, it returned with more Vipers inside it. One can assume, then, that a primary purpose of the storms was simple recruitment. In short, they were building an army of their own.”

  — Terry Jacobsen, “A History of the Supernatural,” 2013

  Jules heard a sharp intake of breath behind her. She turned to find Luke wearing a different expression from his usual placid face. He looked shocked and—if she wasn’t mistaken—angry.

  He stared at Pete. “You’re lying.”

  Luke hadn’t moved an inch, but Pete began scrambling back further as if he were being assaulted.

  “No, no, no, no,” Pete said.

  “Tell me the truth,” Luke said.

  His face was again a mask, the brief flash of rage gone as if it had never been there.

  Jules eyed Luke carefully.

  “Stay back,” she said, though she wasn’t sure if it was necessary. If looks could kill, Pete would have been dead already, but his glare appeared to be the only weapon Luke was planning to use. Satisfied he wasn’t going to attack, Jules turned back to Pete.

  “When did this happen?” she asked. “When were you there with the Kid?”

  “Yesterday,” he said. “Maybe the day before. Sometimes I think it was longer, but then I remember it just happened.”

  Well, it definitely wasn’t yesterday, but Jules had a guess. If Pete was right—and this wasn’t some strangely lucid rambling—and he’d been there when the Maelstrom was quiet, that was at least twenty years ago.

  Maybe he was deluded or he got some of the facts wrong—he was called Crazy Pete for a reason, after all—but if he was right… it meant that the Kid had been there when the Maelstrom was created. It was also likely the Kid had died at the hands of the Vipers, who had been… woken up?

  That was just a theory, of course. She couldn’t imagine one jumping out of a literal box, but at this stage, very little would surprise her.

  Everything fit. Even why her father would rush toward the Maelstrom—because the Kid had gone there first.

  “When did the storms start, Pete?” she asked. “You said it was quiet. Did the storms come afterward?”

  Pete just nodded his head. Then she asked the question she really wanted to know the answer to.

  “Pete, do you know where the jack-in-the-box is?” she asked.

  A jack-in-the-box was nothing like a vase, of course. But Pete’s brain was scrambled. What if he was just describing it wrong?

  “Do you know how to find it?”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” he said. “I remember. I was just there yesterday. I know.”

  She turned to Luke.

  “You thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked.

  “The trip is back on?” he said.

  She nodded. “We just got our fifth man.”

  She turned to Pete. “So, you want to go back to the mountain and show me this door?”

  Pete’s eyes stopped darting and alighted on her again. “No,” he said. “No, never. I’ll never go back there.”

  But she had an idea that might turn him around, something he was always asking about.

  “I’ll give you some wooden crosses,” Jules said.

  Pete’s eyes widened. For the first time, he looked genuinely happy. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I want wooden crosses.”

  She looked at Luke as if it settled everything. “Bring him, I need to get over to—”

  She was cut off as she heard Will shouting her name. He sounded panicked. She looked to Luke.

  “Bring him!” she said, and ran back out of the alley without waiting for a response.

  She emerged to find Will cradling Miranda near the ground by the front of the saloon. Dy was standing in the doorway, looking concerned.

  “Jules!” Will called again.

  She ran to her sister, oblivious to the now small crowd of people that were gathering around in response to Will’s shouting.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  But she could already tell. Miranda’s eyes had gone that awful shade of black again and she lay twitching in Will’s arms. The spasms stopped abruptly and Miranda looked at Jules with those horrible eyes.

  “We see you,” she said, her voice deep, as if dozens were talking instead of one. “We see you.”

  “Leave her alone!” Jules shouted.

  The crowd around them backed up in response.

  “No,” Miranda said. “She’s a thief. She thinks we do not see her, but we do.”

  She was beginning to understand this, at least. Somehow, the Vipers—or whatever was controlling them—could sense Miranda’s ability to see them in visions. And apparently they didn’t like it.

  “Who are you? What are you?” Jules shouted. She heard a scuff of boot behind her, and turned to see Luke had arrived with Pete.

  “We are the ones who seek,” Miranda replied.

  “Do you have my father?”

  A cold smile appeared on Miranda’s face, so utterly unlike her sister that Jules flinched.

  “Yes,” Miranda replied. “But you will never see him.”

  “What do you want with him? What do you want with any of us?” Jules asked.

  “We want to save you,” Miranda said. “We want to save you all.”

  Jules didn’t know what that meant, and didn’t know what to say.

  “Leave my sister alone,” she said.

  “We will come for your ‘sister,’” Miranda replied in the voice of many, a sneer on her lips at the mention of the word sister. “We are coming.”

  With that, Miranda went limp in Will’s arms, and she shut her eyes. Jules checked her to make sure she was still breathing, and satisfied she was, looked up into the sky. There were clouds, but nothing threatening. Still, she knew that wouldn’t last long.

  “What the hell was that?” Dy asked, standing over Miranda.

  She looked at Will. “Take care of her. I have to go. I’ll be back.”

  He nodded at her and she left without another word. She ran back to Onyx, still tied up outside of Rita’s place. She threw herself onto the horse and galloped to the smithy. She found the bundle she’d been carrying in her saddlebag and brought it inside.

  She was relieved to find Hubert standing in front of his forge. The store had been shut when she’d ridden into town, along with everything else.

  “Hubert,” she said breathlessly. He looked at her with concern.

  “You okay?”

  “Far from it,” she said. She heaved the bundle onto a table nearby and his eyes widened as he saw what was inside.

  “How the hell—” he started.

  “I stole it,” she said. “But I need you to smelt the silver down into bullets.”

  “All of it?”
>
  “Every single piece,” she said. “If you do that, I’ll give you quarter of the gold in this bundle.”

  His eyes couldn’t open any wider, but she swore they seemed to anyway.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I’ll pay you a quarter of the gold, but only if you can work quickly. I need these bullets as fast as you can make them. I need to leave soon.”

  “You just rode into town,” he said.

  “And I need to get out—and so do you,” she said. “Something’s coming, Hubert. Something out of a nightmare. Best leave with your wife—after you get me those bullets.”

  “What kind?” he asked.

  For a moment, she was confused. Then she realized he meant type of ammunition.

  “Most of them for my Colt,” she said. “A sizable portion for a Winchester rifle.”

  She sorted out the gold from the silver, handing him all the silver coins. She kept the gold, but at least now he knew she had the means to pay him. When she finished, he was still staring at her. She left without another word.

  There was always the possibility that Hubert would try to run off with the silver instead of doing what she’d asked, but she doubted he’d try. He knew she’d track him down. But she doubted it would even occur to him. Hubert was an honest man, one of the few she’d encountered out here.

  Luke was waiting outside the smithy, his own horse at the ready. She opened the bag of gold.

  “Take what you need and go buy us supplies,” she said, looking at the sky. “You heard my sister. We don’t have a lot of time.”

  Luke nodded. “We have to talk,” he said simply.

  That much was obvious. His reaction to Pete’s words had convinced her of that. But now wasn’t the time.

  “Later,” she said. “We need to get the hell out of here first. A storm is brewing, and I don’t aim to be here when it arrives.”

  She rode back down the street to find Miranda sitting by the side of the saloon, awake and alert. Pete and Will were nearby. Pete was singing a song and beating the ground with his hands as if it were a drum. Will was talking softly with Miranda.

  She leaped off Onyx and ran to her sister. “You okay?” she asked.

  Miranda nodded, but she looked exhausted. “Got a headache, though.”

  “You remember what you said?”

  She nodded again. “It’s getting worse, Jules. Whatever they can do to me, it was more intense this time. They showed me things, horrible things.”

  “Like what?”

  “I was part of the storm,” she said. “I was inside the black cloud and there were dozens of Vipers, maybe hundreds. They were flying inside of it.”

  Jules thought of what she’d seen when the storm had been chasing them and grimaced. It wasn’t hard to imagine.

  “The storm was moving,” Miranda continued. “In the dream, it was headed north—toward Stanton. I could see the town far in the distance.”

  Jules again looked up at the sky, but there was nothing unusual there.

  “It wasn’t happening yet,” Miranda said. “It was something that was going to happen. They showed me what they planned to do. They swept over Rita’s first, killing everyone inside, then made their way down the streets. They found most cowering in their bedrooms. I saw them kill Dy. He had a shotgun he was using on them. They tore it away from him and—”

  Jules reached out to touch her sister. Miranda was shaking now.

  “You don’t need to—”

  “They found Hubert and his wife,” her sister said. “They were praying. They have a son now, did you know that? The Vipers took the boy first.”

  Jules closed her eyes.

  “They’ll kill everyone, Jules,” Miranda said. “I saw it.”

  “What about us?” Jules asked, noticing she’d neglected to mention them.

  When she opened her eyes, Miranda was looking at her strangely. “We weren’t there,” Miranda said. “We were gone, I think.”

  Jules sagged in relief. She wasn’t sure if the Vipers had shown Miranda these things. Her prophetic dreams had occurred without their intervention before. One thing about them, however, was that they almost always came true.

  Jules had tried ignoring them and belittling them, but they never changed. Miranda had talked about dark things on the train, and Jules had gone anyway, only to encounter Vipers there. It had been the same at the bank.

  Jules glanced up at Will, who gave her an uneasy look. She squeezed her sister’s arm.

  “Leaving sounds like a good idea,” Jules said. “I have to wait until Hubert gives me some bullets, but then we’ll get the hell out of here.”

  “What about the people of Stanton?” Miranda asked.

  Jules shook her head. “We’ll warn them, of course,” she replied. “Hopefully some will listen to us. But their fate will be what it will be. We can’t help that. But we can be away from the storm when it comes.”

  Miranda looked stricken and Will appeared appalled.

  “I don’t like it either,” Jules said. “But there’s no sense in staying here to die if those things are coming. Besides, if they’re busy attacking here, that may mean there are less of them in the Maelstrom. It’s an opportunity.”

  Will’s face darkened. “An opportunity? She just said this entire town is going to be wiped out!”

  “And nobody will grieve for it more than I, Will Starling,” Jules said. “This is as close to a home as I’ve ever had. But we have a job to do.”

  He stood up suddenly.

  “I can’t believe you’re saying this,” he said. “You’d really leave the town to its fate?”

  “Did you have another option in mind?”

  She meant it rhetorically, but Will appeared to take the question seriously.

  “Hell yes, I do,” he said. “Stay. Fight.”

  Jules shook her head. “It’s pointless, Will,” she said. “I’ve seen these things before, remember? You can’t stop them. You can only survive.”

  “Then help these people survive, Jules,” Will said. “There’s no one if you won’t do it. You faced these things on the train, right? You know how—”

  “I barely made it,” Jules said. “So did Miranda. Not everyone on that job with me was so lucky, Will.”

  “Luke said you fought them in a bank,” Will protested.

  Jules looked up at the sky, not searching for a storm cloud, but out of sheer frustration.

  “Yes, and I’ve had a few skirmishes with them at other times,” Jules said. “But what of it? I’m not a member of the U.S. Army. I’m no general or captain able to lead these folk into battle. Even if I were, they’re in no shape for it. They’re ranchers, traders, cattlemen and miners, not soldiers.”

  “There is no force so powerful as men and women defending their homes,” Will said, and nodded to Miranda.

  Jules sighed. “Make all the fancy arguments you want. But I’m not staying here to get slaughtered.”

  Will folded his arms across his chest. “I’m not leaving,” he said.

  She stood up and folded her own arms. “So be it, Will Starling,” she said. “You always were pig-headed and foolish. It’s why I—Sally, I mean—liked you so much.”

  “Sally Hawkins would have never abandoned people like this,” Will said.

  “Sally wasn’t real, Will! She was made up.”

  Jules held out a hand to help Miranda to her feet. “Come on, Mira, we’re getting out of here.”

  But Miranda didn’t take the hand. She was looking from Will to Jules.

  “He’s right,” she said.

  “About what?” Jules asked, but she felt an anxiety in her chest that started to bloom.

  “We shouldn’t go,” she said. “We should stay here and help.”

  “You just saw everyone get killed,” Jules said. “Staying here doesn’t exactly seem like a sensible option.”

  “But we weren’t in the dream,” Miranda said. “We could change what happens.”

  “Your d
reams always come true.”

  “Not always,” Miranda said.

  “When have they ever not?”

  “I had a dream of you and Will having a baby,” Miranda said.

  Jules felt like her jaw hit the floor. She knew about the dream, of course. Her sister had told her the night it happened. She just couldn’t fathom why she was bringing it up now. Will looked like he’d been pistol-whipped.

  “So what?” Jules said.

  “It didn’t come true,” Miranda said.

  “Well, obviously it didn’t,” Jules said. “That was just the exception that proves the rule, Miranda. That was a real dream, something you wanted to see. Or, who knows, maybe Will and I will gamely have offspring in the distant future.”

  “No, it was in Chicago,” she said. “I saw you. It was the christening. Will’s father was there. You looked happy.”

  Jules sighed. “Now I know you’re making things up. I was never the maternal sort, Mira. And why in the Sam Hill are we dredging this up right now?”

  “Because I changed the outcome,” Miranda said. “I told you about the dream and you panicked. When Father came to tell us to go through with the job, you didn’t resist. You were supposed to resist. I changed that.”

  “That’s not true,” Jules said. “I could never have stayed.”

  Miranda met her eyes. “You could have,” she said. “You were afraid to. Afraid you might actually be happy.”

  Jules looked away from her, and unfortunately into the eyes of the man she’d married. She swore out loud, and enjoyed the shocked expression that briefly crossed Will’s face.

  “I had to leave,” Jules said.

  She meant for it to come out confident, but it sounded half-hearted even to her.

  “You can make a different choice here, Jules,” Miranda said. “If we leave, they’ll all die. But if we stay—”

  “We’ll die with them.”

  “You don’t know that,” Miranda said. “I didn’t see that choice. I only saw the one where we go.”

  Jules shook her head. “I’m no hero, Mira. You know that better than anyone. Will’s deluded because of Sally, but you see me clearly. Father taught us better than this. ‘When the odds are against you, withdraw. No job is worth dying for.’ It’s the coward’s play, Mira, one of the five. It’s nothing to brag about, but sometimes it’s necessary.”