Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (13 page)

The wolf gave a taunting howl, snapping its jaws, and raced after the others who were just now approaching the mesa’s edge.

Tongues hanging, panting, mewling and yipping eagerly, the four wolves stopped and looked over the lip of the ridge. The stage trail angled around the base of the mesa, and just now a coach was fast approaching from the southeast, the team running full out under the driver’s blacksnake, which cracked over their
backs with the sounds of pistol shots. The sweat-lathered team appeared bathed in silver under the high-noon sun.

The driver cursed and yelled. The shotgun rider sitting beside him held on to his seat for dear life, his double-barreled shotgun wedged between his legs. The coach rattled and clattered. Dust roiled up to glisten like burnished copper.

“Got a timetable to keep, Lucy!” the driver shouted through the bandanna drawn up over his nose, jerking his arm up to crack the popper at the end of the whip once more, making one of the wolves give an instinctive start, leaping up off its front paws and groaning.

“Get up there, Jeremiah!” the driver bellowed.
“Lift some dust, Abilene!”

One of the other wolves nipped another in its eagerness, then all backed a few feet away from the lip of the ridge, so they wouldn’t be seen by the shotgunner or driver, and hung their heads low. Their eyes darkened in hungry anticipation. They snapped their jaws and licked their chops.

The thunder of the approaching coach grew louder and louder until the stage was nearly directly below the wolves. The largest of the beasts glanced at the others, giving the signal, then hurled itself over the side of the ridge, plummeting twenty feet in an arc of gray-brown fur and glowing red eyes, to land on its front paws squarely atop a long steamer trunk lashed to the top of the stage, behind the driver and shotgun messenger.

Two others landed on the roof, as well, while a third—the lightest colored of the four wolves—came to rest directly upon the shotgun rider and went immediately to work, snarling loudly and savagely as it tore the unsuspecting man’s throat out.

The shotgunner screamed as he dropped his Greener and
reached for his bloody throat while the wolf shook him like a bone.

The driver’s eyes nearly popped out of his skull as he watched the attack, his wide-open mouth pushing a circle out from behind his red bandanna.

Blood sprayed, covering the driver, who then commenced screaming, kicking his feet as though to run, until one of the three wolves closed its jaws around the back of his neck from behind and, with the strength of six common wolves, jerked the man up and out of the driver’s boot and onto the coach roof. The wolf promptly tore the driver’s throat open, silencing the man’s hysterical screams, then rolling him off the coach to hit the trail and tumble, limbs akimbo, blood flying.

A woman inside the coach screamed.

One of the other wolves atop the coach grinned at the wolf who’d killed the driver, then pivoted off its back legs. It grabbed the edge of the roof with one paw while throwing the rest of its body over the side.

When it had its back feet inside the coach window, it removed its paw from the edge of the roof, and the coach bounced as it landed inside the carriage. Screams rose in earnest below the other three wolves, who hunkered together on the roof, turning at nearly the same time back into One-Eye Langtry, Lucky Snodgrass, and their particularly savage leader—Charlie Hondo.

There they were—three of them fully outfitted in their Western trail garb complete with six-shooters and battered hats, as though they’d never been wolves at all. Charlie Hondo, born to Romanian nobility, was tall and thin, with bulging, crazy eyes and long, sandy hair hanging down from the sides of his head, while his pate was as pink and bald as a baby’s rump. Gold hoop
rings dangled from his ears. In mockery of the Lutheran church, having been sent to an orphanage after his family had banished him for raping and chopping two serving girls up into tiny bits that he then dumped in the castle’s well, he wore on each cheek two dull green tattooed crosses. They were in grisly contrast to his bulging, glittering, light brown eyes.

Due to a fairly common shape-shifting magic, the Angels’ clothes worn while in their human forms had not materialized in their wolf forms but had come back through the second shifting of their shapes. Now wearing the blue Army uniform of Warden Mondrick of Hellsgarde Prison, complete with cavalry sword, holstered Colt Army.44, and even the pocketknife, matches, and other paraphernalia the man had had in his pockets when Charlie had eaten out his heart and then beheaded him, the leader of the formidable wolf pack gave a tooth-gnashing rebel yell.

He leaped down into the driver’s boot and took up the reins that the driver had dropped on the floor. He almost lost the warden’s blue hat on the wind, but grabbed it and stuffed it under the seat.

The horses had heard the screams and smelled the blood and were still smelling it now as Curly Joe Panabaker was hard at work inside the carriage, raising shrieks and bone-splintering screams from the two drummers, one doctor, and two women riding in there, on what had been, only seconds before, a pleasantly eventless midday trek between Dead Horse Gap and Wild Rose, in the far-southwestern corner of Colorado.

The team was running wildly and trying to leap out of its hames and harnesses, but Charlie Hondo, hoop earrings thrashing and flashing, got them back on their leashes, holding them
steady to the trail. One-Eye climbed onto the box beside Charlie, while Lucky Snodgrass remained on all fours, grinning delightedly over the side of the carriage roof as the savagery continued below.

Presently, one of the now-headless drummers flew out the coach’s right-side door to hit the trail rolling, and Lucky whooped and clapped his hands maniacally. The doctor, also headless, was thrown out the opposite door, where his blood-geysering corpse bounced off a boulder beside the trail. Lucky glanced over his shoulder as the sawbones disappeared in the roiling dust cloud behind the carriage.

He whooped and hollered and pumped his fists in the air. “Wolves at high noon! Can’t beat
that
!”

The wolfish growls and snarls and angry yips intermittently drowned the screams until the throatless, disemboweled women were both rolling like rag dolls in the trail behind the coach, quickly lost in the distance.

A loud snarl rose, followed by a howl. And then the carriage jerked, and two hairy human hands appeared at the edge of the coach roof. Curly Joe lifted his head up above the roof, his funnel-brimmed hat snugged to his head by the rawhide thong secured taut to the underside of his chin. His red eyes turned blue, and the hair on his hands disappeared.

He grinned and gave another howl, this one belonging to a man, and hoisted himself up onto the roof where he sat with his legs raised, arms wrapped around his knees, grinning and looking around at the sunlit afternoon sliding past the carriage.

“I like this,” he said, slowly shaking his head in awe-filled appreciation of his new abilities. “I really do like this a lot, pards.”

Charlie Hondo glanced over his shoulder at Curly Joe, looked away, then looked back again, widening his pale, lifeless eyes under the brim of his dusty blue cavalry kepi with the gold braid around the crown. “Curly Joe, you keep smilin’ that hard, you’re liable to break your face in two!” He loved being a “Westerner” as much as the others.

One-Eye had his Schofield out of its holster. He broke the piece open to check the loads. “Curly Joe’s just enjoyin’ his new abilities, Charlie. You should, too—since it’s bein’ able to turn whenever we want, day or night, full moon or not, that got you outta Hellsgarde.”

“That and that dragon,” added Curly Joe.

Hondo, the alpha wolf, shook his head and stretched his lips back from his rotten teeth in revulsion as he held the six-hitch team’s reins deftly in his long-fingered hands and stared ahead along the trail. “Glad to be out of that fuckin’ perdition. Wish I coulda killed that warden one more time. Ripped his head off with my teeth just once more!”

The former Ludwig Jurgen Abelard Kiesler grinned at his compatriots. “Much obliged, boys. Oh, I woulda got outta there eventually, but you and that fire-breather sure made it a whole lot easier. I owe you a round of ale…if there’s anything excepting coffin varnish to be found out here.”

Dubiously, he studied the parched desert terrain sliding past the coach, and batted his lashes against the dust.

“Where’d the dragon come from, Charlie?” asked Curly Joe. “Don’t recollect anyone mentionin’ dragons.”

“I reckon,” said Charile, planting his cavalry boots on the dashboard and leaning back in the jehu’s stiff wooden seat, “the dragon was a little something extra provided by our lovely,
bewitching benefactor, Senorita Ravenna.” He grinned in delight, remembering the beguiling, crotch-stirring image of Ravenna sprawling nude on a corn-shuck mattress in a Dodge City flophouse, the day after he’d met her in the Long Branch Saloon. “I suspect she’ll be catching up with us soon.”

“Ah,” said One-Eye eagerly, snapping the Schofield closed, spinning the hogleg on his finger, and sliding it back into the holster thronged low on his denim-clad right thigh. “Miss Ravenna.”

“Senorita Ravenna de Onis y Gonzalez-Vara,” said Charlie, letting the long and regal Spanish name roll lovingly off his tongue. “A fitting name for that Mex piece of horny ass.”

“You sure we can trust her?” Curly Joe said, trying feebly to roll a cigarette in his thick, brown fingers, despite the stage’s violent jostling and the hot wind. “I never have known a Mex—male or female—I trusted any more than I could throw uphill against an Oklahoma cyclone.”

“Oh, we can trust her,” Charlie said with a self-satisfied air. “The girl’s powers might be as strong as that cyclone”—he glanced over his shoulder at the others, winking assuredly—“because she needs us as much as we need her. Besides, she fancies my pecker!” He threw his head back and howled, snapping his jaws.

Curly Joe gave up on the cigarette and let the wind take the paper and tobacco, brushing his hands on his patched, checked wool trousers. “And once we get to Mexico?”

“She’ll be sharin’ in our newly acquired fortune, Curly. Once we find it, that is. You don’t think she and her spells helped you spring me from Hellsgarde just for my pecker, do you?”

“I reckon not,” said Lucky Snodgrass, who sat back with his
hat tipped over his eyes, trying to catch a few winks. “But you never know about a witch. Ever’one I ever known has made me nervous. They’re a selfish lot, I tell you. And their powers make ’em dangerous. I hope she ain’t just toyin’ with us.”

Charlie slapped Lucky’s knee, fairly teeming with confidence. “You let me worry about Senorita Ravenna,” he said, shaking the ribbons over the team, urging more speed as they started up a long, easy grade. “Ravenna needs us as much as we need her. She followed me to Dodge City for some reason. If I hadn’t gotten drunk and careless in Denver and thrown in Hellsgarde, I might have found out.” He paused, sucked at a gap in his upper teeth. “Oh, she’s got somethin’ wicked on her pretty little mind, all right. But I think it’s to our benefit.” He grinned at the others. “Besides, I got her eatin’ outta my pants!”

Again, Charlie howled.

The others glanced at one another uneasily as the stage shot up and over the hill, then moved even faster down the other side. Ahead, at the bottom of the grade and in a broad horseshoe amid a jumble of high boulders piled on the trail’s right side, the Sandy Wash relay station appeared—a low-slung, L‑shaped cabin with a broad-roofed gallery angling off its front, a barn and two corrals, and a windmill spinning lazily in the warm fall breeze.

One-Eye sniffed the air in the direction of the cabin. “I do believe I smell beer, Charlie!”

Hondo worked his nose, then shook his head. “You’ve been too long in America, One-Eye. That’s not beer. That’s a flooded hog wallow tainted with alkali and stinkweed. But just what the doctor ordered!”

Charlie pulled the stage up between the barn and the cabin,
and the horses had barely settled back in their collars before the cabin’s timber door squawked open, and a short, potbellied old man in ragged pants and suspenders came out, blinking his eyes sleepily and tucking his shirttails into his slacks.

Two other, younger men came out behind him, and as the old man stepped off the wide gallery shaded by a brush roof, the younger men angled off away from him toward the team and began unbuckling straps while casting wary eyes at the men atop the stage. The old man ambled, limping slightly on his right leg, toward the coach. As he did, he glanced at the driver’s boot and slowed his pace, frowning.

“ What the hell… You ain’t Mike ’ n’ Rascal….”

He stopped, staring up at the four men riding the coach’s roof, blinking as though to clear his bleary blue eyes. The tip of his red nose was nearly as large as an apricot, and badly pocked and pitted.

“You’re an observant son of a bitch,” said Charlie Hondo, throwing the brake and wrapping the ribbons around it. The other three Angels glanced around at one another, grinning and chuckling. The two young hostlers, working quickly and automatically, well versed in their profession, continued unharnessing the team, casting wary glances from the newcomers to each other and back again.

The fresh horses in the holding corral off the barn ran around with their tails humped.

“Hey, old-timer,” said One-Eye, waving his hat at the dust just now catching up with the coach, “you got any beer in there worth drinkin’?”

“I…I don’t see no passengers,” the old man said, tentatively, as he took a few more steps toward the coach, lifting his chin to peer in a window.

“And you won’t, neither,” said Lucky, as he stepped down to the left front wheel, then dropped to the ground. “’Cause they’re all wolf bait litterin’ the trail back yonder.”

The old man made a face as he turned away from the blood-coated interior of the stagecoach. “Oh, Jesus!”

“Jesus won’t help you now!” Lucky said, suddenly back in his sleek wolf form.

Lucky the wolf leaped atop the old man and had him flat on his back and dying in seconds, while Charlie and One-Eye, also in wolf form, leaped down from the front of the driver’s boot and onto the backs of the two horses nearest the stage. In seconds, they ran up across the backs of the other horses that had only seconds ago been released from the hitch, and leaped on the two young hostlers who could only stand there, lower jaws hanging, as the two wolves pounced on them under a high, copper sun.