Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (2 page)

But he hadn’t made it nearly ten years in the ghoul-haunted West by striding wildly into swiller-haunted canyons. His friend Junius Webb, who’d been prospecting here in Colorado for nearly thirty years, had informed Zane of the swillers holed up here high in the Sawatch Range. Webb had stumbled on the lair when, picking and shoveling along the banks of the Taylor River, he’d sought refuge from a violent summer thunderstorm in a cave at the base of the northern ridge wall. He’d shared knowl-edge of his grisly find with the stipulation that once the swillers were sent back to the hell they hailed from, Zane would pay his old friend half of the money doled out by the nearest government bounty office.

Detecting no sign of danger—though one never knew what besides swillers was lurking in these dark canyons—Zane touched his heels to the palomino’s flanks and continued on down the rise. His makeshift wagon clattered along behind him, and Junius Webb found himself eyeing the contraption grimly, for it was far from your usual buckboard or spring wagon. In fact, it wasn’t really a wagon at all but a coffin, of all things, on wheels!

Yessir, a pine coffin showing the wear and tear of many ghoul-hunting jaunts, with a heavy hinged lid with a stout cross carved into its top. Webb shivered and looked away, saw the sun hovering near the crest of a distant western ridge wall, angling dark shadows down the steep, pine-clad canyon walls, and shivered again.

“Yep, gettin’ damn late,” he muttered, though he was well aware his protestations were falling on deaf ears.

Zane glanced over a bulky shoulder at his unwilling partner. “Lead the way, Junius.”

“You sure know how to torture a feller, Uriah,” Webb said, batting his heels against his burro’s sides and riding on ahead down the narrowing, darkening path between ridge walls that bulged and knobbed and sometimes leaned inward, sometimes backward.

Ten minutes later, Zane followed Webb off the trail to the right, and climbed the steep slope spongy with forest duff and fragrant with balsam and spruce. The cave appeared at the base of a bulge in the granite cliff that jutted two thousand feet straight up into the slowly darkening sky. The cavern’s ragged opening was just high enough for a man of Zane’s height of six and a half feet to enter bent forward at the waist.

Zane halted General Lee and, patting the palomino’s long, gold neck soothingly—the General always got his blood up around swillers—slung his two-hundred-and-thirty-odd pounds out of the saddle, walked over to the cavern mouth, and dropped to his knees to get a look inside, one gloved hand on the edge of the opening. The darkness was too dense to penetrate much farther than a few yards.

He sniffed. Cool smells of damp stone, mushrooms, and the fetor of bird shit. A bear had investigated the cave’s opening some time ago—Zane could still smell its rank sweetness. But it hadn’t ventured far inside. The faint tracks led away from the opening.

He turned to where Junius Webb stood in front of his burro, holding the beast’s bridle up close to the bit. “How far does this go into the mountain?” Zane asked him.

“Deep. About sixty yards to the swillers’ lair.”

“What compelled you to venture that far in, Junius? I never would have suspected you of bravery.”

“I’m a prospector, Uriah. Might be a mother lode of silver in there…though I’d never mine it now, after what I seen in there. Got some good color in the walls, though. I reckon that’s what lured me in so far.”

Webb’s Adam’s apple bounced in his turkey neck as he slanted another cautious eye to the west. “You sure you wouldn’t rather we got an early start tomorrow?”

“It’s ten miles back to your cabin.” The big ghoul hunter strode resolutely toward his wheeled coffin. “And I for one don’t cotton to bivouacking in swiller country after dark. Nope, we’ll take care of this situation right here an’ now. Why don’t you hold these torches?” He pulled a couple of relatively straight cedar branches, their ends wrapped in burlap and soaked in coal oil, out from the storage rack beneath the casket, and tossed both to his sallow, patch-bearded, weak-kneed partner.

He flipped the hasp on the casket lid and opened it to reveal a brass-canistered Gatling gun nestling among its wooden tripod and other tools of the ghoul hunter’s trade—wooden arrows, steaks, hammers, a spare LeMat, a shuriken that Zane was still learning to throw and that worked well against the nasty hordes of hobgobbies that roamed certain regions of the West. There were several coiled bandoliers containing.45‑caliber shells for the Gatling gun, which Zane had managed to swipe one night, drunk, his pockets emptied by a run of hard luck at craps and red dog, from an Army paymaster’s storage shed.

He’d chewed himself out the next morning for resorting to common, albeit federal, thievery, but the shed was open, and after he’d stumbled into it and passed out on a pile of flour sacks, the gun was there in all its potential ghoul-killing glory—glistening and attainable—so he’d appropriated it and hadn’t looked back.
He needed the gun worse than the Army did, as they’d proved next to worthless at running ghouls to ground. Mostly, the blue bellies turned at the first sign of a yellow fang or wolf snarl, and ran like hell back to their fort, soiling their drawers.

Junius whistled. “Whoo‑ee, look at all them silver bullets. Good Lord, Uriah, you must have a couple thousand dollars there, with silver prices as high as they’ve climbed in the past few years!”

“I got a secret source. And sometimes Uncle Sam pays my bounties in silver and I have it melted down for bullets.”

Zane slid a few stakes aside and lifted the Gatling gun from its grisly housing. As he did, a burlap sack spilled its contents into the nest the gun had occupied. Junius gasped at the head with its ragged, bloody neck staring up at him, pale blue eyes glassy in death, fangs bared beneath a curled upper lip. The ears were large and porcelain blue.

“Christ!”

“Ah, shit. Here—hold this.”

Zane handed Junius the Gatling gun, which the old prospector accepted after he’d dropped the torches. The vampire head was already beginning to smoke where the sun touched it, the flour-white skin turning waxy and ready to melt, as Zane opened the bag and nudged the head back inside with his fist, saying, “Get back in there where you belong, Mortimer.”

“Nasty damn business,” Junius said, scowling down at the bloody sack.

“Tell me about it. Gotta keep the damn swillers’ heads covered good till you haul ’em in for bounty, because Uncle Sam don’t pay for ashes.” Zane scowled and shook his head, and then grabbed the Gatling back from Junius.

“Wasn’t that Mortimer Quinn?” asked Junius.

Zane nodded as he rested the Gatling on one shoulder, slung a sack of arrows over the other one with his crossbow, and headed for the cave. “Caught him in Leadville some days ago, cavortin’ after dark with fallen women in back alleys. That old stage robber died nasty, but I got him.”

He ducked into the cave, then dropped to one knee and lit a match. He glanced out the entrance at Junius, who stood there holding the two unlit torches in his arms, looking stricken. “Come on. You started this thing; now we gotta finish it. And if we dillydally much longer, we’ll have to wait till morning, and I don’t think you want to camp out here with the beasts in here huntin’ out
there
.”

Junius gave an agonized groan and lurched into the cave. While Zane lit one of the torches, the prospector said, “I been wonderin’ why I been losin’ cattle of late. I bet it’s these swillers in here been takin’ ’em. Thievin’ bastards.”

“Yeah, well, I reckon swillers livin’ this remote have a hard time keepin’ their larders filled. Usually live close to towns like that coven they found livin’ in that old whorehouse in Aurora near Denver.”

“Uriah?”

Zane had begun moving back into the cavern as Junius walked along beside him, holding up the flaming torch. Zane kept his voice down.

“What is it?”

“My Bonnie’s one of ’em.”

Zane jerked a look at him. “You sure?”

“She disappeared a couple months back. She done me that way before, but I think she musta got bit one night when she
was out skinny-dippin’ in the creek by moonlight, and they took her. She was always fascinated by ’em, always talkin’ about how manly the males were.”

“I’m sorry, Junius.” Zane wanted to say that Bonnie had been a good woman, but he knew Junius would see the lie. Bonnie was twenty years Junius’s junior and had taken up with the man when he’d been flush with gold and silver and bought a herd of cattle with which to start his own small ranch. But she was wild—anyone could have seen that. She’d have slept with a billy goat if he’d been flush with poker chips and had flexed his biceps at her.

The prospector shook his head, smacked his thin lips, which were cracked and stained from tobacco chew, the wind and sun of the mountains, and camp smoke. “If we run into her, let me drill the arrow through that bottom-dealing bitch’s heart my ownself, all right, Uriah?”

Zane continued on into the cavern, hiking a shoulder. “I reckon it’s the least I could do, partner.”

Chapter 2
    

BLESSED BULLETS

“We’re gettin’ close,” said Junius, his voice echoing faintly off the stone walls.

Zane could hear water dripping and a faint vibration in the ceiling, feel it in the stone floor beneath his boots. The cave smelled of pent‑up air, bat guano, and a bitter, coppery substance that Zane recognized as blood. Even after all these years chasing ghouls, his heart quickened, and the short hairs stirred faintly along the back of his neck.

The floor dropped suddenly, and the vibration grew to a dull roar that then bounded into a louder cacophony until he could feel the moisture in the air against his face and smell the mineral aroma of underground water. Junius walked a little ahead of Zane, sort of sidestepping, holding the torch aloft and sliding the flickering illumination farther and farther into the corridor, pushing shadows back and away and to each side, angling his
and Zane’s own silhouettes onto the wall to their right and behind them.

“River ahead,” the prospector said. “With a bridge acrosst it. I figured some old prospector built it, so I ventured on across.”

The floor continued to drop steeply until the torchlight showed the walls falling away to each side and a large, cold, dank area opening ahead. The roar here was almost deafening, and Zane could feel water droplets spitting at him.

“Easy, now,” Junius said loudly enough to be heard above the tumult.

He stopped and extended the torch out over a deep, narrow ravine, water coursing through it—white and wild and chugging over submerged boulders. The river’s trench was about twelve feet deep and twice again that wide. Straight out from Zane and Junius stretched a bridge constructed of rope and pine planks. The planks were well worn, varnished by countless crossings.

“I crossed it once,” Junius said, his voice trembling in earnest now as he nearly shouted above the water’s roar. “It’s sound. We’d best get a move on, huh? Them swillers’ll be wakin’ up soon.”

“They are in a ways, ain’t they?” Zane said, feeling Junius’s apprehension at the lateness of the day. Last he’d seen the sun, though, it had just been starting to dip down behind the western ridges. They likely had a good half hour before it fell beneath the horizon.

Zane lowered his Gatling gun to the floor, wincing as the blood flowed back into his shoulder, reawakening numbed nerves, and nodded for Junius to continue. The prospector stepped onto the worn planks and, holding the torch high with one hand, held on to the other torch as well as one side of the
rope bridge with the other. He took mincing steps until he was on the opposite bank, and Zane was right behind him.

“Just beyond here,” Junius said, walking ahead more slowly now between the cave’s narrowing walls, his eyes fairly glittering with terror.

They came to an opening in the left side wall. Junius stopped, holding the torch high. Zane stopped beside him and stared into what appeared to be a library or smoking parlor outfitted by folks of class and culture. There was a red plush fainting couch, heavy, deep chairs upholstered in wine-red and lime-green crinoline, a large scrolled liquor cabinet, and several heavy bookshelves stuffed with well-worn tomes. There were a number of small tables where drink glasses and ashtrays sat. A Tiffany lamp glowed on one, its wick turned low.

By far the largest chunk of furniture in the room was a shiny black grand piano over which a Union flag was draped.

“This job just got a whole lot easier,” Zane said.

“Wonder how long they been holed up here,” Junius muttered.

“What I wonder is how they got that piano in here.”

“Not the way we came—that’s for sure. Must be another way in.” Junius nodded at a low door on the room’s far side, flanking the piano. “They’re back in there. You think we could pick up the pace a little, Uriah?” The prospector made a gulping sound as he breathed heavily through his nose.

He continued forward, crossing the room. Zane followed him, glancing down as he passed the piano, to see an ashtray in which a half-smoked cigar rested, its coal cleanly removed, saving the stogie for later. Zane wasn’t sure why, but the image made the nerves along his spine twang as he ducked through the doorway
to find himself in a long room, even danker than the others, in which seven mahogany coffins sat on pedestals draped in red, purple, or pink velvet with gold tassels.