Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (28 page)

He walked east along the street, following its meandering, widening, and narrowing course between the desert-blistered buildings. After thirty or forty yards, following the mandolin strains, he stopped and drew a lungful of air. The breath spread his ribs, opened his chest and belly, loosened the knotted muscles along his spine.

Maybe he didn’t need a drink, after all. Maybe he just needed a walk to limber his legs and more of this light, cool, desert-perfumed air to nudge him off toward sleep.

He swung around and headed in the opposite direction, intending to walk a ways out of town where it was especially quiet and he could calm his racing thoughts in solitude. He passed the church that hulked up darkly against the shimmering stars that appeared as close as the many small crystals in a chandelier he’d once seen hanging in a Leadville opera house.

He came to the shaggy end of town and kept walking along the road that shone violet under the sky that as yet had no moon. The shrubs and rocks stood out in silhouette, the edges of the branches bathed in a deep purple luminescence. Zane stretched his stride, breathing deeply, the oxygen making him feel lighter, calmer. The blood flowed warm, loosening his muscles. His mood lightened.

He was beginning to enjoy the night, all the sounds he could hear, the brief blaze of a shooting star arcing across the northwestern horizon, shedding sparks before it disappeared behind a jagged-edged sierra. A coyote howled in the far distance. Nearer, he could hear a small pack snorting around an arroyo.

As he continued walking, he swung his head from left to right, scanning the terrain before him. As far as he could tell, the desert nearby was scored with no arroyo. It was dishpan flat all around him for a good half mile, before a low rise lifted like rumpled velvet in the north and began the swell of the foothills climbing toward the Santa Catalinas and the high, triangle-topped bulge of Mount Lemmon.

Zane stopped.

The coyotes continued to yip and snarl. There was a low, frantic peeping. They’d brought a deer down, and the deer was in its death throes while the coyotes finished it and fought among themselves over the warm blood and fresh, hot meat.

But where in the hell were they?

A dark, shaggy line shone to the west and slightly left of the wagon trail he was following. Could that be the arroyo? It had to be a half mile away.

No. His heart chugged softly in his ears as he stared at the mesquites and willows lining the distant wash. The cut was a good mile away. It appeared nearer only because he could see it so well, clearly enough to pick out the silhouette of the mountain lion stalking belly down amid the brush lining the wash. He could see the whiplike curl of its tail as it stole up on the coyotes.

Suddenly, the cat gave a shrill, snarling cry. The echoes rolled menacingly. Brush crackled raucously. Several coyotes yipped.
Their padded feet thudded off down the arroyo, abandoning the now-dead deer to the more formidable stalker.

The wildcat disappeared in the darkness of the cut, but one last snarl sliced across the silent night, chasing its own diminishing echoes.

Zane felt his lower jaw drop. Fear pricked at him like a chill hand under his collar. His senses were alive as snakes in a den. He could not only hear the howl of a wolf on Mount Lemmon now, but he realized that the soft snicking sound he’d been hearing for the past few minutes was a snake slithering along the ground to the north, maybe fifty yards away, maybe heading for a pack rat’s den it had checked out earlier that day and had marked as a good place for a meal.

He looked up. The stars throbbed and glowed as though on the other end of a sharp lens. They were so clear that seeing them now made Zane’s head ache, as though someone were flashing a railroad lantern in his face.

As though chained deep in a cold, dark cellar, the wolf in the ghoul hunter stirred. It paced to the end of the chain and back, sniffing and snorting at the crack under the door, growling and mewling deep in its throat. Angry. Frustrated.

Wanting more than anything to be free to hunt, stalk, and kill…

Zane had chained the beast and locked the cellar door. But for how long could he keep it in there? What would happen during the next full moon, or the next, or the one after that? Would it finally break its chain and burst through the door?

Would he become like Charlie Hondo and the rest of the Hell’s Angels he’d come west all those years ago to hunt?

Closing his eyes against the magnified vision, clamping his
hands over his ears to quell the night sounds of predators and prey—the tearing and frantic screaming and the salty smell of blood—he wheeled and began striding back toward Tucson. He opened his eyes. The dim lights spilling out of the cantinas and saloons beckoned him. His heart beat faster but more hopefully now.

He’d get a drink and try to distract himself from the keenness of his savage senses, the barely contained will to unleash them, to follow them, and turn himself loose upon the night.

He dropped his hands to his sides, ground his teeth against the sounds that began slithering into his brain once more, making him feel dizzy and overloaded and causing his knees to grow spongy, his heart to beat faster and faster, his breath to grow shallow and weak.

His hands sweated in the chill air. His feet burned in his moccasins.

For a moment, he thought he’d pass out.

He kept walking.

As he passed the church, the padding of many canine feet sounded. He glanced down the side street between the church and the Rincon Beer Parlor that was dark now in the wake of the massacre.

Up the hill on which the cemetery sprawled, he heard frantic panting and scratching and saw the silhouettes of several shaggy wolves scrambling around the boneyard while one hunkered forward and dug, tearing at the soil with its front paws. It stopped digging, ran around, mewled and whined in frustration, then resumed digging once more.

Zane’s nostrils filled with the sweet, wild scent of the carrion-
stalking pack. The fetor struck his belly like pig slop, and his stomach turned, nearly heaving up its contents.

If a full moon had been rising, would he have been able to keep his wolf in its cellar?

No, somehow he had to kill it. He had to find a way to kill the beast or surely it would free itself, and it would be Uriah Zane forever chained and locked in that cellar while a madman ran loose upon the frontier.

He quickened his pace, stopped at the first cantina he came to, no more than a long, low adobe box with PULQUERIA scrawled in black paint over its deep casement door, above which a bead curtain hung, clicking and clacking in a slight breeze that had risen, bringing even more scents—so many it was hard to identify a single one—to the ghoul hunter’s nostrils.

He bulled through the curtain, the beads clattering back into place behind him, loud as the thudding of shod hooves in his ears. His knees and hands shaking, he moved forward, sagged into an empty chair that sat back against the cracked adobe wall. A small, square table of half-cut cottonwood logs sat to the left of the chair. He rested an elbow on the table and entwined his hands together, mashing their heels against each other to steady himself.

He’d thought he’d been through all this months ago, during the first several full moons after he’d first been bit. It was happening again with nearly as much force as it had happened then.

He knew why.

It was happening because he’d become keenly conscious of the wolf inside him—maybe partly because of the savagery he’d seen in the Hell’s Angels, maybe partly because of what they’d done here in Tucson day before yesterday—and he was steeling himself against it.

What he needed to do—and he did not know where the realization suddenly came from—was to ignore it. To ride it out. To not fight the sensations. He hadn’t been fighting them before. He’d merely used the heightened senses to his best advantage. Now he was fighting them again in the same way he’d first fought them until he’d learned the key: to let go and distract himself, to have enough confidence in his own humanness to keep the wolf under lock and key without an overwhelming effort.

Without dwelling on the temptation he felt to turn the wolf loose…

The strains of the mandolin flooded Zane’s senses. He welcomed the distracting music and looked around until he saw the player—a plump Mexican girl in an ornate Mexican basque. She was round-faced and sleepy-eyed, and she sat in a chair beside the bar made of crude cottonwood planks and resting on beer kegs. Two large crock jugs stood atop the bar, and Zane could smell the pulque inside one—a milky liquor made from the fermented juice of the century plant. In the other was
bacanora
, brewed from the agave plant, and a form of mezcal.

“Bacanora,”
he told the big-eared, thin-haired barman staring over the plank board at him, while the girl continued strumming the mandolin. While the barman was old and craggy, Zane could see the hint of his features in the girl, probably his daughter.

The barman, dressed in a white shirt, filthy apron, baggy green slacks, and rope-soled sandals, reached for the dipper handle poking up from the
bacanora
crock. Zane looked around the room, which spun and tilted slightly, and saw a milky-eyed man with close-cropped gray hair sitting at a table just beyond Zane’s, staring blindly toward Zane and grinning toothlessly.
His small brown hands with nails thick as seashells were wrapped around a wooden cup.

Three men played craps on the floor toward the back of the cantina, and two other, younger men dressed in the gaudy attire of vaqueros sprawled in chairs near a smoky charcoal brazier. They smiled shiny-eyed at the opposite wall, one waving a hand lazily to the strains of the mandolin.

Beneath the girl’s hide-bottom chair, only partly visible behind the pleats and folds of her black, gold-embroidered crinoline dress, the cur that had stolen Cole Younger’s boot lay curled, nose to tail, sound asleep.

The barman limped out from behind the bar and set a stone mug on the table before Zane. With a shaky right hand, the ghoul hunter lifted the cup to his lips and drank the glass down in four deep swallows, the powerful hooch that tasted a little like skimmed milk and grapefruit juice searing his tonsils and lighting a welcome fire in his chest and belly.

The heat rose from his gut and flooded into his face, and he felt suddenly as though he were ensconced in warm wool during a raging blizzard.

“Another.”

The barman turned from the bar, arching one thin, dark brow dubiously. The man lifted a shoulder, retrieved Zane’s mug, and refilled it from the same crock as before. He set it on Zane’s table and watched while the ghoul hunter took a sip. Zane put the cup down and smiled up at the man.

“Nectar of the fucking gods, eh, amigo?”

He fished some coins out of his shirt pocket, placed them one by one in the man’s open palm, and waved him away.

He sat back in his chair and welcomed the warmth that
washed through him—up and down and sideways, reaching as far up as his hair ends, as far down as his toes.

The girl began to sing an old Spanish ballad, “
Había hace tiempo un muchacho para mí en Chihihuaha
,” and the ghoul hunter sagged farther back in his chair, setting his hat on the table and letting his head rest against the wall.

He sighed.

A warm, relieved smile stretched his mouth. Bittersweet tears filled his eyes as he listened to the lonesome song of unrequited love in Mexico, of a girl who drowned herself in a well because the boy she loved had eyes only for her more beautiful sister, and he indulged himself without feeling foolish.

He probably looked foolish, lounging there, teary-eyed, but he didn’t feel anything but sorrow for the poor girl who’d drowned herself.

He listened to the ballad and then to two more, his soul dangling from every note. He’d never felt more alone—even during those long nights he’d first started fighting the wolf inside him—but the strong Mexican liquor filed off the edges of the loneliness. He finished the pungent but deadening brew, then heaved himself unsteadily to his feet. He shambled over to the girl with the mandolin and dropped a copper dollar into the coffee tin sitting beside her atop the bar.

She gave him a cordial nod as she strummed and sang.

He bowed lavishly, doffing his hat and sweeping it down before him.
“Muchas gracias, senorita. Para uno tan joven, usted canta maravillosamente sobre angustia.” For one so young, you sing beautifully of heartbreak.

He set his hat on his head, turned, and staggered out of the cantina, retracing his steps back to the second floor of the Santa
Catalina Inn. He glanced at Angel’s door directly across from his own.

No sounds in there. At least, none that he could hear. She was likely asleep. His heart started to tighten, and he floated away from it. Vaguely, behind the curtain of drunkenness that had dropped down over his senses, numbing them, he made a mental note to remind the marshal that if they were still riding together during the next full moon, she’d need to keep her guns filled with silver, and a watchful eye on her partner.

He chuckled. Angel wouldn’t need reminding.

He went into his own room and was finally drifting off into a welcome slumber when someone rapped loudly on his door.

“Zane! Zane! You in there, Zane?”

The ghoul hunter jerked his head up from his pillow and reached for the LeMat. He flicked the hammer over the shotgun shell and aimed the piece at the door. “Holy Christ! Who the fuck is it?”

“It’s Jesse. Open up! We gotta talk, Zane!”

Chapter 27