Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (34 page)

While Angel and Hathaway hurried out to grab the reins of their horses, the scout holding the bridle of Jesse’s mount while Zane eased the unconscious Missourian over the buckskin’s saddle, Jericho walked out into the canyon, holding his rifle up high across his chest as he shuttled his gaze up canyon and down, on the lookout for more—what had he’d called the dark-skinned warriors?

Guardians?

When Zane had Jesse secured, he led both the Missourian’s horse and General Lee behind Jericho, who hop-skipped to the opposite canyon wall. Zane was ten feet from the wall when he saw that the wall was not solid. A crescent of thick rock jutted out from one side. Jericho beckoned to Zane and the others, then disappeared behind the crescent.

Zane stopped, frowning.

Jericho poked his head out behind the seven-foot-high wing of crenellated sandstone. “It’s all right. Wide enough for your horses. I bring mine and a wagon through here all the time!”

He pulled his head back behind the rock again, and Zane looked behind it to see that there was a crooked corridor back there, twisting into the side of the cliff wall, wide enough for a couple of horses. He pulled the skittish General Lee around through the half-open door of sorts, having to throw a shoulder into the casket-carrying Gatling gun to position it correctly to slip through without catching its wheels.

When General Lee was inside and moving freely, the wheels clattering behind him, Zane led Jesse’s buckskin in behind him. Angel and Hathaway both followed, leading their own mounts, the mule braying raucously at the foreignness of this inner sanctum.

“Hold on,” Jericho called from ahead, unseen in the darkness.

There was a scraping sound, the clatter of what sounded like a lantern mantle. A light grew slowly until Zane could make out the bull’s‑eye lantern in Jericho’s waving hand, see the dusky silhouette of the Southerner below and beside it. “Everyone all right?”

“Now that we have some light,” Angel said, her tone nonplussed.

Jericho laughed as though at a joke. “Yeah, it’s dark in here. Lighter farther in, but we’ll stop when it’s widened out a little. I call that my smoking parlor!”

Jericho laughed again, turned, and continued limping forward along the twelve-foot-wide corridor. There were rocks along both sides, and Zane stumbled over them, unable to see much but deadheading on the lantern swinging high before
General Lee, whom the ghoul hunter kept moving with frequent slaps to the palomino’s behind.

When the corridor turned abruptly, Jericho waited until the others behind him could see the lantern before he continued forward, swinging the lamp from side to side like a signaling brakeman. More light ebbed into the chasm from chutes and funnels that opened onto the sky far above the mountain they were apparently inside. The sandstone and limestone seemed to glow the same soft red as Jericho’s lamp.

They’d walked maybe fifty yards into the mountain when the right side of the corridor drew back and formed a room of sorts about twenty feet wide by fifteen feet deep and lit from above by two cracks in the ceiling. There was a fire ring in which low flames licked and a coffeepot chugged and gurgled. A rickety ladder-back chair sat near the fire ring, and a dried and cracked cartridge belt hung from the chair back, its Army-issue holster containing an old cap-and-ball pistol, the walnut grips cracked and worn.

There was an old farm wagon here, as well. Its end faced the far wall, tongue drooping forward. It was half-filled with sweet-smelling hay recently cured. Near the wagon, a stocky, cream-and-brown burro was grazing on a pile of hay mounded between its forefeet and the wagon.

A wooden bucket of water sat beside the hay mound. General Lee snorted when he saw the burro. The burro switched its tail in greeting. As Hathaway pulled his mule into the room, the mule lifted a shrill, angry bray as it studied the burro gravely, twitching its ears and stomping a front hoof.

“That’s Jeff Davis.” Jericho stepped aside to let the men, woman, horses, and mule pass into the room. “He won’t hurt
you, mule. He likes company whenever he can get it, and he don’t get it much around here. That’s a good thing.”

Zane was helping Jesse, who was coming around now and grunting through gritted teeth, down from his buckskin. As Zane led the outlaw over to the chair, he glanced at Jericho. “Those Injuns outside,” he said. “Who…?”

“They wasn’t no Injuns like those you ever seen, Uriah. They’re an old tribe, far as I can tell. Maybe an ancestor race of the Yaqui or Apache. I been here for fifteen years, and I never seen a single one stray more than five miles from this mountain range. They stay here in these mountains and canyons—some of the biggest, emptiest country in the Southwest—to guard this here mountain. Against what, I don’t know. I’m the only white man I seen here in twelve years!” He chuckled.

“Why do they need to guard a mountain?” Angel asked as she unbuckled her paint’s latigo strap.

“I can’t answer that question just yet.”

“Why not?” asked Hathaway, who was also unbuckling his mule’s belly strap.

All four were dusty and sweaty, as though they’d soaked in an alkali hole, then rolled in the dirt. Their faces were sun- and windburned, with pale circles around their eyes where their brows and hat brims offered shade. Zane’s and Hathaway’s beards were adobe-colored. As a group they looked like desert nomads, and they were all slouched slightly under the weight of their fatigue.

“’Cause I don’t know you well enough.” Jericho squatted down beside his fire, dug a fat cigar out of his coat pocket, and looked at Jesse. “He don’t look so good.”

“I been better,” Jesse said, his chest rising and falling sharply
as he breathed. “Been worse, too. You didn’t happen to see five renegades out there in the canyon, didja? That’s who we’re after. You can have your damn mountain.”

“I seen ’em,” Jericho said, scraping a stove match to life on his thumbnail. His voice was low and brooding. “They’re trouble—I saw that. They picked up the wolf trail. First white men I ever seen in these mountains—leastways since I come here nigh on ten years ago now. You folks are the second bunch. When I heard you was Confederates, I decided I might have to trust you to help me keep them others away. Then I seen Uriah”—his face brightened as he glanced at the big ghoul hunter kneeling beside the fire and passing a blade of one of his bowie knives over the flames—“and my heart grew light.”

Uriah looked at his old friend. “Where’s that trail of wolf heads lead, Jericho?”

“It…” Turnipseed looked at the others, all of whom had turned to him now with keen interest. “It leads to treasure.”

Uriah looked at the glowing blade in his hand. “I sorta figured. What kind of treasure? If you have a mine, Jericho, we ain’t interested.”

“You trust all these folks, Uriah?”

“All?” Zane set the knife down, slipped another bone-handled bowie from a sheath tucked inside his left moccasin top, and began cutting Jesse’s shirt away from his shoulder, tearing the material as he sawed through it. “I reckon you could say that.”

Jesse looked up at him and grinned.

Zane exchanged the unheated knife for the glowing one and pressed it against the entrance wound in the Missourian’s
breast. The knife sputtered as it seared the bloody, torn skin. Fetid smoke wafted. Jesse screamed, tipped his head back, and his eyes fluttered closed. Out again. Angel came over and held the outlaw up in his chair while Uriah cauterized the exit wound.

“Clean through,” the ghoul hunter said. “That oughta do him. It’s hard to kill a snake.”

“Him a Confederate?” Jericho asked.

“He calls himself one.”

“What about the Negro?”

Jericho glanced at Hathaway, who stood back near his burro, fists on his hips, looking skeptically back at the desert rat. “I notice he’s wearing a Yankee hat. What I have to say, the deal I have to make, Uriah, is not one I take lightly. I’ve been sitting on it for a long time, waiting…wondering what I oughta do. Wondering how I can get the treasure to the Southern folks who need it most, so we can rebuild our country, make it better and more beautiful and gallant than before.”

Zane cleaned the burned blood from his knife on Jesse’s shirt, sheathed it, then dropped to his butt and wrapped his arms around his knees. Angel sat on the other side of Jesse from Uriah and began reloading one of her pistols.

Zane said, “Like I said, Jericho, we ain’t interested in treasure. We’re interested in those four men and that Mexican woman who rode into that canyon ahead of us. They’re ghouls—the leaders of the very same pack of wolves who attacked our soldiers at Gettysburg. The Hell’s Angels. Their leader is Charlie Hondo. I don’t know why they’re here, but we have to catch ’em and kill ’em. We’ll need to get back after ’em soon.”

“No point in goin’ back out there.” Jericho jerked his head in the direction they’d come through the cavern.

Angel said, “You mean because of the guardians?”

“No.” Jericho removed the stogie from his long yellow teeth, blew a wobbly smoke ring, and stared at it cross-eyed. “Them you’re after will be in
here
soon enough.”

Chapter 33
    

CITY OF THE WEREWOLVES

Zane, Angel, and Hathaway stared at Turnipseed, expressionless. Jesse groaned in his sleep.

Hathaway stepped forward slowly, scowling, closing one hand over the Colt Army.44 holstered on his right hip. “Excuse me, there, Mr. Turnipseed, but did you say them ghouls’ll be
here
soon?” With his other hand he pointed at the floor.

“Well, not right here. But they’ll be in the city soon. Them wolf pictures’ll take ’em to the main entrance, on the other side of the canyon.”

“City?” said Angel, arching a brow as though she were beginning to think the old desert rat might be a little touched.

Turnipseed puffed his cigar. “I done sat on the secret long enough, I reckon. Just couldn’t bring myself to tell no one about it. Oh, I brought out a little of the gold now and then—bits and
pieces of a wall or the shavings from a bell. Just to keep myself in hooch and see-gars and dry goods and the like.”

They all continued to stare at him. He shuttled his rheumy gaze around at his dubious visitors and laughed.

He shook his head. “You’ve never seen the like. I’ll show you…as long as y’all swear to keep it a secret till we can figure out a way to use that treasure to build up the Confederate Army once more. See, there’s enough gold down there”—he jerked the cigar over his shoulder—“to rebuild the South bigger and stronger than it ever was. Leave the so‑called Union once and for all, squash that high‑an’-mighty President Sherman like the damn bug that he is, and leave the North in burnin’ ruin!”

Zane felt a twinge of unease. And sadness.

Turnipseed had been out here living in these mountains alone since the end of the War—the massacre that had claimed his entire family. But the seclusion hadn’t healed his wounds, only made them fester. Like so much of the rest of the South, he was living in a dreamworld built on the desire for revenge. Zane didn’t agree with that desire. The only way the country could heal was if all of its citizens drew their horns in and vowed to learn from the mistakes of the past—including the gigantic mistake made by Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet.

“For the last time, we don’t care about the gold,” Angel told him. “The gold is all yours to do with as you see fit, Mr. Turnipseed. We just want the Hell’s Angels.”

Turnipseed slid his glance around skeptically. Gradually, his expression changed to one of deep incredulity. “You just wait till you see what I’m talkin’ about, young lady.”

With that, he used his thumbnail to file the coal off his cigar, letting the ashes roll into the crackling fire, then heaved himself
to his feet, his stiff knees popping. He grabbed his Springfield carbine, slung it over his shoulder, glanced once more at Zane, then walked out of this broad place in the cavern.

Zane touched his pistols, including the LeMat in its shoulder holster. He decided to leave his crossbow with General Lee, then slid his Henry from its saddle boot. He’d leave the Gatling gun here, as well, since they were after only five ghouls and the sidearms and rifle should suffice. He opened the casket’s lid, however, and grabbed a bandolier filled with the silver he’d found at Padre Alejandro’s.

Angel and Hathaway had already followed Turnipseed out of the room. He could hear their boots clacking on the stone floor. Zane hooked the bandolier over his shoulder and started after them.

“Hold on.” Jesse’s voice echoed behind him.

Zane turned. The Missouri outlaw was heaving himself up from his chair. “Stay there, Jesse. You’re in no shape to tangle with Charlie Hondo. I’ll bring you the bastard’s head.”

Jesse winced, gave up the struggle, and sagged back once more in the creaky chair. He gave a ragged sigh. Zane headed on out of the room and strode down a broad corridor that presumably led deeper into the mountain. The floor angled downward. The corridor was lit dully by occasional shafts of light dribbling down natural flues in the ceiling.

He caught up with Angel, who was walking behind Turnipseed and Hathaway. Without looking at him, she said, “What time is it?”