Cape Hell (16 page)

A few yards behind the wagon, a pair of mules with gray muzzles towed another vehicle, a two-wheeled oxcart piloted by my keeper's twin brother: At least I hoped there wasn't an entire race of such nightmare creatures living in those mountains. (That hope would be dashed quickly enough.) This one had on a pair of bandoleers crossed on his chest and a machete like the one I'd taken off the guard in Alamos in an open sheath on his belt, the abbreviated blade hanging off the edge of his narrow seat and banging against the side of the footboard.

In the bed behind him sat a man with his back to me, wearing a decrepit straw hat like the others and more ammunition. Past his shoulder, Joseph faced forward with a stout pinon limb across his shoulders, his wrists bound to it with thick hemp and his arms stretched out on both sides, a seated Christ figure with his face twisted into an expression of indescribable agony.

 

TWENTY-ONE

My head hurt
worse trying to work it out.

It was like one of those cruel games adults play with children: Is the penny in the right fist or the left? It was in the left last time, but that doesn't mean this time it will be in the right. It might be in the same fist ten times in a row; but wasn't that too much to expect? So you bit your lip and pointed, and you were wrong most of the time because you haven't learned to think outside of a straight line. That came with growing up.

And then there was that rare diabolical adult who pocketed the penny, presenting you with two empty fists.

I'd gone out too abruptly to see where the blow had come from; if it was a blow. I located the pulpy spot on my scalp, but just touching it sent a thrill of pain out in all directions, so I couldn't probe it thoroughly enough to decide if it was a bullet crease or if I'd been struck by a buttstock. Joseph had aimed the pistol in my direction, but whether he pulled the trigger or used it as a bludgeon, or was aiming at something through the opening in the cab—a man trying to board, who managed to shoot or crack me over the head before the Indian fired, if he'd managed to fire at all—was lost.

There were two possible explanations: Either he'd acted in my defense and been taken, or he'd betrayed me and then been betrayed by those he was in league with. Had they, too, decided that a man who would turn against another—Hector Cansado, myself—wasn't worthy of their trust? But in either case, why not kill him outright?

Childress.

I'd said it myself: If the
Ghost
was what he was after, it was useless without a man who knew how to run it. They would have their orders to bring back the engineer alive at whatever cost.

Which left the problem of why they hadn't killed me or left me for dead at the train.

Sitting up enough to look around, I found the craziest theory to be the most plausible. The man guarding me, the man driving the wagon carrying Joseph, and—when he stirred to stretch himself and turned his head my way to work the kinks out of his neck—the man guarding him might have been identical triplets, born to a family of marked ugliness and, if their vapid eyes and slack mouths were any indication of what lay behind, brute stupidity. The same was true of others riding mules and gaunt horses behind and alongside the wagons: two-legged beasts with pinched-in skulls, displaying no more intelligence than the cartridges in their belts. The obvious conclusion chilled me there in the thick, sopping atmosphere of the Sierras. They were all related, or nearly so, bred for generations in the same small community, doubling and redoubling family strengths—force and ruthlessness—and faults—lack of reasoning—until what was left was a race of vicious idiots.

Oscar Childress, it seemed, had given instructions to spare my life as he had with Joseph. Probably he wanted to know what I'd learned and reported home; or—crazy even to consider it—maybe he was as starved for intelligent conversation as I was.

*   *   *

Why wasn't I
trussed as well? On the evidence of appearances, our escorts were incapable of deciding I was in too much misery to attempt escape, which I was: Just the thought of crawling over the side of the wagon and taking off on foot through that wild country made the scenery spin around me. More likely it was a tribal thing, and I was immune. There must be Indian blood in anyone living that long so far from villages, but there had been hatred and rivalry between peoples in the New World for hundreds of years before Columbus. With so many guards and in that landscape, the chances of freedom were next to nothing, but it would be only natural to make the journey as painful as possible for a traditional enemy like Joseph.

I didn't ask my throbbing head to explore the situation further just then.

Tethered to the back of the wagon carrying Joseph was my bay. I heard a gurgling, caught a sharp whiff of ferment, and turned to see my driver lowering one of the Judge's bottles, drawing a sleeve across his lips. He hadn't bothered to uncork it, had just knocked off the neck, and a smear of blood on his sleeve told me he hadn't the sense to predict what a jagged shard of glass could do to his mouth. Maybe his brain was too weak to record pain.

Looking around once again, I saw others guzzling from bottles broken the same way, and knew they'd have looted the train of everything they could use: the firearms along with my hip guns, the tins of food, certainly the gold I'd drawn from the bank; but I'd gladly have traded the money to separate these half-humans from the combination of weapons and liquor. They rode spavined, grass-fed mounts with faces as stupid as theirs. Some of the men were singing—humming—moaning—an approximation of some bawdyhouse song or songs, their voices ranging from guttural growls to nasal whines, and the mix of tones, melodies, and off-key renditions of tunes imperfectly remembered fell somewhere between madhouse wails and cats fighting in an alley, or worse: cats and rats tearing at one another for meat. The wheels of the wagons cried out for grease. The din was hellish.

The animals weren't in charge of the zoo, however.

I'd been reluctant to crank my head far enough around to see very much up ahead—it was hurting fine on its own without that, and my guard was still sleeping; passed out, most likely. I didn't want to find out what he was like with a skull full of drunk's regret. But when a rider came trotting back to smack a dozing idiot's thigh with a leather crop, I saw a man with regular features and fierce black muttonchops wearing a campaign hat stained black with sweat and a gray tunic with the cuffs buttoned back to expose a yellow lining: the contrasting colors were faded almost to the same shade, the fabric darned and patched all over, but the stovepipe boots gleamed black above dusty insteps. Gold braid, faded also, made loops on his sleeves, and on his collar glittered the insignia of a captain of the Confederacy, the engraving worn nearly smooth, but the brass highly polished. The left side of his face was white and shiny, in sharp relief to his deep sunburn, cutting a bare patch from his whiskers, and the eye that belonged on that side lay on some old battleground, leaving behind an empty socket, the flesh around it shrunken to the bone.

I remembered that the nucleus of Childress' private army comprised members of his old command. This one, whose burnsides were tipped with gray like the coat of the dead grizzly, drew back his hand with lightning reflexes to avoid being bitten by the man he'd jolted out of sleep, but I heard his teeth snap together inches from the flesh. The captain responded with a backhand swipe, striping the man's face with a red welt. He blinked, but apart from laying his own hand on the machete on his belt showed no other physical reaction. If he'd had a tail (and I wouldn't have bet against it), he'd have tucked it between his legs.

The officer cantered back another hundred yards, casting his one-eyed iron gaze along the procession, then wheeled his mount—a muscular sorrel fattened on grain, unlike the others', with sleek haunches—and galloped the other direction to resume his post in the lead.

The parade wasn't heavily populated, but it was strung out for a quarter-mile. As we climbed, the vehicle bringing up the rear rose into view from below a grade. It rolled on tall, iron-felloed wheels, a bundle of ten blue-steel barrels mounted on a wooden crosspiece. As a weapon of wholesale slaughter the Gatling should have been ugly, but it had been hand-crafted by masters, the weight and balance of its wheels allowing it to roll smoothly, almost gracefully over the rude terrain, its brass fittings flashing in the sun. Some of the deadliest vipers are among the most beautiful things in creation.

Joseph, whose own groans of pain had subsided, swayed and pitched with the motion of his wagon, his eyes closed and his chin on his chest. He'd either passed out or died.

Just then his guard cocked a leg and dealt him a blow that left the clear outline of a bootheel on his temple. He snapped to. Pink-tinged drool dripped off his chin, but the whites of his eyes showed briefly before they closed again.

A toad had climbed into my mouth, bloated and sluggish. It was my tongue. My guard had shifted again in his sleep, exposing the stiletto-sharp neck of a bottle sagging in the side pocket of his threadbare canvas coat. There was no sign of the water vessel he'd let me drink from before. Had I dreamt it? The whole trip, it seemed, had been the product of bad whisky and tainted oysters. But liquid was liquid.

I leaned over until my shoulder touched the wagonbed, stretched my arm across the boards until my fingers just touched the neck. I didn't want to slide closer. Animals have instincts, and what he lacked in brainpower he might make up for in the physical senses. I teased the bottle loose slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, until I could grasp it firmly and slide it free of the pocket.

As I did so, my shirtcuff snagged something. The guard stirred, whimpered. I caught my breath and held it. He opened his mouth, smacked his lips, and snored so rackingly I felt it in my own torn gullet. I let out a bellyful of air and concentrated my attention on freeing the cuff without dropping the bottle. When I pulled gently, something gave: One of the fifty-caliber Gatling shells had come loose from a loop on his belt. I turned my wrist, still holding the bottle by its neck, and curled my little finger around the flanged receiver. With that grip secure I lifted away bottle and round of ammunition in one movement.

I turned the cartridge around in my fingers. The brass shell alone was four inches long and an inch across the base, with the conical lead bullet adding another two and a half inches to its length. Just holding it made me shudder. One of those slugs had come within a handspan of taking my head off.

I put it in a pocket. I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but its weight was reassuring. It was as heavy as a roll of quarters.

There was only a trickle left in the bottle, and just then I'd have traded a carload of the Judge's aged Scotch for as much water as could be wrung from a sponge; but it was all I had available. I closed my cracked lips gingerly around the broken neck and tipped the contents over my tongue. They burned like acid, but I lapped up every drop, stuck my finger as far inside as I dared, wiped it along the glass, and licked it. I lowered the bottle to the boards and let it roll to a stop against the sleeping guard's hip. I lay back, as exhausted as if I'd been pulling the wagon myself.

I dozed, woke; dozed again, and dreamed I was back in Virginia, desperate for rest but bombarded by mosquitoes the size of gypsy moths, whining like mortar shells and stinging like the dull needles military orderlies used to prevent smallpox, wallowing in a puddle of my own sweat in a tent rank with mildew. We were on our way to a place called Cold Harbor, as poorly named a destination as ever there was. I'd been born in the high chill dry air of the Bitterroots, and would never accustom myself to inhaling oxygen as through a moldy bandanna. I jerked myself awake by sheer will—and started shivering. My teeth chattered so loudly I wanted to clasp my hand over my mouth to avoid drawing the attention of my witless beast of a guard; wanted to, but hadn't the strength to lift my arm from the wagonbed.

That's when I learned what I've known ever since: Once a victim of malaria, always a victim, at intervals no physician could predict, no matter how well-trained.

And higher we climbed. I looked up at the black-winged things wheeling in circles against white sky and felt I could reach out and pluck a feather.

 

TWENTY-TWO

Time is measured
by clocks, calendars, the turning of the earth and the shifting of constellations, none of which was capable of marking our passage up those mountains. I woke abruptly, and lay for a moment wondering what was responsible, until I realized we'd stopped. I'd grown so accustomed to the pitch and sway of the wagon and the shrieking of the ungreased axles that the sudden cessation of noise and motion had come as rudely as a pistol report. Dusk was all about, turning the sky the shade of eggplant, the zigzag treetops flat black, as if they'd been stamped against it with printer's ink. I wondered if we'd stopped to rest the animals. The thought that the ghastly shades who commanded them needed to halt for any human reason was too unlikely to consider.

It was dusk, yes:
A
dusk, anyway. There was no telling how many had come and gone since those two insignificant things, guts from a dead bear and a felled tree, had succeeded where nothing else could, stopping the
Ghost
. Nearer ground level, wriggles of yellow and orange suggested flames, spaced too evenly apart to belong to anything so random as nature. They twisted and snapped atop narrow posts stuck in the ground, illuminating a broad one-story building pale with whitewash, pierced at regular intervals with paned windows, dark shutters folded flat against the walls, and a proper shake roof. Peering over the side of the wagon, I swept the sweat from my eyes with the heels of my hands, but when I looked again it was still there, a cozy domestic arrangement, with bowls of flowers hanging by chains from a long front porch containing a bentwood rocker and a wicker table. All it lacked was a pitcher of lemonade to complete the effect. Between the torches, I identified similar posts supporting pale oblong shapes: gourds, set up possibly for target practice, although they looked too close to the house for safety.