Dead Reckoning (27 page)

Steam that smelled of salt.

As the hot salt jet touched each zombie, it broke
from its halting shuffle into a lurching run—but not to retreat. They moved forward with grim purpose. The congregation began to scream again—not just a few of them this time—and Jett spared a moment to hope the sounds meant they were too scared to fight back. The organ had fallen silent once more, but suddenly Jett heard a sound that vibrated through the air like the lowest note of an organ a hundred times larger.

The zombies were wailing.

Steam turned the clear arid desert night into an eldritch landscape obscured by mist—but even now, Jett could see White Fox standing his ground.

The first of the zombies reached him. Its clothes were wet and steaming, as if its body was afire. It ignored White Fox as if he didn’t exist. Others followed, and all of them ignored him. Jett tensed in fear as they reached her, but they passed her too. Now White Fox raised the nozzle of his hose so the spray of water showered over the remaining zombies as if it were rain.

The creatures continued to ignore him.

Every one of them was heading for Brother Shepherd.

The hose went limp. The wagon’s reservoirs were dry. As the last of the water sputtered from the nozzle in a falling arc, White Fox dropped it to the ground. In the instant it took Jett to realize the temperature was rising, every zombie in the compound fell to the ground. Limp. Lifeless.

At last.

There was utter silence for a moment, then Jett heard a loud mechanical rattle and looked away from the corpses in time to see a trap door open in the side of the Auto-Tachypode.

“I very strongly suggest that no one do anything rash!” Gibbons called, leaning out of the back of the wagon.

White Fox walked toward Jett, a Bowie knife in his hand. He slipped the blade under the rope and began to cut her free. Suddenly she felt absurdly self-conscious. Her masculine disguise was armor as much as weapon, and at the moment she had neither one. The ropes fell free and she stepped away from the stake.

“I hope you brought my clothes,” she snapped at him to disguise her unease. She tried to bring her hands around in front of her, only belatedly remembering the handcuffs still on her wrists. She couldn’t feel her hands at all.

White Fox smiled at her. “I’ve brought something more immediately useful,” he said, sheathing the knife again. “You’re fortunate Gibbons carries handcuff keys at all times.”

“Likely because anybody who meets her wants to throw her in jail,” Jett muttered.

White Fox stepped behind her to unlock the cuffs. The moment she could, Jett wrapped her arms around
herself, then inspected her hands, flexing the fingers critically. They were discolored and swollen, and there were deep bruises on her wrists.

But she was alive, which was more than she’d expected an hour ago. She turned around to look behind her. Her eyes widened.

Everyone, Union and Confederate both, had seen Mister Mathew B. Brady’s photographs of battlefields. Jett had never expected to see anything similar in person—but such was the sight before her. The ground was scattered with bodies. There was a mound of them where Shepherd and his organ had been—she had no doubt what was left of Shepherd was at the bottom of that pile—but not all his creations had managed to reach him before he died. Some were sprawled flat as if they’d been running. Others lay in tangled heaps. Some had fallen to their knees and been braced upright by the bodies behind them.

Tante Mère was right. A zombie’s last act is to take vengeance upon its creator.

Most of The Fellowship of the Blessed Resurrected had fled in terror. She didn’t see either Brother Nathan or Brother Saul, which didn’t surprise her. But to Jett’s amazement, about two dozen of Shepherd’s congregation had stood their ground. They huddled together in the open doorway of the ranch house. Some sobbed openly, men and women both. Some prayed loudly.

“Now you listen to me!” Gibbons strode from the back of her wagon, her coach gun prudently cradled in her arms. “I don’t know what this Brother Shepherd told you, and I don’t care! He wasn’t a saint or a prophet! He was a thief and a murderer! If he told you he could raise the dead—he lied! These bodies are dead flesh—zombies—walking corpses, nothing more!”

Gibbons walked toward them. Jett followed her. Jett wasn’t armed, but she didn’t have to be. The fact she was standing here was her weapon. Mister George Wilson Shepherd had tied her to a stake and called down God’s judgment on her—and she was still alive and Shepherd wasn’t. She stood beside Gibbons on one side, White Fox on the other.

“If these bodies had really been alive, do you think a little dose of hyper-salinated steam could have killed them?” Gibbons demanded. “That’s all this was: salt water. And it didn’t kill them! It just broke your Brother Shepherd’s hold over a bunch of carcasses.”

As Gibbons spoke, a few more members of the Fellowship came out of hiding to join their fellows. Suddenly a woman broke away and ran toward the three of them. Jett tensed, and Gibbons swung her gun around, but this wasn’t an attack.

“Oh forgive me! Sister Jayleen, forgive me for doubting you!” Sister Catherine said. She fell to her knees and clutched at Jett’s hands. Despite herself, Jett recoiled.

“I take it you know each other?” Gibbons asked.

“This is—” Jett began.

“I told him everything!” Sister Catherine said, her words nearly unintelligible through her tears. “Brother Shepherd said if anyone worked against him, God would punish them by denying their families angelic resurrection!”

(Zombies)
Jett mouthed at Gibbons, who was frowning at her quizzically.

“Least said, soonest mended, my good woman,” Gibbons said crisply. “All water under the bridge! Now, if you’ll—”

“I had to tell him, don’t you see?” Sister Catherine went on as if she hadn’t heard. “It was for my boy! My boy, my—”

Suddenly Sister Catherine faltered to a stop, realizing that if Shepherd was a fraud …

Her son was truly dead.

As she broke into hysterical howls of grief, Jett stared at Gibbons and White Fox in horror.

There was still one zombie unaccounted for.

Considering that they still had Shepherd’s acolytes to deal with, Gibbons was just as glad to discover Shepherd had apparently confiscated all firearms brought to Jerusalem’s Wall as a matter of course. A panicky mob was bad enough. An
armed
panicky mob was worse. More than a third of the Fellowship were unaccounted for. They would probably come back at sunrise, since the ranch was the closest source of food and shelter. Most of the rest them had decided to gather in the ranch house chapel to pray (whether to be struck dead or forgiven, it was hard to say).

The more Jett told her about “Brother Shepherd,” the angrier Gibbons got. Not only had he been a bully
and a killer, he’d let pride and greed corrode what seemed to have been a first-class scientific mind. For a while she’d wondered if the zombies might be proof that magic actually existed, but now Gibbons wasn’t as sure. Sound had a measurable effect on a living body, after all. At a high-enough volume, it could even kill. Who was to say whether Shepherd had resurrected dead bodies—or simply drugged people into a deep coma and then used sound to control them? It was even possible the zombies had been truly dead, and the corpses host to some form of insect or parasite or bacterium not yet known to science. She wouldn’t be able to hazard a guess until she could examine his laboratory in depth. She could begin tomorrow.

But there was one matter that couldn’t be allowed to wait, and with all her heart, Gibbons hoped Jett was wrong.
She is not a trained observer—though I grant she is a good one—and the disciplines of Science are as yet a closed book to her.

But it is best to make sure.

White Fox chose to remain above to ensure the safety of the Auto-Tachypode—a necessary precaution among a group of people who’d had every certainty destroyed in a few brief hours. Now, accompanied by Jett, Sister Catherine, and—to Gibbons’s faint surprise—half a dozen of the braver souls of the Fellowship, Gibbons descended into what Brother Shepherd had called
his “inner prayer house.” According to Jett, Brother Shepherd’s “
allamatons
” had built it. Gibbons wasn’t sure she credited that, but it was an amazing piece of engineering all the same—a space vaster than the foyer of the San Francisco Opera House, carved by hand out of Texas limestone. The rooms were still brilliantly lit by lamps showing the blue-white smokeless flame of pure alcohol, and for a moment Gibbons wished they weren’t, for the first room Jett led them to was filled with what Gibbons could only categorize as “loot.”

Behind her, she could hear the unhappy murmurs of Shepherd’s former dupes—though perhaps fortunately, they were all still too stunned to work up much in the way of shock or indignation. It was additional proof of Shepherd’s dishonesty and their own credulity, but to Gibbons it was more. It was her first real evidence of how long he had been left to build his empire of death and plunder beneath everyone’s noses. Even if he’d done nothing more than follow the wagon trails to scavenge those items abandoned by travelers (and it did not matter how precious an heirloom had been loaded into the back of a Conestoga at Independence, Missouri, it became merely dangerous makeweight a few hundred miles west), it would have taken him years to acquire the contents of this room.

And she knew he’d done more than that. Far more. But what? And for how long?

Jett led them to a doorway at the far end of the chamber. She hung back, allowing the others to enter before her. The room wasn’t as brightly lit as the other one. Gibbons smelled scorched wool as she crossed the threshold, and beneath it the unmistakable sharpsick stench of zombie.
I did hope she’d been wrong
, Gibbons thought sorrowfully.

“He’s alive!” Sister Catherine cried. “My boy is alive!”

In the cell at the end of the room, a boy perhaps twelve years old was pacing back and forth. When he saw them, he thrust both arms through the bars, his mouth open in a silent howl. Sister Catherine ran to him before Gibbons could even think of stopping her.

“You were wrong, you were wrong, oh, praise the Lord, he’s alive,
alive!
” Sister Catherine laughed and sobbed as she fumbled at the door. The dead child flailed blindly through the bars. “He sees me! He knows me! He’s alive!”

If there is anything left of David in there
… Gibbons shuddered.

Jett walked up to Gibbons and wordlessly offered her something. A key. Gibbons shook her head quickly and walked to Sister Catherine. She put a hand on Sister Catherine’s shoulder.

“No,” she said. “He isn’t. I’m sorry.”

“But you see, don’t you?” Sister Catherine said desperately, turning to address her words to all of them.
“He is. The others are dead, but they—They were dead flesh, like you said. Not my boy! Not my Davey!”

Gibbons reached into her pocket and pulled out her small silver flask. “No,” she repeated unhappily. “If he drinks this, you’ll see.” She held out the flask to Sister Catherine.

“What is it?” Sister Catherine demanded sharply, her eyes narrowing in suspicion.

“Nothing but salt water,” Gibbons answered softly. “Just plain salt water.”

“You have to tell him to drink it,” Jett said. “He’ll do it if you ask. You’re his mother.”

“Of course I am!” Sister Catherine said laughing a little, as if Jett had made a joke. She took the little flask from Gibbons and unscrewed the top. She took a sip of its contents to test it, then turned back to the cell.

“You’re alive, Davey,” she said, holding the flask through the bars. “I know you are. All you have to do is prove it to them by drinking this, and then—and then we can be together! We can be happy! I told you I’d find a doctor for you. I told you I wouldn’t let you suffer. Just drink this. That’s all you have to do.”

Was there a kind of dull desperation in those eyes? Gibbons thought there was. The thing fastened its blind gaze on the flask.

Does it know? How can it know? Impossible of course,
and yet
… Gibbons thought she saw a spark of … something … in that dead gaze.

Hope?

His mother was still talking—promising her son what they’d do, where they’d go—when the child-zombie clumsily pawed the silver flask from her hands, as if the flask held the water of life. It held it awkwardly between its palms and tipped it up to pour the contents into its mouth.

It fell backward, dropping the flask. Dead.

Sister Catherine began to scream, clutching the bars and shaking the cell door. Jett shoved her sideways and thrust the key into the lock. Sister Catherine yanked the door open and rushed inside. She fell to her knees and gathered the lifeless body into her arms. “Wake up, Davey,” she said, rocking him. “It’s time to wake up. You’re cured. You’re healed. He promised me. He promised. Wake up. Prove to them how wrong they are. Oh please, please, please wake up …”

Gibbons felt her eyes sting and her throat close a little. The poor child … and his poor mother. She blinked the tears away with determination. Crying would do nothing to change what had happened, and David had been doomed in any case. Shepherd had made a promise he’d known he could not keep.

No one could cure consumption.

Yet.

And so he’d lied, and given the boy’s mother false hope. That was worse than letting the child die—

She made a mental note to add medical research to the scope of her investigations. In a proper world—a
scientific
world—there would be no Davids, no Sister Catherines, no desperate parents watching their children die of a hundred diseases.

“If that bastard wasn’t already dead, I’d kill him myself,” Gibbons snarled, so low only Jett could hear.

“I’d help you,” Jett said grimly. Then, to Gibbons’s faint surprise, she crossed herself and began to speak, her lips moving as she whispered almost soundlessly. “
Inclina, Domine, aurem tuam ad preces nostras
—”

Gibbons translated the words automatically.
Incline Thy ear, O Lord, to the prayers with which we suppliantly entreat Thy mercy …