Hang Wire (3 page)

Robert looked to his left. The pattern continued, all long the trench, from one side of the road to the other.

Dynamite.

“Help me, please, help me.”

The army wasn’t going to blow up the street; they were going to blow up the trench.

“Help me, please, help me.”

The road moved beneath Robert, undulating waves out from the crack in the Earth. The wave pushed him up, and then continued down the street, the cracked paving clicking as it was lifted and lowered.

Something
moving
. Something under the street. The army knew, had seen it, and were going to try to kill it.

Robert pushed himself to his feet and took one step into the trench, careful of his footing, aware the charred earth could crumble beneath him at any moment. Black hands reached up toward him. He bent over, reached down, and then a black hand was in his. It burned like fire, although it was cold, so very, very cold. The hand pulled him forward with surprising force; then another burst through the black dirt and grabbed his forearm, then another his elbow. Robert toppled head-first into the trench as the black figures – two, three, four – emerged from the ground.

The gunshots were loud, each leaving Robert’s head ringing like a bell. He felt the heat on his face and was showered with dirt and dust thrown up from the ground as the soldiers fired into the trench. Big hands –
hot
hands – grabbed both his legs and yanked him backward. Robert hit the road with his chest, the air driven out of his lungs. He rolled onto his back, and squinted into the sun, blinking away the ash and dust and blood from his eyes.

The soldiers formed a row – five men, rifles raised. They continued to fire into the trench. From where he lay, Robert couldn’t see the carnage within.

“Stop!” he yelled. “For god’s sake, stop!” But his voice was weak and choked with dust and dirt. The soldiers kept firing. Robert clutched his aching chest and arched his neck, looking back at the trench and the soldiers upside-down.

A black figure leapt out of the trench – lithe, naked, caked in black ash, long matted hair swinging. A woman, the first victim Robert had tried to pull out of the ground. Either the soldiers had somehow missed their targets at point-blank range, or the bullets were having no effect. The woman leapt onto the front of a solider, and then pulled him backward. The pair toppled into the trench.

“Retreat!”

The firing stopped. Robert felt himself lifted by four soldiers, one on each limb. As he was carried back to dynamite trucks, he looked back at the receding trench. More black hands appeared over the lip as the creatures began to pull themselves up.

The soldiers had seen. As he got nearer to the trucks there was a flurry of movement, orders shouted. Someone cried out that they couldn’t be stopped, that they’d be out soon, all of them, that they would be all over the city by nightfall, that the street had to be blown right now.

There was a crump, like a gunshot underwater, and the street and the trench disappeared in a cloud of brown dust and red and orange flame.

Then the shockwave from the explosion hit the trucks, and Robert’s world vanished into darkness.

WHAT HORROR SLEEPS BEYOND THE KNOWLEDGE OF MEN?

INDIAN TERRITORY, OKLAHOMA-TO-BE

APRIL 22, 1889

Now, this is the story of a young man by the name of Joel, a young man with nothing to lose and everything to gain by traveling west into Indian Territory, where the Unassigned Lands were ready and waiting for those seeking their fortune, for those wanting to start something special, something new.

Young men like Joel, who had arrayed himself with the multitude assembled in one great line that stretched north to south. A train of wagons and horses, men and women and children, the young and the old, the fit and the infirm alike. The way ahead was free, and at high noon the land run would begin, each settler able to stake a claim on one hundred sixty acres of the finest soil that had once belonged to the native people, but no longer did.

Those on horses would be first off the mark and they’d get the best of the best, of course. Those in wagons would be slower, but the Unassigned Lands were big and even if there were fifty thousand people standing in the line like the whispers rippling back and forth through the crowd said there were, then there would be plenty to go around. And if you were in a wagon, well, then maybe things were looking better for you already, if you were smart and had that there wagon loaded with the tools and means to improve the land you staked.

If you were desperate, you could go on foot. You’d be slow, you’d get the scraps, but maybe, just maybe, you’d find your lot and live happily ever after.

Joel was on foot, and he was desperate, and that was yesterday. Today he watched the sun rise in the east from his camp, nothing more than a makeshift bivouac of blankets over a fallen log. The sun rose into a clear blue sky, the color so deep, so real that if he lay on his back and looked straight up into the apex of the dome above him, the sky was almost black. It filled his vision, and made him feel like he was swimming in an ocean of nothing but color. Joel lay there in the dirt for a spell, staring at the sky until a shining diamond of light struck the edge of his vision as the sun crawled higher, toward the west.

Toward the future. Joel’s future. This he knew, somehow, like it had been foretold, like it was written in his blood and the blood of his father and in the blood of
his
father before him.

Joel hadn’t known his father, not really. His daddy had left to fight in the war back in, oh, must have been ’63 or ’64, marching to Atlanta and never marching home again. But before he’d gone, he’d given Joel something. A coin, a double-eagle. He said it was gold and it sure did shine like it was gold, and his daddy said he wanted Joel to look after it and he’d come back for it.

He didn’t come back for it, but that was OK. The coin was in Joel’s pocket and when he carried it he knew his daddy was with him, marching by his side. Heading west, toward the future, toward the light.

Joel packed up his bivouac and rolled his blankets and turned his back to the sun, and marched onwards across the Unassigned Lands.

By the end of the first day of the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889, the dusty Unassigned Lands had become two cities, Oklahoma City and Guthrie. After the sun had set, two newspapers and one bank had already been established, serving those who had carved a future not just for themselves, but for their children, and grandchildren, and so on down the line.

Joel knew nothing of this. After the first day, as the horses and wagons had raced past him, as men had run past him, he walked onward, due west. He was desperate, he had nothing to lose, but he was patient, and he knew that a patient man was a man whose reward would come, in time.

The morning of the second day was still, and quiet. Joel felt like the only man in the whole world and maybe that was so, because the only thing he’d heard in the night was someone calling, far away, the voice carried on a dull wind even before Joel was fully awake. He thought of the voice now, and as he walked west, across a dusty plain of dry grass, with not a soul from horizon to horizon, he wondered if maybe his daddy really was there with him, calling out for his son to keep on marching and keep on fighting because a patient man would find his true reward.

The coin in his waistcoat pocket felt heavy. Joel kept marching and dipped a finger and a thumb into the pocket. He stopped, pulling his hand away, hissing like he’d just been bit.

Because the day was getting hot already and the blue sky above was an unbroken dome, and the coin in his pocket was cold, cold like the bottom of a blue ocean, the ocean Joel often dreamed of.

He stopped and kicked the dirt and looked around, but he was alone in the world. He looked down at his waistcoat, his eyes following the line of buttons running down to his belt. His suit was old and black, dusty, a relic from another time, something his daddy left behind when he marched to war. Like the silver gun with the creamy pearl handle that hung from Joel’s waist. Why his daddy hadn’t taken the gun to war with him, Joel didn’t know. He’d found it in the closet, along with the suit and a box of ammunition. He hadn’t fired the gun yet, not even to test it, perhaps afraid that the weapon was too old and would explode in his hand. Maybe that was why it had been left behind. But with the gun on his waist and the coin in his pocket, Joel felt as though his daddy was watching over him.

Joel gritted his teeth and slid his fingers into the pocket where the fob watch should have been, had he not hocked it somewhere back in Tennessee the previous week, getting just enough money to reach Indian Territory by high noon. The watch was nothing and was worth virtually the same, but it had been just enough. The coin was worth a lot, Joel knew that, even if it wasn’t gold like his daddy told him (but it was, it was). But the coin was his father and his father marched with him, to the west, to the future.

Joel took the coin between two fingers and pulled it out. It was cold, although not burning cold like it had been moments before. Joel held it up and turned each side in the sun, the embossed bird on each catching the sunlight and shining, shining like the eagle itself was alive.

And then Joel heard the voice again.

The cave was deep – less a cave, more a long trench in the otherwise smooth and rolling dusty plain. It started as nothing more than a crack to catch the foolhardy traveler (although, Joel knew, if they were walking in his footsteps across this particular part of the godforsaken Unclaimed Lands that he found himself in somehow, then they were fools already) but widened and deepened until it was big enough for a covered wagon to fall into, breaking the axle and probably the horse in the process.

Joel had neither. He stepped into the trench and walked down toward the opening in the earth. The ground was dry and brittle, covered with a darker kind of dust than the surrounding plains, something more like ash. It was like the hole in the ground had been burned through the crust of the plain. But there was only scraggly brush nearby, dry enough but still alive, simply baked under the summer sun. If there had been a fire here then it had died long, long ago.

A riverbed then, or a creek – perhaps an underground spring run dry. The cave entrance was a black abyss. Joel slipped and slid forward, dirt and rock cascading from under his old boots, the skin on the heels of his hands soon red and raw.

He stopped when he realized the angle of the gully was steeper than it looked, but he kept sliding a foot or more toward the cave entrance before he came to halt. Nothing but dry dirt and loose rock, of course… except for the fact that Joel was sure there was something drawing him in. Not like being pushed, like some fellow settler desperate for a valid claim in the land run had hidden in the cracks and crevasses of the gully and had come out to shove Joel to his death, hoping his neck would break, and if that failed that he would be on the ground long enough for his attacker to smash his brains out with one of the heavy stones that lay scattered in some abundance around the cave.

No, this was more like being
pulled
, like there was a lasso around Joel’s middle, drawing him gently, slowly in.

Joel’s fingers found the coin again. This time it was cold but there was something else too, a sensation he couldn’t quite describe, like when you sometimes touched the metal rim of a wagon wheel just as you got off after a long journey. A spark, a pinprick, like being licked by the trailing edge of a whip. The sensation was gone in a second and Joel took the coin out, now used to the cold.

But not used to the force that seemed to emanate from it. The coin was moving, or wanted to move, toward the cave. It wriggled in his fingers, back and forth, back and forth. Joel took a step forward, watching the coin, watching the cave.

Then he let go of the coin, and it dropped to the sandy soil like any coin would, and it did not move. With his other hand he brushed the handle of the gun on his belt, ready to draw.

Then a cold wind came from the cave, carrying with it the smell of metal and the voice, calling out, far away. The sun dropped in the sky and caught the face of the coin in the dirt, throwing up a shining, glittering flare into Joel’s eyes.

The cave called again, and hand on his daddy’s gun, Joel stepped forward.

…and in developing news this hour, the San Francisco Police Department has released the name of the woman whose body was found in a back street close to City Hall last week.

The woman has been identified as Lucy Winters, 23. Relatives have been informed.

Police are appealing to any witnesses who were in the vicinity of Olive and Polk in the city center in the early hours of July ninth, and have conducted a door-to-door of nearby businesses and residences. While no further statement has been made by the SFPD, a source close to the investigation told this news organization that the death of Lucy Winters followed the same pattern as that of an elderly resident of Chinatown the previous week. The unnamed Chinese male was found hanged in an apparent ritual murder inside a food import warehouse, but our sources could not speculate on the connection between the two deaths.

We’ll have more news as it comes to hand.

— I —

Ted gave up fighting after a while. No matter how much he insisted he was OK, no matter how gently he protested at being led to the back of the ambulance by two paramedics, resistance was most definitely useless. The whole damn street was caught in the red and blue strobe of the vehicle’s lights, bleaching the faces of the Chinatown onlookers in alternating flashes of color.

Reluctantly, Ted now sat in the back of the ambulance and let the paramedics fuss as much as they wanted. It was their job, after all, and a mighty fine and important one at that. Pissing off the San Francisco Fire Department was rather low on his list of priorities. Figuring out what had caused the explosion at the Jade Emperor was currently at the top.