The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (37 page)

You can’t truly believe something like that unless you’ve seen it. For the next few minutes, the shore of that lake was a flurry of black whispers and bloody fireworks. The bounty killer moved forward, dead men rushing him from all directions. Across the sand he went, and through the shadows, slaughtering the dead queen’s minions as they tried to slow his progress toward that bridge.

He moved forward without a pause, pistols blazing, leaving nothing but gunsmoke where darkness had reigned. And the bridge was closer now. Behind the bounty killer lay a trail of paintbrush splatters and corpses that had hit the ground without so much as the rattle of a medicine man’s spirit pouch. His narrowed lids squinted tight across cat-green eyes, as if the gunman were watching the whole blazing hell-riot from behind an iron mask. And when the killing was over you’d have thought he might have smiled, but he didn’t have it in him. Instead he went down on his knees at the foot of the bridge, a litter of dead men behind him, surrounded by nothing except the pistols he dropped in the sand.

He started heaving again, and now it was his own blood that paintbrushed the shore. It was an awful sight—just as it had been back at the saloon. The bounty killer tried to get up, drove his fists down against the sand and pushed for all he was worth, but such was his misery he couldn’t make the trip.

“Preacher,” he said. “I’m out of steam. Say the words.”

I looked around, because I’d lost track of the man in black. He was hiding behind a clutch of rocks further down the shore, crouching like a crab dreading a boiling pot.

“Preacher!” the gunman yelled. “Time to earn your money! Get over here now!”

The preacher hurried toward us, clutching his Bible, his face whiter than the faces of the devils we’d killed. His hands were shaking so badly he could barely open the book, but soon he managed to find the verse he was looking for, and he began to read.

“Louder!” the bounty killer said. “Make those damn words count!”

And the preacher tried. I really think he gave it his all, and maybe for the first time ever. His voice rang out over the bodies of men who’d died, and lived, and died again. It rang across the water. And it filled up the cavern, but at its heart it was a hollow echo. Soon enough, another sound eclipsed it.

It was the bounty killer. He was back on his knees, retching blood again. Red rushed from his mouth in a torrent. I’d never seen that much blood spill out of anything living in my life. It was as if the gullet that traveled from his mouth to his belly was his very own grave-hole of a cave, and men and monsters were doing battle in a cavern beneath his ribs, ripping him up from deep inside, filling every hollow space with blood.

This was the one time the preacher didn’t twitch. In spite of the horror, he knelt at the bounty killer’s side and kept on reading. His words charged harder now, and he spoke of Lazarus, and Jonah and the whale, and Noah and the flood. He put one hand on the gunman’s shoulder and the words spilled out of his mouth as he begged for deliverance. But the bounty killer only cried out, his body bucking hard against the misery convulsing inside him. It looked like the devil had hold of his tongue and was going to yank him inside-out.

With one hand, the gunman pushed the preacher away.

He hawked another mouthful of blood on the ground.

“Damn,” he said. “Damn.”

Then he got to his feet. I saw it happen, but I still can’t believe it. I don’t know how the bounty man did it, but I do know it didn’t have anything to do with any of the words the preacher had said. No. The gunman made the trip on his own, the same way a man climbs a gallows stairway. He made the journey deliberately, as if every inch of movement cost him more than he had inside, and once he was up he had the look of a man who wasn’t going down again unless it was his own idea.

Spatters of blood were thick on his shirt and face. The preacher took one look at him and backed away. Other words rushed from the spindly man’s mouth, and they were about money, and the deal he’d made with the bounty killer, and how there might be another bit of business he could try if the gunman cut him in for a bigger piece of the pie—

“I can’t believe I spent a night and a day listening to you jabber like a damn parrot in a cage,” the bounty killer said. “You’re useless. It’s time your feathers flew.”

The black rattler filled the gunman’s hand. None of us had even seen the bounty killer snatch it from the sand. One finger did all the work. Three quick tugs and three bullets hit the preacher square, and the man in black crumpled among the dead vampires.

Bank notes spilled from the preacher’s prayer book as he hit the ground.

That low subterranean wind caught them.

Some of the money blew into the black water.

Some clung to patches of spilled blood on the shore.

But there wasn’t one of us wanted to touch any of it.

We left that money alone, and we did the same with the preacher.

The bounty killer went down to the water and washed his face in the lapping waves. I gathered up his pistols and walked to his side.

“Need any help?” I asked.

He smiled at me, red lines of blood filling the creased spaces between his teeth. “I’ve killed a lot of men,” he said. “They’re still inside me. That’s why I’m here. I’m full up with dead men, and there ain’t nothing that can turn them loose.”

“That isn’t so bad,” I said. “I’ve got nothing but
alone
inside me. Sometimes I think it would be nice to have some company.”

The bounty killer laughed at that, and then he stifled a cough. “You know, it’s funny how life sets you on a trail. I first heard about you in a bar down in Tombstone. Brought in a dead horse-thief and collected the bounty from the marshal. After he handed over my bankroll, Virgil Earp told me your story over a beer. The marshal said he heard the tale from a prisoner who’d visited Rumson’s place. That was the first I heard of Vampire Lake. First I’d heard of the vampire queen, too.

“Earp said she was a devil woman who could never drink her fill of blood. By then I’d been heaving red for three months, and the dead men trapped inside me were never far from my thoughts. They haunted me night and day. I knew I had to get shed of them. I figured that queen was the only woman who could see me clear of the hell I was living. I figured I’d track her down and let her drink her fill, and maybe if I managed to walk away I’d be a different man. That’s when I busted Indio out of jail and came looking for you . . . and that’s what brought us down in this hole tonight.”

“But if you let her do that . . . If that queen sinks her fangs into you—”

“I let her do it. And I see where that trail takes me.”

“But—”

The bounty killer held up a hand. “There’s different kinds of death, boy. Different kinds of life, too. I don’t want one spent down on my knees, strangling on my own blood. I don’t want one that sidles up alongside me when my back is turned, wearing the face of some tinhorn who wants to prove he can gun down hell’s worst. No. I want one I can stare square in the eye. One that’ll stare right back and not blink so much as an eyelash. That queen sounds like the ticket to me.”

“But what if she drinks you dry?”

“That’s a chance I’ll take. Whatever hand I draw out there on that island is the hand I’ll play. A man can’t do more than that.”

The bounty killer splashed water on his face and wiped it clean with the back of his sleeve. He stood up. I stared at his face, but there was nothing else there. Not a single sign that could put the measure to his words. Just those cat-green eyes, slitted in his skin. He didn’t even blink as he unbuckled his gunbelt and handed his sheathed black rattler over to me.

“You keep this for me,” he said. “If you never see me again, you can call it yours.”

“But what about you?”

The gunman patted the bandoleers crisscrossing his chest. “I still have four pistols here. Whatever’s coming, they should see me through.”

The bounty killer turned away from me then. Just that fast. Like he was done.

He motioned at the blacksmith. “You. Come here.”

The big man came over, still sweating from exertion. The bounty killer pulled out his bank book. He asked us for our names, wrote them on the flyleaf, then scrawled a note and signed it.

“Ain’t none of us lawyers, but this’ll seal our bargain.” He pressed the book into the German’s hands. “I’m giving this to you, because I’m sure as hell not giving it to Indio. You’ll see this job through for me, won’t you?”

The blacksmith nodded. None of us knew what else to say. We stood there a moment, and it seemed it was as quiet as it had ever been in the world. And then the bounty killer turned toward the lake, and he took out his harmonica. He started playing, his eyes trained on that island, and the uneasy music that had raked over the desert two nights before seemed right at home down here in the earth’s own belly.

Out there in the darkness, the bridge started to creak and sway as the Navajo slave girl started across it. She was just a slip of a thing, and the bounty killer watched her as she drew nearer.

He slipped his harmonica into his pocket. She walked up to him, barely making a sound.

The girl said a few words in Spanish, and that was it.

The bounty killer turned to Indio.

“What’d she say?” he asked.

“That dead queen wants you,” Indio said. “She wants you now.”

There was no reason for us to stay down there in the cavern after that, but we did. Even the Navajo slave girl stuck close to the shore. We watched the bounty killer walk over the half-planked bridge, heard the old wood moan beneath his tread. Those albino gators thrashed in the water beneath him, driven wild by the scent of the dead men’s tide rushing through his veins.

Once the bounty killer hit the shore of the island, that queen didn’t parley long. She rose from her throne of bones, tossed her cigarillo into the water. Next came a couple minutes of jaw, and one long stare between them that said more than any words could. Maybe that was the thing that did the trick. Whatever it was, a second later she attacked the bounty killer like a ravenous spider.

That was what he wanted, after all. Her skinny arms scrabbled over his big shoulders. That black dress hiked up around the shanks of her white legs as she wrapped herself around his hips like a harlot flying the eagle. But it was those teeth of hers that did the work no words could. Her fangs trenched the bounty killer’s neck, digging in like coffin nails. We heard him grunt even though we were far across the water, and we watched blood geyser from his wounds. The red shower caught the shadows and matched their darkness inch for inch, and it flowed over the shrouded island and seeped into the ebony water beyond.

They say that queen had drank down a thousand men, but it was a fact she’d never met one like the bounty killer. He was a gusher, filled up with life and filled up with death, and too much of both had spent years stoppered up inside him. He was more than that queen could handle. The wet sound of her feasting sent a horrible echo rippling through the cavern, and soon she began to swell like some monstrous babe that had nursed too long at the devil’s own teat. The back of her dress ripped apart, black lace shredding like cobwebs. Still, the queen didn’t cut loose of the gunman’s pumping artery. She hung on and burrowed in deeper, and still she drank.

Another vein let loose, spewing blood from the bounty killer’s neck. Red mist sprayed across the island, and dead men rose in its wake. We’d had no hint that the queen had companions out there, but there must have been one last pack of shadowmen that served as bodyguards. They hurried to her side, fanged maws spreading for bad business, teeth latching onto the bounty killer as if he were a lone steer turned loose in an empty butcher shop.

But he did not fall, and he did not go to his knees. The killer stood there with those things roiling over him. Every bite was like another hole burrowed into a dam. The bounty man’s blood was everywhere now. It was a red mist driven by underground winds, spreading over the water. It ran in thick rivulets over his shirt and down his boots and across the island shore, sending scarlet veins rushing into the lapping tide. That was when the gators went crazy. They swam toward the island, thick tails cutting steely wakes, thrashing in the blood-charged water as if the lake itself were on the boil.

And soon that lake wasn’t black anymore. It was as red as everything else. On the island, a few of the vampires burst like ticks. Others drank furiously. Still others tried to stopper the bounty killer’s wounds with clawed hands, but there was no plugging the dike. Everything on the island was the color of blood, and the red lake was rising all around it.

At last, the queen and her shadowmen broke away from that wild gusher of a man. They started across the bridge, coming our way. The queen was sow-fat now, her tattered lace dress a rag on the shore. She ran naked and white and round like the moon, the bridge swaying under her weight. It was her and her followers above the lake, and those rotten planks between, and a riptide of white gators below. And the whole pack of them were coming our way, with nothing behind them but the bounty killer, dancing alone on that island like a man trapped in a scarlet hurricane.

And the lake was rising higher, blood lapping the bone-colored beach at our feet. The gators and vampires were closer now. One of the albino reptiles charged between a couple rocks and latched onto the blacksmith. The big German went over like a falling redwood, and two more gators hit him like bait on a hook. I saw the bounty killer’s bank book tumble from his shorn pocket, watched it disappear into a gator’s mouth. Then the blacksmith screamed as the same beast came after him, and he caught a pair of snapping jawbones between his big hands.

I yanked the bounty killer’s black rattler, but by the time I got it out of the holster the blacksmith’s head was already gone. I fired at the gator anyway. The bullets drilled it straight through. Three of the other beasts set on the dead monster and slaked their hunger. By the time I reloaded the bounty killer’s Colt, Indio had shoved me backward. He had his rucksack open, and dynamite sticks filled his hand.