Dead Men's Dust (25 page)

“
REMIND ME NOT TO INVEST IN A HOLIDAY HOME OUT HERE,
” Rink said. “Could be a bitch lettin’ it out during the winter season.”

“It’d be a bitch in any season,” I told him.

The Mojave Desert occupies more than 22,000 square miles, bordering California and portions of Arizona, Utah, and Nevada. Where we were at that given moment I couldn’t even begin to guess. I was only pleased that we had a vehicle. If we’d had to walk out of there in the daytime, I didn’t think much of our chances for survival.

Not that it was a desert in the true sense of the word. It wasn’t made up of mile after mile of dunes like I’d experienced in the Sahara. But one look at the blasted landscape told me it was every bit as arid.

We were climbing higher into the foothills. All around us the night sky was torn along the horizon by weird shapes that I knew were Joshua trees. In my imagination, they appeared to be misshapen giants waving us on to our doom. The road was now all but gone, and what Rink followed was the faint trail Cain’s Dodge had left upon the earth.

During the day, this area was hot, and through the middle hours of the night the temperature could drop uncomfortably low, but we were driving during those hours when the heat stored during the daylight hours still radiated from the rocks and gravel. Still, even with the heat on in the SUV, I felt the first hint of the cold. I shivered, found myself tightening in reflex.

“You okay, Hunter?” Rink asked.

I mumbled assent.

“Everything’s gonna go fine, you just mark my words.”

“I’m okay, Rink,” I reassured him. “Just felt like someone walked over my grave.”

Rink fell silent. Maybe my words were too prophetic for his liking. He concentrated on guiding the SUV up an incline toward a pass into the foothills marked by two gargantuan crags. Nearing the summit, he turned to me. “It’s Cain who’s gonna die.”

I exhaled. “I hope it’s all over tonight.”

I looked at him. He coughed deep in his throat, a low grumble. “Cain’s number’s up. That part’ll be finished. But what about the rest?”

“What rest?” I asked, but already the question was rhetorical. He was referring to John, to Louise Blake, Petoskey and Hendrickson, Walter, the Secret Service. All the victims and the families of the Harvestman. Maybe Cain would die tonight, but how long would the repercussions last? There were other deaths—Cain’s victims aside—involved along the way. In particular, the hit man killed at Louise’s house, the other I’d killed back at the beach house. How were those going to be resolved?

“We’re gonna have us a three-ring circus out here,” Rink said.

I stared straight ahead. The two gigantic pillars of rock dominated the skyline. Against the purple sky, they looked like monoliths, stones to mark the tombs of twin giants. And we had to pass between them.

Driving between the huge crags, I knew we’d just gone beyond
the point of no return. Clichéd, yes, but true. Once more, I checked my weapons. They were still prepared, just as they’d been minutes earlier. Momentarily I wondered if they would be enough.

Beyond the rock gates was a flat expanse of sandstone. It sloped gently toward the horizon, shelf built upon shelf of petrified sand. Millions of years ago, this area had been the bed of a prehistoric ocean, teeming with weird and astonishing life forms. But now, hundreds of feet above present sea level, the huge rock was devoid of life. Only dust devils moved here, tiny zephyrs plucking and whirling particles of grit across the unresponsive land.

“Looks like we just touched down on Mars,” Rink breathed.

It was apparent by the way the table of rock disappeared into the night that we were on a massive shelf of land, and I cautioned Rink, urged him to slow down. Just something about the color of the night beyond the scope of our vision gave me pause, as though we were standing at the edge of the world and an unwary step would pitch us over the edge.

Rink pulled the SUV to a halt. We leaned forward, craning our necks to look down on the mist-shrouded valley below us. We shared a look. If Rink hadn’t stopped when he did, we would’ve dropped two hundred feet to our deaths.

“Which way now, Daniel Boone?” Rink asked.

“Any way but forward,” I said and we both laughed.

Careful not to slip us over the rim of the cliff, Rink edged the SUV to the left, then drove with the caution of someone suddenly struck blind. Here the rock became rutted with deep crevasses, and Rink drove back inland, did a complete U-turn, then swung back the way we’d come. Out of the night loomed queer shapes. Only as we drew alongside them did I realize that we were traveling amid the husks of burned-out vehicles. Predominantly they were camper vans and Winnebagos, the occasional minivan. Cain, it seemed, had a major gripe with the drivers of those vehicles. Then we found the Dodge
abandoned. Both front doors stood open and the interior light was a yellow glow against the night sky.

Nothing stirred inside the car. Cain could’ve been stretched out across the backseat, waiting for us to blunder over and poke our heads inside so that he could shoot us. Or he could’ve been hunkered down behind the car. I dismissed both ideas.

What fun would that be?

He hadn’t brought us all the way out here just so he could hit us with potshots while we were out in the open. Cain had planned a more interesting game than that.

But we still had to check.

We got out of the SUV fifty feet shy of the Dodge. Cautiously we moved to the Dodge and checked it out. While I trained my barrel on the interior of the car, Rink moved in closer and checked the rear seat.

“Clear?” I asked.

Rink nodded me in closer.

“Check it out, Hunter.”

I did. And I could do nothing but groan. The backseat was covered with blood. Not pools of the stuff, but enough streaks and smears to indicate that John didn’t have much time left on this earth.

While I continued to stare at the mess in the car, Rink quickly checked the trunk of the Dodge, finding it locked. Cain wasn’t about to slip out from inside it while our backs were turned. Rink came to stand beside me and nodded to where patches of scuffed rock marked someone’s passing. So did the periodic droplets of blood that glistened darkly against the paler surface.

We were off again. Fanning out so that a dozen paces separated us, we edged forward. Then no more than a hundred yards from the parked car, we reached the brink of the cliff. Out of the confines of the SUV, we could approach nearer to the cliff than before, so the void below us no longer appeared so empty. The cliff fell more than
two hundred feet to a sloping embankment of shale and sand before leveling out into a natural amphitheater that extended farther than I could see. It was a great bowl shape, alkaline white, with gathering mist hanging over it like a multitude of specters. The sun-bleached basin reminded me of only one thing: the scooped-out, hollow interior of a human skull. I hissed. If Cain could call any place home, this would be it.

Outlined on the escarpment’s rim, we made easy targets for anyone positioned below. We stepped back.

“Over there.” Rink motioned. “Looks like a way down. Has to be the way they went.”

I saw the fissure in the earth and nodded. Moving toward it, I peered over the edge. A casual glance probably wouldn’t have revealed the fabricated steps leading down the cliffside, but they were what I’d been looking for. Cain had been here many times in the past; the steps were testimony to that.

“I’ll take point,” I told Rink. Then I set off. The steps weren’t as sheer as they first appeared, and surprisingly, you wouldn’t have had to be mountain-goat nimble to climb down. However, burdened with John, I did wonder how Cain managed to make his way down without tripping and carrying them both to their deaths. It gave me a healthy new respect for what the man was capable of.

I reminded myself that he was a trained Secret Service agent, that he was probably whalebone-tough beneath the unassuming exterior. Now I had to credit him with above-average strength and determination. He wouldn’t be easy to take out in a chest-to-chest fight.

Rink didn’t need guidance on how to handle our descent. He waited until I’d hit the bottom before he set off.

While he descended, I covered him. When he reached bottom, I stalked forward. Rink followed, scanning left and right, periodically behind. We traversed the slope of the bone-white hollow in that fashion until we found level footing. The ground was no longer as treach
erous as it had been on the descent, but the mist rose up before us, obscuring our view. That was bad enough, but it also played tricks on our ears. As I stepped out on the sand, I could’ve sworn I heard the tinkle of music. I paused, turned back to Rink.

“You hear that?”

Rink’s eyebrows knitted. “That a radio playing?” he whispered.

I shrugged, stepped forward. Between patches of mist, I thought I saw something move. In response, my hand swung toward it, fingertip caressing the trigger of my SIG. Again the tinkle of music. Then the mist writhed and the shape I’d glimpsed was gone.

“What the hell was that?” Rink hissed at me. Which confirmed I wasn’t hallucinating.

“Don’t know,” I replied.

“Freakin’ ghost,” Rink muttered under his breath.

Music tinkled from in front of me. Like the dissonant chimes of a musically challenged orchestra. Once more I snatched a glimpse of the conductor waving his baton. And inured to horror as I’d become, even I cringed back from what stood before me.

“Crap,” I breathed.

Rink had been right; the monstrosity before me was indeed best described as a ghost.

CAIN WHISTLED WHILE HE WORKED. HE KEPT HARMONY WITH
every wince of agony from John, exhaled loudly in time with every grunt of pain, laughed when John ground his body against the rock wall in an effort to pull away from his slicing administrations.

“The pain will go away soon,” Cain reassured John. “Once I’m through the dermis, as far down as the bone, I’ll be beyond the nerve endings.”

John howled.

Cain stepped in closer, eyes like lasers, guiding the scaling knife with a surgeon’s precision. In such deep concentration, the tip of his tongue poked from beneath the slash of his lips, writhing like a fat worm as he plied his tool. Beyond flesh was bone, and that would require effort. His whistling stopped, and now he moaned more often than John did.

John was beyond agony now, beyond the point of human endurance. Cain sighed. His work wasn’t the same, didn’t hold the same satisfaction, if his subject wasn’t around to appreciate it. Shaking his head, he stepped away. Then, hands on hips, he surveyed his work of art.

Not bad, I suppose
, he told himself. Though it still lacked a certain flamboyant statement to finish it off. If this was to be the magnum opus of both Jubal and Tubal Cain, he required a truly magnificent centerpiece to finalize it.

He slipped the scaling knife into his waistband, retrieved the empty gun from where he’d laid it on the floor, and headed out into the night.

I’VE OFTEN WONDERED IF THERE’S ANYONE MORE SUPERSTITIOUS
than a soldier. You’d think that with such a reliance on fact, science, and technology, the basis of modern warfare, there’d be no room for a belief in the supernatural. But there is the firm belief in many a soldier’s mind that paranormal skills are often within the warrior’s arsenal. I am a believer in a sixth sense, the heightened ability to detect the unseen watcher, the sniper on the rooftop or the tiger hidden in the long grass. It’s so widely believed that it has even been given a term:
Rapid Intuitive Experience,
the soldier’s very own ESP.

I accept that the proof of such a thing is subjective, but it has saved my life enough times that I give it full credence. But up until now, despite my fanciful notions during the assault on Petoskey’s building, I hadn’t given the existence of ghosts much credibility. How could I? The number of men I’ve killed, I would go insane if I dwelled on the number who must haunt me.

Still, belief in ghosts or not, for more than a heartbeat I genuinely accepted that the thing in front of me was a vengeful spirit risen from its grave to exact retribution. I stepped back, eyes wide, mouth hanging open. And if the blade it held in its clawed fist had been
animated, I doubt that I could’ve stopped it scything my head from my shoulders.

“Holy Christ!” I heard the words, but was unsure whether it was me or Rink that said them. Maybe we both did.

Point Shooting is based entirely on the natural posture, the natural reaction to lifting the gun and firing wherever danger presents itself. When confronted by this diabolical creature, my reactions failed me. The SIG hung useless by my side.

Then Rink was beside me. He laid a hand on my shoulder. “Hunter…we gotta keep moving, man. Can’t let this damn thing throw us.”

“It’s a little hard not to,” I croaked.

The miasma of fear gripped me, and it was an effort to shake free of it. When I did, it was through the exhalation of pent-up fear.

“What the hell is it?” Rink asked.

I looked again at the specter in the mist. A human skull grinned back at me. But I could see now that there was no life behind the recessed sockets, no drool dripping from its widely splayed teeth. It was a simulacrum, given the illusion of life by Cain’s artistic dementia. The skull was mounted on a pole pushed into the sand. A tattered blanket was draped over a crossbar to give the semblance of a body. Hands and forearms—withered skin and tendons holding together the bones—were bound to other poles concealed within the blanket. I shuddered.

“It’s a warning,” I finally managed. “Or a gatekeeper. I think we’ve found him, Rink.”

“You’re not kidding.”

We both heard the music again; a sonorous piping this time. I stepped closer to the skeletal form. The music was coming from its bones. Tiny drill holes along the radius and ulna of the forearms made for a maniac’s idea of a flute. When the wind picked up, it disturbed the blanket and produced a racket like a wind chime.

“Son of a bitch’s crazy as a bag of weasels,” Rink offered.

As we walked on, I couldn’t help peering back at the ghostly form.
Who do those bones belong to?
I wondered. Is there a family someplace that to this day hopes that their loved one will turn up one bright morning and announce that he’s fine, that he only needed to get away for a while but now he’s back? I promised myself that I would see to that return, that I would take this person home again. The day wouldn’t be bright, and neither would he be fine, but he would be going home.

As would the next twelve skeletons we came across as we walked.

It was an unholy baker’s dozen.

All were posed in similar styles to the first, strung up on poles, bodies formed of blankets. But some were in reclining postures, others placed to give the impression of flight, two of them strung together as though engaged in a slow waltz. Cain was indeed crazy, as dangerous as a pit of venomous reptiles, and every bit as sly.

Across the amphitheater we went, and with every step my dread grew. I wondered if we were already too late. If John were already strung up in an insane effigy to Cain’s dementia.

The tiny bones strewn in the sand gave me an even greater loathing for Cain than before. Many were the remains of tiny animals and birds fallen out of the sky, but here and there, I saw the phalanges of human fingers protruding from their graves as though clawing their way to an afterlife denied them. Rink looked equally disturbed. I didn’t know what face I wore, but I was sure that if my friend studied me now, he’d see that I, too, could fear.

The wind was picking up. The mist—not true mist, but particles of the alkaline desert borne on the wind—billowed around us. It invaded my mouth and nostrils, caused me to squint. I had the horrifying notion that the desert was actually formed of particles of bone, and I gagged and spat in reflex. It was an absurd notion, but it was there. I pulled my shirt up over my face as protection against inhaling dead men’s dust.

“Hunter.”

I heard Rink’s whisper. He was thirty feet to my left, crouching down, gun trained on something I couldn’t see. I stopped, took up a crouch of my own. Rink indicated something beyond him that I couldn’t discriminate from the shifting veil of sand. Duckwalking, I made my way over.

“There” was all Rink said. I could make out a hulking formation of rocks jutting out of the desert like the ruins of a mythical castle. Like the sand, the rocks were chalk white and glowed with phosphorescence against the night sky. If this amphitheater had once been the floor of an ocean, then the rocks were millions of years old, ancient testimony to volcanic activity that had shattered the sea floor in a cataclysmic upheaval. Directly ahead of us, two more spectral forms marked a fissure in the rocks. Truly, they were gatekeepers this time.

This had to be the final place. Cain’s place.