Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (16 page)

Zane had ridden only halfway through the carnage before his eyes were aching from the stench of burned flesh, leather, and horsehide combined with the dragon smell of brimstone he’d noted before.

“There must be twenty soldiers here, Uriah.” Angel’s voice was muffled by the red neckerchief she held to her mouth and nose. She stopped her paint beside a boulder near which another horse, its burned rider’s right leg poking from beneath it, smoked and sizzled, the belly expanding and contracting from the gases inside. “They must be out of Fort Saber near Socorro.”

“This is Abner Dean’s command.”

“Who?”

“Buddy of mine. Captain of the first cavalry who rides patrol around here.” Zane looked at a horse and a charred black skeleton several yards to his left. “A good man, for a blue belly. Poor bastard didn’t know what hit him.”

“Hold it right there!”

Zane snapped his head around, trying pinpoint the owner of the burly voice. His eyes stopped on a short, portly black gent in buckskins and blue cavalry hat standing in a deep notch in an escarpment against the base of the bluff. He was round-faced, and his woolly black beard was liberally sprinkled with gray. He held a Sharps carbine to his shoulder and was squinting as he aimed down the barrel.

“One wrong move out of either one of you, I’ll drill ya good, kick ya out with a cold shovel!”

Zane studied the black man. “Who the hell are you?”

“Scout. Ride over here, both of ya.” He added with menace, “
Slow.
And keep them hands where I can see ’em.”

Zane and Angel shared a glance, then moved their horses forward across the hollow. They halted near the mouth of the ravine where the short, stocky black man stood, aiming his cocked carbine, coffee-brown cheeks bunched as he squinted against the sun.

Angel glanced in revulsion at the carnage around them. “Put the gun down, mister. You overestimate us if you think we did this.”

Zane, within twelve feet of the man with the rifle, could see that despite the rough features and smoke-stained buckskins bespeaking a man of a long career on the Western frontier, the officer was as stunned by the bizarre happening here as Zane and Angel were. His chocolate eyes were rheumy and uncertain—an uncustomary look for the man, obviously. Like the wolfer and the marshal, he was as frightened as a kid just run out of a haunted house by an ax‑wielding blood-swiller.

“I seen it.” The black man mashed his lips together inside his thick, curly beard. He seemed a little incredulous about the rifle, but he was too stunned to lower it.

Vaguely, he wanted to put human or known ghoul form to the killings. Humans, swillers, and the like were more easily understood, more easily held responsible for their actions than that winged, fire-breathing, man-incinerating creature known only in fairy tales.

He said in his deep, quavering voice, “Don’t know if I believe what I saw. I take it you seen it, too?” The skin above the bridge of his freckled, wedge-shaped nose wrinkled.

“We saw it,” Zane said. “Saw it a while ago, too. It took out a passel of Apaches on our trail. Torched ’em just like Abner Dean’s boys.”

The black man lowered his rifle to hip level, keeping it aimed in the general direction of Zane and Angel, canting his head to one side. His buckskin shirt was sleeveless, and his black upper arms hung like slabs of charred beef at his sides. “You knew Dean?”

“That’s right. When he was stationed at Fort Bowie, I rode scout for him against a pack of Injun swillers in the Chiricahuas. I’m Uriah Zane. This here’s Angel Coffin, deputy U.S. marshal out of Denver.”

“I’m done having that carbine aimed at me, mister,” Angel said tightly.

He depressed the Sharps’s hammer and raised the barrel, pressing the stock against his double cartridge belts from which several knives and pistols jutted. A thin smile parted his cracked, pink lips, and his weary eyes flashed in recognition. “You got your father’s disposition, Marshal Coffin.”

Angel frowned.

“You don’t remember. I don’t blame you. I was your father’s deputy when he was sheriff o’ Julesburg.” He patted his hard, black belly angling roundly out from behind his worn buckskin shirt trimmed with Indian designs that Zane recognized as Coyotero. “And I was, oh, about fifty pounds lighter.”

“Alpheus Hathaway!” Angel’s face lit up, white teeth flashing, as she swung down from her saddle and ran into the broad arms of the burly Army scout.

He laughed and held her tightly, patting her back. His face sobered quickly, and he glanced from Zane to the burning shrubs and charred bodies around them, the stench not so bad here as the breeze was out of the north. “Sorry place for a reunion, huh, girl?”

Angel pulled away from him, following his gaze, her own smile fading quickly, as well. “At least twenty men, Al.”

“Twenty-three. I rode with ’em as chief packer and scout. I was ridin’ ahead, as the Lipans been on the prod of late, though it wasn’t the ’Paches we was after. We was headed for Hellsgarde
Penitentiary over in Devil’s Canyon.” He canted his head to indicate southwest, talking to Zane now, too. “I was up there on the saddle, headin’ back this way, when I seen the bird.”

He shook his head and looked truly befuddled, almost out of his mind in confusion and bereavement. “A fire-breathin’ bird.”

“A dragon,” Angel said softly, as though to herself, as she looked around.

“Yessir. As real now as the blood-swillers and shape-shiftin’ wolves from across the ocean. What’s the frontier comin’ to?” Hathaway looked at Zane, furling his brows. “It’s almost like Hell’s doors done opened again, just like they did back in sixty-three, lettin’ ghouls from our worst nightmares out.”

He paused, grimaced sadly. “I’d like to bury these boys. But there’s no time. We was headed for Hellsgarde. Been a break there.”

“Nah,” Zane said. “Not possible. Hellsgarde’s an impregnable castle. Hell, Devil’s Canyon itself allows no way in or out except through a stout steel-mesh door.”

“That’s what I said when Major Dean told me about it, and signed me up to scout the expedition.” Hathaway studied Zane. “You’re Uriah Zane.”

“That’s right.”

“I’d recognize you anywhere, Mr. Zane.” Hathaway walked over and extended his hand, and Zane shook it. “Pleased to make your acquaintance. You’ll be interested to know that the four survivin’ Hell’s Angels broke out of Hellsgarde. Three broke in, broke Charlie Hondo out.”

Zane straightened in his saddle, stared at the man as though he’d spoken in a foreign tongue. Rage bit him like an Apache
arrow. Rage and fear. That the man who had led the wolf pack that had wiped out several Confederate companies including his brother and several cousins and an uncle was free, was beyond belief.

He hardened his jaws and shook his head. Suddenly, he neck-reined General Lee around, ground his heels into the horse’s flanks, and bounded off at a dead gallop toward the blue, serrated ridges of the San Juan Mountains rising in the west.

Chapter 15
    

A BREED OF FLYIN’ CRITTER

Zane checked General Lee down after a quarter-mile sprint, realizing that killing his prized horse wouldn’t get him to Hellsgarde. Gradually, Angel and Hathaway, who rode a tall and surprisingly quiet gunmetal-gray mule, caught up to him and kept pace to either side of him.

“How’d it happen, Hathaway?” Zane asked the cavalry scout.

“Don’t know the answer to that question, Mr. Zane. All I know is most of the guards was killed, but they sent a telegraph message to the fort yesterday, asking for help to track the killers down and manpower to keep the rest of the ghouls in their cages.”

“Any others get away?”

“Don’t believe so. Three Angels were hauled through the gates in a jail wagon, though no one knew they was Angels. Didn’t even know they was ghouls. Killed some federal badge
toters to get themselves hauled to Hellsgarde, then shapeshifted soon as they got inside the main door, sprang Charlie Hondo, killed the warden and a passel of guards.”

“They changed in broad daylight?” Angel was dubious. No ghouls were ever hauled by night. Not on any night.

“That how I understood it, Miss Angel.”

Zane said, “How’d they get out the tunnel? You couldn’t drive a Baldwin locomotive under full steam through those bars. And not even a ghoul could climb those canyon walls.”

“Don’t know the answer to that, Mr. Zane. The message that come in didn’t tell us much, just to fog the trail out to Hellsgarde as fast as we could.”

“You can call me Uriah.”

“All right. An’ I’m Al. What do you suppose ole Charlie’s intentions are now that he’s free?”

“No tellin’,” Angel said, riding on the other side of Zane. “But I’d bet the seed bull he’s not aimin’ to start a church.”

They pushed their horses hard toward the steep ridge wall behind which the appropriately named Devil’s Canyon and Hellsgarde prison lay.

The ridge stood tall and dark and fittingly ominous, owning the shape of a black-scorched sawtooth blade. While they’d spotted the ridge not far from where they’d met Hathaway, the formation rose before them slowly across the cedar-stippled flat scored with sudden arroyos and pocked with low bluffs. Slowly, the pits and troughs and fissures in the ridge’s sheer wall gained shape and dimension.

The October sun hammered down, and the day grew hot.
The air smelled of greasewood and sage, and there were occasional tinges of blossoming autumn wildflowers. The sky, to the group’s relief, remained free of dragons.

When the trio had slowed their mounts after a long lope, giving them a rest, Angel swung her paint up beside Hathaway’s mule, which the black scout called Annabelle and which he’d been riding for nearly six years, preferring the mule’s bottom and sure-footedness over what he called the clumsiness and unreliability of horses.

“Sure is nice to see you again, Al,” Angel said. “Though I wish it were under better circumstances.”

“Them boys didn’t deserve to die like that. Personally, I’d like to give that bird about twelve rounds of twelve-gauge buck, if I ever see him again.” Hathaway patted the long, double-barreled shotgun that rode in a saddle sheath on the opposite side from his rifle. Like most frontiersmen, he also had a crossbow lashed to his saddle, draped across one of his saddlebag pouches, the flap of which was stamped U.S. He frowned apprehensively. “Why is it I have a feeling I will?”

“Why is it I have a feeling that twelve rounds of twelve-gauge buck won’t bring it down?”

Hathaway glowered, then, as he studied the young woman he’d known long ago, gave a low whistle. “Look at you. The last time I seen you, you was in pigtails and tendin’ chickens behind you and your pa’s house when you weren’t out trying to bring down sage hens with your slingshot. Now…why, you’re a full-grown woman.”

He grinned brashly, showing a nearly full set of large, white teeth. “With all the curves to prove it!”

Angel colored with embarrassment.

Hathaway glanced over at Zane. “Ain’t she a fine-lookin’ woman?”

Zane glanced over at Angel, who did not look at him. “About the finest I’ve seen.”

“I know it ain’t none of my business, but are you two…?”

“Hell, no,” Angel said too quickly. Then, to soften it: “You best get yourself under rein, Mr. Hathaway. I’m also a federal marshal and I do not cotton to bein’ harassed by an old saddle tramp.”

Hathaway shifted his questioning gaze between Zane and Angel, then chuckled uneasily.

After a time, as they rode straight toward the ridge, following the wagon trail they’d picked up several miles back, he said without looking at Angel, “Again, this ain’t none of my business, but any word about your pa?”

“No.”

Zane hadn’t expected her to elaborate, as she rarely spoke of her father since the respected lawman James Coffin had been turned into a swiller by a pack haunting the Missouri River breaks up in Dakota. They had attacked him and two other federal marshals when they were investigating illegal shipments of whiskey to the Sioux reservation near Bismarck. So he was surprised now to hear her say, “Last I heard he was spotted in Montana. That was two years ago. He sent me a letter once, but I didn’t open it.”

“Why not?”

“He’s a killer, Al. There’s a high bounty on his head. Like most, he just can’t resist human blood. Even if he could, once they’ve changed, they’re no longer the people they were.” She turned her head slightly to give Zane a quick, sidelong glance.

He was glad when they saw the tunnel mouth at the bottom of the ridge, and the six or seven soldiers milling around a Gatling gun on a tripod aimed straight into the hand-hewn and dynamite-blasted cavern. Two others were hunkered in rocks on both sides of the trail, sitting smoking against the rocks until one swung his head toward Zane’s group and whistled at the guard on the other side of the trail from him. Both soldiers jerked to life and grabbed their carbines.

“Who goes there?” shouted the young soldier on one knee atop a boulder on the trail’s right side. They were skittish
as hell.

Angel called, “I’m a deputy United States marshal. We got word of the attack on the prison and are here to investigate. Who’s in charge?”

The rifle-wielding guards glanced at each other. Another swung the Gatling gun around on its wooden tripod, and aimed the six-barreled weapon at the group.