Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (20 page)

Charlie gave a howl as he snared his own Colt in his hands, clicking the hammer back and going to work, the blasts rising like cannon fire in the otherwise quiet night. Smoke puffed and flames spewed. In little more time than it took to blink, both Burt and the other man beside him were grunting as Hondo’s lead punched them back in their saddles. They bounced off their horses’ rumps and tumbled on down to the yard, the horses pitching and screaming and lurching away to gallop off in the night.

The boys looked at Charlie. One-Eye threw up an arm in exasperation. “We coulda handled it, Charlie. No need for all that commotion.”

Hooves thudded. Beyond the boys, the third rider was a shadow galloping off to the west, his silhouette bobbing against the stars. Charlie took long strides as he crossed the yard and stepped into the trail, raising one of his pistols once more, narrowing one eye as he aimed.

The Colt leaped and roared.

Charlie listened. The hooves continued thudding. Then there was the gravelly thump of a body hitting the ground.

Charlie lowered the warden’s Colt, turned, and headed back toward the fire where the other three were still regarding him doubtfully. “You boys ain’t gonna be changing’ for a while,” he said as he continued toward the cabin and the lovely, insatiable witch awaiting him there. “So keep your nasty ole selves on a short rein, hear?”

Chapter 19
    

WOLF HUNT

Tracking the wolves out of Hellsgarde gave even experienced trackers like Zane and Hathaway fits the next morning.

Inside the canyon, the prints were sometimes men’s boots and then wolf paws and then back to boots again—as though the four were still trying to get steady on their wolf legs. They had run down the tunnel as wolves, then sprinted along the Hog Wollop Trail for about a hundred yards before swerving off the wagon road and heading dead south across a high-desert bowl. The four were running all-out, obviously enjoying their new freedom.

They slowed their pace about halfway across the five-mile-wide bowl, milled around a long-dead deer carcass surrounded by coyote and bobcat tracks in a shallow dry wash, then followed another wash up through low hills stippled with Spanish bayonet, post oaks, and cedar. Here, the rough terrain made for slow
going for Zane’s and Angel’s horses and even for Hathaway’s mule. The wolf tracks were harder to follow, as the four spread out here across the hillocks and rocky knobs, but Hathaway found where they converged once more on a freshly killed elk.

They’d gutted the beast, ripping out most of the good meat and organs, including the liver and heart, and had a leisurely meal before drawing water from a nearby spring. Their prints were clearly etched in the mud rimming the moss-edged bowl in the rocks.

Refreshed, they’d continued southwest over a low jog of sandy hills.

The trackers had an easier time following the pack here but a harder time later on when they’d followed a rocky draw that rose up the side of a steeply shelving mesa. It was late in the day when they came to the mesa’s lip, where all four prints simply disappeared.

Zane stepped down from General Lee’s back, dropped to a knee beside the tracks, and looked over the edge of the cliff. A trail furrowed with narrow wheel tracks curved about fifty feet below, coming up an incline on the left and twisting and turning on down the grade to the right before straightening out and heading across a rocky flat. The sun was low, drawing shadows out from the sage and greasewood clumps, brushing the cedars with soft copper light.

“That’s the Drier-Phelps Stage Company Road. Follows an old fur traders’ route from Taos all the way to Tucson.”

Zane looked at the trail, unable to see any wolf tracks in the finely churned, pale brown powder. He looked at Hathaway crouched beside him. “You reckon they hopped the stage?”

“I reckon I wouldn’t put anything past ’em.”

“That must be what they did,” Angel said.

The marshal was holding a pair of field glasses to her eyes and looking south along the stage road. “Buzzards ahead. Feasting on something along the trail.” She glanced at Zane and Hathaway as she dropped the glasses back into one of her saddlebag pouches. Then she reined Cisco around and trotted along the edge of the mesa, scouring the ridge face for a way down to the trail.

She found it a few minutes later, and Hathaway and Zane followed her down the perilous path twisting among red rocks and boulders. Zane brought up the rear, moving more slowly with the casket behind him, not wanting to crack a wheel or an axle. When they reached the trail, they scoured the area for more wolf prints.

Finding none, they decided to head south, the direction in which the stage’s tracks said it was heading, and soon drew rein. Just ahead, buzzards were milling around a bloody woman’s body dressed in a shredded dark red traveling suit. She lay parallel to the trail, hugging the right shoulder, one buzzard on her head, another on her belly.

The baldheaded, beady-eyed carrion eaters eyed the interlopers angrily, squawking their disdain and flexing their wings. Several more were hunkered down on both sides of the trail where they were dining on spilled entrails. A few more milled farther up the road, where Zane could see another body lying father off the trail about ten yards.

Zane stared down at the woman, whom he judged to be in her late forties, early fifties. A cameo pin was still stuck to her red jacket, which was spotted with the darker red of blood. Her limbs were stretched out to both sides of her, and she stared up at the sky through empty sockets.

Zane felt a keen revulsion. Murder for the sake of murder—that was the wolf’s way. He thought of that vile predator lurking around inside him, and it made him want to throw his guts up.

“Take time to bury her?” Hathaway asked.

Zane shook his head. “Best not. Best to get on up the trail. She’s dead. More’ll soon be dead if we don’t catch up to Charlie Hondo.”

Angel gigged her paint on up the trail. Zane and Hathaway followed, stopping beside her near the other body, another woman, lying in the brush off the trail’s left side. The shaggy black buzzards mewled and squawked in a half circle around her, one feeding on the navel exposed by the torn, spruce-green traveling suit.

Probably a sister of the other. Maybe a mother and daughter traveling together. Hard to say, with all the blood. Zane resisted the urge to shoot the buzzard off the woman’s belly. Like the other woman, she was dead. And buzzards needed to eat, too. Even if he and the others buried these women, coyotes or wildcats would likely dig them up again.

“Let’s ride.” Zane mashed heels to General Lee’s flanks, and galloped on up the trail, Angel and Hathaway falling in behind him.

He didn’t slow when he spied several more bodies lying off in the sagebrush. He saw a blood-splattered coach gun, too, leaning against a sage-shrouded boulder as though it had been purposely set there. Most likely, that was where it had tumbled after the shotgun messenger had dropped it.

They rode hard for thirty minutes before rounding the base of a broad escarpment. At the bottom of the gentle grade before them lay a relay station—the Saber Creek Station, Zane knew
from having crisscrossed this country several times in the past, hunting spooks. The stage sat in the middle of the yard, between the stock tank and windmill. In the holding corral off the barn, several horses stood like statues, heads hanging, a couple lazily switching their tails.

The group continued down into the yard, looking around cautiously, all shucking their rifles from their saddle sheaths and racking rounds into the chambers. They paused at the edge of the yard. Zane detected a sickly sweet stench in the desert off to his left and recognized it instantly. Putrefying human flesh.

They continued on into the yard, Zane edging away from the others and moving toward the stage whose wagon tongue drooped to the ground. Before he was twenty yards away from it, he heard the flies, and now as he approached he saw the clouds of them swarming around the carriage.

He rode up and glanced in the window. It was as though someone had taken a bucket of blood and sloshed it over both cowhide seats and walls and even the ceiling. There was more red than any other color in there. More blood lay thick in the dust beside the carriage, and as Zane gigged General Lee forward, he spied even more just ahead of the tongue. Men had been killed there, too.

He swung General Lee around and galloped across the yard and into the desert to the southwest, reining up when he saw the four bodies lying in the sage—dragged there and dumped unceremoniously. One older gent, two young men, and a young woman who wasn’t wearing a stitch and whose pale body looked obscene in the harsh western light.

They’d been worked over by the carrion eaters, as well, until there were few distinguishing characteristics. Tonight, the coyotes and bobcats would return to fight over what was left.

Zane touched his moccasin heels to the palomino’s flanks, and rode back into the yard, circling the holding corral twice and leaning out away from his saddle to inspect the ground etched with multiple sets of shod hooves. Angel and Hathaway were filing out of the cabin, holding their rifles and casting cautious glances around the yard.

As Hathaway dropped to one knee about thirty feet in front of the cabin, near the stock tank, Zane pulled General Lee back over toward the cabin, where Angel’s horse and Hathaway’s mule stood ground-tied.

“Nothin’ in there,” Angel said, grabbing Cisco’s reins.

“No, they left early yesterday morning. They’re long gone. Rode out on five horses.”

Angel slid her rifle into her saddle boot. “Five?”

“Maybe one’s a packhorse. Maybe they met up with someone else here. Ravenna Gonzalez-Vara.”

“Got somethin’ over here.”

Hathaway was still down on one knee and staring at the ground before him. Zane swung out of the leather and set his rifle on his shoulder as he and Angel walked past a fire ring heaped with gray ashes, and over to the scout, slanting their long shadows across Hathaway and the track he was inspecting. It looked like the print of a large bird. Zane had seen such prints embedded in ancient lava in Utah and Arizona, and had figured them to be the marks of a winged dinosaur from eons past. Not only strange to see one similar in the finely churned dust and horse shit of the station yard, but also chilling.

Walking around, he saw several more prints just like it. As though one of those winged dinosaurs had been walking around out here recently. Or something akin to it.

A dragon, say.

Hathaway walked a few feet away from the first print and stooped to run his gloved hand over a sage shrub, crunching the blackened branches in his hand. “Burned.”

“I have a feeling your friend Ravenna was here,” Angel told Zane, lightly jeering.

“One good thing.” Zane raked a thumb down his bearded jaw and stared at the corral. “They not runnin’ as wolves. They’re in the saddle. Ravenna must be tapped out, saving her strength.”

“For what?” Angel asked, moving up beside him. “Where are they headed and why? Elaina have any idea at all…during your private conversation?”

Zane shook his head slowly.

Behind him, Hathaway gave a fateful sigh. “Hell, they’re Hell’s Angels. They’re probably gonna run and kill awhile for fun, then try to slip in among the usual crowd again, just like they done before ole Charlie was caught in Denver.”

“I don’t think so.”

Zane stared down the trail colored gray brown with the sun tumbling behind the western ridges, remembering the fear in Elaina’s eyes that had pricked the base of his spine with the point of a cold, sharp nail. The memory of it did the same again now, and he felt the urge to hurry.

“Nah, I don’t think so. Let’s mount up.”

“Dark soon,” Angel said.

“We have another hour of light left.” Zane slid his rifle into its saddle boot and stepped into the leather. “Let’s make use of it.”

He touched moccasin heels to General Lee’s flanks.

They made camp that night in a box canyon south of Alamosa, and ate a meager supper of jerky, hardtack, and coffee. Wolves howled from the surrounding ridges and canyons. They took turns keeping watch from a scarp high over the camp.

During Zane’s time on the scarp, he could hear the slightest rustle of burrowing creatures in the brush up and down the canyon they were in. He could hear the howl of a distant coyote, smell the blood of a rabbit killed by a hawk that the night breeze brought to him from the north, possibly far, far away.

Turning his attention to the camp below in which the fire guttered weakly, flames fingering up from a bed of umber coals, he could hear Angel’s slow breathing as she lay curled in her blankets. From time to time, she gave a soft moan, and he wondered what she was dreaming about.

Him?

Her father, who had also broken her heart when he, too, had become a ghoul? James Coffin was a renegade now, running wild in the Montana mountains.

All Zane’s senses were almost frighteningly keen and alive. The feeling made his limbs tingle thrillingly. At times, despite his trail fatigue, he felt a surge of raw power that made him want to run and climb and jump and…what?