Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (22 page)

The padre’s cot lay before the hearth, in which a small fire smoldered. On the cot lay a man in threadbare long handles. He had long, obsidian-black hair and a long, sharp, upturned nose. The way he lay bespoke a hump on his back, neck bent at an angle. An empty whiskey bottle and a shot glass sat on the hearth on the far side of the sleeping beast. A cigarette stub lay on the floor a few inches below his sagging, knobby hand with fingernails shaped like arrow points.

On the room’s other side, two more figures lay on a straw pallet—a naked male and a naked female only partly covered by a green wool Army blanket. Lice flecked the hair of each. Two whiskey bottles, one empty, one half-full, and several of the padre’s beer bottles lay or stood around them. The male was spooned against the female, cupping one of her small, pert breasts in his pale, gnarled hand. His face was buried between her shoulder and her neck, and he was snoring loudly.

The female opened her eyes and stared at Zane through sleep
fog. She blinked, recognition flashing in her pale blue eyes as she realized that she was not dreaming the big man in the room. She lifted her head with a start, stretching her lips back from yellow fangs.

A snakelike hiss rose from deep in her throat, and her eyes slanted devilishly. Zane’s Colt roared, spitting smoke and flames into the dimness. The female tipped her head back and clutched her throat with both hands, making strangling sounds and staring wide-eyed at the herringbone pattern on the ceiling, quivering.

The male behind her lifted his head up, coming awake instantly, snarling, and reaching under the pillow they both shared. Zane’s Colt roared twice more, blowing the male back off the cot, both slugs exiting his back with a spray of snot-colored blood and viscera, and painting the whitewashed wall behind him.

The female had fallen onto her back atop the cot, and was flopping around like a landed fish. Zane shot her again, through the heart, then turned toward the other side of the room where the other ghoul was reaching under his own cot for a sawed-off, double-barreled ten-gauge.

As the ghoul brought up the coach gun, Zane drilled him through his left shoulder. The man loosed a shrill falsetto squeal that felt like a slap to the ghoul hunter’s ears, rattling his eardrums painfully. The black-haired hobgobbie dove forward off the bed, turning a complete somersault as he hit the floor, rolling toward the door. As he came to a standing position in his threadbare, filthy white balbriggans, he tried to bring the shotgun up once more, shouting in his bizarre old woman’s voice,
“Fuck you, you red-blooded coyote!”

Zane’s Colt belched twice more, punching one slug through the top of the man’s center chest, another through his other shoulder. The man squealed louder, and Zane threw himself hard to his left as the double-barreled barn blaster roared like a cannon in the close confines, spraying a pumpkin-sized load of buckshot across the kitchen and into the table and wall and through the open back door.

Zane rolled off his left shoulder and hip, dropping his empty pistol and shucking the one holstered on his right side, thumbing the hammer back, narrowing an eye as he planted the bead at the end of the barrel into the V over the cylinder, and fired.

The slug hammered through the ghoul’s forehead, just below his hairline. As he flew back against the door with a high wail, he triggered his gut shredder’s second barrel into the ceiling. He lolled against the door, which wobbled in its frame on weak hinges until it gave way with a crunching splintering sound, and both the door and the ghoul went sailing into the padre’s front yard.

The ghoul piled up atop the door. He sighed heavily and lay still. Greenish-yellow blood oozed from the silver dollar–sized hole in his forehead.

Zane looked around the room, in which powder smoke billowed in blue webs, smelling like rotten eggs. The other two were down and still, oozing their putrid fluids onto the padre’s hard-packed earthen floor.

“Sons o’ bitches,” Zane bit out, wincing at the pain his impact with the floor had caused in his left shoulder.

Slowly, breathing heavily, he gained his knees. He retrieved his empty Colt, then heaved himself to his feet, holstering the right-side gun, flipping open the loading gate on the left-side
gun, spinning the wheel and letting the empty casings tumble onto the floor around his moccasins.

As he plucked fresh shells from his cartridge belt and punched them into the Colt’s cylinder, turning it slowly, hearing each click, he walked through the open door and stepped over the dead ghoul. He looked around, expecting more ghouls from any quarter. They usually ran in packs, and it was odd to find only a few at a time.

He glanced up at the church, then toward a knob of rock looming on his left, then at the garden and clumps of brush and cedars all around the place. He heard a murmur of voices from the direction of the canyon, and stepped farther out away from the padre’s shack to peer the hundred yards down the gradual slope into the deep arroyo.

Three figures were just now crossing the ghost town’s single street and angling toward the base of the slope, looking up at Zane from beneath the brims of their battered hats. They were three ragged-looking hombres in worn trail garb. One wore a duster. He also walked with a limp and had a prominent hump on his back, giving him a twisted look. Zane inspected the other two more closely, saw that they, too, had humps lifting the backs of their shirts.

The one who wore a funnel-brimmed hat, red-and-black-checked shirt, and green neckerchief dropped suddenly to one knee and raised a pistol, aiming up the slope at Zane. The ghoul hunter wasn’t worried about the hogleg. He was pretty much out of range of the short gun, unless the shooter was the best shot Zane had ever known. But ghouls were notoriously lazy and undisciplined, and it was hard to find a good shooter among them.

What had gained the brunt of his attention were the clumps of other ghouls just now spilling out of two of the other rickety, false-fronted buildings on the far side of the ghost town’s narrow main street. They were all slouched and still pulling on shirts or denim jackets and checking pistols as they came on toward the slope. More movement caught Zane’s eye, and he saw three more men filing out of the old Palace Hotel, and then three more men stepped out behind them.

And four more…

A pistol popped. Zane looked straight down below his position and saw smoke puffing in front of the hobgobbie in the checked shirt. The other two men were running up the slope now, taking long strides and casting savage looks up at Zane.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” the ghoul hunter muttered, swinging around and running over to where General Lee stood about fifty feet in front of the padre’s shack, swinging his brown tail back and forth sideways and twitching his ears as he stared down the slope at the crowd headed toward him and his master.

“Easy, fella,” Zane said, quickly shucking his Henry repeater from the saddle sheath.

He ran back to the brow of the hill and quickly, resolutely, dispatched the two ghouls running up toward him and laid out the pistol-wielding ghoul in the checked shirt. That didn’t waylay the others a bit. In fact, it seemed to lure them on.

All twenty or so loosed a low roar and surged forward, filtering out between the dilapidated buildings and running up the slope. For all their sloth and the cumbersome humps on their backs, hobgobbies could run. It was almost as though they had springs in their ankles.

The group was coming on fast, triggering lead.

Zane lowered the Henry and ran back to General Lee.

“Hate to tell ya this, General,” he said, catching up the reins and swinging into the saddle. “But I do believe we’ve done wore out our welcome here in old Dry Wash.”

General Lee replied with a shrill whinny and lunged into a gallop, kicking up great gouts of clay-colored dust behind him.

Chapter 21
    

A SNARLING HORDE

As Zane, atop General Lee, angled down the slope toward the creek threading the canyon’s bottom, he looked to his right. Now the horde of hobgobbies in the grimy garb of thirty‑a‑month-and-found cowpunchers was running along the road paralleling the creek, on an interception course with Zane.

Holding the General’s reins in his teeth and giving the horse his head, Zane shouldered the Henry repeater and snapped off three quick shots. The slugs puffed dust along the road and the slope and skipped away, screaming. That didn’t stop or even slow the hobgobbie horde, as the ghoul hunter had known it prob-
ably wouldn’t.

Once a hobgobbie had you in his sights, there was little stopping him except a slug or an arrow. They could be snivelingly nonaggressive when they weren’t excited, but whipped up by the bloodlust, they’d chase you barefoot across a smoking lava field
and gut you with the short, razor-edged knives they favored, or shoot you with a pistol or hogleg. They lacked coordination, and their eyes were bad, but they could shoot within ten feet as well as your average greenhorn who’d been practicing only a week or two.

The really bad thing about them was how fast on their feet they were. Zane had less ground to cover to the canyon bottom than they did running out of the ghost town, but as fast as they were all moving, as one yipping, snarling, cursing horde along the trail, he judged they were running nearly as fast as General Lee, and the palomino had been cut and gentled out of a bronco mustang herd in the rough country around Arizona’s Chiricahua Mountains.

As he approached the canyon-bottom trail, Zane cursed and snapped off two more shots. One hobgobbie, within fifty yards and coming hard, running abreast of three others, yelped, grabbed his knee, hit the ground, and rolled, nearly tripping one of the others.

They all kept coming.

The front of the snarling, long-striding pack was only thirty feet from the intersection of the two trails when Zane hit the canyon bottom. General Lee gave an indignant whinny at the closing horde and swung hard left, faltering slightly before grinding his rear hooves into the turf and lunging forward until he was in full gallop once more.

Behind Zane, pistols and rifles popped above the hum and buzz of the frenzied ghoul pack. He heard the fast patter of running feet and glanced over his right shoulder just as the lead ghoul pistoned off his heels and made a mad dive forward, scissoring his arms as though to grab one of General Lee’s hammering rear legs.

The ghoul missed by inches. He hit the ground with a shrill, enraged cry, and rolled off to the side of the trail, the one behind him wildly leaping over him, the others hammering on past him and after Zane.

Two of the front-runners were sporadically triggering shots, and several times the ghoul hunter felt the air beside his head curl warmly, saw the bullets plunk into the dust ahead of him. As he approached the rise atop which he’d glassed the canyon an hour ago, one bullet tore through his flapping wolf vest to kiss his right side, about a foot below his armpit. He felt little except the slight dampness of trickling blood.

He glanced behind once more. A few hobgobbies were slowing for the grade, but General Lee was, too, so the horde was continuing to gain on Zane in small increments. He could probably outrun them in time, because General Lee had more staying power than the hobgobbies, who could run like grizzlies for only short stretches, but this group was especially determined. He was beginning to feel the stony chill of the doomed in his bowels when, as he closed the gap between him and the crest of the hill, a familiar sight appeared between a boulder and a gnarled cedar right of the trail.

The Gatling gun’s brass canister flashed as bright as a miniature sun, blinding Zane for an instant. As he snapped his eyes away, he heard the sudden ratcheting of the six-bored gun. Squeals and agonized cries rose behind him as the.45‑caliber slugs tore and crunched through flesh, snapping bones. Zane rode on up and over the rise, leaped out of the saddle, and ran back up to the crest of the hill.

He dropped to one knee and raised the Henry to his shoulder.

Now he could see Angel kneeling behind the Gatling gun
and working the crank for all she was worth, wine-red hair spilling about her shoulders. On the opposite side of the trail, the bulky dark figure of Al Hathaway in his smoke-stained buckskins and blue cavalry hat knelt on a flat-topped boulder, levering rounds from his ’67 Winchester, the empty casings flashing in the sun as they arced back over his right shoulder.

Straight down the trail, a good half of the hobgobbies were down and bloody, a few of the wounded trying to crawl away. Those still on their feet continued to come, showing their teeth between their thin lips as they snarled and raged, so infuriated by the human interlopers, and wanting blood so badly, that they continued heading fiercely, stupidly, straight into the bullet storm.

A few dropped down behind rocks on either side of the trail and tried to return fire, but the Gatling gun had them mostly cowering, unable to lift their heads.

Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!

The hiccupping gun continued to tear through flesh, blow up dust, throw up sage branches, and hammer shards from rocks. Two well-placed bullets blew one of the ghouls’ heads off its neck, which went tumbling in a geyser of snot-colored blood across the gravel, the body it had left kneeling as though in prayer, slowly lowering the Remington .44 in its quivering hand.