Ghostwalkers (22 page)

The Sioux opened his mouth, thought better of it, and turned away. He tapped Brother Joe on the shoulder. “Come along. There are people who could probably use our help.”

They hurried off to tend to the wounded, the shocked, and the grieving.

Hitching up his borrowed pants and all of his courage, Grey walked over to where Jenny stood. The carnage around her was horrific. There was one final rumble of thunder, far away over the ocean. Above them, though, the moonlight was scattering the last of the storm clouds. It spilled a pure white light down on everything.

It seemed odd to Grey. He'd always hated the night and the cold eye of the moon. Now it was the purest thing in his world.

For a long, long time he said nothing. He did not touch her, did not speak her name.

She stood like a statue, frozen by the impossibility of what was happening, and Grey understood that. The world was wrong. Everything was so damn wrong.

He knew that he should find Picky and get the hell out of Paradise Falls. Out of the Maze. Out of California.

Maybe go East. See if Philadelphia was still normal, still sane.

Or perhaps take a ship. He'd heard about something called the
Légion
étrangère.
The French Foreign Legion. They were supposed to be a group of misfits and outcasts, and nothing seemed better suited to him than that.

He almost smiled at the thought. Putting ten thousand miles between him and this godforsaken little town. Putting an ocean between him and this whole broken country.

It was a nice thought.

The moonlight painted everything with a veneer of purity. The mud, the bloodstained buildings, the mangled dead.

The light traced a silver line along the profile of Jenny Pearl.

A pearl in pearlescent light.

A poet could make something out of that.

Very softly, Grey said the only thing that he could say that might matter to her.

He said, “I'm sorry.”

It broke her.

She bent and put her face in her dirty hands and wept. It was a horrible sound. So deep. Torn from some private place.

Jenny turned and leaned against him, and then she wrapped her arms around Grey and clung to him. He hesitated for only a heartbeat, then he took her in his arms and held her as the storm and the madness of this night went away.

 

Chapter Thirty-Seven

They walked through the town together. Silent, his arm around her shoulders, her hand clutching the torn front of her dress.

The town was coming alive, but death circled like a carrion bird. People were in the street and there were torches and gas lamps lit. Three bodies lay on the back of a wagon. A young man named Huck who worked in the livery stable and an older couple—the Delgados—whose family had lived in Paradise Falls for nearly a century. More than thirty were hurt, including a twelve-year-old boy with a bad bite on his upper arm.

Looks Away and Brother Joe were tending to the wounded. It did not surprise Grey that the Sioux was skilled in medicine. The man seemed to have a remarkable depth of knowledge, especially in scientific fields. He diagnosed injuries, cleaned and dressed wounds, and mixed compounds that he said would prevent infection or ease pain. Brother Joe, on the other hand, seemed to be more shamanistic in his approach, using herbs and prayers. In both cases, though, the people seemed to respond to the treatments. It was, Grey knew, as much from the appearance of authority and knowledge as it was from what the men did.

They found the little red-haired girl sitting near Brother Joe. Grey learned that her parents had been badly injured but were expected to recover, and that the girl—whose name was Felicity—was herself unharmed. The blood on her face had not been hers.

Saying that she was uninjured and knowing it to be true, though, were different things. When Grey looked into the girl's eyes he saw that shadows had taken up residence and they would be hard to exorcise.

He carried his own shadows around, so it was something Grey knew all too well.

Thinking that made him glance toward the unlighted far end of town. It was a reflex; something he did when he felt like ghostly eyes were watching him.

There was no one there, though. No one—nothing—that he could see.

“What is it?” asked Jenny.

“Huh?” he said, jolted back to the moment.

“You look like you saw a ghost?”

He turned to her. She was trying to force a smile, but it was a ghastly attempt. It broke apart and fell away, and then she, too, was staring toward the darkness.

“Is it them? Are they back…?”

“No,” he said gently, making himself turn his back on the night. “It's nothing. They're gone. They won't be coming back.”

“How do you know?”

“That damn contraption of Doctor Saint. The gas gun thing. Whatever it is. I think they've had enough,” he said, and nearly added “
I hope.”

Jenny nodded.

“What I don't understand,” she said after a few steps, “is
who
they were. That was Jed Perkins and his men. I mean, that's who some of them were. What happened to them?”

“I'll be damned if I know.”

They walked together to the well at the other end of town. There were four teenagers busy drawing bucket after bucket of water up from the shadows. The town's school marm—a hatchet-faced old buzzard named Mrs. O'Malley—stood guard with a woodsman's axe clenched in her hands. She had a fierce glare in her eyes and her dress was splashed with black blood.

While they were still out of earshot, Grey murmured, “There'll be a story behind that.”

“Sure,” agreed Jenny, “but I know her. She was my teacher, too. She keeps things to herself. Farthest thing on God's earth from a gossip. If there's a story there, and I have no doubt there is, she won't be the one to tell it.”

Grey nodded. “That's how it often plays out.”

Jenny leaned her hip against a hitching post outside of the feed store. “What do you mean?”

He took a moment before answering, but he could see that she wanted to talk. Probably to distract herself from what she
needed
to talk about but wasn't yet ready to face. So he lowered himself onto the edge of the feed store porch.

“History books and newspapers talk about battles as if they're one big event. This side and that side. They talk about the land that's being fought over, the generals or officers, maybe a hero, and they count the dead, but that's not what makes a battle. Not really.” He leaned his forearms on his knees and watched the teens bring up the water. “Battles are people. Battles are small things. They're big, sure, but up close it's man against man. When it starts, okay, it's lines of men firing rifles, but then you get into it, then it's one guy shooting at another. Specifically at another, you understand?”

She nodded.

“It becomes very personal. You fix on someone and you try to kill him, and it hurts you because up close you see that it's just some fellow wearing a uniform. If your folks had moved a hundred miles away and settled on the far side of some invisible line, that might be you over there. It's kids a lot of the time. Especially if the war goes on for a while. Boys who can't shave who are being fed into a meat grinder.” Grey paused, shook his head. “There are these moments in a battle. No one sees them because everyone else is having their own series of moments. But it's all about you in that moment. You. A guy comes at you and you fire your gun—and you miss, or maybe your powder's wet, or maybe it hits his buckle and wings off. Then it's you and him, up close. Hitting each other with your guns 'cause you don't have time to reload. Maybe bayonets or swords or knives. Sometimes it's just hands. And teeth. Dirty fighting. Gutter fighting. And you'll do anything to live through it. To not die.”

She nodded again.

“I remember once, back was I was sixteen—no, seventeen. It was my third battle. We were down in Culpepper County in Virginia. I was with the 46th Pennsylvania Infantry. Papers called it the Battle of Cedar Mountain, though afterward most of the fellows I know called it Slaughter Mountain. Stonewall Jackson plumb beat us to death and nearly ran us all down. The battle was important, because it was the beginning of the South's Northern Virginia Campaign. But on my level, it was me and this other guy fighting in a streambed. He was twice my age and he looked like my Uncle Farley. A lot like him, which still bothers me. Anyway, we were on the fringes of our two lines and we emptied our guns at each other. I could feel his bullets whipping by my head but nothing hit me. Then for a while we were swinging our rifles back and forth like gladiators with swords. Whanging them off each other, trying to bash in each other's heads. It was right about then that the slope we were on crumbled and the two of us slid down into a stream. There we were, half drowned, no guns left, beating the pure hell out of each other. He tried to bash my head in with a hickory branch. I hit him with some stones I picked up. I'm telling you, this fight went on and on. We chased each other up and down the muddy slopes. We kicked each other in the privates. We beat on each other's faces until our hands were busted up.”

“What happened?” she asked.

Grey shook his head. “He slipped on a mossy stone and fell. Hit his head on another stone and was just lying there in the water. So I … well, I…”

“What?”

He cleared his throat. “I sat on him and pushed his head down into the water and held him there for maybe ten, fifteen minutes. Long, long after he stopped moving.”

The night was huge and now there were thousands of stars. The teenagers worked like machines. Lowering, filling, cranking, dumping, lowering again.

“I never told anyone about it,” said Grey.

“It must have been awful,” said Jenny.

“No, that's just it,” he said, “it's
always
awful. It was awful for every man on that field. It's awful for everyone in every war, on both sides and for everyone who lives in the path of the armies.” He pointed to the town. “This was awful for every one of them. Most of them will eat their pain and their horror. Like I did. I never told anyone because it's not something you do. Not unless you save the day and you need the applause to help you win a promotion or an election. Like generals. Like heroes. They say history is written by the winners. That's true to a point. I think what's really true is that history is written by the ambitious.”

Jenny glanced over her shoulder at Mrs. O'Malley. “She's not the ambitious type.”

“No.”

“She wouldn't brag if she won a prize hog at a county fair.”

“A lot of people are like that.”

“Is it pride?” asked Jenny. “Or fear?”

“I don't know. Maybe it's just that on that level, killing is personal. It's something you own, something you have to deal with.”

“Is that how you see it, Grey?” she asked.

When he didn't answer, Jenny came over and sat next to him. So close that her body touched his, and despite the wet clothes she wore, he could feel her heat.

They sat together in a silence that was at first awkward but which became gradually comfortable. Even comforting.

“Those men tonight,” she began slowly.

He nodded.

“I knew most of them. Not just Perkins and the deputies, but a lot of the others as well.”

Grey turned sharply toward her. “What?”

“Most of them I knew only to see. They worked for the railroad. For Nolan Chesterfield.”

“Ah.”

“But the others? They were from here.”

“Here, meaning—?”

“Paradise Falls,” she said. “They were all men from right here in town.”

“Jesus.”

“Aside from the deputies, the rest were men who worked in the mines.”

“Mining for what?”

She looked at him. “What do you think? Ghost rock's the only thing people care about, apart from water.”

“As I understand it, the mines are owned by two men. Some by Chesterfield and most of them by Aleksander Deray.”

“Yes,” she said. “Those men … some of them worked for one, and some worked for the other. But they all died. Mine collapses. Tidal surges into the caverns. And other stuff. Men gone missing and people talking about sea serpents and cave monsters. Crazy stuff.”

“Crazy,” he said, but it didn't sound one bit crazy to him right then. And probably not to her, from the tone of her voice.

He steeled himself to ask the next natural question.

“Jenny…,” he began, but she cut him off.

“I know that was my pa,” she said.

He said nothing.

“He knew me, too.”

Fresh tears glittered on her cheeks.

“And I know he was a monster.”

“I'm so sorry…”

Her mouth was a hard, uncompromising line. “Somebody did that to him. You saw them. Those
things
. You saw the stones in their chests. Somebody did that to them. Which means they did it to my pa. They turned my father into a monster and they sent him to kill me.” She shook her head. Two slow, decisive shakes. “I can't let that go. I never will. I need to find whoever did this—Chesterfield, Deray or someone else. I need to find them and I need to kill them. No … that's not right. I
will
kill them. As God is my witness—if there's even a God left in heaven—I will kill them.”

Grey reached out and took her hand. He entwined his fingers with hers and pulled the back of her hand to his chest. He wanted her to feel the strong, steady beat of his heart.

“And I am going to help you put those evil sons of bitches in the ground.”

 

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Even the longest of nights must end, and that night passed, too.

Grey found his horse, Mrs. Pickles, shivering under a palm tree half a mile from town. Queenie was a few hundred yards away along with a dozen other horses, cows, and sheep. Why the animals had come to this spot to stay safe was something Grey never found out. His horse nickered reprovingly at him, but when Grey produced some carrots from a pocket, Picky forgave him and even pushed against his chest with her long, soft nose.