Ghostwalkers (40 page)

“That's our cue to get the hell out of here,” said Grey. “Let them get drunk.”

Looks Away nodded and began leading the way along the ragged line of boulders. When they were a hundred yards from the scene of slaughter, they paused. The last rock in the line was big enough to hide them both, and they could see a clear path that led down to the shoreline. If they could reach it, then they could try and make their way back to Chesterfield's basement.

The only problem was that between their rock and the safety of the distant shoreline was an open space of nearly five hundred yards. Crossing that without being seen was virtually impossible. The soldiers were at ease and still milling around. Some admiring their new tanks, others staring in wondrous appreciation at the gleaming hulk of Samson. Grey noted that no one looked at the smears of red. Was it cold dismissal? Indifference? Or were they afraid to see what these new machines could do to bodies as frail as their own?

Grey had to believe it was the latter more than anything.

He was a soldier, too. Maybe he no longer wore the uniform, but his life had been defined by warfare. He'd grown up during the age when machines were replacing men. There were factories in Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia where machines clanked along day and night while the former factory workers starved. Metal warships were fast replacing wood and sailcloth. And now this. Horseless carriages that could bring cannons right up to the enemy's gates, and metal monsters who could slaughter ordinary flesh-and-blood soldiers with impunity. It was ghastly.

Some of this was the result of ghost rock and the scientific leaps that had occurred since its discovery. Some—perhaps much—was simply that the world had changed. It was no longer the one he'd been born into thirty-three years ago.

“We have to warn people,” he said again.

Looks Away nodded. “If it's not too late.”

The gap between shelter and escape seemed to stretch for a million miles.

“I, um…,” began Looks Away nervously, “could cause a distraction. You could slip away…”

“Nice gesture, but no. We
both
get out.”

“How?”

“I—,” Grey was about to answer when he saw a familiar figure walk out from between the gates. Tall, dressed in black, wearing a gun slung low on his hip. He walked with a pantherish grace and came to stand with Deray and the generals. Looks Away saw him at the same moment and seized Grey's wrist in a crushing grab.

“Look!” he cried. “That's—.”

“Lucky Bob Pearl,” finished Grey. The Harrowed accepted a glass of wine and sipped it, his dark eyes roving over the faces of the generals. Then they all laughed at something Deray said. Lucky Bob's laugh looked and sounded genuine, but Grey wasn't fooled. Those eyes were the eyes of the dead.

They were demon eyes, and he could only imagine what things a manitou would find amusing. Certainly not a conversational witticism.

Deray separated himself from his guests and stood apart with Lucky Bob, their heads bent together in private conversation. Grey and Looks Away were too far away to hear a word of it.

“Well, they certainly seem chummy,” observed Looks Away.

“Whatever they're talking about, I don't much like it.”

They crouched there, tense and uncertain, for nearly half an hour. Then fortune dealt another card.

It was one of the soldiers who spotted her. An Italian, who was standing atop the tank his general had bought. He happened to peer off toward the path that led down to the chasm. He frowned, cupped his hands around his eyes, and stiffened. He pointed and rattled off something in Italian. Other men turned. And eventually, so did Aleksander Deray and Lucky Bob Pearl.

They all turned as a slim figure in sheer gossamer walked with languorous slowness toward them. Her body was ripe, her hair a mass of black curls, her eyes as dark as a midnight sky.

Although they did not look it from that distance, Grey knew those eyes were green.

The woman called out a name. “
Deray!
”

The necromancer stiffened, and beside him Lucky Bob went for his gun, but Deray stayed him with a gesture. He shook his head and a dark smile blossomed on his face.

Grey heard Looks Away utter a low moan of sick despair.

His friend spoke her name.

“
Veronica.”

The dead woman walked toward the gathered men who stood waiting for her as if this were all part of some prearranged drama. It was not, of course, and Grey found himself frightened by what Deray might do to the woman who wore the skin of the woman his friend had loved.

“What's she
doing
?” demanded Looks Away in a strangled whisper.

Veronica did not walk directly to where Deray stood, but instead angled over to stand in front of the silent giant, Samson. All eyes were on her.

“I think … I think she's giving us a chance,” said Grey.

To do what—?”

“To live,” said Grey, then he amended it. “To get out of here alive.”

“But why? That's not even Veronica. It's a mockery of her. A ghost or whatever damned thing she's become. She's in league with those sods. She's come to tell them we're here and—”

“No,” said Grey, touching his companion's arm. “I don't think so. Whatever else she is, that woman is no friend to Deray, which means Veronica's on
our
side.”

“Impossible. Veronica is dead. Lost.”

Grey glanced at him. The tone of Looks Away's words was harsh and bitter, but the look on his face told a different story. There was a complexity of emotions warring on the Sioux's features. Anger and gried, pain … and something else.

Love?

Grey did not know what his friend truly felt for the dead woman, but he suspected that Looks Away had been greatly underplaying his affection for Veronica. That made this all so much more terrible.

Everyone on the plain had turned to stare. Veronica had become the center of all attention. Of course she was. Tall and beautiful, with a voluptuous body clearly visible through the sheer fabric and each curve accentuated by the blue-white light that burned within. Grey imagined that many of the soldiers would be afraid of her, repelled by her, but nevertheless enthralled. He hadn't known the woman in life, but in death she was magnificent.

Aleksander Deray, flanked by Lucky Bob Pearl and the cluster of generals, approached her but they did so without haste and perhaps with a bit of understandable caution.

For the generals, Grey assumed it was fear and caution. For Deray? Probably curiosity and maybe some appreciation for whatever was about to happen. He had that kind of look on his ascetic face.

Lucky Bob was smiling a cold, cold smile as he followed his master.

So many smiles. As if this was something wonderful, as if it was something unlooked-for but delightful. Like an improbable meeting of old friends on some unlikely street.

He took his companion's arm and began pulling him toward the open space they needed to cross.

“We have to go.”

“I can't leave her there,” said Looks Away, tugging his arm free.

“We have to.”

On the field Veronica and Deray now stood a dozen paces away. Grey could hear a faint murmur of their conversation, but he couldn't make out a single word.

“Looks—come
on,”
snapped Grey.

“No! They'll kill her.”

Grey grabbed his shoulder and turned him around roughly, then he bent close. “They already
have
. Don't you get that? They murdered Veronica and now whatever of her is left of her is trying to save us.”

Looks Away stared at him. Conflicted and appalled.

“It's not her,” said Grey in a kinder tone than he'd used a moment before. “Listen to me, brother, she's gone. Veronica's gone. Now her ghost is giving us a chance…”

Looks Away still didn't move. Grey tightened his grip on the other man's shoulder. “Do you want Veronica's death to mean nothing? Do you want Deray to get away with this?”

“No…” was Looks Away's almost soundless reply.

“Then we need to get more men and more weapons. We can't win this fight. We can't even
fight
this fight. Not now. Smart soldiers know when to retreat from the battle so they can re-engage when they have better odds.”

“I'm no damn soldier,” said the Sioux, slapping Grey's hand away.

“Yeah … you are. We both are. We're at war with Aleksander Deray,” said Grey. “We have to make a choice. Fight now and almost certainly lose. Or fight later when we have a plan and a chance, and maybe actually kill that evil son of a bitch.”

Looks Away unslung the Kingdom rifle. “I could kill him now.”

“From this distance? Not a chance.”

“If we got closer—.”

“They see us coming and wipe us out. Don't be crazy.”

The Sioux chewed his lip. “What about a chain reaction? If I shot the nearest undead, the ghost rock bullet would explode the rock in him, and perhaps that would cause a chain reaction.”

“Would that even work?”

“I don't know, but it's worth a try.”

Grey thought about it, then he shook his head. “No. It's too risky.”

“God rot you, we have to do
something
. Don't be a coward.”

Grey turned to him. “Easy now, my friend,” he said coldly. “I know you're upset seeing Veronica and all, but try to use your brain for a minute. If you set off a chain reaction, you might kill half his army—and that's great—but Deray's so far away, and the men closest to him look like ordinary soldiers. They don't have ghost rock implants and they won't explode. If anything, their bodies would shield him and the bastard would slip away. That would leave us with no ammunition left and the
rest
of the army, and all of Deray's allies, coming down on us like the wrath of God. And that's even
if
the explosion doesn't bring down the fucking ceiling. No … much as I wish we could, I don't think we can guarantee that Deray would die. Anything less than that would be us throwing our lives away and failing everyone in Paradise Falls. Think it through, man, and you'll see that I'm right.”

Down on the plain Veronica said something that made Deray clap his hands and laugh out loud. It was not a pleasant laugh.

The Sioux shook his head and fingered the outside of the copper trigger guard. Then he turned his face to a mask of stone, reslung the rifle, and nodded.

“I
will
kill him,” he said. “You hear me, white man? His life is
mine
. And I'll kill anyone who gets in my way.”

Grey nodded. “Fair enough. Now let's go.”

Like silent ghosts they crept from behind their shelter and began moving across the plain toward the sea. They stayed low and moved with many small light, quick steps instead of at a full run. That kept their bodies and equipment from jiggling and making unwanted noise.

Deray's laughter seemed to pursue them.

It drove knives into them.

And it threw fuel on the furnaces of hate that burned in their hearts.

 

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Their path to freedom took them past the railroad tracks and the massive train. They went to the far side of it and ran along the row of empty flatbeds, and then reached the first of the hoppers.

What they saw in the shadows of the hoppers stopped them dead in their tracks.

They hadn't seen this side of the train from their earlier hiding place, but now they could see everything. Too much.

Laid along the ground, one between each of the endless rows of wooden ties, were corpses. They were soldiers.

Some were dressed in the smoke grey or butternut brown of the Confederacy. Others were dressed in Yankee blue. Hundreds of them. All dead.

The stench from their rotting flesh was appalling.

The bodies were clearly battlefield dead. Every man carried evidence of the wounds that had killed them. Black bullet holes. Ghastly shrapnel wounds. Knife slashes. They lay there, face up, their uniform blouses torn open to expose their bloodless chests.

“What
is
this?” said Looks Away, recoiling from the stench and the gruesome violence.

Grey could not answer the question. Instead he stood there, not looking at the bodies on the ground but instead staring in abject horror at the mound of cargo on the nearest hopper.

He had originally thought it might be coal or raw ore heading for the ghost rock smelting fires.

He wished that was true.

What he saw was far, far worse.

The hopper was piled high with more bodies.

Hundreds of them.

Thousands.

Every hopper was full. Mountains of the dead were crammed into the cars. The corpses had been dumped in with no thought to the people they'd once been. They were—what?

Surely Deray had not brought them to bury them.

Then what?

Even as he asked himself the question, he realized that he already knew the answer.

And it was a terrible answer.

“Grey—?” asked Looks Away softly.

Grey didn't answer. Couldn't.

“Grey, do you understand what this is?”

He nodded.

He had thought he'd seen the depth of horror, that he knew its outer boundaries. That he was aware of its rules.

All of that was wrong.

Deray had no rules, no limits.

Grey dragged his wrist across his mouth.

“How many?” he murmured.

Looks Away glanced up at the hopper, then at the others, then down at the corpses laid in a long row here. “Two thousand? Three? Maybe more.”

Grey shook his head. “I think it's a lot more.”

A gleaming black beetle crawled across the face of the nearest corpse. The soldier was from the South. A boy, no more than sixteen. He had a bullet hole in his abdomen and the crust of dried blood. A gut shot and proof that he hadn't died right away. Dead men don't bleed. Bullet wounds to the stomach kill slowly and the pain is enormous. This boy had fought for his flag and probably died screaming and alone. Probably called for his mother rather than God in those last hours. Men do that. They know their mothers will mourn them; God seems to enjoy the slaughter.