Unquiet Dreams (28 page)

I decided my usual empty-headed approach was the best. I didn't have many others. “Howdy, miss!” I said with all the friendliness I could muster. “Thanks a whole heap for getting that crazy lady out of my face and all—for the most part.” I could help adding the last part. Likely she didn't know what I was saying anyway, but I was hoping she understood the tone of my voice as meaning no harm.

It seemed to work, as she lowered the gun and darted a quick glance over at Jim before returning her gaze to me. “You must be the brains of the outfit,” she said in perfect English, albeit with a bit of a funny accent so her T's were almost swallowed.

All the Chinese girls in the world, I get a sarcastic one.

Jim grinned broadly. “Hello. I am Gáagii, but most folks,” he looked over at me, “call me Jim. This is Finn.”

“Howdy.” We were being damn polite considering the circumstances.

She looked back and forth between us, as if she were making up her mind about something. “I am Yun.”

If she were going to say anything more, it was halted by the arrival of a bevy of formerly lovely ladies who had stomped down the stairs behind the bar and shuffled vaguely toward us. Yun swung around and lifted the shotgun to her shoulder and let the other barrel go at the nearest one, whose head just as quickly blossomed open with a horrible noise. I lifted my pistol just in time to hear her bark abruptly, “The head. You must hit the head.”

Well, okay then. I didn't need a little girl to tell me twice. I aimed for the next one in line and damned if I didn't knock her melon right off her shoulders. Admittedly, not as neatly as she had done—there was a good bit of cheek and jaw hanging loose—but I had a pistol and she was right up close, too. Not that it mattered, really, but it did irk me a little. Jim got the third and fourth floozie and then there were just the jerking, bleeding trunks that stumbled over each other on their way to the floor.

“How many more?” Jim asked hoarsely.

 “Just the one behind you,” Yun said pointing.

That mangled geezer Jim had tried to help was now turning on him, eyes rolling and teeth chomping. It was beginning to seem like there was something inevitable about folks changing into shambling wrecks. This was not good. Yes, I am aware that's a bit less than insightful, but at the time it was still enough of a shock to be worth remarking upon.

Jim took a quick step back and started to fumble for more bullets and I did the same, but Yun was ahead of us and brought up her shotgun again and let him have it. Another blast of gunpowder and another head gone. We were left standing in a saloon with a whole lot of fresh meat, spent shells and a bunch of questions.

“So,” I finally said, as the other two seemed plenty busy looking around carefully for more problems. “Your town always this much fun?”

“Not my town,” Yun said a bit sharpish.

Great, I thought, another chatterbox. “So you been here long?”

“Maybe we should get out into the daylight,” Jim suggested quietly. Evidently he had heard enough of my pithy wordsmithing. We slipped outside, keeping an eye on everything that might even begin to look like it might move. I had my pistols at the ready now, just in case there were something to wing, but we made it outside without further incident.

“You think they won't come out here?” I asked Jim as we continued to jump at every little sound, real or imagined.

Jim shrugged. “We can see better out here.”

There he goes, using that thinking again. “I expect you're right enough there, Jim. But you think we're about ready to head out of town now? I don't know about you, but I think the best thing we could do would be to get a whole lot of miles between this town and our sorry asses. Sorry, Miss Yun. Not used to having a lady present.”

She just looked at me like I was some kind of small lizard that crawled out from a crack between the rocks. Not that it was a particularly threatening critter, but it was certainly unwelcome and more than a tad ugly.

Jim looked at me, too. I was more accustomed to his looks, so by comparison, it wasn't near so bad, but I sure didn't like his next words. “We can't just go.”

I felt a sigh rising up to my throat. Why was it our business anyway, I could feel myself wanting to argue, what had we to do with this little pissant town that we just happened to have the bad luck to stumble across? But I strangled the words before they worked their way up. I might be happy to wander across the plains without much of a plan or purpose or with any requirement to do a thing for anybody; not Jim. He had purpose. I suppose I was riding with him because of that. There are people who do things and there are those who follow along behind them and sometimes help out. That'd be me. So we weren't going anywhere.

“How long they been like this?” I asked Yun instead.

She looked for a moment like she might not want to have anything to do with me, but she finally answered, “Not long. Things have been not right around here for a few days. In the saloon, things got bad just last night. I think it was Cherry.”

“Cherry?” I said dumbfounded. “That some kind of liquor?” Jim and Yun both looked at me and I shut up.

“My friend,” Yun said quietly. “I shot her just now.”

Well, that was something, all right. At least I didn't know any of the folk I had to shoot today (always a good thing to be able to say). Poor kid, having to shoot a friend like that must have been just awful. “Sorry, kid.”

Yun gave me that look again. “How old are you? Because I am nineteen. I am no ‘kid' to you.”

She looked ready to lift that shotgun again, so I was quick to apologize. Jesus in his blessed grave, some folk were touchy. “Sorry, miss. You just look kind of youthful, you know. No harm meant.” I didn't want to have to tell her I was only twenty. It didn't seem like enough of a gap for all the superiority I had been feeling.

“What did you mean about Cherry?” Jim asked, just trying to get things back on a more promising track.

Yun finally took her accusing eyes away from my face and turned to Jim. “She went to see her daddy and when she came back, she was…different.”

“Where is her daddy?” Jim asked quickly.

Yun pointed in the direction from which we rode this morning. “He has a chicken farm out east of here.” Our guilty looks must have tipped her off. “You know something?”

Jim nodded. “I think we buried him this morning.” Now, I would have started with fighting him off amongst his chicken beak collection, but there's Jim for you. Smooth, thoughtful. It was damned annoying at times. Jim looked at me as if I had spoken that out loud, but he was thinking along other lines. “We ought to be doing the same here.”

“I guess that's my cue,” I said sourly. “You got some tools around here?”

“There's a shed around back. I think there are some tools there.”

“Where's the church?”

Yun shook her head. “There isn't one.”

I had to admit, I was a bit taken aback. We had been to any number of tiny little towns across the plains and every one had at least a tiny church of some kind. Sometimes it wasn't much more than a little shack, but it was there. We were in the heathen wilds, all right. “You ain't even got a preacher?”

“Oh, yes. Him.” She pointed to a torso lying under a table near the open door. “He gave his sermons in the saloon. Unless the men decided to beat him up or he was too drunk.”

Jim and I exchanged a look. Well, that was peachy. “Well, where do you bury the dead? There's gotta be some folks who died before this.”

She pointed off to the west, where we could now see a small forest of listing crosses. Walking closer, we saw an indifferent scattering of random graves, some sunk into hollows, a few newly dug.

“Well,” said Jim.

“Yup.” What else was I gonna say? We got the horses and hitched them to a wagon we found out behind the saloon, a couple of beer barrels sitting on it like a reward just out of reach, at least Jim's sidelong glance at me suggested that it would be out of reach for a while. We tossed the bodies and bits onto the wagon and rolled it the couple of hundred yards to the burial ground. The sun was creeping up steadily as we began to put the spades to work. Mine was loose on its handle, so I'd have to stop every few tosses and tamp it back on.

While we buried the bodies from the saloon, Yun told us about the events of recent days. It was eerie—not just the story she told us, but the strange silence of the town. We tried to piece together what Yun told us with what we saw at Cherry's daddy's farm.

“The old man must ha' been there a few days at least, I think,” I offered as I tamped down the sandy dirt over a collection of arms and feet. “'Less he just got awful hungry in a very short time.”

Yun looked thoughtful at that. “Cherry went out to see her daddy yesterday morning, but came back by dinner time. She didn't look well, so Miss Amanda tell her to lie down. She had a few clients that night, I think, but they all wander off. We don't notice who hands around because many times the men pass out at the tables and we leave them.”

“Makes sense,” Jim said, handing me the canteen to take a swig of warmish water. “When did they start acting strange?”

Yun sighed. “Yesterday is when I really noticed. I told Miss Amanda, but she tell me to get to work. There were more men this morning who never left and I heard them start moaning and calling out. When I saw what they were doing to each other, I went to find Miss Amanda. But it was too late. She was one, too.” She kicked a little cascade of rocks into the last shallow grave.

“Miss Amanda—she the one with the red hair?” Yun nodded. I whistled. Damn waste, that's what it was.

“So it spreads like a sickness?” Jim seemed to be thinking aloud, unusual for him. But this was one crazy, mixed-up town, where people stopped living and became—what? Was there even a name for what happened to them? All I could think of was Lazarus and his miracle, blasphemous as it might sound. These Lazarus folk were damn creepy. I sure didn't like it. But if it were some kind of sickness, we ought to make sure it didn't spread any further.

“You don't suppose we been exposed?” I said as suddenly as I thought it. What if it was like scarlet fever or consumption? We all looked at one another suspiciously. Was there a way to tell when you caught it?

“Did you see it happen to anyone?” Jim asked Yun.

“I think we sort of did,” I reminded him. “That guy today, he turned right quick.” That was a hopeful thought. If we hadn't turned, maybe we weren't going to do so.

Yun seemed to ponder the thought carefully. “Cherry seemed ill when she came back. Pale, chills. She lay down because she was tired.”

“Did she have any visible…signs? Before she turned, I mean.” Things were bad if even Jim was groping for words.

“She had a fever, seemed weak.”

“Any injuries?”

“Yes, yes. She had a bandage on her hand. Didn't want to talk about it. It seemed to upset her.”

“Bet her dad went spare on her hand there,” I said to Jim, who glared at me. Yun did, too. I could see a pattern developing between the two of them that was not going to be pleasant for me. “I'm just saying. The old man, the guys in the bar—they all went to chomping on us if they could. Maybe they got to bite us to make it happen.”

For once it looked like everybody agreed with my conclusion. I was feeling a mild bit of pride in my cogitating skills. Sure beat the hell out of grave digging. But as my mother would say, bless her heart, pride goeth before a fall. I was just getting ready to scootch the last body into its grave when I got careless. One of them torsos, which didn't look like there was enough left to move much, let alone get so lively, suddenly got its second wind. You wouldn't think—or at least I didn't—that you'd need to be much afraid of something so whittled away.

But it had teeth, and those chompers were enough to be trouble. One minute it was stiff as a three-day-old squirrel carcass, the next it was twisting every which way. I dropped it like it was on fire. It huffed and snarled, wiggling back and forth like a snake I had injured but didn't quite kill. All three of us jumped every which way. I banged into Jim, and then I backed into Yun, and then finally Jim and I both let the thing have it with our pistols. There weren't enough teeth left in its head then to do much biting, but I still wasn't going to take my eye off it until it was good and buried, too.

“T'óó hodiilzha'.”

That was from Jim. Not sure what it meant, but it seemed to have been hurled in my direction, which seemed a bit unfair. “How was I to know—” I started with a voice that had a little too much whine in it even for my liking.

“We all have to be more careful. Did it bite either of you?” Yun and I shook our heads. “Any scratches?”

“What's it going to scratch us with? Ain't got no hands or feet.”

“Well, we have to be sure. It travels in the bite, maybe—but it could be the skin or the blood.”

Just peachy. I threw a few more shovels full of dirt over the torso and mopped my brow. The sun wasn't even up to its highest point. It was going to be an ugly day. I'd rather have been somewhere cool and shady just then. The barrels of beer back in the saloon were going to taste really good. Of course before I could even tap into one of them, Jim insisted we put all the tools back where we found it (he was much worse than my old pop when it came to putting things in their proper places), watered the horses good and washed up. Yun scrounged around in the kitchen of the saloon, and found us some bread and cheese and a few strips of jerky. She hadn't wanted to say any words over the graves, even of her friend Cherry, which puzzled me a bit. Maybe it was the Chinese way. We mumbled our bygones and let it be. That beer and grub sure tasted good. Nothing like a burial to give a body an appetite. But it was hard to relax. Every creak or whisper made me jump, thinking another one of those Lazarus folks was about to leap up and start gnawing my arm. It was like to give me indigestion after a time, but I ate my fill anyway. Who knew what might happen next? Best to have a full belly.