Unquiet Dreams (30 page)

Our bickering was interrupted by the sound of the mule wagon approaching. We all gaped at one another for a few ticks, then scattered like hens before a fox, taking up positions with as much cover as we could find. It wasn't much. Yun leaned around the corner of the part of the passage where it made its downward turn. Jim lay flat against the wall where the tunnel first opened up into this room. I kind of hunkered down below those lines and squiggles and got a snoutful of dead chicken and old liquor. Then we waited. That was the hardest part, and it was making me antsy. “Think he'll be in the front?” I whispered to Jim, “Or them Lazarus folk?”

Jim looked at me kind of funny and then I remembered that I hadn't introduced him to my notion of what to call them. Being a heathen man, he didn't know the Good Book so well, although from time to time he'd surprise you. But he understood anyway, he was smart like that. “If he is, we get the necklace. If not, aim for their heads.”

“But he'll run off!” Yun whispered a good bit louder. “We cannot let him get away.”

She had a good point. It was a pickle, I must admit.

“All right,” Jim said, a trifle short like. I couldn't help but smile because it wasn't me who ticked him off this time. “We let them all come in if he's not first.”

Well, that was just damn peachy. All those hungry chomping creatures in a small dark cavern would find us like picnic lunch. Mama, why didn't I listen to you and become a telegraph operator like you wanted?

We could hear the creaky wheels of the wagon, like the passageway somehow made the sound grow louder down here. We could hear old Dauphine cussing a blue streak of harsh words at the shambling folk who were likely doing the best they could without much of their cogitative abilities remaining. And then we heard the scuttling tramp of feet in the passage and we all three tensed, ready to fire.

It was not our lucky day.

We saw the glassy eyes of the Lazarus folk come shuffling through the opening, all looped together like before. Apparently Dauphine was heading up the rear, riding herd on them with his big old stick. If we had some shreds of luck left to us, it would be all he was armed with. I must admit, Jim has to be about the most courageous man I think a person could meet, heathen or Christian. He let those Lazarus folk stumble past him into the room without flinching, though he held up the torch in one hand and waved them away. My fingers were itching to fire, but I held on waiting like I was supposed to do. I threw a glance over to Yun and I could see her still crouched against the wall, looking tense as a buckboard spring.

Finally, there he was, big as life and twice as pleased with himself, although a bit scowling at present because it couldn't have been much fun wrangling those hobbled corpses, though at least he had the walls to kind of keep them penned. “Stop right there,” Jim said with all the authority of a Texas Ranger.

That Dauphine, he was a cool customer. He snatched one of them folk right around the neck and dragged him between Jim and him. I don't know if he figured out our plan or he was just in the habit of protecting himself, but it was the smartest move. There was about a minute where I think we all held our breath and it was like time was never going to pick up its heels and run ever again.

Then Yun let go with one barrel at the nearest of the Lazarus folk and his head exploded like a too ripe melon. I let go on the one nearest me and the craggy old woman on his right. The sound of the firing echoed so around that chamber that I thought my ears might well ring for the rest of my life. But I didn't let it stop me, nor did Yun. She let go with the other barrel and then grabbed a couple more shells from where she had them tucked in the top of her dungarees—funny place to keep them, it struck me in the back of my mind then, but there was no time to cogitate about it. I put my next bullets to good use and we soon were thinning the herd quite nicely.

Meanwhile that Dauphine character was holding a conversation with Jim as he ducked for cover behind the dead guy, making Jim awful frustrated as he tried to aim for that necklace thing and keep the other chompers away with his torch. Heshot the Lazarus guy once, but the bullet didn't seem to go through, must have hit bone. Dauphine gloated, “You can do nothing to me. I called on Baron Cimetière and he protects me still. You have no dominion over me.” There was a funny lilt to his voice that made the words seem almost musical. His pale face looked almost grey in the flickering torchlight but there was a madness in his eyes brighter than any fire. The god-damned gold lust! He had it bad. I don't know who his important friend was, but unless he showed up pretty sharp like, he wasn't going to be able to help him much. Yun and I were doing a good job of shooting down all the Lazarus folk. Having seen them in action we had plenty of encouragement not to let those teeth get any closer to us than we could help.

All at once the pale man tossed back his head, closed his eyes and began to chant words like a preacher almost, except I couldn't understand a one of them. He might as well have been croaking like a frog. But the strangest thing happened.

It was like the air suddenly got hot and cold at the same time, and it became almost visible, swooping around us and shimmering like you see on a real hot day above the desert sands. I felt real odd, like something was pulling me from inside. I don't really know how to explain it any better than that. We all seemed to stop in place, the quick and the dead alike, and hearken to these sounds that probably weren't even words, at least not proper words a body could understand. Dauphine stretched his left arm out like a preacher casting away sin as his words grew mightier and louder. I could see Jim struggling to resist the pull of this spell or whatever it was he was putting on us, trying to bring his pistol back up to take advantage of the opening, but he was being affected by those strange words almost as much as I was.

Things were not looking good.

I remembered how my mama always scolded me—back at the kitchen table at our sheep farm, what seemed so very long ago just then—never to get in front of the hired men when breakfast was being served. If I got elbowed or sat on, it was my own hard luck, she said. Men who're working a real day's work needed some rib-sticking food and a little kid getting in their way wasn't going to get a brotherly treatment. That Dauphine should have had a mother like mine—well, for all kinds of reasons, but especially right then to tell him something like that. Good thing for us he didn't though, because I don't know what we would have done if that Lazarus guy hadn't whipped his head around and took a chunk out of Dauphine's arm.

He screamed like a possum snatched by an eagle and the blood sprang out against his shirt. It was only natural to chuck that critter as far from him as he could, which of course left him open to Jim's shot, the spell over us all kind of broken by his first cry. Jim aimed right at the big round part hanging from the necklace and hit it square center.

Lucky enough, I think his heart was conveniently located behind that. He spurted a whole lot of blood then from his chest and his mouth and started to slump down. Jim gave him a shove with his foot and the three or four Lazarus folk still moving made a bee-line for this fresh meat. Me and Yun made our own bee-line for the egress, waved through by Jim who looked careful like at the still body of Dauphine and then joined us high-tailing it out of there. The kiss of the sun felt like a mother's welcome and we startled the mules with our relieved shouts of laughter. I ducked my head in the water barrel, much to Jim's disgust—he was always as particular as a cat about his drinking water—but it felt so good to be out of the smelly cave I wanted to blow out my nostrils with clean smells.

“You suppose that's the last of them?” I finally asked as I tried to smooth the water out of my sopping hair.

“Probably,” said Jim, always the careful one.

“Why don't we use this dynamite,” Yun said suddenly, grabbing the sticks from the crate. Jim and I looked at one another and shrugged. It's not like anyone was going to be wanting to go down there anytime soon. We led the mules some distance away from the cave and walked back. Yun insisted on lighting the fuses herself, whispering a few words over them before she tossed the sticks in the opening. The hill blowed up real good, rocks tumbling down and a whole lot of other rubble too. No one was going to be digging that out anytime soon. I asked Yun what she said over the sticks while we led the mules back to find Beau and the paint.

“A prayer for my father. He was killed by dynamite.”

Damn. Well, that was a fitting remembrance then, I guess.

“What are you two going to do now?” she asked Jim more than me, but we both kind of shrugged. We didn't really have any set plan. If she wanted to tag along with a couple of no-accounts like us, well, I don't think we were going to mind. Yun had proved herself to be a useful gal. Pretty, too, though I had a feeling that might prove to be trouble sometime. But we could work that out.

Besides, whatever we decided to do, there a whole lot of gold to help us do it.

 

 

K.A. Laity is the award-winning author of Rook Chant, Owl Stretching, Pelzmantel and Unikirja, a collection of short stories and a play based on the Kalevala, Kanteletar, and other Finnish myths and legend, for which she won the 2005 Eureka Short Story Fellowship as well as a 2006 Finlandia Foundation grant. With cartoonist Elena Steier she created the occult detective comic Jane Quiet. Her bibliography is chock full of short stories, humor pieces, plays and essays, both scholarly and popular. She also writes romance as C. Margery Kempe and Kit Marlowe.

 

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Thank you for reading Unquiet Dreams.

 

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Author Copyright 2012 K.A. Laity (http://www.kalaity.com)

Covert Art: Amanda Stephanie (http://www.tirgearrdesign.com)

Editor: Kemberlee Shortland (http://www.tirgearrpublishing.com)