Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (6 page)

“Hey, where you goin’, honey?” Borgland said, spreading his arms. “I done told ya—I’ll be back in a minute.”

“You paid for an hour, Pete. That hour was up pret’ near two hours ago.”

Dixie, dressed in a low-cut, cheap, pleated dress with a red sash to match her hair, and taffeta flowers pinned to one thin shoulder strap, rolled her hips as she approached Zane, who stepped to one side, making room. She blinked slowly and spread her thin lips in a smoky smile. “Hi, there, Uriah. Long time, no see.”

Zane removed his hat and dipped his chin. “How you been, Miss Dixie?”

At the door, she swung around and slid a slender lock of hair behind her ear, caressing the doorframe with her rump as she raked her eyes across the big ghoul hunter’s tall, brawny frame. “Come on over to the Wildcat later, and we’ll discuss it.” She cut a wry glance at Borgland. “I’ll give you a good deal.”

She rolled on out the door and pulled Junius’s battered canvas hat down over his eyes as she stepped down off the veranda and headed out into the street.

Borgland sighed as he removed a small canvas sack from the safe, whose only other content was an old Civil War–model Colt Army, straightened his back with a slight crunching sound, and, wincing, tossed the sack onto his desk.

“Twenty-one ghouls,” he muttered, shaking his head and tipping up the sack to allow a mess of gold coins to spill out onto the blotter half covering the scarred top of his desk. “And here I thought we were runnin’ them ghouls to ground, cleanin’ ’em out good. Ain’t that what the Army’s been tellin’ us—that we’re winnin’ the goddamn war against those creatures?”

“That’s what the Army says,” Zane said, digging a small hide makings sack out of an inside pocket of his wolfskin vest. “But I been out there in them mountains and canyons as much or more than any Army patrol, and I can tell you, you can’t ride from Bozeman City up Montaway to Denver without runnin’ into more than I got bullets and arrows for. Everywhere you go, settlers are havin’ a time of it—losin’ stock to the swillers’ and werewolves’ night raids and bein’ attacked right out in open ground by the hobgobbies.”

Thoughtfully, Zane dribbled chopped Mexican tobacco onto a sheaf of wheat paper troughed between the first two fingers of his left hand. “And I don’t know if the altitude’s gettin’ to me, or what, but I think I saw a dragon on the way into town.”

The government paymaster stopped counting and sliding coins around with his index finger to glance up at the bounty hunter skeptically. “What’d you say?”

Zane rolled the wheat paper closed around the quirley and stuck the cylinder in his mouth to seal it with spit. “You heard me right.”

Borgland studied him for a time, then went back to sliding gold coins away from the scattered group on his blotter. He laughed and shook his head, as though Zane had told him an especially funny joke. But his expression soured suddenly, and, still counting under his breath, he said, “I just hope you’re as mad as you must be. The swillers, werebeasts, and hobgobbies are all the monsters I need. Don’t need no more.”

He reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a small canvas pouch, which he held open beside his desk while he slid the counted coins into it. “At least Charlie Hondo’s all sealed up tighter’n a tick on a dog’s ear in Hellsgarde Pen.”

Zane frowned over the match he’d lit to fire his cigarette. “Hondo’s in Hellsgarde?”

“Sure as shit in the hogpen.” Borgland smiled though he had only two gold coins left on his blotter. The rest were in the burlap sack he now set down hard on Zane’s side of his desk. “They run him to ground two weeks ago in Denver, playin’ faro if you can believe it. Drunk as a damn English lord. A barman recognized him from a wanted dodger, sent over to the federal building for marshals, and eight of ’em came in, snugged their rifle barrels up against Charlie’s neck, and dragged him away, howlin’ like a fork-tailed devil, in chains. They had a quick trial and, since it was obvious they really did have the fearsome leader of the infamous Hell’s Angels in custody, hauled him out to Hellsgarde in one o’ them armor-plated jail wagons accompanied by an entire company of federal soldiers, three cannons, and four Gatling guns.”

“What the hell they go to all that work for?” Zane said, anger burning in him as he remembered that horrific night in the green hills around Gettysburg, when he lost not only a brother, three cousins, and an uncle, but nearly every Confederate soldier bivouacked in the area that night excepting a few wise and desperate enough to throw up a white flag with General Lee’s own tearful blessing.

Lee had been mangled and would later take his own life with a silver bullet, just as Abraham Lincoln did a few weeks later, disgraced by his unforgivable sin.

“Shoulda taken his murderous hide out and shot ’im! Course, they shoulda shot Abe right alongside him—if he wasn’t already dead, that is—but the least they coulda done is killed the sonofabitch!”

Zane’s face was swollen with rage, veins standing out on his forehead. He clenched both fists tightly at his sides until his knuckles nearly popped. Tobacco from his crushed quirley sifted between his fingers. Borgland backed away from the enraged hunter, genuine fear bleaching his pasty features.

“Christ almighty, Uriah—I myself personally had nothin’ to do with it. You know what the policy is—those ghouls they think might be more dangerous dead than alive, they lock up in Hellsgarde and throw away the key. They don’t want none of ’em comin’ back even stronger than they was when they was alive.”

Jaws hard, eyes blazing, Zane said, “The superstitions of foolish old men. You kill a werewolf, he’s dead. That’s all there is to it.” He oughta know as well as anyone, Zane vaguely reflected with a moment’s feeling of dread.

“Well, some Europeans more experienced with them vermin than even we are seem to think the most powerful of ’em gain more strength if they’re killed by humans. Takes a werewolf to kill the most powerful werewolf and keep him dead.” Borgland shook his head. “I reckon after the big mistake they made at Gettysburg, trusting those devils
who just seemed so honest and sincere
, they ain’t takin’ no more chances. It’s Hellsgarde for the worst.”

“Ah, hell, Uriah,” Junius said, standing near Zane, looking apprehensively up at the big man towering over him and Borgland. “It ain’t like Hellsgarde’s a Sunday picnic along the river. They don’t treat ’em none too well there. I hear they cage the werebeasts up tight in stone-walled cells without windows and with stone, iron-banded doors that need to be opened with three keys.”

The prospector whistled his appreciation of the government’s thoroughness. “I say it’s a fate worse than death.”

Zane drew a deep breath but he still looked swollen up and ready to rain. “They get the rest of ’em—the other three still on the loose?”

The original band of Hell’s Angels had been comprised of forty-five mercenaries, most of whom had been run down and killed by bounty hunters, including Zane himself, who’d personally taken care of a half dozen. Last he’d heard, four remained on the run somewhere in the West, keeping low profiles, including Hondo himself.

“Ain’t heard nothin’ about them.” Borgland sagged down in his chair and pocketed the remaining two coins on his desk. “All I got to say is folks everywhere is gonna be sleepin’ a whole lot sounder now that old Charlie Hondo’s been run to ground and locked away at Hellsgarde on a diet of cornpone and piss water.”

Borgland blew a deep sigh of genuine relief.

“Well, that’s somethin’, anyway.” Zane, calmer now, stuffed the coin pouch into a pocket of his wolf vest and cuffed Junius lightly on the shoulder with his hat. “Let’s get us a drink and split the winnin’s.”

As Junius followed Zane to the door, Borgland said, “Ain’t you gonna count it?”

“Why?” Zane said, not looking back but striding on out of the office, the little man limping along behind him. “I’d feel cheated if you didn’t short me.”

Chapter 6
    

WELCOME TO HELLSGARDE

“Hey, Curly Joe!” summoned the uniformed driver of the prison wagon making its way along the scruffy, two-track Hog Wollop Trail in the shadow of the snow-dusted San Juan Mountains in southern Colorado Territory. “You know what smells worse than you and your amigos, Lucky and One-Eye?”

“No, what’s that?” yelled Curly Joe Panabaker above the jail wagon’s incessant rattling and clattering. He slouched in the modicum of shade provided by a bobcat hide tied over the cage’s top.

The driver winked at the man riding shotgun beside him and glanced over his shoulder at Curly Joe and the other two men riding in the cage, their hands cuffed, their ankles shackled to the strap-iron bars. “Nothing stinks worse than you boys.
Nothin’!
”

The driver threw his head back and laughed. The shotgun rider laughed as well.

Curly Joe looked at his cohort riding directly across from him. One-Eye Langtry returned the dull stare as he jerked and lurched with the wagon’s pitch and sway. The other man—the third prisoner in the wagon—rode with his back against the rear door.

Lucky Snodgrass was a tall, rangy redhead with a face nearly covered with tan freckles, and a braided ponytail that slithered down his back before it coiled up from the wagon’s hard, plank floor to slither onto his buckskin-clad lap, showing the diamondback rattle wrapped into it with cracked rawhide.

“Is that right?” Lucky said to the driver, bunching his broad nose, his pale blue eyes searing into the driver’s back, which was clad in a dark blue cavalry tunic, the shoulders of which were mantled in clay-colored dust. “When’s the last time you had a bath, Murphy?”

“Me?” said the driver. “I had me a bath last night in Sapinero. Me and Jimbo here both did; didn’t we, Jimbo?” He grinned over at the shotgun rider beside him—Sergeant James “Jimbo” Schwartz. “Us and the two whores we bought for ourselves in Missus Dyer’s House of Unbridled Badness!”

Murphy and Schwartz elbowed each other and giggled like schoolgirls, both men staring straight ahead toward a high sandstone ridge standing up tall in the desert, a steep arm of the San Juans looming cool and blue behind it.

“You sure there was girls present?” asked One-Eye Langtry, blinking his one brown eye against the dust roiling up from the wagon’s right front wheel.

Schwartz looked over his shoulder. “What’s that s’posed to mean?”

“It means,” said Curly Joe, flexing his right forearm and staring
down at the naked dragon-girl tattoo dancing through the thin curtain of fine, light brown hairs, “we think you two Nancy boys mighta been entertainin’ each other in that washtub. No girls present at all!” He grinned wickedly. “Accordin’ to the rumors we been hearing across the whole Southwest, you two wouldn’t know how to please a woman even in the unlikely event you was fortunate enough to bed one!”

“So, instead of women, you boys prefer to play grabby-pants with each other.” Lucky Snodgrass squirmed around on the wagon floor, lifting one buttock and then the other, and mocking, “Oh, Jimbo, reach down there for the soap, would you, please? Oh, you naughty rascal, that wasn’t the soap and you
know
it!”

The three prisoners laughed and yipped like wolves.

Murphy and Schwartz looked at each other, their faces flushing behind the dust and windburn on their bearded cheeks. Finally, Schwartz flexed his fingers on the shotgun he held in both hands before him. “Tough talk for doomed men, eh, Murphy?”

“It is, at that,” said Murphy, loudly enough for the men behind him to hear above the wagon’s clattering. “We’ll see how tough these fellas are once they get to Hellsgarde.”

“Hellsgarde won’t hold us,” announced Lucky Snodgrass. “No, sir—I’d bet the seed bull me and my pards’ll be bustin’ outta there in a few days. Maybe a week, since the layout’s new, an’ all. But a week at the most.”

Murphy and Schwartz looked over their shoulders at Lucky, as though the man had just sprouted horns and a forked tail, and they roared in exasperation. Murphy slapped his thigh.

“Son,” he said as the ridge wall grew higher and sheerer before
them, so that the men in the wagon could make out the pits and fissures in its towering face, “ain’t you never heard of Hellsgarde before? No one—and I mean
no one
—breaks out of Hellsgarde. Not even the
ghouls
!”

Schwartz was still looking incredulously back at the three scruffy, dusty prisoners, the long, curly, seed-flecked hair falling from the man’s tan cavalry kepi blowing in the breeze. “No, sir, not even the spooks the place was built for even try it!”

“Hey, you know what, Schwartz?” said Murphy. “I wonder if they’ll house these fellas with ole Charlie Hondo himself. Hah! Wouldn’t that be
fun
?”

“Charlie Hondo’d have these three for a saloon-sized meat plate, first full moon.” Schwartz winked at Curly, One-Eye, and Lucky.

Curly Joe feigned a puzzled air, and said, “Who’s Charlie Hondo?”

“You mean you ain’t never heard of Charlie Hondo?” asked Murphy, staring straight ahead over the backs and bobbing heads of his four-mule hitch.

“Don’t recollect I have,” Curly Joe said, shrugging a shoulder and looking around at his partners. “You boys?”