Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (7 page)

One-Eye and Lucky also feigned befuddled expressions and shook their heads.

“Charlie Hondo’s the meanest goddamn son of a shape-shiftin’ demon son of a bitch in all the West,” said Schwartz. “How could you never hear o’ Charlie Hondo? Why, he was the leader of that pack of werewolves those two geniuses, Lincoln and Grant, brought over from Russia or Prussia, or wherever the hell they found ’em. You know, the leader of the pack those crazy Yankee bastards used to win the War with.” He narrowed
a skeptical eye. “You fellas sure you never heard of Charlie Hondo?”

“He only became Charlie Hondo when he came west,” said Murphy, flicking his reins over the mules’ backs and turning off the main road onto the secondary trail that rose gently toward a dark oval in the sandstone cliff wall. “I believe his name over the big water was Ludwig somethin’ or other. Three or four names strung together like freight cars.” He gave a mocking snort. “Who the fuck needs more than two names? Someone please inform me.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Schwartz said, nodding. “When this Hondo feller—his real name I can’t pronounce—and his yellow-fanged werewolf amigos came west, they took American names, don’t ya know? So they’d fit in, you see? And lost their accents, and dressed like us normal folks so they could wreak all sorts of blasphemous, ass-ripping havoc.”

Schwartz gave a shudder.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said One-Eye, shifting his lone eye toward Curly Joe and quirking his mouth corners ever so slightly. “Learn somethin’ new every day, don’t we, Curly Joe?”

“I’ll say we do,” said Curly Joe, glancing at Lucky Snodgrass sitting at the rear of the jail cage, showing a gap-toothed, tobacco-brown grin.

As the wagon approached the cliff wall, Curly Joe saw that the black oval he’d seen was in fact a tunnel mouth. One just large enough to fit a wagon the size of the one he and his compadres were riding in.

As the wagon drew to a stop while a man walked out away from the ridge, Curly Joe saw the blue steel bars over the tunnel mouth. They winked darkly in the late-afternoon sunlight that
was touched with salmon and saffron hues, pulling dark pools out from cedars and clumps of rabbit brush.

To each side of the tunnel mouth was a high, wooden, brush-roofed platform. On each platform, a guard in infantry blues sat behind a brass-canistered Gatling gun, which together looked like twin giant, golden mosquitoes. The muzzles were turned toward the wagon, both guards flexing their gloved hands over the guns’ wood-handled firing cranks. Long cartridge belts draped down from the gun’s brass barrels.

The man walking toward the wagon was large and hairy and sporting a striped serape instead of the customary government-issue tunic. A long, stout cigar protruded from one corner of his mouth. He wore bandoliers crisscrossed on his chest, two pistols in hip holsters, and a third in a shoulder holster.

“Hello, Pablo,” hailed Schwartz. “You wouldn’t spare another one o’ them stogies for an old friend, would you?”

Pablo scowled at Murphy and Schwartz as he sauntered back to the jail cage, the dust just now catching up to the rig and making the big Mexican blink and swipe at the air with one thick, brown hand. He told Schwartz to go fuck his mother. Then, “Who you got here?”

Schwartz reached into his tunic and extracted a bulging manila envelope. “Here’s the orders. Bringin’ one Curly Joe Panabaker, One-Eye Langtry, and Lucky Snodgrass to Hellsgarde for incarceration under order of the—”

“They spooks?” Pablo asked, ignoring the envelope, standing well back of the cage and cocking his head to one side as he inspected the contents of the jail wagon.

“Nah, hell, they ain’t spooks,” said Murphy, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, lightly holding the reins of the stamping,
blowing team. “They killed a coupla federals down in Arkansas. You know what happens when federal marshals get beefed.”

“Might be against the law to jail humans with spooks,” Schwartz said, hungrily eyeing Pablo’s big cigar, “but I reckon we won’t tell on ole Judge Parker if you boys don’t. Besides…” He gave a devilish leer to the three slouched, bored-looking prisoners. “We think it’d be kinda fun to see how long these fellas’ll last at Hellsgarde, jailed with the likes of Charlie Hondo. Or maybe they’ll feed ’em to Avril Wiggins or that crazy blood-swiller Hannibal James.” He blinked slowly and held his narrow-eyed gaze on Curly Joe.

“Damn!” Curly Joe feigned a look of bald horror. “You didn’t tell me you not only got ole Charlie Hondo housed here, but Hannibal James, too! Law, law, pards, I think I just pissed down my leg!”

The prisoners hissed through their teeth and hammered their backs against the cage walls, making a racket.

Scowling, Pablo turned and walked back to a small, brush-roofed shed that abutted the cliff wall, just right of the steel-banded door over the mouth of the cave. He threw up a hand. “Take ’em in!”

He ducked into the hut. A cranking sounded along with the clinks of large links looping around a winch, and slowly the steel door rose and disappeared into the cliff face over the cave. When Murphy had flicked the reins over the mules, and the team and wagon had disappeared into the cave, heading toward the light on the other side, Pablo shouted, “You three amigos have a nice time in our fair little prison, now, you hear?”

Pablo and the two men manning the Gatling guns grinned at one another.

From inside the tunnel, above the wagon’s loud rattling and the mules’ clomping hooves, Curly Joe shouted, “Thanks for the warm welcome, Pablo. But we ain’t fixin’ on stayin’ all that long!”

The prisoners’ echoing wolflike yips and howls dwindled slowly. Pablo rolled his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other and scowled darkly into the tunnel.

Chapter 7
    

THERE BE DRAGONS

“House o’ ghouls—that’s what this place is,” Curly Joe said as the wagon rattled out of the hundred-foot tunnel and into the light of the canyon beyond.

Curly Joe, Lucky, and One-Eye stared up at the giant, castle-like dwelling that must have occupied a half square mile of the canyon floor. There was a moat around the place, complete with a drawbridge, and American flags buffeting from the six or seven tower turrets. The castle had been fashioned after the medieval castles in Europe, because not only were they impregnable from the outside; they were damned hard to escape from once you’d been locked up inside.

“What’s that?” Schwartz asked as Murphy headed the mule team toward the castle’s giant wooden door constructed of complete red oak logs and which, drawn up tight against its casement,
appeared wide enough for at least two broad wagons to safely enter in tandem.

“I said this place is a damn house of ghouls,” repeated Curly Joe.

“You got that right,” barked Murphy, waving to one of the several blue-clad guards standing sentinel in one of the two turreted towers on each side of the drawbridge. “This house o’ ghouls is you boys’ last resting place. Don’t worry, though. There’s more like you here. The warden likes to keep a good supply of blood for the swillers—don’t ya know? President Sherman says out of one side of his mouth that the swillers ain’t s’posed to dine on nothin’ but chicken and hog blood, thus the barns way on the back side of the canyon. But out the other side, he says we can do as we see fit, ’cause nothin’ quiets a howlin’ swiller like human blood.”

“Yeah,” added Schwartz, widening his eyes in mocking delight. “Fresher, the better.” He glanced at the greenish sky arcing over the canyon and the giant hunk of carved granite housing more than two hundred spooks of all known varieties—from werecats to witches—and whistled. “Gonna be a full moon tonight, too. Charlie Hondo, he loves nothin’ more than a human thrown into his cage on the night of a full moon.” Schwartz elbowed Murphy. “Don’t he, Murph?”

“Sure ’nuff,” the driver said, having stopped the team and now watching the drawbridge slowly drop down toward the moat. “Keeps him busy for a while. Keeps him from howlin’ all night. There’s a ranch a coupla miles from here, and we get complaints the day after every full moon. The Chain Link’s foreman says Charlie’s caterwaulin’ stampedes his cattle!”

“Hell,” said Murphy. “I hear him down in the quarters by the creek; wakes me up of a night dripping in a cold sweat and streakin’ my drawers. Sounds like a hundred million ghouls all howlin’ at once. But I reckon it’s only Charlie Hondo himself and the two or three other hairy bastards housed here. And the swillers. Plenty of them here, and thank God they don’t raise the racket the shapeshifters do.”

Lucky Snodgrass wrinkled his nose as he sat inspecting the giant castle from which ribbons of smoke curled through two separate chimneys visible from this vantage. “Smells worse than we do. Even worse than Schwartz.”

Murphy chuckled. “You house a few hundred ghouls together, and that’s the smell you get. Nothin’ stinks worse than a blood-swiller’s shit. Like blood sausage left out in the sun—oh,
Lord
!”

“You got that right,” said Schwartz as the drawbridge dropped lower, the great ratcheting sounds from a winch inside the castle sounding like the rumble of near thunder. “Some say a werewolf smells worse, but I say hog scat to that. A werewolf’s a werewolf, and I have no love for the breed—even though they did help us win the War, by God—but a vampire’s shit smells like a whole privy full of well-seasoned dead rats with a couple of dead skunks and adders thrown in to really make you sick!”

The drawbridge dropped to the turf, and the mules brayed and jerked in their harnesses as dust wafted from the platform’s impact with the ground on the near side of the moat. The giant chains squawked like the heavy timbers of clipper ships moored to harbor wharves.

“Well, what you fellas might think of doin’,” said One-Eye, wrinkling his nose against the almost palpable stench, “is
haul
the shit
outside
and bury it
deep
.”

“Done thought of that,” said Murphy, shaking the ribbons over the backs of the mules and putting them up the ramp. He cackled and cut a cunning glance at Schwartz. “Why you think you boys are here?”

He cackled some more as the wagon lurched and thumped onto the drawbridge and headed on over the deep, black water of the moat from which sharpened silver blades protruded at irregular intervals. Schwartz said, “Charlie’ll probably feed on one of ya tonight, but that leaves two of you to haul his shit out of the place…at least until the next full moon! Charlie’s shit ain’t as bad as the swillers’ shit…less’n he’s been feedin’ on human flesh. Oh, gawd!”

Both men tipped their chins back and laughed as the wagon clattered between the castle’s four-foot-thick stone walls. Once inside a broad, open area littered with straw and horse shit, where several cook fires added the smells of roasted meat to the latrine and rancid sweat smell of the place, Murphy halted the wagon.

Soldiers clad in Army blues and fur coats—the sun had fallen behind the western ridges now, and the autumn chill was fast descending—sat around on benches with bored, lazy expressions. Some were playing poker while others whittled or cleaned rifles or, in one case, fed strips of jerky to a three-legged cur that rose on its one back leg, dancing in a circle and howling for dried bits of parched beef or venison.

There were women here, too—broad-bottomed wives or whores of the noncommissioned officers, likely—clad in shapeless skirts and jackets or animal skins, stirring clothes in black kettles suspended over dancing fires. From somewhere unseen came the clangs of a blacksmith’s hammer. From a long row of stables to the left of the wagon came the whinnies and brays of
horses and mules while a limping soldier in a bobcat skin forked hay into a small corral abutting the stable, where an empty jail wagon sat, tongue drooping.

While the drawbridge began rising back toward the castle’s outer wall, Gatling guns atop the twin towers on either side of it were swung around, the soldiers behind them hunkered low and aiming, menacing looks in their eyes beneath their kepi brims. A man moved down the steps from the left tower—a portly, middle-aged man clad in a long bear coat and wearing a blue cavalry hat. The bear coat was open to reveal his blue wool cavalry trousers, a single yellow stripe running down the outside. He puffed a meerschaum pipe, and his tall, black boots flashed in the waning light, the heels clicking on the stone steps.

“Who do we have here?” he asked, removing the pipe from his thin lips and scowling at Murphy and Schwartz, who’d climbed down out of the wagon’s driver’s box to walk around to the cage’s rear door. Murphy pulled a key threaded on a rawhide thong out of his coat.

“Three prize turkeys, Major Mondrick. Sent out here from Arkansas by Judge Parker with President Sherman’s signed blessing.”

“Spooks?” asked Mondrick as he neared the bottom of the steps, scrutinizing the men through frosty blue eyes set deep in suety sockets. His nose was long and stitched with crinkled veins like knots of blue thread.

“Not these three. Killed a coupla U.S. marshals out Arkansas way. For non-spooks, they’re a savage bunch; I’ll give ’em that. They had the choice of being hanged last week in Fort Smith or getting hauled out here.” Murphy gave a cockeyed smile.