Nightmare of the Dead: Rise of the Zombies (4 page)

Her head buzzed with the unanswered questions. She was wasting time with self-pity; in order to find answers, she had to get off her ass and find them.

Close your eyes and try to remember.

A name was the most important thing. Bannan could work—she was clearly good enough with a gun to inspire some measure of fear in others. If she needed to prove herself, she could hold her own.

The train was the best place to begin looking for answers. When she stepped back inside, it smelled worse than before. The fresh air had tainted her ability to withstand the coppery smell of blood and the musty stench of rot in an enclosed space. The green fog slowly rolled out of the train and evaporated into the cool air.

After dealing with the conductor,
she had
discovered the shattered remnants of a glass jar in the hospital car as she'd made her way outside. From what she could figure out, a sort of timer had been attached to the jar with a hammer that apparently smashed it at a certain time. She was confident the mist, or whatever it was, had been trapped inside the container.

Bannan and Carter had been immune to the terrifying effect that green cloud had on the human condition. The doctor, the wounded men, and the conductor had
all
been tormented and transformed into
things, which
were
hardly human
;
creatures with a penchant for violence and terror.

She was starting to think that she'd been pitted against those creatures as part of some benign scheme. It would certainly explain the metal-toothed man's
intentions.
However,
did it also explain her amnesia?

While making her way to the supply car, she stepped over the fallen, desiccated corpses of the surreal creatures
she had
managed to destroy. She wanted to feel pity for Bill Carter, but she felt nothing. Why should she care? He was a stranger, and he was a likely co-conspirator in the plot to hijack her memory. Was it true that
he had
lost a brother, too? The boy's parents would never see their two sons again.

Bannan thought about these things, but she remained indifferent. She could easily get used to the life of an outlaw, even if she really wasn't Bannan, after all. Wouldn't a normal person care something for the boy? Wouldn't a normal person observe the human waste and
feel a
twinge of anger at the war-mongering politicians who ground his life beneath the weight of the mighty war machine?

She stepped over the corpses, careful not to get blood on her boots. Chunks of gore were apparently vital organs that slipped out from the bowels of those horrendous ghouls. Certainly, no man could live without the ropy intestines that sat in a smoking pile beside an organ that Bannan couldn't easily name. Those creatures had been walking dead men whose existences could only be ended with a gunshot to the brain.

And what of the green cloud? It slipped out of the train and into the Mississippi wind…was it still dangerous, or did its strength subside?

Carter seemed a tragic figure, lying
face down
in a pool of blood in the immense, still
ed
silence that corrupted the aura of peace that dominated the low plain outside of the train. Bannan stepped over him and opened the door to the supply car, where she found plenty of medical supplies, including opium, morphine, and apparatuses for crutches and other barbaric replacements for lost limbs. There were containers full of fresh water, which made her tongue race along the edges of her dry, cracked lips.

There were packages of salted beef, corn, pork, and soft bread. She sat down for a while and removed her gun belts. After laying out both guns, she proceeded to check and reload all of her cylinders. While the stench of the dead continued to corrupt the train's stale air, she filled her stomach with food and water while systematically taking inventory of her powder and ball supply.

The ritual calmed her. She lost herself in the exercise, completely forgetting the nightmarish event
she had
survived. The entire process was familiar to her. Perhaps she really was a mysterious outlaw with a bloodthirsty reputation.

As she investigated the pouches on her belts, a crumpled slip of paper dropped to the floor. She immediately opened it and read the perfectly neat penmanship.

Please understand  it was not our intention to kill you. We're all very glad  you're still alive,
and we know
you
'
re
very
concerned
about
the tragic fatality of your memory. It would be my pleasure to have you join us in the town of Cedar Rock. I have provided a map that will adequately reveal its location. I look forward to enjoying a pleasant meal with you, although I can predict your own apprehension. My liaison will greet you there; he might be identified by the mark on his left forearm, which resembles your own. Answers will be provided, and perhaps, too, you may recover a semblance of yourself. See you soon!

Doctor Saul Lynch

The letter fled her fingers and dropped to the floor. She stared at her arm as if it might unleash an unspoken hazard upon her soul. She hesitated; if she was an excellent killer, did she really want to know who she was?

Of
course,
she did. Dispelling her sense of dread, she quickly pushed up her sleeve.

On the inside of her forearm was a tattoo. A fiery black stallion was forever etched into her skin, flame dancing around its head.

She remembered:

Under the cover of darkness on the Potomac River. Inside a slender boat, she waited with three men, all of them killers. She was going to help them murder a man. The boat floated uneasily on the black water, and three pairs of eyes watched her from beneath the shadows of wide-brimmed hats. Her hands rested upon her guns. These men wanted to kill her.

Their eyes leveled against one another. The man closest to her turned and spat into the river. His hands were far away from his weapons, yet she understood that he was confident in his own ability to end her life. He leaned forward with his forearm against his knee and dared her to attack.

A glancing blow of pale moonlight revealed the dark ridges of his face and the thick, black moustache above his upper lip. This was a man whose cold gaze had withered the courage of whores and the bravado of outlaws. His was the gaze of a man who murdered others as if it were a matter of course, a primeval gesture of will that was as simple as shoveling food into his mouth or shuffling a deck of cards.

They could have been floating on a river of blood and pain, for all the suffering this man had wrought. He lived by a code that was his alone, a path that would certainly bring him to the edge of mortality, though it was something he understood. His own end would not be tragic, or heroic. He lived not by the gun, but by a terrible power residing within him. He did not enjoy nor lament his position in life, because it was his. The world spun and bled within the palm of his calloused hand; in his world, any man could and would die.

Bannan shivered and opened her eyes. She was desperate for the truth and closed her eyes again, but the vision didn't return.

The Potomac River. A plot to kill a man. She'd gone with three other men, yet, they'd turned their attention to her. Why?

The mustached man was still alive.

Bannan packed up provisions and prepared her guns. Before she left the train, she wet some black powder and set fire to the train. The wind carried the smell of its flames a short distance over the horizon, as the storm of distant cannon fire thundered over
the
entire state of Mississippi and damned every man, woman, and child to a sudden death.

***

She walked through the angles of fiery light that shattered the calm and peace of a land that seemed untouched, or perhaps
it had
been rendered invincible by the unreal world in which she found herself. The homicidal dusk bled sunlight out of the land and invaded Mississippi with a legion of infernal shadows that crept along slender blades of tall, wind-swept grass.

The game players had anticipated she would destroy the creatures on the train. They seemed to be dependent on it; the train would have over-shot the town of Cedar Rock by several miles. It was clear that Doctor Lynch anticipated the conductor's death, as well as the deaths of others aboard the train, but what did they have in mind for her? Why did the doctor kill the soldiers on the train if he knew that she would live?

Why did they steal her memory?

A town
that had
likely been built as a sanctuary for rail workers who labored to repair the tracks that were damaged during the conflict, Cedar Rock was ghostly, with the only noise coming from the piano keys that were being hammered in the saloon. Freshly-painted signs above the general store, post office, sheriff's
office
and saloon
,
suggested that the town's builders had packed up and perhaps quit the town altogether when the war landed in Mississippi; the town wasn't on the map—Bannan's map had the name of the town written in neatly next to the railroad. Upright boards that served as the empty shells for incomplete buildings bordered the town's edges.

A crowd of nine horses
w
as
tethered near a trough in front of the saloon's boardwalk.

Cedar Rock was the
spitting image
of a frontier town that would have been found west of the Mississippi River. It looked every bit a dusty retreat for cowboys looking to gamble, drink, and plot more deeds that could earn them every shred of notoriety. There were those who dreamt and wondered about the various gangs which roamed the lawless lands, territories monitored by a few mercenary sheriffs and townsfolk who were often as unsavory as the men they defended their livelihoods against.

Bannan realized she was connected to that frontier, and
she
found Cedar Rock to be oddly comforting as she walked along its lone street. The loping, limping dog that clacked its nails across the saloon's boardwalk seemed a weathered animal, a refugee made out of grit and bone. The piano music drifting out of the saloon was accompanied by the rough laughter of drunken men. The rest of the town was deserted.

Twilight followed Bannan through the saloon doors. The wrong keys on the piano were struck, and a group of heads turned toward the town's lone woman.

A band of seven men wearing pistols and cowboy hats were huddled around the piano player, who was another likely member of their ragtag gang. They were dirty, uncouth men with sweaty, tan faces and dust on their boots. They eyed Bannan hungrily, each one of them imagining the travesties of the flesh they could visit upon her. She was alone, and everyone in the saloon knew it.
The
ir
eyes moved up and down over her body without stopping. One of them cleared a dry throat. A shrill, childish chuckle erupted out of another's mouth.

The ninth man lay on the floor; a bloody, beaten man with a thick orange beard beneath wincing blue eyes. He looked up at Bannan and spat a bloody tooth out of his mouth. "Bannan," he coughed, and then said, "
Thought
you were dead."

Her breath caught in her throat. Was it true? Was that really her name?

"She is."

One man stepped out from the crowd. His spurs jangled, and the men stepped aside to let their unquestionable leader approach the intruder. She couldn't help but display the fingers at her hips near the holsters, but the undaunted figure stepped forward heedlessly.

The black moustache and the heavy eyebrows over his eyes marked him as the man from her fragmented memory, the man on the Potomac. It was everything she could do not to betray any hint of alarm or weakness. She had to be strong, now. Was this a trap? What was their game? This man, whoever he was, had likely caused her strife in the past.

"That's close enough," she said slowly.

The gang of men guffawed and hollered as one. Their amusement was a stark contrast to the bleak gaze their leader bestowed upon Bannan. He was monstrously tall, and
a necklace of dried ears that hung over his chest complimented his height
. An officer's combat sword rested at his left hip, while a large revolver sat in its holster along his right hip. He stepped over the fallen man and continued to approach Bannan.

She took a step forward and met him halfway. She refused to allow this man to intimidate her.

"Hey Boss!" one of the men shouted. "Is that a man, or a
wo-man
?" His comrades joined in the explosion of laughter.

He was a foreigner, likely from Mexico, with deep, brown eyes covered by slow-blinking eyelids. His eyes were impossibly dry, and the clean, almond-colored cheekbones were incredibly smooth. He folded his arms across his chest and leaned against a table while the tormented, red-bearded man
who had
called out Bannan's name looked up wonderingly at the exchange.

She considered her words carefully. Would this man know that her identity was gone?