The Company of the Dead (61 page)

The ghost dancer grabbed his shoulder and turned him roughly to one side.

Shine stared in disbelief at the horizon.

Another figure emerged from the sand. He leaned forwards, bracing his palms on his haunches, and forced out a vigorous, hacking cough. He turned to Shine and said, “Are we too late, son?”

Shine gazed at the fireball that seethed and churned the night, and replied, “I don’t know.”

Ten miles out of Red Rock

The red dust was falling. It eddied and whirled with the occasional gust and dropped in a fine coating that gilded the trucks, the trail and the meagre outcroppings of sagebrush with an even layer of amber.

Morgan peered over the landscape, staring between interlaced fingers.

No one moved.

This was the way it would be forever; the trucks and the bodies, huddled under the protective rise of the bluff, preserved for all eternity. A snow globe of red flakes trembling beneath the malevolent glow of a new sun.

Get up.

Give me a sec.

Get up, you lame fuck.

Language, David.

Heh.

Morgan shifted in the dirt and raised himself slowly to his knees.

Lightholler looked across at him and said, “There may be more.”

“I don’t think so.” Morgan brushed himself off and got to his feet.

The others stirred around him.

Kennedy gently disengaged himself from Malcolm’s grasp and removed his goggles. “Get down, Darren.”

Morgan dropped to the ground.

Kennedy crawled his way over to Tecumseh’s side. “Have someone check the trucks, the radio gear.”

Tecumseh gave him an empty look.

“Just do it.”

Tecumseh signalled to his men. Two of them broke away from the group guarding the agents and inspected the vehicles. They emerged from the cabs with a brisk shake of their heads.

Tecumseh turned back to the major. “I need to be with my brothers now, sir.”

“I understand.”

Morgan made his way over to Kennedy. “We’re only a few miles out.”

Kennedy gazed at him with sudden intensity.

Ask me what happened
, Morgan thought.
Ask me why I haven’t had a drink in three days; why I haven’t fallen apart at the seams.

Kennedy broke off the look and nodded slowly. His eyes fell on Lightholler. “You okay?”

Lightholler was inspecting his forearm. He’d been sitting closest to the tailgate when the shock wave had sent their truck careening off the trail. There was a deep gash where the door had snared his arm.

“I’ll live.”

The sky was darkening again, reclaimed by the night. A faint nimbus remained amongst the clouded stars; an after-image etched into the fabric. Morgan could still read the expressions on his companions’ faces in the dun light. They mirrored his own.

“Patricia?” Kennedy spoke softly.

Her face was a smudge of sand and camo cream. A fresh abrasion extended from her hairline to her jaw. She blinked slowly and worked a thin smile with some effort.

Kennedy let his hand fall on her shoulder. “Good soldier.”

She put her hand on his and then let it slip away.

The men were chanting. Their voices, oddly melodic, were a low drone drifting over the bleak desolation. Occasionally a single voice would rise up, wrenching some unexpected note from the hidden skies, then fall back to nothing.

Lightholler appeared disturbed by their song. He peered warily at the ghost dancers, edged closer and whispered, “Are they praying to it?”

“No,” Kennedy replied.

“They know what it is,” Morgan added. “They’re praying for the Earth.”

Lightholler gave him a doubtful look. He’d clearly been ill prepared for his encounter with Tecumseh’s ghost dancers. They sat in silence as the chant drew to a close.

Malcolm said, “I’m going to check on Agent Reid and the others.”

Kennedy let her go.

They tracked her cautious movements over the alien landscape. The prisoners were grouped together beside the third truck, secured to one another by coils of thick rope. They were guarded by a couple of Tecumseh’s men. The rest of the crew were still gathered around the medicine man, their heads bowed.

“You told me you saw Red Rock in ruins, a radioactive wasteland,” Lightholler said to Kennedy. “That detonation was high altitude. Close, but not
that
close.”

“There may be more.” Morgan echoed Lightholler’s earlier observation.

“A blast like that might have been meant to disrupt communications.” Kennedy kept Malcolm in sight as he spoke. “I can’t come up with any other explanation, and if that’s the case we can expect company soon.”

“We’re in no condition to deal with any threat,” Lightholler commented darkly.

“I think we can still do this,” Morgan said. “I think there’s still time.”

Lightholler said, “You’ll tell me what you’ve done with the real Darren Morgan when we’re finished here, won’t you?”

Morgan laughed nervously.

“Frankly, I don’t want to know,” Kennedy said. Then he added, “Grab some winks. Have a smoke. We march in ten.” He went over to check on the prisoners.

“So much for our pep talk.” Lightholler sighed. “Once more into the breach.” Returning his attention to his wound, he added, “Last thing I need’s a bloody infection.”

Morgan nodded absently. He felt the desert’s chill begin to work its way through him. He’d be warm again soon enough once they started marching. He just hoped his leg would stand up to the ordeal. He considered smoking a cigarette but was dissuaded by the burning taste of murky air that already filled his lungs.

Lightholler removed the canteen from his belt and poured a measure of water over his forearm. He worked the accumulated grit away from the wound’s edge with the bunched-up hem of his shirt and said, “I got to read some more of the journal.”

“What did the major tell you?”

“Everything.”

“What do you think?” Morgan asked.

“Eloquent, articulate, insane.”

“You’re talking about the journal, right?”

Lightholler snorted and left the question dangling.

“Do you believe it?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” Lightholler lurched to his feet. “I’m going to raid the medical supplies.”

“Bring me back some morphine. Make it a double.”

Lightholler chuckled. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Morgan thought about the ghost dancers. What would they make of all this? They knew that the nuclear explosion wasn’t of the world beyond the senses. It bore the scent of Man. No, it wasn’t of the world beyond the senses, but it would be felt there.
That
was why they were praying.

So.

So.

I was never the class clown.

I had you pegged as the school bully.

You’ll never know.

You’re not even here, Hardas.

Neither are you.

Morgan leaned back and closed his eyes, an uncertain frown forming on his face.

They’d been arguing for a while now. Shine watched them from his vantage point, a cleft in the rock face that marked the westernmost portion of their dog-legged route. His best reckoning put them twenty miles from the Rock. On foot, by night, under the blood-red cloud, it might take him seven hours. What was he waiting for?

His father had asked him to sit there till the parley was over.

He recognised some of the chieftains: Michael Iron Horse, Jimmy Crow God, Cole Thomas, Charlie Wilson and Jackie Red Thunder. They represented the Sioux descendants of the last warriors lost at Wounded Knee. They represented the Objiwa peoples who’d wandered far from their native lands to band with their ancient Lakota enemies. They represented the local tribesmen of the Shoshone and Washoe nations. They also spoke for the blacks whose tribes had been left on some far and unremembered shore. In more peaceful times, their gathering would have called for a response from the National Guard.

They had guessed that he journeyed to Major Kennedy’s secret domain—that
other place
. They knew that the government agents had been ordered to torch the camp, and they knew that a detachment of German tanks was nearby and closing in, but they had no real comprehension of what lay ahead—only a determination that their time had come. And they made none but the most severe of requests: they asked to accompany him north.

What had begun as an honour guard rapidly swelled to an escort of twelve-hundred men as they bled in from the fade-out. These were the soldiers who’d sworn fealty to the major. The latest incarnation of the ghost dancers, a cohort of the major’s trainees whose beliefs had shaped—and in turn been shaped by—the mysteries of Red Rock. Sieved from the major’s old unit, salvaged from the privation, disease and squalor of the labour camps, they’d found succour in the banned religion of Wovoka.

The original tenets of that faith had stated that the ghost dance ceremony would return the indian nations to their homes. That the Earth would be covered with dust and a new world would come upon the old. All the long dead would come back, all the whites would disappear.

More than a hundred years ago they wore their ghost shirts of sky blue; cotton cloth, brightly painted with thunderbirds, bows and arrows, suns, moons and stars. They believed these shirts would protect them from the white men’s bullets. They bore no weapons save for defence. The dance was the message and the harbinger of a redemption that would never come. They were massacred at Wounded Knee Creek. One-hundred-and-twenty men, two-hundred-and-thirty women and children.

The practice, prohibited by death, was buried along with its practitioners, only to rise again in small clandestine movements during the intervening century. The major had contravened military law by turning a blind eye to its observation. When had he decided to mine the common vein of their desires?

Shine coughed and wrapped himself tighter in the thin blanket. There seemed dust enough to satisfy the direst of prophecies, but the blast had triggered discord amongst them. Now there were questions, or so it seemed. He looked up at the menacing sky and wondered if he could honestly blame them.

They talked amongst themselves another hour before finally approaching him. Shine’s father was among their number.

“Thanks for waiting, son.”

“We’ve made our choices,” Iron Horse said. “It’s just a matter of ratifying it with our brethren.”

“I understand,” Shine said. “I know this is more than you bargained for.”

“This?” Iron Horse let out a mighty laugh. He was joined by the other chieftains, until the night was filled with the sound. “
This?
” His sweeping gesture seemed to include everything. “We recall a time when the Moon was brighter in the sky, when Venus was not yet a star in the heavens, and the Sun came up in the west. This is merely a trifle.”

Shine listened to the reply, dumbfounded. “Then what were you fighting over?”

“The right of passage,” Crow God said. “Most of the tanks and trucks have been disabled by the electromagnetic pulse. We could only recover fifty-three horses. We had to decide who gets to ride with you and who must suffer to follow behind on foot.”

Shine understood that the suffering was in the delayed arrival, not in the fact they’d be walking.

“You’re coming with me?”

“Who else can lead us?” His father said. “You’ll have to leave a trail so the rest of us can follow on.”

“You can’t walk those miles.”

“I can’t take a warrior’s horse either. The strongest of us will force-march overnight. We should only be a few hours behind you.”

“Pa...”

“Yes?” His father drew out the word playfully, as he had when teasing him as a child. It was sadly absurd and strangely comforting.

“I’ll see you up north.”

The chieftains began to work their way back through the stalled procession to where their men had encamped. They stood among the kneeling figures, making their selections with cold deliberation. Iron Horse remained close by.

Shine’s father extended a hand. “I’m hoping that by the time I get there you’ll be long gone, son.”

Shine’s hand fell away from his father’s grasp.
How long have you known about the carapace?

Iron Horse said, “The old men say the Earth only endures...”

Shine, both astonished and relieved by his father’s complicity, simply nodded.

Iron Horse offered a hopeful smile. “See that it does.”

To Malcolm’s credit she wasn’t slowing them down. If anything, it was Morgan’s stride, restricted by his injured leg, that set the pace.

They marched with the bulk of Kennedy’s men, arranged in two files further back along the trail, the prisoners kept between them. Three soldiers scouted ahead, their figures emerging through the haze from time to time. Tecumseh dropped back to apprise Kennedy of their progress.

The Rock lay beyond the next rise.

They had been on a steady incline for a while now. Their path snaked between low hillsides that rose slowly to enfold them, while to either side the crests of two mountain ranges marched under the crimson skies of false dawn. If the camp truly lay ahead, Lightholler could find some solace. By default or design, Kennedy had built his base within a natural fortress of shale and stone.

Malcolm watched until Tecumseh disappeared ahead before speaking. “Ghost dancers? Is that what all this has been about?”

“There’s no such thing as ghost dancers,” Kennedy replied. “That’s a tale used to frighten little children.”

“Your association with them alone merits a death sentence. Does Webster know?”

“It’s the least of my crimes. As for Webster,” Kennedy shrugged. “He wouldn’t care if I was training cannibals, provided his work got done.”

“Who do you serve now, if not Webster? If not the Confederacy?”

Lightholler had posed a variation of this question himself, but now they felt like another man’s words, spoken lightly in a place far removed.