The Company of the Dead (71 page)

“Good cloud, sergeant, and give ’em hell.”

The dancer retreated, smiling.

Kennedy sealed the mouthpiece of his air filter and looked over at Crow God. The indian’s goggles illustrated his warped reflection: a leering death’s head under the emblem of a bloody red hand. He gripped the pouch tightly, then loosened the drawstring and raised his clenched fist high into the air where every dancer’s eye would see.

“Captain Crow God, prepare to have our snipers take out those samurai, then redirect them onto the officers. Captain Red Thunder, cover the hillside in smoke; I want a three-up formation on my mark, straight down the hill. Captain Wilson, bring up the Jacksons. Carve us a path toward those eighty-eights. Our new Union ‘allies’ will need a little inspiration.”

They acknowledged his commands.

He looked out east, to where his men lay under siege, and pictured the tortured golden-brown outline of Red Rock as it would appear under this bright late-noon sun.

“
Ate Wankantanka, Mitawa ki
.” He opened his fist. “
Wicahcala kin heya pe lo maka kin
.”

He let the handful of otherworldly dust slip through his fingers. “
Wicahcala kin heya pe lo maka kin.
”

An answering bellow tore itself from a thousand throats.

“
WICAHCALA KIN HEYA PE LO MAKA KIN
.”

The Jacksons kicked forwards, the mortars coughed lethal fire and the ghost dancers swarmed. They swept down the hill like a curse.

Lightholler emerged from the shack and stepped into an abattoir. He thankfully accepted a gas mask from one of the ghost dancers. At the very least, he thought, it would conceal his sickened expression.

Shine, a radio in hand, was by his side. Morgan and Hayes stood back by the entrance. Malcolm was at their elbows, straining to get past them. She froze, taking in the scene that had first met his eyes.

The sea of bodies spread as far as the eye could see: tangled among the smoking residue of shredded armour, huddled in newly formed ditches, twisted and pinned where they’d fallen. There was no movement.

The saviours of Red Rock had swept through in the wake of Iron Horse’s armour. Every Japanese soldier had been impaled to confirm the kill. The ghost dancers had collected their wounded, but their dead remained among the enemy. Time permitted the salvage of men who might still fight, but the dead had danced their last.

“Tell Doc not to bother coming up,” Lightholler said. “His former occupation won’t be of much use at present.”

“What about Joseph?” she said. “Where
is
he?”

Lightholler pointed westwards. The horizon was lost in dismal grey fog. He ushered her back into the shack, his hand maintaining a firm grip on her arm.

Shine’s radio crackled abruptly. “
Wicahcala kin heya pe lo maka kin.
” Kennedy’s voice, distorted and broken in transmission, was an unfamiliar snarl.

“What’s
happening
out there?” she asked.

“A massacre. But it’s bought us some time. Tell Doc to wrap up the equations as soon as he can.” Lightholler gave the grounds another cheerless inspection. “They’ll be back.”

Hayes said, “I’ll fire up the generator.”

“Don’t,” Lightholler said. “We don’t know what the japs have behind those two divisions. I don’t want the carapace primed until Doc has the coordinates locked in.”

He stepped back out onto the grounds. His escort had shifted away, regarding him with watchful eyes. Morgan and Shine were talking quietly by the radio. Dust whirled to the south of the compound’s ashes.

Lightholler felt the thunder in the soles of his feet well before he saw the horses break through the eddying smoke and dust. The posse pounded across the grounds and halted before him in a storm of flying sand. There were four riders in all.

Tecumseh dismounted awkwardly. His right leg was a seared fusion of flesh and uniform. His face bore a ragged cut that ran red across his brow. He gripped a tomahawk in his gnarled fist. Lightholler had supposed it to be ceremonial, but Tecumseh’s weapon was dulled with black gore. His eyes peered at Lightholler from darkened sockets. “How long?” His voice was a hoarse croak.

“Two hours. Maybe less. Where’s Captain Iron Horse?”

“He’s reclaimed the western defences and holds them now.” The medicine man grunted. “I leave these men to you.” He indicated his companions with a wave.

They dismounted and stood at attention, each offering a brisk nod. Their war bonnets were adorned with fresh red symbols among the feathers. According to Shine, each distinctive marker represented a kill.

Tecumseh’s bonnet was a spray of scarlet.

He grabbed the reins of his horse, a dappled Appaloosa, and remounted with barely a wince. He gazed down at Lightholler. “
Wankantanka nici un
.”

“Where are you headed?” Shine looked up from his radio.

“The major’s attacking their main supply dump. He’s turned the Union guns against them but the fighting is fierce. He’s five miles out. With your leave, Captain, I’ll ride out to join him.”

Morgan said, “You’ll never make it through their lines.”

Lightholler wasn’t sure at which point they’d all come to realise that Kennedy was lost to them, but it was their silent, bitter accord. He said, “You won’t get past their guns.”

Tecumseh struck the fabric of his shirt. “The prairie is so big and wild, there is so much space for bullets to spend themselves. I will be spared.”

Looking up at Tecumseh now, Lightholler marvelled at the hope that had brought him through so many terrors and obstacles. Who could have ever truly believed that this task would be an easy one? This final battle, waged not so much between good and evil as between ignorance and insight, smacked of Armageddon.

He grabbed one of the horses and mounted up before anyone could protest. His selection, a white sorrel, was robust at seventeen hands high. It gave a slight whinny and stamped at the pebbled earth.

Tecumseh shot him a dark look.

Lightholler said, “Two hours to ride in, find the major, and ride out. Piece of cake.”

Tecumseh said, “You are not coming with me, Captain.”

“We have seven of your best warriors watching the cavern. Iron Horse holds the western ridge. As you say, the prairie is so big and wild.” Lightholler pointed at his chest. “We’ll be spared.”

Shine looked up at him, pleadingly.

He said, “We’re going to need a radio, Martin.”

Shine shouldered the radio pack eagerly and approached the horses. He mounted up.

Morgan eyed the three riders pensively, focusing on the savage aspect of Tecumseh and Lightholler’s own visage, alien behind the gas mask. He shrugged, grabbed a pair of reins, and struggled onto a chestnut stallion. Glancing over at Lightholler’s white steed he asked, “Does this make me Pestilence or Famine?”

Lightholler snapped his reins and the charger wheeled westwards on a cloud of white powder. He threw Morgan a look over his shoulder and said, “Take your pick.”

Kennedy’s command car careened wildly, its course a rowdy sideways slide down the rocky decline. The driver was using all his skills just keeping the vehicle upright.

Halfway down the slope and the enemy guns would find their range. Kennedy called a halt and the car skidded into a trough of flung shale. He adjusted his goggles and surveyed the attack.

The escarpment was a knuckled promontory in a sea of smoke. A V of Jacksons ploughed forwards, their shells directed at the wide picket of enemy supplies. Heavy machine-guns sputtered ruin among the climbing formations of Japanese infantry. Within moments, the tanks had entered their thinning ranks. Ghost dancer mortars chased the rolling armour, creating a region of whirling shrapnel and sudden death.

The first wave of dancers whooped and leapt, a surging blue crest of bared bayonets and metal-lashing gunfire. They broke upon the Japanese ranks and punched through. Serried cobalt arrowheads drove onwards, piercing the chaotic grey columns oftenemy infantry.

The deformed shell of a Jackson was a blackened, corpse-ridden husk. A second Jackson, the target of multiple bazooka rounds, surfed a swell of pebbled sand. Its crew, with their chainmail face plates and exposed body armour, rode its skirting like knights of old. They leapt off as the tank fireballed, a landborne comet that detonated at the foot of the slope.

The next wave of dancers struck little resistance, their movement a grim ballet among the fleeing soldiers, but along the hillside an intolerable number of blue-shirted bodies writhed, or lay too still.

Kennedy looked out to the Union guns. The glint of flashing metal through flame-tinged fog told him that too many samurai had evaded his snipers. The Japanese infantry was re-forming on the plain; a wide, deep cordon of men, taking up defensive positions around the depot. A few eighty-eights, in enemy hands or under their instruction, still pounded the hillside, grinding man and machinery into gristle.

He said to his radio operator, “We can’t let them dig in.” He indicated a transient gap in the enemy line that was filling with sapphire-robed members of the Imperial Watch. They had mortars, heavy machine-guns and rocket-launchers among their kit. “Tell Wilson to bring up armour through there, mortar cover all the way. Have Crow God’s shooters pick away at their tank busters, fire at will. Red Thunder needs to split his dancers. Three companies engaging the picket lines, four intercepting those reinforcements making for the Rock.”

“Yes, sir. What about the last two companies?”

“Have them follow us.”

His driver glanced back at him while the operator dispatched the orders. “Follow us where, Major?”

He gave his driver’s shoulder a squeeze and pointed towards the growing barricade of bristling iron. “Through there. We’re going in with the tanks.”

The driver grinned, turned to peer through the windshield, and floored the accelerator. Kennedy renewed his white-knuckle grip and the command car resumed its stormy route.

Striking the plain, they bounced along the fissured stone through a hail of flying metal. Bullets rang against the plating, snagged the snapping fabric of the flag. He felt a glancing blow strike his helmet. The radio operator’s grip on his shoulder drove him further beneath the command car’s cover. The ear-pummelling clank of steel tracks on splitting rock told him his armour was nearby. A choking bank of dust and filth obscured the clash in swollen tiers of glowing cloud. Shells shrilled by. Mortar fire rutted the dunes, sending showers of thick ochre spray into the already grime-filled air.

“
Pull up
.”

The driver braked hard. Two Jacksons surged out of a bulwark of sand and pulled ahead. Trucks, their frames seething with clinging dancers, listed into view. They set upon the Watch’s position. Dancers sprang from the sides of each truck and filed between the advancing Jacksons. A squad formed beside the settling command car.

Kennedy tossed their leader a fleeting look.

“Red Thunder says we’re with you.”

Kennedy shrugged. He jumped the side rail and dropped onto the sand. He called out to the driver. “Grab the flag, leave the car.”

The driver bundled the flag and joined him on the ground, along with his radio man. They all crept forwards, the squad fanning out to flank them. A shell, striking the side of the motionless car, rocked it in place. Another smashed through the rear deck. As the fuel tank erupted, Kennedy thrust himself forwards. The heat of the explosion washed over him. A metal wheel sliced the sand where he’d crouched.

He thrust himself forwards again.

The ground to all sides was a fractured hellscape. Frantic, afflicted cries completed the abyss. Shapes shifted in the haze ahead, multiplying as he advanced. They moved like men in fear. Lacking the dancer’s way, gracelessly stirring the shapes of ungainly packs and setting up weapons in plain sight, they perished under the rapid machine-gun fire of Kennedy’s squad.

He forgot the cavern and the journal and Patricia’s scent. The universe tottered on every gained inch of ground.

They came across a pile of watchmen. Their blue robes, parted and torn, revealed body armour not dissimilar to his own. Each soldier exhibited ghost dancer handiwork in the slashes, thick and deep, applied to their throats. A dancer lay moaning with his hands over his groin. Black skin puckered around the rude entry site of a fifty-calibre round. His clamped fingers barely staunched the flow of bright blood.

“Company of Imperial Watch,” he called out to Kennedy. “Setting up machine-guns, launchers. Twenty feet ahead.”

Kennedy signed to his squad leader. Six dancers began snaking forwards low over the sand and vanished into the smog. He told his radio man to call the tanks to cover.

Short bursts of gunfire were answered with wild shrieks, then silence, then a low keening whistle.

He sent the tanks onwards.

“Please,” the dying man whispered.

Kennedy had a brackish taste in his mouth. He signed to his squad leader. The leader crossed to the man and brought a pistol up beneath his jaw.

“Thank you, Major.”

The man had his gaze fixed on Kennedy. Kennedy held it firm. The Colt fired. His head fell back in swift release.

They pushed forwards.

They found their first samurai face down in the blood-crusted sand, a neat hole beneath his ebony plait. Another two bore the mark of Crow God’s snipers. The ground ahead presented a particularly choice piece of earthwork. He signalled Wilson’s tanks.

Eight of the original fourteen had made it this deep into the camp. They found partial cover in newly fashioned hollows. Nose up, turrets depressed, each presented a limited target to their exposed foe. Ghost dancers dropped in the dirt beside the sunken vehicles.

The watchmen, augmented by standard infantry and samurai sharpshooters, had sought cover among the casings of dead armour. Not far behind them, the artillery barrels of the Union 82nd pierced the sky, uselessly. The samurai had done their work.