Blood Riders (2 page)

“Open fire! Open fire!” Hollister commanded. But only he and Lemaire remained alive. “Sergeant, shoot!” There was no response and Hollister turned in horror to see another creature, taller and bigger than the rest, suddenly tearing at the flesh of Lemaire’s neck. He had no idea where this one had come from. The sergeant’s eyes were open and empty. His arms and legs still moved and flailed against the being holding him, but he was already dead.

Hollister shot the attacker, his first bullet taking him high in the shoulder. The creature stood up straight and faced Hollister, blood and flesh covering its mouth and chin. Hollister shot again and again. Both bullets entered the creature’s chest, but it didn’t even flinch. He was a giant. Hollister was six feet four inches tall and the thing towered over him, at seven feet tall, at least. It had shoulder-length white hair and the wind seemed to pull it behind him like a cape. His eyes blazed red and his mouth was elongated; fangs descended where teeth should be, just like the woman Hollister killed moments before. It was all wrong.

Don’t let it touch you
, Hollister thought. He was out of bullets. It kept coming forward and Hollister threw his pistol at the beast, but the heavy Colt bounced off its head with no effect.

Keeping the thing in sight, he backed slowly away in the direction of the horses. A quick glance over his shoulder showed his own mount still standing there, pacing nervously at the edge of the camp—disturbed by what was happening, but too well trained to leave its master. Lemaire had just broken a mare two weeks ago and the not-quite-tame horse had skittered away. Jonas thought of turning and running, but instinctively knew the creature would be upon him the moment his back was turned.

Reaching into his boot, Hollister pulled out his Bowie knife with one hand and drew his saber with the other. Most times he didn’t carry the sword as it only got in the way. But the colonel was a stickler for it, always insisting officers carry one on patrol. And for some reason, the saber seemingly gave the creature pursuing him more pause than the other weapons, for it slowed its advance. Its gaze locked on his and it made him feel like a frightened buffalo calf staring into the eyes of a wolf.

“You have taken one of ours,” the creature said to him in a voice tinged with anger and hatred. It made Hollister cringe to hear it. He found himself losing his breath and he tried to calm himself, but he was too afraid.

“You killed my men!” Hollister shouted at him.

“Yes. We feed,” it replied. “My followers feed. And you have taken one of mine. Caroline. You will die for this.”

“Murdering bastards! I’ll kill you all!” Somewhere Hollister found the courage to step forward and take a mighty swing at the man with his saber, but the creature dodged it easily.

Hollister had overswung, and with his next step backward, tripped over something and fell to the ground on his back. Without warning the creature was straddling him, pinning his arms to his sides. The creature struck him with a fist the size of an anvil. Hollister felt his nose crunch, and the warm taste of blood filled his mouth as it hit him again. He screamed in agony at the fangs descending toward him. He knew he was going to die and wished to close his eyes against it but found he could not.

Suddenly and without warning the creature straightened up, looking off to the east. Hollister was still pinned beneath him, struggling to free his arms. But day was breaking as the sun topped the horizon and light spilled across the prairie. The creature shouted out something in a language Hollister had never heard and stood up. For a moment, Hollister thought he saw smoke coming from the fiend’s skin and clothing, but was sure his own loss of blood must be playing tricks on him.

“Some other time,” the creature hissed at him, “for Caroline.” He moved backward toward the camp, into the shadows and away from the advancing sunlight. The smoke coming from his clothes and body disappeared. Hollister sat up and watched in horrid fascination as these living monsters moved among the camp, dragging the bodies of his dead men behind them. Each body, in turn, was tossed into the back of the upright wagon effortlessly, as if it were a sack of flour from a general store. Six creatures remained, including the one with the white hair. He counted his blessings they hadn’t all attacked him at once. All of them moved with speed and precision, as if it was important for them to make some unknown deadline.

They had taken four of the dead trooper’s horses and cut loose the saddles, hitching them to the wagon. The white-haired giant looked back at Hollister as he donned a long robe he had pulled from the back of the wagon. The robe covered him completely and before raising the hood, he studied Hollister again. He took a few tentative steps in his direction.

“Another time. For Caroline,” it reminded him. It stood there staring at Hollister for a long moment. Hollister felt as if the giant man were toying with the idea of finishing him now instead of waiting. It looked down at its robe and then off to the east and the rising sun. For a reason he didn’t understand, it left him there in the dirt.

In two steps it vaulted into the seat of the wagon. The other creatures had disappeared into the back, and Hollister could hear awful sounds coming from behind the canvas covering.

He stayed on the ground, too terrified to move, watching until the wagon disappeared from sight. Hollister tried to stand, to reach his horse and give pursuit, but had taken a frightful beating. His head was bleeding and the pounding was so loud in his ears, he thought his skull might cleave in two.

“Bastards!” he shouted. “I’ll find you! I’ll kill yo . . .” the world spun and he collapsed in the dirt, flat on his back. As he drifted into unconsciousness, the morning sunlight washed over him like a blanket and the last thing he remembered was its warmth on his face.

F
rom a small hillock to the west, Shaniah watched and waited. She knew the troopers were doomed the moment they approached Malachi’s camp, but there was nothing she could have done to stop it. Not yet. Malachi and his group were feeding, drinking what the Old Ones called
Huma Sangra
—the name for human blood in the ancient language of her people—and growing more powerful every day. Though she was strong and nearly an immortal herself, she did not feed on human blood, and because of it, could not match their speed and strength. It frustrated her to stand idly by with Malachi so close. But she would not be able to end it now.

The human who’d survived intrigued her. Though it was the sun that had saved him, he had fought bravely, and she’d watched in fascination as Malachi hesitated briefly, cautious of the human and his saber. One of the few ways to kill an Archaic was to cut off its head, but there was no way for the man to have known that.

She rode into the camp. The man was still alive, but she would be gone before he regained consciousness. Standing over him a moment, she pulled her hood wide in order to study him more closely. He was a handsome man, for a human. For a brief instant she thought his eyes opened and he looked at her, but he had been beaten so severely that she was sure he was only semi-conscious at best. His eyes closed again. She could not stay much longer. The leather gloves and cloak she wore were too warm in the morning sun, but she could die without them, for she was a creature of the night, an Archaic herself.

Malachi had captured and turned a band of settlers. Humans were turned when they were bitten and then drank the blood of an Archaic. The change happened in a few hours. Some could not survive the process and those who proved unable were merely drained of their blood and their bodies discarded. She had watched for three days, unable to stop Malachi or help any of the humans they had fed upon.

Malachi had then used his new recruits to stage a scene looking like a Lakota attack. They waited for a rescue party to show up, with the intent to feed upon or turn more humans. Malachi was becoming more and more daring, gathering more and more followers.

Shaniah inspected the camp, peering inside the wagon, looking for any clue of where Malachi might be headed.

She remounted her horse, turning the great stallion west. The animal, named Demeter, was one of many that had been specially trained since birth not to fear her kind. He would not spook or shy away from her as most creatures would, and as a result the horse had saved her life on more than one occasion.

She could not ride for long in the sun and heat, even with the cloak, and would need to find a place to hide until the night came. Then she would think about Malachi again. Where he might be going next and what his plans were.

And more important: how to stop him.

Chapter Two

Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas

June 1880

“W
here you goin’, Chee?” Sergeant McAfee asked as he poked a sausage-sized finger into the young man’s chest. Chee, thin and rangy, with dark eyes, said nothing, but Hollister saw his fists clench. There were seven of them on prison work detail, digging another well, and it was unseasonably hot for June, with the afternoon sun high in the sky moving the temperature just past hell. Hollister kept digging, not caring about their conflict, but watching from the corner of his eye just the same.

McAfee was a huge Irishman, nearly three hundred pounds and solid, his skin pale and ruddy from drink. The lines on his face were a map of booze, fights, and hard living. He was hot-tempered and foulmouthed; he smelled like a stable and was quite likely insane.

The officers who’d served on McAfee’s court-martial board had deliberated for less than three minutes at his trial. He had shot his commanding officer, a lieutenant, in the head. The lieutenant had taken issue with McAfee’s handling of a half dozen Sioux prisoners. According to rumors, he’d pulled his sidearm and put a round between the man’s eyes and left him on the ground. Then he’d shot his prisoners for good measure.

He had been a master sergeant, and had been incarcerated at Leavenworth since it opened. When Chee arrived two months ago, McAfee had chosen the kid as his personal punching bag. Hollister had a feeling someone was going to break, soon, one way or the other.

Whenever there was no other meaningless labor for them to perform, the warden decided the prison needed a new well. Hollister hated digging, but he had at least another six years of it. He didn’t know the length of Chee’s sentence; the kid never talked much. McAfee was in for life.

“I said, where you going, boy?” McAfee was in front of Chee, blocking the path to wherever.

“Let me pass, please, Sergeant,” the boy said quietly. Hollister guessed Chee was in his early twenties, just a boy compared to everyone else behind these walls.

McAfee laughed and his crew laughed with him. McAfee had a group of vultures following him around Leavenworth, watching and sometimes participating in his terrorization of the prison’s population. There was a moment of quiet. Hollister knew the sound of this silence. With every altercation—any fight, every battle he’d ever witnessed since he’d left West Point in 1864—there was always a calm before the storm. A brief moment of silence before the screams and grunts and dying began.

“Huh. Let you pass. I’m sorry. Why of course, you mongrel-breed, dog-shit-eatin’ son of a whore. I don’t know what I done with my manners. By all means, you little sack a’ shit, pass by.” McAfee made a show of stepping back, bowing at the waist and slowly throwing out his hand like a matador.
Don’t do it kid
, Hollister thought to himself. There were two guards, both armed with Springfields and blackjacks, talking in low tones to each other more than forty yards away, up by the barracks. Hollister knew the guards wouldn’t do much of anything. They were probably as terrified of McAfee as everyone else.

Chee stood still a moment. He closed his eyes and stepped past McAfee. The kid was a hard worker, and he’d dug up more ground this morning than anyone in the detail, Hollister included.

As he moved past the ex-sergeant, Hollister wanted to shout out a warning, but he knew better. Chee needed to deal with this, and if Hollister got involved he’d have to handle McAfee himself somehow, and so far the giant ape had left him alone.

As McAfee remained bowed, pretending to give Chee a pass, he flexed his arm, fist clenched behind his back. Hollister saw the big man’s arm swing forward and winced. He’d watched McAfee fight before and knew he was deceptively fast. This blow might just separate Chee from his head.

But it never landed. McAfee swung hard, but Chee was no longer standing where he should have been. The ex-sergeant’s momentum twisted him around and off-balance so fast that Hollister didn’t see how Chee got behind him. His foot shot out and connected with the back of McAfee’s knee, and the giant man crumpled. Chee’s left hand shot out like a sidewinder, grabbing a handful of McAfee’s hair and pulling his head back. With his other arm he drove his elbow into the bully’s nose. The crunch and crack of bone and tissue made McAfee bellow in pain. One of the other men moved on Chee, swinging his shovel like an axe. Chee released McAfee, who fell to his hands and knees, blood darkening the ground beneath him.

Chee easily ducked beneath the shovel and kicked the man solidly in the groin. He dropped the shovel, clutching his crotch with both hands. Chee took the man’s head in both hands and drove his knee into his face. He slumped to the ground, finished.

McAfee was standing, his mouth and nose a mass of twisted gore and blood, his eyes watering.

Three of McAfee’s men down in the hole with Hollister grabbed their shovels, thinking about climbing up to join the fray. Hollister moved in front of them and with a commanding look at the first one, an illiterate trooper named Smith, said quietly, “Don’t.”

The man looked at Hollister with hooded eyes. He tried to shrug past, and Jonas put his hand on the man’s chest. “I said,
don’t
.” The three of them saw something in Hollister they didn’t like and backed off.

Up above them, McAfee charged at Chee, trying to get his hands on the younger, faster man. His primitive brain told him if he could do that, he could rid himself of the pain he felt by pounding away at Chee until it was gone. What he didn’t realize was that the fight was already over. Hollister, with one eye on the three dregs in the hole with him, watched in quiet fascination as Chee leapt in the air, his foot flicking out and taking McAfee square on the chin. McAfee went down and didn’t move.

“The hell you doing, Chee?” said one of the screws, a blue-coated corporal named Larson. He and the other guard had finally arrived, waiting as usual until the two men had settled things before taking action. Chee said nothing and the corporal drove the butt of his Springfield into the young man’s gut. He groaned and doubled over, dropping to his knees.

What the corporal hadn’t noticed was the rifle butt had hardly hit Chee at all. He’d managed to bend his body away with it and take most of the force in his hands. He was acting. With Chee on the ground and Hollister in the hole, they were at eye level, and when the dark-skinned man winked mischievously at him, Hollister couldn’t help but smile.

“You’re going in the box, half-breed,” the corporal sneered as he and the other guard lifted Chee to his feet. “You men, drag this fat tub o’ lard to the surgeon.” McAfee’s followers scrambled out of the hole, pulling the sergeant and the other man to their feet, leading them away toward the administration buildings.

Hollister watched them for a while and returned to his digging.

Hollister dug on through the afternoon, then climbed out of the well, taking a break for water and hardtack with a piece of wormy bacon for lunch. The meat was inedible so he threw it over the wall of the fort. McAfee’s three varmints had never returned after hauling him to the infirmary. It was all the same to him; he preferred solitude.

As always, his mind returned to the ridge in the Wyoming Territory where he’d watched his men die four years ago. He remembered passing out as the wagon pulled away, and he’d woken up with the sun beating down on his face and his mount snorting at him from a few yards away. He was grateful he’d taken the time to train his mount, who he called Little Phil. The horse hadn’t spooked like most horses would. Besides mourning the loss of his men, the destruction of his life and career, and being locked up in Leavenworth for ten years, Jonas really missed that horse. Little Phil had been the best ride he’d ever had.

All that was left there on that ridge were the smoldering wagon and his horse. He mounted up and tried to follow the wagon trail, but quickly lost it. He was no tracker. He’d counted on Lemaire for that. As he rode back toward Deadwood, the face of the woman leaning over him kept returning to his memory. Had she been real or imaginary? He was convinced she was there, but why? Was she one of them? Or was she one of the party who had been able to escape somehow?

It was nearly a two-day ride back to Camp Sturgis, where he arrived sunburned, his horse nearly dead and wild with thirst. He staggered into the colonel’s office and reported what had happened. The next day the colonel got him a fresh mount and sent two companies back with him to the site.

There was nothing to see. The wagon was still there, but there were no bodies, no other evidence. There was another thing that bothered Hollister: the wagon was still full of goods. No one, not even the Sioux, had salvaged anything. In his heart he knew it was because there was a veil of something evil over the place where his troopers had died. His eleven murdered troopers had disappeared without a trace.

After returning to Camp Sturgis, Hollister slowly came to the realization that his colonel didn’t believe him. The old man had sat Hollister down and gone over the story with him again and again.
What had he seen? How had his men died? It must have been the Sioux, wasn’t that how it happened? Not some strange and unbelievable story about blood-drinking creatures.

Hollister never wavered, and after nearly six hours of nonstop interrogation, a private walked in with a telegram for the colonel. Hollister remembered him running his hand through his white hair as he read it. He barked an order and a detail of troopers entered the room, ordered Hollister to attention, and arrested him.

He was held in the brig, and court-martialed two weeks later for dereliction of duty, conduct unbecoming an officer, and several other made-up charges. The next thing he knew, he was in Leavenworth.

Hollister rarely thought of anything else but that day. He remembered the look on the face of the man-creature as the sun had risen. How the smoke had rolled off his clothes and skin as the light peeked over the horizon. He heard the serpentlike hiss of his voice. “We shall meet again. For Caroline,” he’d said.

Well, he’d have a hard time finding Hollister now. Hollister thrust his shovel into the ground and climbed back into the hole. He was wearing his striped cavalry pants and a red undershirt, soaked through with sweat and grime. The sun was almost gone behind the western wall of the prison fort. It would be chow time soon. Hollister laughed at the thought.

He had lost about thirty pounds since being incarcerated, and he’d never tended toward heavy anyway. The food in Leavenworth was awful beyond description, as long as the description commenced at disgusting. Hardtack was about all a man was able to choke down here.

“Hollister,” a voice called behind him.

He turned to find the duty officer; a first lieutenant named Garrick was headed his way. He figured now he’d have to make some kind of report about the fight. Whether he liked it or not, it looked like he was involved. Hollister scrambled up the ladder and came to attention, feet together and shoulders back. He made sure not to look the lieutenant in the eye when Garrick reached him. In his time in Leavenworth, Hollister had learned eye contact was a tool to be used in very specific ways: avoided with the guards and officers, used as a means of intimidation with the other prisoners.

“Sir,” he said.

“Colonel wants to see you. On the double, inmate.”

“Yes, sir.” He saluted and started for the administration building. Strangely, the lieutenant followed along. Word of Hollister’s story had made its way through the population and command structure at the prison. It had only served to isolate him because he was considered crazy. Luckily, in a place like Leavenworth, craziness was one way to stay alive: even thugs like McAfee gave him a wide berth. Yet he felt something changing. Jonas suddenly realized this shitty day had the potential to grow much worse.

“What’d you do, Hollister?” Garrick asked him. With the sun gone behind the western wall, the heat had subsided a bit and twilight shadows were racing across the grounds.

“I don’t understand, sir,” he replied.

“Like hell you don’t. You been writing letters again? You might’ve stepped in the cow shit, Hollister.”

“Yes, sir. I’m sure I did, sir,” Hollister said.

When he’d first been sentenced to prison, Hollister had used whatever meager privileges he could muster to write letters to his former comrades, commanders, and even the congressman who’d appointed him to West Point. Asking for a new trial, he had pleaded his case and begged his friends and former classmates to investigate the disappearance of his men and find the creatures that’d killed them and destroyed his life.

All for naught. He was shunned by everyone he’d once called a friend; standing up for him was a sure way out of the army. He had given up after a year.

“Colonel Whitman ain’t going to be happy, if you been stirring up the shit, inmate. You been stirring up shit again,
Captain
?” The lieutenant sneered. It was a grave insult to a prisoner, especially a former officer, to be referred to by his old rank. He took a deep breath, determined not to let the lieutenant draw him in to his little game.

“No, sir,” he replied quietly.

The two men crossed the main yard, reaching the wood-plank walkway leading to the main gate. Passing through, they entered the administration building with the lieutenant in the lead, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and proceeded to the colonel’s office. The lieutenant knocked on the door and they heard the gruff man answer from inside.

Lieutenant Colonel Whitman was a pompous little rooster. He was about five feet five inches tall, gray haired and clean shaven. He was approaching thirty years in the army without ever seeing combat, and as a result had never risen above his present rank, even during the war, when promotions were handed out like wooden nickels.

“That will be all, Lieutenant,” the colonel said. He was standing at the window of his office, which overlooked the yard of the main prison. Running the nation’s military prison was no plum assignment no matter how you tried to frame it. Whitman would be here until he retired or died.