Dead Man’s Hand (38 page)

The echo of the scream rolled past him and was torn to pieces by the desert wind.

McCall could feel his heart pounding. He could
hear
the thunder of it in his ears.

His breath came in short gasps.

Silence fell like snow. Soft and slow, covering everything.

“A cat,” he said, and his voice was as thin as the lie he told himself. “Mountain
cat.”

After a long time he lowered his gun and exhaled heavily. Behind him his horse blew
and nickered uneasily, shifting from foot to foot, tail switching in agitation.

“Just a damn mountain cat, Bob,” said McCall. “That’s all it is, don’t you worry.”

Bob blew and stamped.

The echoes faded until they were nothing.

“Y’see, Bob? You dumb son of a mule? Stop being such a—”

The second scream tore the night apart.

It was huge and massive and so loud that it punched into McCall’s head. He screamed,
too, and threw himself to one side, spinning on his hip to bring the pistol up again,
aiming behind where he’d been facing.

The scream rose and rose.

And even as McCall screamed back at it he knew that this was no cat. No mountain cat
and no jungle tiger like the one in the traveling circus. The sound was too loud,
too prolonged, too shrill.

It was more like…

Like what?

If there was an answer to that question then McCall’s mind did not want to give it.
His brain refused to put a name to it.

The shriek went on and on, louder and louder and louder.

The gun fell from McCall’s hand as he clamped both palms over his ears. He screamed
as loud as he could, trying to push the sound back with his own scream.

Still it went on and on and on and…

Nothing.

Gone.

Stopped.

There was absolute silence. Immediate and total.

Only when McCall stopped screaming could he hear the echo of the screech rolling away
from him. He lay there, gasping like a trout on a riverbank. His horse stood trembling,
coat flecked with nervous sweat, foam dripping from the bit.

“Steady on, Bob,” gasped McCall. “Steady on. It’s just a…”

His words trailed off into nothing. McCall didn’t try to lie to the horse. Or to himself.
This was no cat or anything else whose cry he’d ever heard. This was a banshee wail,
like in the stories his grandmother used to tell him. Wailing spirits that warned
of death trying to sneak into the house.

But there was no house out here. McCall was sprawled on the sand in the dark wind,
and the sky was empty of everything but dying echoes.

And then there was movement out there.

McCall lunged for his fallen gun, clawed the ground for it, scrabbled it into his
fist, raised it toward the shape in the darkness.

“No,” said the shape.

“Step into the damn light or I’ll blow your head off,” snarled McCall.

The figure moved closer. It was a man. Tall and broad-shouldered, McCall could see
that much; but he stood just beyond the reach of the small campfire’s glow.

“No,” the man said again. “No reason to fire.”

McCall did not fire, but he did not lower the gun.

“No,” the man said a third time as he stepped forward into the light. The glow illuminated
a face that was hard and angular and streaked with blood. Firelight glimmered in the
slanting dark eyes and glistened on the edges of five ragged bullet holes in the broad,
flat chest. “No need to shoot. You’ve already killed me.”

McCall stared up at Walking Bear.

And he screamed.

Then he fired.

One, two, three…

Six shots that burst in the air with hot yellow flame and sharp cracks. The bullets
punched into Walking Bear, striking him in the chest, in the stomach, in the thigh,
the arm, the throat, the face.

Every bullet hit a target.

Cloth and flesh puffed up from each impact. Blood and bone flew.

The hammer clicked down against a spent shell.

Click.

Click.

Click.

McCall’s finger jerked the trigger over and over. The cylinder turned with impotent
desperation. The clicks chased the gunshot echoes into the darkness.

Walking Bear stood there.

He did not fall.

The new wounds did not bleed.

His face was unsmiling.

“No,” he said again.

McCall cried out. A small, mewling sound. Once more the pistol fell from his fingers
and thudded into the dirt.

Walking Bear stepped closer. A single step, but it sent McCall scrabbling backward
onto his buttocks, then into a skittering crab-like scuttle on hands and heels until
he was almost in the coals of the fire. He recoiled from the flames and fell onto
his side, panting, sweating, tears boiling from his eyes.

“Oh god,” he whispered. “Oh god…”

Walking Bear sighed and stepped forward again, but not toward McCall. There was a
large stone near the fire and he lowered himself onto it.

McCall goggled at him. He could feel the skin of his face contract, could feel his
lips curled back in terror and disgust from the thing that sat on the rock. When he
could force the words out, his voice was a strangled whisper.

“What
are
you?”

The Indian snorted. A soft sound, with only a splinter of amusement gouged into it.

“I’m dead,” said Walking Bear. “What the hell do you think I am?”

“I killed you.”

“Yes, you did. Twice, though I’m not sure the second time counts.”

Walking Bear’s voice was so normal that it made McCall want to scream again. It had
the casual tone and cadence of a city man, a gift from the Quakers who’d taught him
English. But the accent was Indian. There was no mistaking that odd lift at the end
of each sentence. Not like someone asking a question. Indians just had a little hook
at the end of everything they said that lifted their tone and then went dead flat.

“How are you… I mean… how…?” McCall couldn’t patch together a sentence that made any
sense.

Walking Bear shrugged. He bent down and picked up a handful of small stones, considered
them, and dropped them one at a time. No pattern to it, no haste.

McCall sat up with a jerk. With one hand he fumbled for his fallen pistol and with
the other he began pushing cartridges out of his belt. He managed to open the cylinder
and drop the spent shells, dropped most of the fresh ones, clumsied a few into place,
slapped the cylinder shut and held the gun out in two trembling hands.

The Cheyenne looked faintly amused. “Damn, white man, how many times do you want to
kill me?”

McCall licked his lips nervously. “Until it takes, damn you.”

Walking Bear dropped the rest of the pebbles and placed his fingers over the holes
in his chest, then showed those fingers to McCall. They were smeared with blood.

“It took the first time out.”

The gun barrel shuddered like a reed in a windstorm.

“I…”

“You’re going to try and make sense of it,” said Walking Bear. He shook his head.
“But it doesn’t make sense. Not the way you think.”

Before McCall could organize a reply to that, there was more movement out in the darkness.
He flinched and swung the barrel around.

But it was a horse.

A big roan with a blanket instead of a saddle. It walked slowly past the camp, cutting
a single glance at the two men without pausing. It gave Bob a soft whinny, but didn’t
stop there, either. McCall stared at it. There were three bullet holes in its stomach
and one in its chest.

“That’s not… that’s not…”

“Possible?” finished Walking Bear. He shrugged and they watched the horse walk away
and vanish into the darkness. There was a long time of silence as they both looked
at the shadows. Then another horse came walking by. Its stomach was torn open, entrails
dragging in the dirt as the animal followed the hoof prints of the roan.

“Jesus Christ the savior!” cried McCall. “That thing’s
dead
.”

Walking Bear gave him a pitying look. “I thought we covered that.”

“But
how
?”

“Why are you asking me?”

“Because… because you’re dead, too.”

“Sure.”

“Then how are you here? How can you be sitting there? How can you be talking to me,
god damn it?”

But Walking Bear shook his head. “I don’t know, white man. I woke up dead. You shot
me full of holes and I fell down. Then I woke up.”

“Are you… a ghost?” demanded McCall. “Tell me if you are.”

“I don’t know. I’m dead.”

“How can you not know?” McCall lowered his pistol, laying it on his lap. “You’re a
ghost. You have to be.”

“Then I’m a ghost.” Walking Bear seemed to think about it. He scratched at the bullet
hole in his face. “What’s a ghost, though?” he asked. “I mean, to you whites?”

McCall didn’t answer.

“Sure,” said Walking Bear, as if answering his own question, “I read the Bible with
the Quakers. There was a lot in there about ghosts and spirits. Jesus was a ghost,
I suppose. He came back from the dead.”

“He was a spirit,” said McCall, calling on what little he remembered of proper Sunday
school. “The Holy Spirit.”

“Okay, sure,” agreed Walking Bear. “But I remember reading that he was flesh, too.
At least when he first came back. He met with his disciples and even ate with them.
Fish, I think. And one of them touched his wounds to prove that he was really there.”

“Thomas,” said McCall softly. His mouth was as dry as paste.

“Thomas, right. So, I guess that’s what happens.”

“I’ve seen a lot of dead people, damn it,” growled McCall, “and none of them ever
came back.”

Walking Bear turned and looked at him, his dark eyes as cold and hard as chips of
coal. “How would you know that?”

There was a sound behind them and they both turned to see four men milling at the
edge of the clearing. Not Cheyenne. These were white men in jeans and canvas coats,
with gun belts and Stetson hats. McCall knew them, every one. Lucas Polk and his brother,
Isaac. Dandy McIsle. And Little Joe Smalls.

All of them were on McCall’s payroll. They’d been at the battle. They’d each killed
one or more of the Cheyenne.

All of them were dead.

Bob whinnied in fright and tugged at the rope that held him.

The four men stood together, speaking to one another in low whispers. McCall couldn’t
make out the words. They cut quick looks at him, and Dandy McIsle gave a single shake
of his head. When they began walking, they edged around the camp, staying at the very
edge of the spill of orange firelight.

“Hey!” cried McCall. “Lucas… Joe…”

But the men ignored him and hurried away. They headed in the same direction as the
two horses.

“Where are you going?” McCall yelled.

There was no answer. McCall wheeled on Walking Bear.

“What’s happening?”

The Indian seemed to think about it. “I guess they’re going home.”

“Home where? Little Joe’s from Arkansas. Dandy got off the boat from Ireland two years
ago. He’s been with me ever since. He doesn’t have a home.”

“I guess he sees things another way now,” said Walking Bear. “I guess they all do.”

“What in tarnation are you talking about?” McCall wanted to laugh. He wanted to slap
himself across the face and wake up from what was obviously a dream. But he sat there,
clutching the gun that lay in his lap, talking nonsense with a dead Indian. “Come
on,” he snapped, “tell me what you’re talking about. Tell me how this makes sense.”

More men walked past. Indians and his own men. Some of them walked together, heads
bent in conversation so private that McCall couldn’t catch a single word. Others walked
alone. The expressions on their faces were mixed. There was fear on some faces, and
even terror on a few. Some looked profoundly confused, and these men stumbled along
in the wake of those whose countenances showed determination. But whether that determination
was bred from actual understanding or if it was in the nature of those men to believe
they understood what was happening at all times, McCall couldn’t tell. One man staggered
past, arms wrapped tightly around his chest, eyes screwed shut as he wept with deep,
broken sobs. And one man went by, singing a slow, sad Presbyterian hymn. Every man
was pocked with bullet holes, pierced with arrows, or opened by blades. Every single
one. And yet they walked without evident pain, even those who limped on shattered
legs. One man waddled past on the stumps of legs that had been hacked off below the
knee. Josiah Fenton, one of the youngest of his riders.

McCall watched them go.

All of them.

Every man who had ridden with him, and every Cheyenne they’d died to kill. He even
saw two men—an Indian and one of his own men, Doc Hogarth, walking together as if
it was something they’d always done. As if it was something normal to do. Even Walking
Bear seemed surprised to see that.

“Hunh?” grunted the big Cheyenne.

Doc Hogarth had an arrow all the way through his head. The barbed tip stood out ten
inches from the back of Doc’s split skull, and the fletched end stood out four inches
from the shattered lens of the right side of his glasses. In a dime-novel drawing
it might have been bizarre enough to be funny, but McCall gagged when he saw it.

Doc heard the sound of him retching and turned to him, a flicker of sympathy and perhaps
disapproval in his remaining eye.

The men passed, some coming so close that firelight danced on their faces and in their
eyes, others staying well away so that they were vague shapes in the darkness. It
seemed to take a long, long time for them to pass. Too long.

Then McCall cried out as he realized why it was taking this long.

There were strangers mixed in among the known dead.

Other Indians. Too many of them. Some white men, too, but not as many as the Cheyenne.

“Who are they?” he barked, pointing to the Indians.

Walking Bear shook his head. “I don’t know them.”

Somehow, McCall felt that this was a lie. Or, at least, not a whole truth. The tone
of his voice suggested that he knew, or guessed, something.