Dead Man’s Hand (42 page)

Keen’s face scrunched up in defiance and anger. Finally, after several short breaths,
he screwed up his face in disgust and turned around.

He trembled a bit, expecting the shot.

But Willie nodded. “You’re all right.” He slid the two Colts back into their holsters.
“I apologize for drawing on you.”

Keen yanked his own, overly large revolver out, but Willie ignored him. He moved around
the house, kicking open doors and looking into rooms as the sheriff followed him,
gun aimed. Willie paused in front of a store room in the back. Looked at the bodies
on the ground.

“See that?” he asked Keen.

The sheriff’s green eyes took it all in. Shattered human ribs poking through broken
skin. Glazed eyes staring at the ceiling. The wife, the two children lying in her
arms. “Like the cattle,” he said.

“Like the cattle.”

“How’d you know?” Keen asked.

“Seen it before. Some men attacked a camp I was providing protection for. Wasn’t pretty.”
Willie remembered muzzle flashes and glazed eyes, men with broken legs dragging themselves
toward him.

“Would he have gone for me?”

“Guessing so.”

“Then I owe you my life,” he said. “But I still gotta take you in.”

Keen waved the gun at Willie, pointed outside. There was a horse and wagon waiting.

Willie looked at the old mare. “Sheriff, I got the impression I wouldn’t be welcome
in Duffy after sunset. That was the word. You telling me I got that wrong?”

The sheriff shook his head. “Putting you in the jail. For protection.”

Willie raised an eyebrow incredulously. “Protection?”

“The cattle. It isn’t just Longfellow’s farm. They’re all over the place,” he said.
“All around town.”

All around town.

“There’s a Pawnee tracker I hired to help me get here. He’s just outside the other
side of Duffy,” Willie said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to pick him up or let him
know to run like hell. If that’s all right with you.”

Sheriff Keen nodded. “After what I just saw, I’d say that’s fair. But my shotgun’ll
be resting here on my lap, and you’re still coming with me.”

Willie nodded. He had time to think about what to do next on the ride out. Time to
decide whether it was better to lay in with the people of Duffy or leg it out into
the dark wilds knowing there were strange things out there.

He got up in the back of the wagon, looking around the farm.

The sheriff urged his horse forward, and they rumbled out over the dirt road in the
dim light of a nearly setting sun.

* * *

“Damn.”

Willie stood on the edge of the wagon and looked down at the tortured body of the
Pawnee man who’d led him here. They were well into dusk, the last sliver of sun slipping
down under the trees. Residual orange light dappled the scrub.

“Never even got his name,” Willie said, a bit of anger touching his voice. “What a
thing.”

The sheriff looked over at the horizon. “Figure we got time to bury him?”

“No difference to him now, and I doubt that’s a good idea, tarrying here. I think
it’s time we got moving along,” Willie said.

“What are they?” the sheriff asked. “I know I saw what I saw. Enough to turn my wits
shaky.”

Willie nodded. “You saw what you saw. And I don’t know what they are either. I just
know they overran us. We set up camp for a night, on the way to the goldstrike outside
your hills. They killed the men I was being paid to shotgun for. Murdered them before
I understood what was going on.”

“But why? What did they want? What demonic thing is happening out here?”

“Never really had a chance to ask,” Willie said. “Been moving behind them and trying
to get my revenge since they hit.”

He’d been turning over the idea of overpowering the sheriff and walking out into the
desert. But to do that he’d have to steal the man’s horse and leave him without a
gun here.

Not a fair thing to do to a man in these circumstances. Not with what might be out
in the dark. And Willie was a man of the law. Sure, most hated him. But there was
a respect he’d come to expect, and that had been earned by being a stickler for rule
of law. Drilled into him even earlier by the army and his years in uniform.

Sheriff Keen was a fellow officer; leaving him out here alone was not a brotherly
thing.

And the murderer who’d escaped Willie’s camp was somewhere around Duffy. Willie had
sworn he’d bring justice.

Willie sat down on the bench in the back of the wagon and tugged his hat down lower.
“Sheriff, what kind of trouble are your townsfolk going to make for me?” he asked.

Keen shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Well…” he said. “I’ve been thinking on that.
I can pass you off as someone I caught and lock you up, keep you under watch. But
that could end up going the wrong way. I’d rather explain to the mayor what’s happening.
Because if those things are all around Duffy now, what happens when they start coming
in? Either way, I’m getting you to safety and standing outside with a shotgun.”

Willie thought about the shambling forms ripping through the darkness of the camp
toward him. It might be dangerous back in the cell. But certainly not as dangerous
as it certainly was out here. In the dark.

“Promise me something, Sheriff,” he said.

“What?”

“Put a key to the cell in one of my boots, and my guns in a box under the bed. No
one has to see them, but I want them there. In case.”

Sheriff Keen thought about it for a long moment.

Then he nodded.

* * *

The mayor glared belligerently at Willie through the bars of the cell. He didn’t say
anything. Quirked the edges of his mouth, then stalked back to Keen’s desk. They started
arguing.

Willie sat on the wooden bench and leaned back, sighing.

He could see where this was going.

The mayor wasn’t about to let some “darky” tell them all how some possessed people
were out there lurking in the dark. That maybe they’d come attack townsfolk.

Didn’t make no sense, the mayor insisted.

“I don’t care how deputized you are,” the well-dressed mayor hissed. “You don’t come
into my town spouting half-crazed bullshit like that and expect any of us to believe
you. You killed Longfellow. You may well have killed his family, too. And that Indian
the sheriff saw. I think we’ll keep you locked up in here and locked up good.”

Willie didn’t say anything. That was always the better course in these situations.

He just eyed the man levelly until he swore and walked out.

The sheriff checked his shotgun, then sat at his desk. “You think, whatever those
things are, they’re going to come for the town?”

Willie leaned back against the wall, relaxing a bit. “Hope they don’t,” he said.

“That all you got? Hope?”

“All any of us ever had, Sheriff,” Willie said as he lay down on the bench and pulled
his hat down over his head.

* * *

He woke at night to the sound of the sheriff cursing.

First he stretched, worked out the kinks in his arms and back, and then splashed water
on his face from a small jug Keen had put inside the cell with him.

“They are gathering outside.” Keen drew the rough burlap curtains closed against the
flicker of torchlight. “And I cannot see their necks,” he said, clearly exasperated.

“So we don’t know whether they are here to lynch me for being in Duffy after dark,
or to kill us and fill our heads with insect parts,” Willie observed.

Keen looked back at him, horrified.

“I’m just saying, either reason is a messy one,” Willie said.

“You’re right. We need to get out of here,” Keen said. “If they’re here for a lynching
they’re likely to come after me for trying to help you.”

Willie was already pulling the box out from under his bench. He holstered up and took
a step toward the metal bars, and right as he did so the front doors busted open.
Three townsmen stumbled in, and Sheriff Keen wracked a round into his shotgun. “Now
there!” he shouted. “You stay back or I’ll shoot.”

“Sheriff,” Willie muttered through the jail bars, key in hand as he tried to unlock
the door. “I’d get in here with me quick…”

They didn’t look like the hanging type, the three that stepped forward. They looked
drunk. Vacant eyed. Although once they saw Willie, their heads tracked him.

Sheriff Keen stepped forward. “Get outta here,” he growled.

“We want the nigger,” they growled right back. Willie stiffened. Lowered his hands
to his belt.

Keen aimed the shotgun at them. “I’ll shoot,” he said. “Jamie, Nicodemus, Alex, you
know I mean it.”

They swung their heads to regard Keen. Willie scuttled over to the edge of the cell.
“Sheriff, I—”

Keen fired. Buckshot ripped through all three men, and both Keen and Willie swore
to see the black ichor and chitinous pieces mixed with skull slap against the wooden
doors. Jamie and Alex slumped dead to the ground, but the one Keen had called Nicodemus
jerked forward like a sped up marionette.

Willie fired from between the bars of the cell, got him twice in the chest, but the
man kept on. It took a third shot to get him in the head, and by then the rest of
the mob was kicking through the door.

“Keen!”

The sheriff never even backed toward the cell. Stood and reloaded his shotgun, fired,
moved to reload again, then pulled a pistol. He threw his keys with his spare hand
back toward the cell without a word.

He went down, covered by townsfolk ripping him apart, limb from limb, with one last
muffled shot.

And then when they were done, they stood up and looked at Willie.

There were more of those possessed townspeople out there than he had bullets for.
And he could hear more of them shuffling around in the dirt outside. They pawed around
the sheriff’s remains, looking for the keys to the cell with those vacant eyes as
Willie watched them.

He figured he’d shoot as many as he could as they came in, once they figured out how
to break through the cell.

Willie dragged the bench out to the middle of the cell, pulled the blanket off it,
and set his spare bullets down on the hard top. Checked his two Colts.

Twelve in. Ten loose on the bench.

Thirty townsfolk.

“Marshal, sheriff, you still in there?” shouted someone in the street on the other
side of the mob. “Lie down flat! I am opening fire!”

Many other men would have paused or asked a question back.

Willie did no such thing. He dropped and kissed the dirty floor without a second thought,
and as he did so the
chack chack chack
sound of a multi-barreled Gatling gun ripped through Duffy’s main street. The windows
exploded, wood cracked, splinters flew around the room. Black ichor stained the bars,
Willie’s hat, coat, the floor.

The barrels wound down.

Wounded townsfolk scrabbled around the floor.

“I’m standing up!” Willie shouted. He shook black goop from himself, and then shot
the nearest man still stirring. He let himself out of the cell, dispatching anyone
that even groaned, and stepped through the door warily.

There was a wagon parked in the middle of the street with a Gatling gun mounted to
the back. A grandfatherly black man in a duster with a marshal’s star on his lapel
stood behind the still smoking and crackling barrels, reloading the ammunition belt
by himself. When he saw Willie, he swung the gun at him. “Show me your neck,” he said.

Willie leaned forward and exposed it.

“Good enough,” the stranger said. He had a shock of white hair that he’d left long.
It framed his lined and strong face, off which a strong snowy white beard hung. The
eyes glinted in the firelight of the street’s torches.

“Sheriff’s dead,” Willie reported. “My name’s Willie Kennard. Who’re you?”

The man looked around the town warily. “I’m Frederick Douglass,” he said.

“The abolitionist?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you for the assistance,” Willie said, surprised. What was Douglass doing out
west? And at this particular moment? “Do you know what in hell is going on?”

Douglass looked down the street. Now Willie heard a faint buzzing in the dark distance
of the night lurking around the edges of the town. Like a hive of bees, but lower
pitched.

A beam of light lanced out of the sky and illuminated the scrub. Strange, haunting
shadows danced and moved across the horizon.

“We’d better get up into the crags and hills,” Douglass said, pointing Willie toward
the rider’s bench and the reins. “They’ll have a harder time catching up to us amongst
the rock. I’ll tell you what I know as we ride.”

* * *

The team of horses ran like the devil and dragged the wagon along over the rough dirt
road leading out of Duffy. Willie could hardly hear Douglass over the racket of hooves,
the creaking wagon, and the bouncing of his chair. Douglass was cleaning the mounted
gun and arranging belts of ammunition, grunting with the effort.

“I’ve been appointed a marshal of the District of Columbia, by President Rutherford
B. Hayes,” Douglass shouted. “Ostensibly it is so I can bring more of our folk into
civil service. And with those strong jobs previously denied to them, we might rise
in our stations. I’m the first negro man in this position. We have had many firsts
since President Lincoln—God rest his soul—passed emancipation. I see you, and I see
a marshal. All over this land, even despite the fact that President Hayes agreed to
end Reconstruction in the South, we are making great strides, Mr. Kennard. Great strides.”

That flying beam of light stabbed out and lit up the world like a second sun.

“I know. I served with the Seventh Illinois Rifles,” Willie said, urging the horses
on faster. The droning sound, a hellish one if he’d ever heard it, had grown louder.
It was associated with that infernal light in the sky. “What is that in the sky?”

Douglass shielded his eyes and looked up. “They’ve spotted us.” He swung the Gatling
gun up and squinted through the sights.