Dead Man’s Hand (44 page)

The droning sound Willie’d heard last night returned. The cigar-shaped airship passed
overhead and floated over the canyon. Steam and black smoke poured from slanted, sideways
stacks in a metal basket underneath the massive gas bag.

Willie stared, the miners momentarily forgotten. The thing was the size of a large
city building, floating lightly through the air.

“What a thing,” he said to Douglass.

But Douglass was more focused on the crowd lurking behind cover, trying to advance
on them. His rifle cracked out, dirt puffed, and the possessed miners hung back.

For now.

* * *

“I count a hundred figures,” Douglass said, his dust-flecked face lined with exhaustion.
Red eyes betrayed the man’s lack of sleep. “I was not expecting so many, so quick.”

And despite a full night’s worth himself, Willie was already tired of shooting at
shadows.

“They’re massing for a charge. They’ll be easy to shoot when they come over that open
ground, but they’re just too many,” Willie said. “And without a Gatling gun or something
as serious, I don’t see how we kill them fast enough.”

“I just had the one,” Douglass said. “I was tracking the airship after I sent the
pigeon for the cavalry. When I saw the mob, I thought I’d lend a hand.”

“Was the gun damaged? I can’t remember after the dynamite,” Willie said.

“Dirty, on the ground. And not here,” Douglass said.

The murmuring of the crowd shuffling about the loose rock downhill had been growing.

“If we climb up over the rock, the airship will see us in the daylight and shoot at
us or drop dynamite. And if we go down there we’ll face these miners,” Willie said.
“If we stay here, we will be overrun before noon.”

“It is a despicable position we are in,” Douglass agreed. “I can bring more rifles
and ammunition up for our last stand. But I’ll understand if you want to make a run
for it. I, however, will make a stand and fire off the flares before I fall. I cannot
imagine what these things would do if they were to get into a city. Think of New York
or Philadelphia falling to them. It makes me shudder.”

Willie leaned against the rock and thought of that for a moment, and then decided
it was best to focus his imaginations on the present.

“Mr. Douglass, we should take our chances heading over the hills and staying alive,”
Willie said. “If we do that, we can alert the cavalry.”

“The airship…”

“It’ll be dangerous, but I think it best we engage with it if we have to,” Willie
said levelly. “I will smite these god-damned possessed men out of the sky if I must.
But hopefully we can keep running long enough for the cavalry to save us.”

* * *

They crawled out of the canyon with difficulty, hauling rucksacks with ammunition
and several rifles with them.

And the signal guns.

Willie stopped twice to fire back at the horde behind them. Any of them able to climb
with any precision dropped off the high hill face.

The horde waited patiently for them to make their climb.

Sweat drenched their dusty, tattered clothes by the time Willie and Douglass topped
the hill and began to leg down into the next canyon. For another hour they hiked it,
stopped to drink water, and then climbed up the other side.

It felt pointless skirting the foothills of the mountain, but once they had a canyon
between them and the horde, they sprinted downhill, back toward Duffy.

“This way,” Willie muttered after a half hour of fast walking.

Douglass said nothing. He looked focused on his breathing, and Willie eventually offered
to take the man’s rucksack. Douglass refused with a snarl.

And that snarl turned into a chuckle when the older marshal suddenly realized where
they were. “Hell, Mr. Kennard. You wanted an old friend back, didn’t you?”

Horse flesh littered the ground and draped off scrub. Flies buzzed. Pieces of the
wagon were scattered around, and the Gatling gun was buried upside down in the dirt.

“We don’t have much time,” Willie said. “Help me drag it into the clear area.”

That horde of mining men would not be too far behind.

* * *

The gun was mounted in such a way it wouldn’t tilt up to aim into the sky. Why would
it? No one had designed it with airships in mind.

But the Gatling would let Douglass hold his own.

They could hear the trampling march of feet in the distance. See some heads wavering
over the low-lying scrub. The dust and desert made it easy to spot the first elements
of the charge.

Willie grabbed the rucksacks and opened them up, pulling apart a knot and unrolling
them. Set on the rock, their small arsenal was at the ready.

He picked up a pair of the signal guns.

Douglass glanced at his pocketwatch. “It is eleven. We still have an hour with even
the most optimism.”

Willie paid the time no attention. “I’m not thinking about your cavalry,” he said.

“Then what…”

The airship swooped in from the hills with a buzz and swoosh of steam and smoke.

“Shoot at it with your rifle,” Willie said. “Let them know we’re down here.”

Douglass looked reluctant to let go of the Gatling. He picked up a Winchester and
fired off at the airship. It adjusted course, bearing down on them.

It vented something from the gasbag and lowered. Willie eyed it as being some five
hundred feet off the ground.

“Come lower,” he said sweetly.

And it did, responding to the crack of Douglass’s Winchester.

It passed over the masses of miners advancing on them, some of them shooting wildly
in their direction. A brown whale, shifting slightly as the wind bumped at it.

“Mr. Kennard?” Douglass asked. “What do you plan to do?”

“It’s easier to shoot if you wait until you can’t miss,” Willie said, and fired the
Very pistol. The flare sparked and fizzed as it arced out toward the airship.

Willie picked up the next pistol and fired. Same arc, slight adjustment based on the
course of the last shot.

The first shot still hadn’t hit as he picked up and fired the third.

And then one, two, three flaming orbs of light struck the gasbag.

The first one hit the nose and bounced off. People in the metal understructure were
running back and forth, and already the airship was beginning to change course. Lift.

The second ball of light hit a piece of rigging. And stuck. It began to burn merrily.

Willie sighed and picked up the fourth Very pistol. The last one. He looked at the
three rifles waiting beside them. The backups for the last stand.

The third flame, the last adjustment, arced over the nose of the airship and toward
the area he’d seen the venting. There was enough left over gas in the air still.

It caught.

A wild, dancing flame ran along the top of the airship, and then like a devil it lanced
downward. The entire envelope began to glow like hell itself, and then flames burst
out from every corner and seam.

The cigar-shaped inferno staggered out of the sky and dropped to the desert floor
before them.

When the hesitant crowds of miners walked around the remains of the airship, Frederick
Douglass and the Gatling gun raked them with a withering volley of gunfire, while
Willie stood on a tall rock and sighted with a Winchester, picking them off one by
one with shots direct to the head.

* * *

Willie walked from body to body, examining them. Douglass followed him.

The cavalry had arrived, following the smoke. They’d help flush the town out. Drag
the dead bodies to the street. They’d done the same to the mining camp.

Now Willie could look for the murderer that he’d tracked here. Make sure his job was
done.

“I wonder,” Willie mused as he walked down the line of carnage. “Why here?”

“What do you mean?” Douglass asked.

“Why Duffy? Why did creatures from some other world fly their airship all the way
from the Alaska territories to Duffy? It was the mine, wasn’t it? Just like everyone
else coming here?”

Douglass thought for a moment. “If their machine was damaged, they could have been
looking for metals.”

Willie nodded. “That was what I wondered.” He stopped. And squatted. Looked into a
familiar face.

Well that was that, then: He’d found the man that had come into their camp. Killed
his employer. Killed the other men.

Willie stood up. “Thank you, Mr. Douglass. I’ll be on then.”

“I have a counter-proposal,” Douglass said abruptly. He waved his hand around at the
uniformed cavalry stacking dead bodies. “There are still possibly other infected out
there, in the countryside. You are a steady man with a gun, and with flint in his
heart. We could use you, out here. And elsewhere. With… other things that pose a threat
to the nation out here in this country.”

Willie nodded. “I understand. But I was headed east, hoping to find myself a good
woman.”

Douglass leaned forward. “Now, I don’t take you as the settling down sort. I asked
around about you via telegraph yesterday,” Douglass said. “Learned about you and Billy
McGeorge. How’d you bring him in?”

Willie scratched his chin. “Offered a reward. Met him in town when he rode up to discuss
the matter with me.”

“He came to you?”

“Well, he wasn’t too happy about the reward,” Willie explained. “Everyone else was
offering north of $300. I figured $50 was good enough for him. He figured that was
insulting.”

“Insulting?” That smile had come back to Douglass’s lips again.

“Yep. Met his whole gang when they rode into town right in the middle of the street
with my shotgun. Ended up shooting one of his men when they drew on me. Led the rest
of them off to jail. Hung McGeorge from the same pine I hung Casewit on.”

“Just like that?” Douglass asked.

“Just like that.”

Douglass looked easterly, down the main street. “No room for a man like you back east,
Kennard,” he said softly. He gave him a business card. “If you don’t find that woman
you call on me.”

Willie nodded.

They’d gifted him a swift horse on Douglass’s orders, though they grumbled about it.
Willie left, riding east, leaving Duffy as the sun began to sink toward the horizon
in the west.

I was adrift in Las Cruces with no dime in my pocket and an empty stomach. I’d started
west from Pennsylvania at age sixteen, four years earlier, working a little and then
traveling till my money ran out and then working some more, in hopes of reaching the
gold fields of California and making a killing. My Ma and Pa told me I was foolish
to leave the East, and they were right, God bless them.

In any event, there I was on a July morning, having just arrived, standing by the
stagecoach post in the bright sun under a clear blue sky. I squinted into the distance,
trying desperately to figure how I could get a meal. Hungry and half in a daze, I
looked around at
The Town of Crosses
, as it was called.

There was a short main street of adobe buildings, a few ranchero-style places, mostly
wood, but one of stone and mortar. It looked as if the natives had built some huts
out at the edge of town. I saw a tin lean-to or three out there as well. There was
a hot breeze, and I could taste the dirt in the air, smell the horse shit. Flies all
over. People were jawing about a killing that took place in town the night previous
to my arrival. I cocked my head and heard a terrible story. Some fellow they called
Bastard George had supposedly killed and ate a young woman name of Pearl Gates. The
old man standing nearest me repeated, “Ate ’er like a rump roast.”

I moved away from the stage post and stumbled through town, searching as I do when
I land in a new place for any signs of opportunity. I approached a few friendly-looking
men and women, told them I was new in town and inquired if they had knowledge of any
gainful employment to be had. Folks talked to me, me being so young-looking, and I
do believe my freckles, which I always hated as a kid, made me seem like a vision
of innocence they’d not seen in those parts.

The fact is I was far from innocent. In the four years I’d been traveling, I’d laid
with whores, stole food and money, and carried in my satchel a brand new LeMat Revolver
I swiped from a drunken soldier in an alleyway in Cleveland, Ohio. I practiced with
that pistol when I could afford the bullets and got pretty good with it. It had two
bores, and one of the tricky things about it was that, in addition to its six bullets,
it fired a barrel of grapeshot too if you flipped a little lever. Like a shotgun in
one hand. I’d learned to always keep it loaded, either stuck in my belt under my cold
weather coat or handy in my bag. That gun got me out of a lot of scrapes but my sweet
face got me out of more.

I was drenched with sweat, and it finally dawned on me how hot it was. Must have been
a hundred degrees, no lie. That and my hunger were doing a wicked job on me. And the
bustle in the street was dizzying. For a place in the middle of drop-dead nowhere,
there were a fair amount of people in that town. There was a saloon big enough for
a second floor of rooms. I thought I’d go in there and see if I could beg a drink,
but just when I was stepping up out of the street onto the walk in front of the place,
I heard a commotion off to my left. I stopped and looked, and there was a man in the
street and there were a bunch of folks crowding around him. All I had to hear was
that he was looking to hire some gents to do a job.

I quick made my way over there to catch the drift of what he was saying. Moving through
that crowd sideways and abouts, I eventually slipped up to the front. First thing
I saw was the fellow’s badge. He was a deputy sheriff, and wore two six guns in holsters.
His flat-top, wide brim hat was the same black as the bandana round his neck. He looked
about as old as my Pa would have been, and had his same expression between a sigh
and a strain. Just when I got there, it seemed folks started drifting away. The deputy
said, “Where are the courageous citizens of Las Cruces?” I heard laughter, drifting
away. “Wait now,” he said, “I already said four dollars a day.”