Ghostwalkers Read online

  It was Grey’s bad luck and, he knew, his own damn fault for being careless.

  And, for all that, it was typical luck, as far as he was concerned, because lately he hadn’t had much of any other kind. He tended to ride that narrow path between no luck and bad luck.

  Now he had guns in his face and all of his luck seemed to have run out.

  The big man wore a long-sleeve denim shirt and canvas gloves with the fingers cut off. He stood holding a Manhattan Navy pistol in a rock-steady hand, the black eye of the barrel staring right at Grey. A British Bull Dog revolver was tucked into his belt, ready for a quick grab. He stayed close, his finger inside the trigger guard.

  Grey smiled at him, raised his hands and said, “Howdy.”

  “Shut up and tell me who the hell you are,” growled the man.

  “Um … can’t really do both.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t shut up and tell you—.”

  “You trying to be smart?”

  “Trying to be helpful,” said Grey. “Just like to know which of those two things you’d like me to do.”

  “Careful, Bill,” said Riley, “he thinks he’s funny as a catbird.”

  “Don’t matter what he thinks. He seen us going after the stash, and that’s too damn bad for him,” said Bill. “Get some rope and tie him up. Big Curley’s going to want to have a long talk with this dumb son of a bitch.”

  Grey didn’t know who Big Curley was, but he guessed it was the large man climbing up after the Indian. He was positive he didn’t want to meet him. Especially when hogtied.

  No, the situation was rolling downhill on him. Grey felt like sighing and crawling back into his bedroll to see if there was a way to start the day over again. Instead he remembered a Latin phrase he’d read in an old book written by some Roman fellow named Horace. Carpe diem.

  Seize the day.

  Or, possibly seize the moment. Grey didn’t really understand Latin.

  The message, though, that was easier to grasp.

  When a man stands with his hands raised he is admitting defeat. When, as his granddad once told him, a smart man does it, he is preparing for action. Grey’s hands were up at shoulder level, raised and slightly forward. Granddad said: “Always place your hands so you can see the back of ’em. That means they’re like a couple of snakes, ready to bite. So … bite. But be quick about it or you’re going to die looking like you was giving up, and that ain’t no way for a Torrance man to go down.”

  Without changing his expression, without tensing a single muscle, Grey moved.

  He whipped his left hand out and slapped the Manhattan pistol away, swatting it like a scared man swats at a wasp. The barrel swung right at Riley, who yelped and jumped backward. In the same second, Grey snatched the Bull Dog from Bill’s belt, used the hardwood butt to chop down on Bill’s wrist, and then lashed out with the barrel across the bridge of Riley’s nose. Two guns hit the ground—Bill’s and Grey’s own Colt. Riley staggered back with blood exploding from his nose.

  Bill, startled as he was, tried to make a fight out of it. He swung a wild left hook that popped Grey in the side of the head hard enough to make all the church bells from Sacramento to Chicago play the Hallelujah chorus. Grey took two quick wandering sideways steps then wheeled around as Bill came after him. The big man was swinging rights and lefts with every ounce of his muscle and mass behind them. Huge punches, the kind that work really well in barroom brawls.

  This, however, was not a barroom.

  Despite the pain in his head, Grey tucked his chin down on his chest, hunched his shoulders, covered his left ear with a fist, and raised his elbows into the path of the left haymaker. The inside of Bill’s right forearm hit the point of Grey’s left elbow. The impact was considerable, but it was muscle against bone, and bone always wins. Grey thought he could hear something go crack inside the big man’s arm.

  He didn’t wait for the pain to hit Bill. He did it instead, clubbing out fast and nasty with the Bull Dog. He banged the butt into the center of Bill’s forehead once, twice. On the third blow all of the clarity fled from the big man’s expression. The fourth put him down on his knees, and a fifth, this one behind the ear, put him flat on his face.

  Grey turned to Riley, who was doing some kind of Irish dance while holding his bloody nose and wailing like a banshee. Grey kicked him in a most unsportsmanlike way. Twice. Riley joined his friend on the rocky ground and lay there curled like a boiled crawfish, whimpering like a baby.

  Grey blew out his cheeks and tried to shake the bell echoes from his head. That bastard Bill could hit, damn him to hell. He knelt, quickly patted Bill down, then fished a piece of hairy twine from his saddlebag and lashed both men wrist and ankle. Bill was totally out, but Grey crouched over Riley and said, “I took you twice, old son. Get loud, warn the others, or make me tussle with you again and I guarantee you won’t like what happens. Are we understanding each other here?”

  Riley squeaked something that sounded like a yes.

  “Good doggie.” Grey patted his cheek and stood.

  His Colt had landed on hard rock and there was a scrape along the cylinder, but the barrel was clean and the action was as smooth as ever. He slid it into its holster. The Manhattan had fallen barrel-first into soft sand, so he kicked it away. The Bull Dog was a tidy little five shot and that went into his pocket.

  Picky was stamping and pulling at her tether, so Grey soothed her with long strokes down her neck, murmuring calming words to her. In truth, though, he was as nervous as the horse. Whatever was going on here was none of his business, and now he was ankle deep in a mess. It felt like standing on quicksand, and Grey cursed himself for making the kind of move that had gotten him into trouble too many times before.

  Far too many times before.

  He squinted up to try and see what was going on above him, but none of the players were in sight. He could hear the other members of the posse cursing and shouting to each other, which told him that they hadn’t yet reached the summit.

  The fact that he couldn’t see the other men suggested that they had not spotted him. None of their shouts seemed to involve anything but climbing and getting to the Sioux. As for the Indian, there was no sign of him at all. Not a peep, either.

  Grey looked at the two fallen men. Riley glared up at him through painful tears.

  There was still time to change the course of what was happening. He could gag Riley, cut the posse’s horses free, climb onto Mrs. Pickles, and ride like hell for anywhere but right here.

  Yes, sir, there was time to do that.

  Grey Torrance stood there, looking up.

  He could be halfway to what was left of California before these jokers organized a proper pursuit.

  Yup. He could get away clean.

  But there was the Sioux.

  And there was that damn blue flash. What in Satan’s own hell was that?

  It had to be something really important or these men wouldn’t be trying so hard in such a wretched place as this to get it. Grey worked it through in his mind. He liked puzzles and this one had some useful clues.

  The posse was after the Sioux but instead of shooting him, they let him climb the rocks. Why? Was there something he had? Something they needed him to tell them? Something that they wanted to force out of him?

  That seemed pretty obvious.

  The wanted man kept spitting on the ground and he looked like he’d been rubbing at something. Once, down in New Mexico, Grey had spent a couple of weeks as hired security for a professor from the University of Pennsylvania. The professor had been looking for wall carvings left behind by some ancient tribe of people who lived around Clovis thousands of years before the Indians moved in. He sometimes used spit to clear off old dirt and grime to reveal the faint lines etched into rock walls. Was that what the Sioux was doing? Looking for something hidden? But what? Now was a damn poor time to be doing scientific research, and Grey doubted the Indian was a natural philosopher or any kind of univers
ity pencil neck.

  But he was looking for something, and he seemed pretty damned desperate to find it.

  What could that possibly be? A cache of weapons hidden in a concealed cleft? A trapdoor to a hidey-hole?

  Maybe.

  Didn’t explain the blue flash, though.

  So, despite his better judgment and a clear path to safety, Grey Torrance began walking toward the rocks.

  He got exactly four steps before there was a second blue flash.

  This time it was bigger.

  Much, much bigger.

  It was so bright that it turned the rocks, the desert, and the sky itself into one big blue nothing.

  And it was loud.

  For one split second Grey thought that the Sioux had found his weapons cache and had set off some kind of explosive device. There was plenty of it around. Tons of it had been looted from the camps of the barons tied up in the Rail Wars. Just as much had gone missing—along with rifles, ammunition, and even cannons—from both sides of the War Between the States.

  That’s what flashed through Grey’s mind in the first microsecond.

  Then the sound of the blast pummeled his head even as the force of it picked him up and hurled him into the juniper tree.

  It was not the deep rumble of dynamite or the hiss-pop-boom of black powder.

  No. Nothing as ordinary as that.

  The sound that screamed inside Grey’s head as the blue flash filled the world was the ungodly, tormented wail of a thousand lost souls. The sound of the damned shrieking in spiritual agony from somewhere down in the depths of Hell itself.

  He hit the tree and bounced off and crashed into a terrified Mrs. Pickles. The horse reared up and he saw a wild eye and then the blur of a hoof.

  Then he saw nothing at all.

  He felt himself fall and the screams of the damned followed him all the way down.

  Chapter Four

  Grey Torrance was lost in a dream of dying.

  Of running. Of fighting. Or being killed and rising from his own grave. Of fighting again. With guns bucking in both hands. With the smell of cordite in the air and the taste of gunpowder in his mouth.

  In the dream his guns never ran out of bullets. They fired and fired and fired. Heavy slugs ripped into the flesh of the men and women who came toward him. Their flesh ruptured and bled as each round struck them, but they did not fall. Their eyes were not eyes. They were hollow pits in which fires blazed. Black blood ran in lines from their open mouths. Their blood-streaked legs kept working, kept moving, kept propelling their bodies forward into the hail of bullets that exploded from Grey’s guns.

  They moaned as they came. Not from the pain of his bullets. This was something else, something much worse. It was a deeper kind of pain. An agony of the soul that manifested as a wordless cry of despair that was a more eloquent accusation than any words could ever be. You did this to us, it seemed to say. You damned us.

  Grey shouted back at them, denying everything. But even to his own ears his words were false and hollow.

  Of course they were right.

  They were the damned.

  What reason could they have for speaking anything but the unbearable, naked, bloody truth?

  Grey fired and fired and the moans of the dead rose above him like a wave of sound that threatened to drown the world.

  He tried to back away from it, but the wave slammed down on him and consumed him.

  Chapter Five

  “Did I kill you, white man?”

  The voice did not belong to the chorus of the damned.

  It did not belong to Grey’s memories, either.

  It was the voice of a stranger. Soft, cultured, accented.

  British?

  That didn’t seem right somehow.

  Grey’s eyes were closed and he wondered if he was dead. He wondered if the Devil was an Englishman. The world was strange, but that would be the strangest thing in it.

  He opened his eyes. It hurt to do it. Everything hurt. His eyes, his skin, his bones. Even his hair ached.

  “I—don’t know,” he said in a dusty croak of a voice. “Am I dead?”

  There was a pause, and then the voice said, “Perhaps halfway. Not entirely, I’d say.”

  The world was out of focus and Grey had to blink several times to coax the shapes into some order that made sense. The mingled blurs slowly coalesced into a canopy of juniper leaves, a wall of cracked sandstone, the docile face of Mrs. Pickles chewing a mouthful of grass.

  And the face of a man.

  Not a white man. Not black either.

  It was a red man.

  A Sioux.

  The Sioux.

  The Indian was smiling. He was a few years younger than Grey; about thirty. He had the broad, long nose and strong chin of a Dakota Sioux, probably an Oglala. Long, gleaming black hair tied in pigtails, eyes so brown they looked black. And … steel-framed spectacles. Blue-lensed spectacles, in fact, perched on the bridge of that impressive nose.

  “Welcome back to the land of the living, old boy,” said the Sioux. “Jolly good to know that I have not, in point of fact, killed you.”

  The British voice came rolling smoothly off that Indian face.

  At least fifty possible replies stampeded through Grey Torrance’s muzzy brain. None of them seemed able to adequately address that comment, the man who spoke it, or the circumstances surrounding all of this.

  What Grey managed to say was, “What the fuck?”

  The Indian’s smile widened. “Come on, old chap, let’s sit you up.”

  He cupped the back of Grey’s neck and took his arm and eased Grey into a sitting position. Hoisting a piano to the second floor of a dancehall using a cheap block and tackle would have been easier. Grey felt simultaneously flattened and swollen. His body felt like a stepped-on sore toe. He cursed a blue streak as he sat up, and one of the things Grey was good at was cursing. He’d learned some vile phrases from a girl he was sweet on down in New Orleans. Nobody could out-curse Shotgun Ginny. No one. Not even a sailor who’d spent time among Malay pirates. Grey always admired that about Ginny. That, and other things.

  The Sioux picked up a water skin had handed it to him. It was Grey’s own.

  “Take a sip. No, just a sip. Let’s not be greedy. Eye to the future, what? Besides, it’s all we have.”

  Grey paused with the mouth of the water skin an inch from his mouth. “We?”

  The Sioux shrugged. He wore thin deerskin trousers and a hand-stitched breechcloth, but for a shirt he wore a stained and dusty blue U.S. Cavalry blouse that was unbuttoned halfway to his breastbone. Loose bracelets of leather and beads hung from each wrist. He wore a gentleman’s bowler hat beneath which a scarlet cloth was wound around his forehead. The cloth looked to be silk, and there was a hint of lace—the kind they put on women’s drawers.

  “Who,” asked Grey, “the hell are you? And while you’re at it, how is it we’re suddenly friends?”

  “My name,” said the Sioux, “is Thomas Looks Away of the Oglala Tiyośpaye, grandson of Mahpíya Lúta, better known as Red Cloud to you white men.”

  Grey stared at him. There wasn’t a man, woman, or child in the western hemisphere who didn’t know who Red Cloud was. He was one of the reasons the Sioux had won back their tribal lands and formed a powerful nation. Grey said, “Wow.”

  Looks Away chuckled, enjoying the reaction. “And your name, my dear fellow?”

  “Torrance. Grey Torrance out of Philadelphia. My grandfather was a wicked old cuss and isn’t worth naming.”

  Looks Away grinned at that. “Well, we don’t get to pick our family, do we?”

  “Not usually. But … how is it you’re an Oglala Lakota and you speak like you just stepped off the boat from London?”

  “Very likely because I just stepped off a boat from London.”

  “Okay,” said Grey. “What?”

  “Oh, it’s a long and rather sordid story,” said Looks Away, waving a dismissive hand. “And I don’t know
you well enough to share the squalid details. The quick version is that I went to England as a young buck in a traveling Wild West show and now I’m back.”

  “Fair enough. Now let’s talk about the ‘we’ thing,” said Grey. “You’re helping me and I want to know why. And while we’re at it, what in the hell was that explosion?”

  “That’s also a long story,” said Looks Away.

  “Well, I’m too banged up to ride and there’s not enough daylight to make it anywhere worth getting. Seems like a good time for a tale.” Then another of the clouds in his mind blew away and he jerked upright and looked around. “Hey—where are those other fellows? The posse?”

  Looks Away’s smile faded. He said, “Ah.”

  “Ah?”

  “The sins of those men seem to have caught up with them.”

  “You kill them?”

  “In a word, yes.”

  “Jesus Christ. Alone? One against six?”

  “Well, you helped by stretching two of them out on the ground.”

  Grey bristled. “I trussed them up to keep them out of it. I didn’t mean for some savage to come along and slit their throats.”

  “First,” said Looks Away in an offended tone, “I am not a savage, thank you very much. Clearly not. Anyone can bloody well see that, the braids and buckskin trousers notwithstanding.”

  “I—.”

  “Second, I did not slit their throats.”

  Grey relaxed. “Well, that’s—.”

  “I dropped half a mountain on them,” said Looks Away.

  “You—.”

  “Though, technically it’s not a mountain, more of an outcrop, I suppose…”

  “You’re sun-touched, aren’t you?” asked Grey.

  “Mm? Oh, no, sorry. Merely digressing into trivialities. I do that when I’m upset. Killing those men has me quite distraught.”

  “You ever going to tell me what happened or are you going to simply talk me to death and bury me next to them?”

  Looks Away straightened and walked a few paces away. He held his arms wide to indicate the big pile of rocks.

  “This is what happened to the posse,” he said.