Novel - Dead Reckoning (with Rosemary Edghill) Page 5

  “Well?” Jett demanded.

  “My dear young man, you can hardly expect me to summon the angels of memory in my parched and famished state,” Maxwell said.

  Gibbons gave a sharp huff of annoyance and thrust her hand into the pocket of her voluminous pantaloons. She extracted a small silver flask and thrust it toward the bars. Maxwell plucked it from her grasp, deftly unscrewed the cap, and drained it at a single gulp. He sighed with deep satisfaction as he handed it back.

  “As I said, there was a good deal of gunfire,” Maxwell continued. “And more shouting than I cared for. I kept a lookout through my window”—he gestured behind him toward the barred window in the back wall of his cell—“and after about a quarter of an hour, the town was silent. But the revelations of the evening were not complete, for there, passing outside my coign of vantage, came a vast and silent army.”

  “What sort of army, Mister Maxwell?” White Fox asked.

  “As to that, my dear lad, I cannot fairly say. They all appeared to be sick. Or drunk, and I assure you, ma’am and sirs, the celebrated Finlay Maxwell, Esquire, is a connoisseur of the inebriated state. Regardless of their condition, I was about to bestir myself to beseech them to relieve my unjust confinement when I saw that a number of them were carrying bodies. And so I decided that ‘tacere,’ as the Greeks would say, was the better part of virtue. I kept my vigil in silence—and it was just as well I did, for there was one last mystery to unfold.” He paused again.

  “You might as well tell us everything now, Mister Maxwell, because I’m out of brandy,” Gibbons said.

  “Ah, yes, but you still hold within your gift that pearl beyond price—freedom!” Maxwell said, gesturing toward the wall.

  White Fox took down the ring of keys Maxwell had indicated. He moved toward the cell, but Gibbons plucked the keys from his hand before he could open the cell door. “Your ‘mystery,’ if you please, Mister Maxwell,” she said, holding the keys up meaningfully.

  “Oh very well,” Maxwell grumbled ungraciously. “I watched the nightmare army depart Alsop, and the stench of the grave was in my nostrils. I knew then that I was in the presence of the Legions of Hell, my own life spared by Divine Providence. And yet, that ghastly army of the dead possessed a living General, for I saw him with my own eyes urging them onward. I know no more.”

  “I was right,” Jett said smugly.

  “That still doesn’t make them reanimated dead,” Gibbons said stubbornly. “Plague, autohypnosis, drugs—or outright fakery—there’s a perfectly reasonable scientific explanation. I just need to find it.”

  “Whatever it is Mister Maxwell saw,” White Fox said with calm certainty, “it has left a trail I can read.” He took the keys back from Gibbons and unlocked the cell. When he swung the door wide, Finlay Maxwell strode through it, glaring at all three of them reproachfully.

  “Hectoring a starving man—withholding not mere sustenance, but the very waters of life—I hope you’re properly ashamed of yourselves, the lot of you!” Still grumbling, he made his way to the door of the jail and disappeared up the street.

  “Where do you suppose he’s going?” White Fox asked curiously.

  “Probably straight to the saloon to drink himself blind,” Jett answered. “Can you really track them?”

  “Living or dead, by your own testimony they are corporeal beings,” he answered. “They will leave some trace of their passage that I can follow. It … the trail will be easiest to follow if I start at once. I will return as quickly as I may.”

  “You mean ‘we,’ Mister Fox—anyone who’s looking for trouble had best have company doing it. Will you be all right here by yourself?” Jett asked, even though (since Alsop was currently zombie-free) she knew Gibbons should be perfectly safe.

  She knew she ought to mount up and ride away right now. But White Fox had already made it clear he was staying—or at least coming back. She just couldn’t leave him to deal with this by himself. And she’d be lying if she didn’t admit, at least to herself, that he was mighty easy on the eyes. But the same things that made it possible for Jett to masquerade as a boy were the same things that guaranteed someone like White Fox wouldn’t look twice at her, even if he did know her true sex. She was too tall, too skinny, and dark like her Creole great-grandmother. While Gibbons …

  Gibbons was small and plump and blond, and those big blue eyes of hers could stop any beau dead in his tracks as quickly as a bullet from one of Jett’s pistols. Quicker.

  “I’ve been fending for myself since you cut your milk-teeth, Jett Gallatin,” Gibbons said derisively (and inaccurately). “Just be sure to bring me back one of your zombies … if you actually find one.”

  Jett had been about to sigh for “can’t be” and “never happen” when Gibbons’s remark made her exchange a disbelieving glance with White Fox. When she turned to give Gibbons the full force of her incredulous stare, she realized Gibbons hadn’t noticed White Fox’s considerable charms. White Fox might have been Finlay Maxwell for all the consciousness of him Gibbons displayed.

  “Surely—” White Fox began disbelievingly.

  “Surely I need one of them to find out how they tick, Mister Fox!” She regarded both of them stubbornly. “Do you or do you not want this mystery solved? Well? I am the only person here with the scientific training to discover how these so-called ‘zombies’ came to be. If they exist at all!” she added with a snort.

  “They do. You just wait and see,” Jett said, more cheerfully than the subject probably called for.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The trail the marauders had left was easy for White Fox to follow. He was not willing to say, even within his own thoughts, whether they were living or dead—but without Jett as a witness to the attack, Alsop would have been just one more deserted settlement like Glory Rest. He would have arrived this morning to find an uninhabited town, and there would be one more mystery to add to … far too many others.

  He’d intended to backtrail Alsop’s destroyers alone, but he was forced to admit having Jett accompany him only made sense. If they found what they were seeking—living enemy or dead—she could return to Alsop and telegraph for help while he kept an eye on them, following them further if needful. And her company was not as onerous as he’d feared. She didn’t talk when there was nothing to talk about, and though she was far from an expert tracker, she knew enough to stay out of his way and let him work without interference.

  If I had not had her account and Mister Maxwell’s to go by, I would not have thought to follow this trail, he thought. And by evening, wind and dust would have wiped away all trace of those who passed this way. Even now, he was not entirely certain whether the wagon whose passage he could detect had traveled with the marauders or had simply passed by some hours before them. Whichever it was, he could find no trace of the animals that should have drawn it, and that was more puzzling still. Until he’d made Gibbons’s acquaintance, he could not have imagined a wagon that could move without horses. Surely there could not be two of them …?

  “Smoke,” Jett said, speaking for the first time in several hours.

  White Fox glanced up from where he knelt in the dust. She pointed. There was nothing to see but heat-haze and sagebrush, but the wind was blowing toward them, and once he withdrew his attention from the ground, he realized he smelled it as well. The scent was so faint most would have missed it entirely.

  “You came from this direction, did you not?” he asked.

  “Sure did. But I was making for Alsop, hoping to get there before dark. Wind was blowing the other direction, too,” Jett answered.

  “Perhaps whoever lit that fire will have information about the attack,” White Fox said, swinging up onto Deerfoot’s back again.

  “P’raps. And perhaps they know more’n they should,” Jett said distrustfully.

  White Fox dismounted several times to check the trail, but whoever—whatever—they were following had taken a path as straight as a crow’s flight once they’d left Alsop. It
was not long before the trail crossed a well-used pathway and vanished. The pathway was rutted with wagon wheels and scarred with hoofprints, but it was too hard-packed to hold any lighter impression, and he could find no trace of the trail on the far side.

  “I think they turned down this trail,” he said quietly.

  “Ranch road,” Jett said, thinking aloud. “Don’t know as I credit Mister Maxwell’s tale of some ranahan giving them orders, but this is the closest spread to Alsop …”

  “If they merely came to kill, why carry off the bodies of the townspeople?” White Fox asked.

  Jett nodded. “And if the fella givin’ ’em their marching orders is from around here, here is where he’d be from. And if not, then no reason this place wasn’t attacked, too. I’m thinking it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get a look around before we go riding in.”

  They crossed the road, looking for someplace where they could see without being seen. Less than half an hour later they found a stand of scrub pines. They didn’t give much cover, but it was the best they could find.

  The ranch in the distance looked utterly ordinary at first glance. Main house, bunkhouse, corrals, storage sheds, a windmill to bring water up from the grudging earth. But even a few minutes of observation showed White Fox that this ranch wasn’t entirely ordinary. In addition to the buildings any ranch would possess—both of adobe and of timber weathered to gray by the elements—there were several whose tin roofs gleamed as bright as silver in the sun, and their walls were of new timber.

  “Never saw a bunkhouse that big in my life,” Jett whispered, pointing toward one of the new buildings. “Don’t see any people, either.” Despite that, she seemed content to remain where she was, watching for signs of life. A few minutes later her patience was rewarded. A woman in a calico dress and poke bonnet stepped from the doorway of the main house and walked toward the windmill, a tin bucket in each hand. She set them down at the foot of the pitcher pump and began working the arm. The creak and thump carried clearly in the quiet. When both buckets were full, the woman called back to the house, and a younger female came running across the yard to join her. Each of them picked up one bucket, and they began to walk carefully back the way they’d come.

  White Fox heard Jett sigh.

  “Well, they aren’t zombies,” she said grudgingly. “And after what I saw last night, I don’t think the zombies would leave anyone alive wherever they went. But they came here,” she finished, a faint questioning note in her voice.

  “Whatever attacked Alsop came here,” White Fox agreed. “It would have taken them perhaps six hours to cover the distance.”

  “Meaning they got here around midnight,” Jett said. “And they could have just walked straight across and out the other side. But they’d need to be under cover by daylight.” She sighed again. “So somebody needs to go down and have a look around. And that means me.”

  White Fox regarded her quizzically. He’d seen her terror last night, and knew she still believed she’d narrowly escaped being slain by the undead. And one or two living people—or even a dozen—was no surety that more of the creatures she feared did not await her.

  “I know you aren’t a hostile, White Fox, but some folks wouldn’t see that. And they might just take you for a blue—for a soldier, and that’d be just as like to spook them. So I’ll go and scout around while you see if those critters really did just sashay right on through.”

  “Will you be all right going by yourself?” he asked.

  In answer she drew one of her pistols and spun it before dropping it fluidly back into its holster again. “Been alone for a while and haven’t had any trouble yet.”

  * * *

  Jett backtracked to the ranch road and then set Nightingale ambling along it. She’d been about to take offense at White Fox’s question when she realized he’d have asked the same question of a man. The thought warmed her. He was the first man in the last two years to know her secret, and he hadn’t lectured her about wearing trousers once.

  A few hundred yards along, she passed under the archway that was a common feature of ranches. Usually there was a clapboard sign with the name of the spread and a copy of its brand hanging from the crossbar, but there wasn’t one here. As she neared the house, she saw something she hadn’t been able to see from the trees. There was a cross cut out of sheet brass covering most of the door. It was polished so bright it was nearly painful to look at.

  The door opened as she approached, and the same woman she’d seen earlier stepped out, regarding Jett curiously.

  “Afternoon, ma’am,” Jett said, touching her hat brim in greeting. “Don’t mean to startle you. Name’s Gallatin. I’m looking for an outfit that might need a few extra hands.”

  The woman smiled up at her. “I’m sorry, Mister Gallatin, but I’m afraid this isn’t a ranch anymore. It’s Jerusalem’s Wall. My name is Sister Agatha, and we are The Fellowship of the Divine Resurrection.”

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance, ma’am. Reckon I’ll keep looking. Mind if I water my horse before I push on?”

  “Oh, but you must at least stay for dinner, Mister Gallatin. Charity is the first duty of our Fellowship.”

  “Much obliged, Miss Agatha,” Jett said, swinging down from the saddle.

  “It is Sister Agatha, Mister Gallatin. We leave worldly names behind us when we join the Fellowship. Come inside when you’ve seen to your animal.”

  Jett nodded and led Nightingale over to the watering trough that stood beside the pump. Being invited to stay was a good excuse to find out about this Fellowship. She wasn’t particularly surprised to find a place out in the middle of nowhere calling itself “The Fellowship of the Divine Resurrection.” This wouldn’t be the first such she’d come across, and she doubted it would be the last. Most of them were harmless enough, and few of them insisted their guests abide by their ways. The West was a place where you could come to shed your past, and plenty of folks took the opportunity to shed a lot more than that. Places like the Fellowship were usually heavy on the idea of everyone holding their worldly goods in common and light on Bible preaching, though most of them could claim someone, man or woman, who’d had a “Divine Revelation” or two. Those “Revelations” could be about something as innocent as not eating meat or as outlandish as not wearing clothes and nobody getting married. She’d actually found some of them to be a comfort, since one of their prayer meetings was as close as she was likely to get to the inside of a church for the foreseeable future. She knew God would forgive what she had to do to find her brother, but that didn’t mean His priests would.

  She gave Nightingale a good long drink and then led him back to the hitching rail beside the door. She flipped his reins up over the saddle-horn just as she always did. “Behave,” she told him, patting his shoulder. He turned his head and blew a fine spray of water against her cheek.

  Sister Agatha opened the door as Jett approached and beckoned her inside. Jett removed her hat—one of the many things a man would do and a woman wouldn’t; there’d been so many things she’d had to learn—and followed Sister Agatha. This close to the border, there was as much “rancho” as “ranch” in the buildings. Her boot-heels made sharp clicking sounds on the red tile floor.

  “Come into the parlor and rest. It’s nice and cool there. Isn’t the sun dreadful?” Sister Agatha said.

  “Sun gets pretty hot,” Jett agreed neutrally. She was willing to bet hard cash on Sister Agatha having come from somewhere back east—and not too long ago, either.

  “Now, you just make yourself comfortable and I’ll bring you something nice and cool to drink.”

  Before Jett could protest that Sister Agatha wasn’t to go to all that trouble, the woman had scurried off. At least it gave her a chance to look around. The house was built in a typical Mexican style: the main part of it balanced by two wings, giving the whole the shape of a squared-off C. There was a deep porch running across the back of the house between the wings, and a roof built out over to the edge of i
t, ensuring that the main part of the house would be in shade for most of the day. Whoever’d been the original owner of Jerusalem’s Wall had done well for themselves—there were French doors opening out onto the porch, and every pane of glass in them would have had to come by freight wagon and flatboat from the East.

  But the French doors were the only sign of gracious living left here. The parlor furniture was sparse, stark, and all bare wood. The half-dozen chairs, benches, and small low table did little to fill a space that had probably once contained velvet-upholstered mahogany furniture, a Regulator clock, and even a pianoforte. She could see faint shadows on the lime-washed walls where paintings and trophies might once have hung, but now there wasn’t even a mirror over the fireplace.

  Just as well you don’t go getting too comfortable here. Those zombies might not have come from here in the first place, but Jerusalem’s Wall was sure where they headed after they left Alsop.

  Her musings were cut short by Sister Agatha’s return. She carried a clay pitcher in one hand and a tin mug in the other. She filled the mug and handed it to Jett, then set the pitcher down on the bare wood of the room’s only table. Jett managed to keep from wincing, although it was clear there wasn’t any need to protect the wood. If the Fellowship got tired of water-marks, they could just sand the surface down and it would be as good as new.

  “Drink up!” Sister Agatha urged.

  Jett sipped cautiously. The liquid was cool, but it was also bitter and almost foul-tasting. After a moment she identified it—tentatively—as the worst herb tea she’d ever drunk in her life.

  “It is one of Brother Shepherd’s own recipes,” Sister Agatha said. “It came from a Revelation.”