“From this distance? Not a chance.”
“If we got closer—.”
“They see us coming and wipe us out. Don’t be crazy.”
The Sioux chewed his lip. “What about a chain reaction? If I shot the nearest undead, the ghost rock bullet would explode the rock in him, and perhaps that would cause a chain reaction.”
“Would that even work?”
“I don’t know, but it’s worth a try.”
Grey thought about it, then he shook his head. “No. It’s too risky.”
“God rot you, we have to do something. Don’t be a coward.”
Grey turned to him. “Easy now, my friend,” he said coldly. “I know you’re upset seeing Veronica and all, but try to use your brain for a minute. If you set off a chain reaction, you might kill half his army—and that’s great—but Deray’s so far away, and the men closest to him look like ordinary soldiers. They don’t have ghost rock implants and they won’t explode. If anything, their bodies would shield him and the bastard would slip away. That would leave us with no ammunition left and the rest of the army, and all of Deray’s allies, coming down on us like the wrath of God. And that’s even if the explosion doesn’t bring down the fucking ceiling. No … much as I wish we could, I don’t think we can guarantee that Deray would die. Anything less than that would be us throwing our lives away and failing everyone in Paradise Falls. Think it through, man, and you’ll see that I’m right.”
Down on the plain Veronica said something that made Deray clap his hands and laugh out loud. It was not a pleasant laugh.
The Sioux shook his head and fingered the outside of the copper trigger guard. Then he turned his face to a mask of stone, reslung the rifle, and nodded.
“I will kill him,” he said. “You hear me, white man? His life is mine. And I’ll kill anyone who gets in my way.”
Grey nodded. “Fair enough. Now let’s go.”
Like silent ghosts they crept from behind their shelter and began moving across the plain toward the sea. They stayed low and moved with many small light, quick steps instead of at a full run. That kept their bodies and equipment from jiggling and making unwanted noise.
Deray’s laughter seemed to pursue them.
It drove knives into them.
And it threw fuel on the furnaces of hate that burned in their hearts.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Their path to freedom took them past the railroad tracks and the massive train. They went to the far side of it and ran along the row of empty flatbeds, and then reached the first of the hoppers.
What they saw in the shadows of the hoppers stopped them dead in their tracks.
They hadn’t seen this side of the train from their earlier hiding place, but now they could see everything. Too much.
Laid along the ground, one between each of the endless rows of wooden ties, were corpses. They were soldiers.
Some were dressed in the smoke grey or butternut brown of the Confederacy. Others were dressed in Yankee blue. Hundreds of them. All dead.
The stench from their rotting flesh was appalling.
The bodies were clearly battlefield dead. Every man carried evidence of the wounds that had killed them. Black bullet holes. Ghastly shrapnel wounds. Knife slashes. They lay there, face up, their uniform blouses torn open to expose their bloodless chests.
“What is this?” said Looks Away, recoiling from the stench and the gruesome violence.
Grey could not answer the question. Instead he stood there, not looking at the bodies on the ground but instead staring in abject horror at the mound of cargo on the nearest hopper.
He had originally thought it might be coal or raw ore heading for the ghost rock smelting fires.
He wished that was true.
What he saw was far, far worse.
The hopper was piled high with more bodies.
Hundreds of them.
Thousands.
Every hopper was full. Mountains of the dead were crammed into the cars. The corpses had been dumped in with no thought to the people they’d once been. They were—what?
Surely Deray had not brought them to bury them.
Then what?
Even as he asked himself the question, he realized that he already knew the answer.
And it was a terrible answer.
“Grey—?” asked Looks Away softly.
Grey didn’t answer. Couldn’t.
“Grey, do you understand what this is?”
He nodded.
He had thought he’d seen the depth of horror, that he knew its outer boundaries. That he was aware of its rules.
All of that was wrong.
Deray had no rules, no limits.
Grey dragged his wrist across his mouth.
“How many?” he murmured.
Looks Away glanced up at the hopper, then at the others, then down at the corpses laid in a long row here. “Two thousand? Three? Maybe more.”
Grey shook his head. “I think it’s a lot more.”
A gleaming black beetle crawled across the face of the nearest corpse. The soldier was from the South. A boy, no more than sixteen. He had a bullet hole in his abdomen and the crust of dried blood. A gut shot and proof that he hadn’t died right away. Dead men don’t bleed. Bullet wounds to the stomach kill slowly and the pain is enormous. This boy had fought for his flag and probably died screaming and alone. Probably called for his mother rather than God in those last hours. Men do that. They know their mothers will mourn them; God seems to enjoy the slaughter.
Looks Away moved down the line of hoppers and then Grey saw him stagger as if struck. He hurried over.
“What’s wrong?”
All the Sioux could do was point. The side door of the last hopper was open and a mass of bodies had fallen out to form a ragdoll mound that spilled across the rail bed. These were not soldiers. Instead of blue or grey, they wore buckskins and breechcloths. Their ruddy skin was now pale from loss of blood. Their hair was black and much of it was caked with dried blood.
They were Sioux.
All of them.
With a trembling hand, Looks Away reached for the nearest corpse and saw the distinctive body painting of the Sioux. However there were a few dots of black paint on the left side of the man’s face.
“See those marks? They were with the border patrols,” he said.
Behind them, on the far side of the train and across the plain, Deray laughed again.
“This is madness,” growled Looks Away. “Madness.”
Madness it might be, but Grey thought he understood the genius buried within the madness. All of these cars were heaped with rotting corpses from the War Between the States, and the border conflicts with the Sioux Nation. Maybe even some from the Rail Wars. A few of the corpses on this car wore dusters. Deray was clearly having bodies shipped to him here in this forgotten, hidden place. He had his dark magicks, and he clearly had his dreams of conquest. He had the weapons and a vast supply of ghost rock.
He wasn’t just supplying the armies of the world. He was building his own army.
An army of the dead.
For the third time Grey said, “We have to warn people.”
Looks Away nodded. “I have a terrible feeling we are too sodding late.”
“We have to try.”
They looked at each other for a long moment. “Yes,” said Looks Away. “We bloody well do.”
They turned and fled. But as they ran, Grey thought he saw movement off in the shadows, back near the rocks that had served as their hiding place. He fancied he saw a group of people there. Not trying to hide, but apparently not being seen. They looked like figures seen through a fog. Hazy, indistinct, nearly featureless. Except for one. A woman. Not Veronica, but like her she was someone lost to violence.
Annabelle.
Grey swore that he saw her standing there with the others.
With the ghosts.
But for once—for this one moment—they were not looking at him.
/> Each ghostly face was turned toward the spirit of Veronica and the necromancer.
Then Grey and Looks Away passed behind a row of stalagmites and when they emerged from the other side the ghosts were nowhere to be seen.
If, indeed, they had been there at all.
Deeply troubled, Grey ran faster, desperate now to find the tunnel, the basement, the house, and then the world. He needed to feel sunlight on his face before he lost all hope that he would ever see daylight again.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
It took them hours to find their way out.
Care and caution take time and they could not risk being found out. Apart from the simple truth that they were ill prepared to fight an army of men and machines, they did not want Deray to know that they had witnessed anything. There was no way of telling how that madman would react to the threat of having his plans—his alliances—discovered.
Grey was certain that the necromancer would leave the earth scorched and barren where Paradise Falls now stood.
They did not speak of this. They said nothing at all until they reached the tunnel that had been burrowed through the bedrock into Chesterfield’s basement. Only then did they pause. Looks Away touched the slimy walls and shook his head.
“As a geologist I’ve come in contact with some of the world’s strangest creatures,” he said. “Those dinosaurs and pteranodons and all that—frightening as they are, they belong to some part of the natural world. Things that once lived and were believed to be extinct. But this…” He shook his head again. “I don’t know what could have done this. If this were something tiny, a little hole, I would speculate that it was some kind of worm with highly acidic secretive glands, but … no worm ever lived that could make a tunnel this size and cut it through solid rock.”
Grey nodded. He didn’t touch the walls and didn’t want any of that slime on his skin.
They looked back the way they’d come and for a moment Grey felt a deep sadness sweep through him. It was a stew made of equal parts dread and acceptance. Deray was coming, that much was clear. He had the weapons, the numbers, the science, and the bloodlust.
What did Paradise Falls have?
A few hundred farmers. Most of them old people and children. Some men who could probably handle a gun. Some women, too.
And what else? What did they really have that could be used to mount a defense against Deray? What was there in town that could stop one of those tanks? What could even hope to stop the metal giant, Samson?
And even if the impossible could be managed, there were still whatever that flying machine had been that Grey had seen during the storm, the soldiers, the dinosaurs.
The undead. The Harrowed Lucky Bob.
Any of these would, alone, probably be enough to destroy the town.
Together? Grey doubted even a nation could stand against a surge of power like that.
Get out, whispered the part of his mind that had kept him on the road since the deaths of his men and Annabelle. Get out while you can.
Grey thought of the ghosts of his abandoned friends, and of the way Jenny Pearl looked in the sunlight this morning before they’d ridden away from her place. He thought of the pain in Brother Joe’s eyes and how that man had come back from the brink of personal hell to stand with the people of his town. He thought of that good man, Lucky Bob, and how he had been turned into a monster.
He thought about the deep pain in Looks Away’s voice and in his eyes when they’d found Veronica dying on the stairs.
Get out?
“Go to hell,” he murmured.
If Looks Away heard him he made no comment.
Together they went into the basement.
PART FOUR
What We Die For
When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.
—TECUMSEH
Chapter Sixty-Nine
They met no resistance in the house.
No gunmen, no foreign soldiers. No ghosts. No dinosaurs.
Nothing.
Everyone and everything was dead.
They climbed the stairs and paused briefly at the place where Veronica had died. Her blood was still there, pooled, drying but not dry. Looks Away bent and touched two fingers into the center of the pool, then used them to draw parallel lines on his cheeks.
“War paint?” asked Grey.
The Sioux straightened and wiped his fingers on his trousers. “Call it a promise.”
Grey didn’t ask what that meant. He knew.
They shared a nod and moved on.
Before they left the house they paused in the treasure room. They exchanged a brief, wordless look as they began stuffing their pockets.
While they were loading it, Looks Away said, “I wonder why they left all this here. I mean, they took the time to wipe Chesterfield out, why not plunder his treasure trove?”
Grey shrugged. “Why hurry? As far as Deray knows this is all here safe and sound, ready for when he needs it. Or maybe he’s going to have his troops haul it out of here after his foreign guests have left. Might not be the sort of thing he wants to let them see. Either way, I don’t think Deray frets all that much about anyone from Paradise Falls taking it.”
Looks Away sucked a tooth as he weighed a bar of gold in his hand. “I wish we could scarper with all of it and leave something clever and obscene written on the wall.”
“Yeah, well I forgot to pack an entire wagon train in my saddlebag.”
“Pity.”
They stole as much as they could carry.
When they finally stepped out into the fresh air they were shocked to see that it was nighttime. The sun was down and the moon rode naked across the sky.
“Must be nearly three in the morning,” said Grey. “Can you find our way back in the dark?”
Looks Away snorted and they went to find their horses. They had to feed and water them first, and both animals stamped in irritation at having been abandoned for so long.
“Stop complaining,” Grey said to Picky. “Let’s all be happy we came back at all.”
They mounted and rode off.
Dawn found them with miles still to go. While Looks Away could find the path, navigating it in the dark was another matter. Very often they had to walk single file, leading the nervous horses through the landscape torn by the Great Quake. Finally, as the red eye of morning began peering suspiciously at them over the eastern mountains, they saw the road that led through the last of the town’s working farms. Paradise Falls was a tiny smudge in the heat shimmer on the horizon.
They mounted and began riding again.
As they did, Looks Away kept glancing at Grey.
“What?” Grey asked. “What’s wrong?”
“I was about to ask you the same thing, old chap,” said Looks Away. “For the last two miles you’ve done nothing but frown, nod to yourself, and grunt. If you’re having so thorough a conversation with yourself, then please invite me in.”
“Oh … yeah … I’ve been thinking about our boy Deray. I guess there are a few things that sort of bother me.”
“A few things about Deray that bother you,” echoed Looks Away. “Imagine that. And, pray tell me what in particular?”
“Well … for one thing, I’m not sure if I buy that whole business about helping those generals start wars.”
“Why not? Deray has a reputation as a weapons merchant.”
“Right, I get that part, but he’s going about it in a strange way,” said Grey. “It’s a little too…” He fished for the word. “Obvious.”
“Obvious? How so?”
“Looking at him, at the way he acts, it’s like he sees himself as something more than a guy who peddles guns.”
“He is.”
“No, you’re missing my point. You saw how he was treating those generals? The
y weren’t just customers. You don’t put on shows like that for people you’ve already sold your wares to.” Grey fished for some beef jerky from his saddlebag and shared it with Looks Away. “Deray held himself above them. Like he was something bigger and more important than any general. Like it was expected of those generals to hang on his every word. Like it was expected that they would cheer him. I never met one, but I imagine that’s how a king would act.”
“A king? Interesting.”
“You don’t see it?”
“Yes,” said Looks Away slowly, “I think I’m beginning to. But what of it? Deray is a famous megalomaniac.”
“A what?”
“Someone who thinks too bloody highly of himself.”
Grey grunted. “Tell you the truth, friend, I’m not so sure this is a matter of someone putting on airs. I think he is setting himself up as an actual king.”
“What? Because he has a kingdom of dinosaurs and undead soldiers? That’s hardly—.”
“No, because I think he’s planning on doing a lot more than helping to start a bunch of wars. Those hopper cars filled with bodies gave me a very bad idea. He’s building an army of the living dead and—.”
“We already know that.”
But Grey shook his head. “Let me finish. His army is going to be made up of the dead. Of people who were killed in wars. Right now it’s the wars here in America. But what happens when he starts raising everybody’s dead?”
The Sioux stared at him in shocked silence.
Grey nodded. “Yeah. So he sells the kinds of weapons that will allow those generals to wage wholesale slaughter. Those tanks and such? They’ll kill hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions.”
“And then Aleksander Deray will come along and raise all those dead…” Looks Away’s voice was hollow.
“He’ll have the biggest army anyone’s ever seen,” said Grey. “And with those metal giants like Samson as backup—or maybe to keep his own troops in line … he’ll be able to conquer the whole damn world.”
“Dear God in heaven I hope you’re wrong about this.”
Grey nodded. He hoped he was wrong, too. But he was one hundred percent certain that he was right.