Last Train from Perdition

Ten.

They came fast. Some were faster than others. The most nimble hurtled through the windowframes and the gaping hole the horse-creatures had torn open. Lawson and Ann barely had an instant to take aim. Some moved like the wind, nearly invisible until they were right there, lower jaw unhinging, mouth straining wide, fangs sliding out for the feeding under the crimson glare of the eyes.

The first one Ann shot in the head wore the flesh of a little blond girl about ten years old, but there was caked blood all down the front of her lavender-colored dress and she shrieked like a storm of ravens as she burned. Lawson killed a young male vampire who had a deep jagged scar across his forehead, the testament of a hard human life. The fangs of a red-haired woman in the sackcloth dress of a farmer’s wife came at Lawson before he shot her between the eyes and she fell back hissing like a snake and cracking like old plaster. Ann missed with her next shot at a gaunt male vampire in a filthy mud-colored suit, but Lawson got him in the left temple as he scrabbled toward Eli Easterly.

A female vampire with long dark hair and a nearly-skeletal body had leaped upon Gantt, who tried to fight her off but was no match for her strength. Lawson saw two vampires, a male and female, bearing Rooster down to the floorboards. Eric was firing his pistol, hitting nothing but at least keeping them back. Mathias was fighting a pair of vampires using the Winchester as a club. Lawson suddenly had the grinning rictus of an old white-haired man right in his face, and he shot the thing just below the left eye as it opened its mouth to bite. Ann killed another young female vampire, a golden-haired girl in a yellow dress who was still beautiful and who might have been in another life a stage actress or some celebrated but ultimately doomed soul.

Both Ann and Lawson were running out of bullets and had no time to reload. Then a blurred form fell upon him and a tremendous strength bore him down, and he looked up into the gap-toothed face of Henry Styles Junior, the one-hundred-and-five-year-old vampire boy. Ann was pushed down by a wiry vampire with a thatch of black hair wild with cowlicks. Her gunhand was knocked aside just as her last silver bullet was fired.

“Ssssuch a sssstubborn fool,” Junior said, as delicately as if already tasting him. His mouth opened and the fangs slid out. One hand was on Lawson’s throat. A knee pinned the gunfighter’s Colt. “We win, Trevor,” he said in a whisper. “You ssssee? Firssst we win the battle, and then we win the—”

He blinked.

There had been a disturbance, a movement of something unseen, a something that should not be. Lawson felt it, just as Junior had.

Junior’s head twisted around.

In the splintered mass of the car’s side there appeared a figure, standing over Junior and Lawson.

It was an Indian with a single eagle feather in his braided hair. He was barechested but wore an open cowhide waistcoat decorated with patterns of red, blue and green beads. He held a sawed-off shotgun, the double barrels of which he pressed against Junior’s forehead.

Lawson said to Junior, and afterward never knew why he spoke it: “Merry Christmas.”

The Indian pulled both triggers.

There was no sacred work of the silver bullet in this. There was no butcher knife to cleave off the vampire boy’s head. There was only a double load of buckshot, delivered at flesh-kissing range from a fearsome weapon held by a determined killer.

In the next instant Henry Styles Junior had no head. From the ragged mess of where it had been the black ichor streamed out, and the Indian grasped the neck of the writhing body and drank from it.

Lawson, in a kind of shocked stupor, realized he was seeing something he had never expected to witness: a vampire Indian, probably a Sioux by the look of him. He roused himself and used his last silver bullet to shoot in the midst of its cowlicks the creature who was bearing down on Ann. As that thing convulsed and burned, the Indian had already reloaded two shells and had strode forward to blow the head off one of the vampires who drank from Rooster. Then he grabbed by the hair a female who was gnawing into Deuce Mathias’s back and he threw her through one of the windowframes as if she were made of straw. As the Indian was reloading for another vampire scalp, a second half-seen figure that had been moving with the quickness of the Dead Society slowed enough to come into view: a broad-shouldered, white-bearded mountain man in fringed buckskins and a coonskin cap. With a howl of rage he went to work with the axe he was carrying, causing heads with fanged mouths to fly and ichor to pour thickly from the neckstumps.

The appearance of a third figure, immediately following, was enough to send the remnants of Junior’s army scrabbling from the car. This one was another male, slim of build, dressed in patched but relatively clean clothing and a dark blue jacket, and the axe he wielded did the same quick and violent work as the burly mountain man’s. The bodies of the decapitated vampires continued to thrash, the arms flailing as if seeking the heads they’d lost, but the wound was too severe for the ichor or the lifeforce of the creatures to heal and their motions were slowing. A female vampire in blood-crusted rags showed either extreme hunger, courage or stupidity as she leaped upon the mountain man’s back. Her fangs sank into his shoulder but her head was blown apart by the Indian’s shotgun and all that was left were the curved teeth. The mountain man plucked them out with disdain and flung them away, then he grasped the twitching body to take his own drink.

They were on the run. A couple more dared to attack the new trio and were dispatched by the axes. After that, the passenger car emptied of the last of them. Lawson caught sight of the remaining troops, a paltry number, fleeing through the snow down the embankment into the woods. The winged shapechangers took to the air. A few half-hearted shots were fired from the rocks on the left, and then there was no more gunfire. The arms of Junior’s headless body reached out as if trying to grasp hold of a purchase enough to stand. The hands with their dirty clawlike nails closed on empty air. Then the arms fell back, as from the stump of the neck the last of his ichor oozed out like ebony mud.

Lawson stood up. As he warily watched the new arrivals, he reloaded his Colt with silvers by holding the gun as best he could in his right hand; the broken arm was an impediment but at least he had a little strength in his fingers now. Ann was standing too, her face and hair splattered with vampire gore. Her expression was eerily calm, but her hands were shaking as she fed her pistol.

The Indian pushed two more shells in the shotgun. The mountain man swung his axe back and rested it on his shoulder. The vampire in the blue jacket leaned on his axe and looked around at the carnage.

“Travel this way often?” he asked. It was the voice of a refined and educated man.

“Once will be enough,” Trevor said.

The man’s eyes were light brown. There was a combination in them of both terrible sadness and terrible ferocity. Though his mouth was stained with the ichor his fangs had sucked from the bodies that still convulsed on the floorboards, he might have given the merest hint of a smile. It was hard to tell, because the light came only from flickering pools of lamp oil.

“You’re one of us,” he said.

“I’m one,” Trevor answered. “Who are us?”

The man grunted softly. He was nearly Lawson’s height, had thick black hair with streaks of gray on the sides and a gray lock that fell across his forehead above the right eye. On the left side of his face was the puckered round hole where a bullet had made its entry, and on the right side the same where it had made its exit. Another scar was scrawled from the corner of his left eye to the left corner of his mouth, and the disfigurement of the upper lip made him appear to wear the faint and rather mocking smile.

Minie ball hole and saber scar, Lawson thought. “The War For Southern Independence?” he asked.

“The War of the Rebellion,” said the man.

“I was taken at Shiloh.”

“You mean Pittsburg Landing? I was taken at Antietam.”

“You mean, of course, Sharpsburg,” said Lawson. “I was a captain.”

“I was a major…captain.”

“Ah,” Lawson said, and returned the smile in same faint and mocking fashion. “Well…we are greatly thankful for your arrival here, major. All of us.”

“Figure you’d best see to your people,” rumbled the mountain man. “Smellin’ their blood.”

Except for Ann, the others had become a frozen tableau…and almost literally because the air was far below freezing, the snowfall heavier, and the car looked to have been busted and crushed by the fist and boot of a disagreeable giant who hated trains. It was time to count the costs.

Blue was all right, drifting in and out with no knowledge of any of this. Easterly had taken some splinters and glass cuts, but he’d had the presence of mind in the battle to draw his crucifix and use it to burn the creatures who’d tried to swarm both himself and the girl. Eric had suffered the rake of a claw from the top of his left shoulder down to the elbow and been bitten on the throat but the vampire’s thirst had been interrupted by the noise of the Indian’s shotgun. With the decapitation of Junior the creature had decided a few cupfuls of human blood was enough soup for the nightly meal and had fled the car through a window.

Mathias had fought them off as well, though he’d taken several bites to both arms, his hands and one more frenzied bite on his back. He was weak and dazed but he was alive.

“I’m all right,” said Rooster as he struggled to his feet. What had saved him was the fact that the male and female vampires who’d attacked him had started fighting each other for his blood. The female had gotten to his neck while the male’s fangs had pierced his right hand, but just after the male had been destroyed by the shotgun the female had pulled out and turned away in time to give her head to an axeblade. “I’m all right,” Rooster repeated, though he had lost a goodly amount of blood and was near falling down again. “I’m ready for the nuthouse, but I’m all right.”

“Gantt?” Lawson called. There was no answer.

The mountain man had already walked back to the strongest smell of human blood.

“This one’s gone,” he said. “Throat open…chest too. Heart’s tore out.” He glanced at Lawson with a pair of narrow pale blue eyes in the rugged and wrinkled face. “Took it and skedaddled. Blood trail goes out the window.”

Lawson had to see for himself. He hated the sight, for Gantt’s eyes were open and blood had run from both corners of his mouth. It seemed a terrible violation, worse than having your throat pierced by a pair of fangs, to have your heart torn out and stolen as one might snatch a gravy-soaked biscuit from a dinner plate. He recalled seeing a very thin female vampire with long dark hair bearing down on Gantt. He wondered if it might have been Eva, and if so…LaRouge was teaching her well.

He had no doubt LaRouge was somewhere near. Maybe not in the Montana territory, but near enough to have planned all this, and near enough to soon know that Lawson had escaped.

But he and the other survivors had not gotten out of it yet. Helena still seemed a world away…and there were these three to be considered.

“Josephus Wilder,” said the mountain man. “Your handle?”

“Trevor Lawson. Your name?” he asked the major.

The man was standing over Reverend Easterly and Blue, and the Indian was walking back and forth among the dying vampire bodies.

“Achilles Godfrey,” said the man.

That name. That name, Lawson thought. Where had he—?

Oh yes.

“Major Godfrey,” said Lawson. “Also known as ‘Godless’.”

“By some,” the major said. “Those who failed to grasp realities.”

“I read in the newspaper…somewhere…about you and your men at the battle of Boonsboro.”

“You mean the battle of South Mountain.”

“The Yankee name for it. Specifically, what happened at Fox’s Gap. September 14th, 1862…three days before Sharpsburg. Does that bring back a memory?”

“Dim,” came the answer. “All of that, except for that night on the Antietam battlefield, among the screaming wounded, when they found me under my dead horse…very dim.”

“I’ll refresh your memory. Sixty Confederate bodies thrown down a well in the aftermath of Fox’s Gap. Thrown down there like garbage. Did you piss on them afterward?”

“Trevor,” said Ann. “Don’t.”

Lawson realized that the vampire Indian had moved slightly to one side and nearer him, the better to get a clear line-of-fire with the loaded shotgun.

“I call him Smoke, because he moves so quickly and quietly,” said Achilles Godfrey, in a soft and beguiling voice. “He doesn’t speak. I saved his life many years ago from a pack of them. His own kind, turned. He has repeated the favor many times. We are all brothers here, and there are several more out there who came with us to dispatch as many as possible. We have a small community a few miles away, in the mountains. We felt them gathering. We sent out scouts. Smoke is not the only Sioux in our happy little town. Imagine our amazement…that instead of humans being trapped as food for them, aboard this train is one of us. We saw you talking to that…boy, and what happened afterward. It was quite a shock to me personally, but then again…there had to be others like us out there. Had to be.”

“Like you? How?”

Godfrey was slow in answering. He walked over to a puddle of burning oil and stared into it, and by that light Lawson caught the red glare in the eyes of his battle-scarred face. “Ex-Captain Lawson,” he said, “that war you refer to with understandable bitterness is over. Yet there is another war that has been going on for years…centuries…that shows no signs of abatement. You are either on one side or another, and I will term those the dark and the light. May I call you Trevor?”

Lawson nodded. He realized he owed his continuation of existence and the life of the others to this man, to Wilder and to Smoke, but…Achilles Godfrey? One of the most malicious and hate-filled officers to ever wear the Union blue? The story of the sixty bodies and the well had been verified, but what of the other tales? The quick execution of prisoners both by firing squad and hanging? The burning-to-the-ground of Southern villages removed from any military purpose? The placement of severed heads atop fenceposts as markers to show where the troops of Major Godless had passed through? And the skinning of the two camp followers who were proven to be Confederate spies…

All those things Lawson had read about in newspapers in the aftermath of the conflict, as more witnesses had come forward and facts revealed. But who knew where Major Godless had disappeared to? He was one of the many hundreds missing from the battlefield, yet his legacy was still a matter of heated discussion in the papers of the day. Lawson recalled sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Sanctuaire not a year ago and reading that a new common grave of Confederate dead had been found on farmland west of Fox’s Gap. Of the thirty or so soldiers most were headless, yet it appeared a few had been buried alive with their arms severed at the shoulders. This was reported to be the work of Achilles Godfrey and his troops from a drummer boy who had escaped the carnage.

“Trevor,” said the major, “this war is one we cannot lose. We have decided to fight the inhumanity that is attempting to consume us. We drink animal blood, not human…except for the occasional freshly-dead body we must dig up from graveyards. We portion that out in shares. The body is returned to the coffin and the earth, and no one is the wiser. We can hold out for a few months between feedings. As I say, we subsist mostly on animal blood.” His gaze sharpened as he looked upon Lawson. “I suspect your so-called life is the same?”

“I haven’t sunken to grave-robbing.”

“You mean…you haven’t sunken to grave-robbing yet.”

“You’ve started drinking the ichor? That sustains you?” Lawson recalled his own brief and bitter taste of LaRouge’s ichor at the mansion in Nocturne.

“We have been victorious in a few small skirmishes and have learned to drink from our enemies when possible,” Godfrey said. “It’s a particularly vile liquid but we’ve found that it does give strength…though not anything like the power of human blood. You’ve never tasted it?”

“Only once.”

“Listen…please…maybe I shouldn’t oughta be hearin’ this?” Rooster asked.

“I don’t think I ought to be, either,” Mathias added. “It doesn’t sound too healthy for a regular man to know.”

“We need to get this girl to the hospital in Helena,” Lawson told the major. “Rooster, can you drive this train?”

“I can drive, but can you shovel coal?”

“I can try,” said Eric. He had wrapped cloth torn from his coat around his wounded shoulder. “I’m not hurt bad enough to want to just sit here and wait.”

“The track’s still blocked,” Mathias said. “What about that?”

“It’s nothing we can’t move,” the major answered. “As I say, we’ve brought others. They’re standing guard around the train…what’s left of it.” He looked back and forth along the car. “I expect we should remove these bodies before you get to Helena. There’s going to be enough to have to explain to the sheriff and the railroad company as it is.”

“Holy Lord!” said Rooster, with renewed alarm. “And me the only one left of the crew! They’ll split me in four pieces and hang every one of ’em!”

“We’ll figure something out,” Lawson said. “Ann and I will stay in Helena as witnesses to a bandit raid.”

“What…bitin’ bandits? They’ll laugh me right into the prison hole!”

“I’ll have a talk with the sheriff. I can be very convincing when it’s necessary.” One benefit of his condition was that the Eye could be used to sap a victim’s strength of will and turn his or her mind into clay that could be shaped to suit the purpose. Even so, it seemed he and Ann would have a lot of claywork to do in Helena.

“I’ll verify whatever Lawson says,” said Easterly. “We are not going to let anyone suffer any further.”

“We?” Lawson lifted his eyebrows. “We?”

Easterly came toward him and stopped only a couple of feet away. He cast his gaze upon Wilder, Smoke and Godfrey before it came back to Lawson.

“I am everything you already know,” he said. “I have lived in the blackest of shadows. I have done terrible things, in my own name and in the name of God. I have lost…the most precious gift that was given to me: my family.” He lowered his head, and it was a moment before he could speak again. “I have nothing now,” he said, his voice strained by emotion. “I have been a thief, a charlatan, a wife-beater, a drunk, a joke of a father, a false prophet, and a back-shooting bounty hunter.

“But, Mr. Lawson,” he said, and he lifted his eyes to the vampire’s, “I have never been a soldier. Would you allow me that honor?”

“A dubious honor,” Lawson replied. “One that may kill you…or present you with something worse than death.”

“I am already beyond that point,” said the reverend. “I am dead now…and I would like to return to something that might be called life.”

Easterly meant it. Lawson didn’t have to throw his Eye to see that.

“We’ll talk in Helena,” he said.

“Shall we start removing this trash?” Godfrey asked. “Then we’ll get to work on the rocks.”

Lawson was still in no shape to be moving bodies, as his broken right arm had not yet mended. He sat down on a bullet-nicked seat as Godfrey, Smoke, Wilder, and Easterly began to haul the dead vampires out of the car and throw them into the woods below. Ann sat on a seat facing him. Tears had rolled down her cheeks, but her expression was still eerily composed. She had to break sometime, Lawson thought. It might be tomorrow or the next few days, but sooner or later she would break.

Then he would help Ann put herself back together again, and they would go on.

“Trevor?” Her voice seemed distant. “Trevor?” she repeated.

“Yes?”

“Did I kill my father?”

He looked her square in the eyes, trying to give her as much of his strength that he could spare. “You know the answer to that.”

She nodded, but even as she did two fresh tears spilled.

He reached out with his good arm and took her hand. There was nothing more he could say, and nothing more she could ask. She shivered from the cold, and the snow blew into her hair and the puddles of lamp fuel flickered, and the bodies of the vampires were thrown into the woods and at one point Ann removed the pistol from her holster, put it on the seat beside her and stared at it as if it were the most hateful enemy she had ever faced. Then after awhile she put it back into its holster, where it belonged.

When the bodies were cleared out, the vampires along with Eli Easterly began the removal of the rocks. Eric and Rooster went out to watch, and Rooster wanted to go over the process of bringing the locomotive up to steam. Ann informed Lawson that Blue was waking up, and he went back to kneel beside her.

She was still very pale and obviously in great need of the surgery, but her voice was stronger when she spoke. Her eyes, at first unfocused, found Lawson. “Am I…guh…guh…gonna die?”

“No. We’ll be getting you to the hospital in Helena very soon. Just hang on a little longer.”

She gave a small laugh that must have hurt, because she winced. Then she said, “If there’s…anything Ca…Ca…Cassie Fredricks can d…do…it’s h…h…hang on.”

“Cassie,” Lawson said quietly, and he put a hand on her forehead. “That’s my daughter’s name.”

With an effort, she moved her head away. “Ohhhh,” she whispered, “your h…hand’s so c…cold.”

“I’m sorry,” he told her. He had forgotten for a moment what he was. He waited until she slept again, and then he stood up. He saw Deuce Mathias sitting on the remnant of a seat toward the front, bent over with his hands to his face, and he crunched across the debris of timbers and glass to the man, who looked up when he heard someone coming.

Lawson leaned down close, and he saw Mathias’s face tighten with fear.

“When we reach Helena,” Lawson said, “you are going to start walking. Go in any direction you please, but never look back.” He held up a finger when Mathias started to speak. “Don’t question. Consider your life from this point on to be a second chance. I think you’ve earned it. Shut,” he said when again Mathias opened his mouth, and then Lawson turned away before good sense and a reward for a common killer changed his mind.

It didn’t take much longer before Achilles Godfrey and Easterly returned to the car. Steam had begun to billow along the tracks. Some of it would be coming into the car, along with the wind and the snow and coalsparks, but Lawson doubted that anyone would complain too much about their open-air condition as long as the car held together. Easterly went back to again stand watch over Cassie Fredricks. Ann sat alone with her thoughts. Deuce Mathias sat alone with a new future ahead of him and a past night that he knew no one on earth would believe. The bodies of Keene Presco, Johnny Rebinaux, Glorious George Gantt and the skin of Jack Tabberson had joined the dead vampires in the wooded embankment below the tracks, and this was an area where the predators were always hungry.

“I have questions,” Godfrey said to Lawson. “Do you have any idea why this filth gathered in such numbers here, and why they went to such effort? I doubt they were after only the humans.”

“They want me, and my friend Ann.”

“Decidedly so. And why might that be? Do you pose a particular threat to them?”

“Resistance is a threat,” said Lawson.

“Yes, but…is there anything more I should know? Evidently they hold you and your friend in dangerous regard. The bullets you were using…what of those?”

“Silver bullets blessed with holy water by a priest.”

“Ah. So you’ve discovered a better way to kill them than with shotgun blast and axeblade?”

Lawson was a little late in answering, so the major went on. “I believe we should meet again. In fact, I insist upon it. I’d like to hear your story. Where might I find you?”

Lawson retrieved his wallet and gave him one of the plain white cards. Beneath Lawson’s name and the address of the Hotel Sanctuaire was the line All Matters Handled. And below that…

“I travel by night,” Godfrey read. “Were you trying to be humorous?”

“No. Realistic.”

“Well…New Orleans is a distance and I too would be forced to travel by night. But I think it would be a journey worth taking. There are not many of us who fight against this, Trevor. We need to form our own army, and we need a plan of battle.”

“Agreed.”

“I’ll visit you there. When, I’m not sure. But soon.” Godfrey put the card away in a pocket of his jacket. Was he smiling, or was this just the wound of his face? “I do recall Antietam,” he said. “The night I was taken. And the one who turned me. Oh yes, I do remember her.”

“Her?”

“A woman who calls herself LaRouge. A very beautiful monster, Trevor. This is who I search for, and you can believe I’ll never give up. Do you know the myth?”

Lawson was unable to speak.

“The myth…that consuming the ichor of the one who has turned you will turn you back to being fully human again? Is it a myth, or is it truth? I don’t know, but I do know that I want to die as a human, and nothing on God’s Heaven or in Satan’s Hell will stop me from finding that monster and draining every drop of ichor from her body. She is mine to kill.” Godfrey put a hand on Lawson’s shoulder. “That keeps me going, Trevor. It keeps me wanting to live. But as you must know, I was always inflamed by the idea of revenge.”

“Yes,” said Lawson, and it was the only word he could think to say.

“I will see you in New Orleans. You may count on that. And then I shall be ready to lead our army into a war we must win.” Did the eyes spark, or was it a shine of madness?

“Goodbye for now, Captain,” said Major Godless, who gave the soldier from Alabama a brief salute before he went out the door beyond which the silent Smoke was waiting. They drifted off together, along with the other figures that moved through the snow.

The train gave a lurch. The iron wheels turned. The damaged car squealed and cried out, but it held together as the locomotive rolled onward through where a pile of boulders had been, with a little boy perched on the biggest one.

Lawson had to sit down, before he fell.

The last train from Perdition was going home.