Ghostwalkers

Chapter One

Grey Torrance sat on his horse in the dark shade of a tower of rock and watched a posse try their damndest to kill a Sioux.

They were going about it with a will, Grey had to give them that. Clearly they’d given it some thought. Put some effort into. Making a job of it.

The Sioux?

He seemed to have the same work ethic when it came to not being killed. Riding hard until they shot his little pinto out from under him. Then climbing onto the big piles of rocks left over from when sheets of ice covered this whole land. The Sioux kept deviling the riders, cutting through narrow clefts in the rock, picking his way up trails a goat wouldn’t risk. Tumbling rocks down on his pursuers. Even set a small brush fire. The man was using all the tricks.

Grey thought it was highly entertaining.

Kind of a shame the Sioux had no chance at all.

Not with six mounted men. Not out here where he could stall but he couldn’t really escape.

Still, it was fun to watch.

Grey took a piece of jerky from his pocket, bit some off, and chewed slowly, letting the salt coax spit from his dry mouth. He wasn’t entirely sure the jerky was beef, but as he’d taken it from a dead man’s saddle it wasn’t something he could verify. It kept him alive, though. That and a handful of beans and a water skin he’d filled from a dreary little stream.

Alive, and until now, unhappy.

This lifted the day from nothing to something.

One man on foot trying to escape six on horseback in a country that was made for dying. The hills were a broken tumble of tan rocks that looked like they’d been dumped here at the end of the sixth day of creation. When God was just too damn tired to build anything else, so he tossed it all across Nevada and said to hell with it.

Maybe he thought the Devil would want it.

No one else much did.

Hateful, ugly place where the scorpion was king and water was worth more than gold or ghost rock.

It wasn’t a place for the living.

It was a desert.

A boneyard.

A dead land.

He chewed and watched as the Sioux raced for the shelter of a massive tumble of rocks and started to climb. Some of the rocks stood straight up like the arms of buried giants. Some lay flat and stacked. Three of these formed a kind of rough terrace, with two smaller platforms and a big one up top. Be hard as hell to make it up that top shelf, but as Grey watched the Sioux seemed to be trying just that. The Sioux raced across the lowest table, leaped up and out, and caught a twisted root of a Joshua tree. The root was as withered as the tree, which leaned drunkenly over the edge of a higher shelf. Grey narrowed his eyes, trying to understand the point of the Sioux taking that risk. Even if he got to the next shelf, the posse could simply fall back and wait. There was nowhere else to go. That second shelf stood alone, like a tiny mesa, offering no shelter or…

The Sioux snaked out his hands and caught the vine. Clutched it firm, then immediately began to climb. He was clearly making for the dense shadows under that bigger top shelf and Grey wondered why the six pursuers didn’t just shoot him down. At that range they could shoot to wound and have a good chance of getting it done.

But they didn’t seem to want to kill or injure the Sioux. They wanted him alive.

Now… why was that?

As the fugitive climbed up the vine toward the lip of the higher shelf, Grey found himself chewing on the question as much as on the jerky.

Why would six white men go to such lengths to capture an Indian unharmed?

That was damn odd, even for a part of the country that was odder than most. If it was one man Grey could put it down to heatstroke or some personal grudge. But this was six men. Well-armed, and from their bulging saddlebags, well-provisioned.

And wasn’t that damned interesting?

Grey reached down and stroked the long neck of his horse. His newly acquired horse. The animal’s coat was the same shade of dusty blue as the hair of Grey’s grade-school teacher back home in Philadelphia, so he’d named the mare Mrs. Pickles. Picky for short. Nice horse.

Picky blew softly and shook her head. But she, too, was watching the drama below. She seemed every bit as curious as Grey was.

“So,” Grey murmured, “what do you think?”

Picky lifted her head as if listening.

“We could turn northwest and leave these fellows to their own adventures.”

Picky made no move.

“Or we could be busybodies and go interfere where we ain’t wanted.”

The horse blew again and stamped the rock with a hoof. She did it so hard it kicked up a spark.

“That’s what I thought you’d say.”

Grey thumbed the restraining thong off the end of his pistol and loosened the Winchester in its scabbard. He absently touched the knives in boot-top and belt. Then, as he did a thousand times a day he turned and looked over his shoulder.

There was nothing there.

Behind him was more of the blasted and blighted Nevada wasteland. The road he’d come was a random zigzag through different states, different nations, different climates.

Different wars.

He knew, with all his intellect and experience, that no one was following him. He was good at leaving no trail to follow. So, he knew that there was no one back there. No one hunting him, as the posse down there was hunting the Sioux.

He knew that.

Just as he knew that he was wrong.

Partly wrong.

No man followed him, that was certain. No posse, no hunting party, no Agents or Rangers.

What was back there, riding his back trail somewhere in the dust and distance was not a man. Or even a group of men.

No, you couldn’t call them “men.”

Not anymore.

They’d been men once upon a time, though. They’d been men before they died.

Before he killed them.

The ghosts of his crimes were relentless.

Grey took a breath and forced himself to turn and study the landscape before him, not the wreckage behind.

He swallowed the last bit of jerky, took a long drink, nodded to himself, and then kicked Picky lightly in the sides.

“Come on, girl,” he said, “let’s go see if we can’t get into trouble.”

Which is what they did.

Chapter Two

By the time Grey reached the floor of the broad valley the Sioux was scaling the wall that led to the topmost shelf. He had a fair piece of work ahead of him and Grey didn’t envy the task.

Below, the posse had all dismounted. The men tied their horses to a stunted juniper and left the smallest man among them to guard the mounts. The others spread out to look for a way up. Two of them circled around out of sight while the remaining three set to climbing. As Picky drew closer, Grey could see that they weren’t going about it the right way.

One fellow was trying to climb one-handed while holding his rifle in the other, and he was making a piss-poor job of it. Another was trying to muscle his way up, showing off by chinning himself on edges of rock and making big leaps. It was impressive for a few seconds, but under this sun and wearing jeans, a heavy canvas coat, boots, and a gunbelt, the fellow was wearing himself out. By the time he reached the second of the two highest shelves he was moving at a breathless crawl.

The other two were not climbers at all, but at least they went about it with caution.

While all this was happening the Sioux seemed to be either unconcerned with their approach, or he was looking for something. Or, Grey thought, maybe the man was plain loco.

The Sioux dropped to all fours and began spitting on the ground. Grey could see him suck in his cheeks and hock spit over and over again. Once the Indian took a wrinkled water skin from his belt and upended it, squeezing out the last drops. Instead of swallowing them, he bent forward and let the water dribble from between clenched teeth.

“Yup,” said Grey quietly, “that boy there’s lost it.”

Then something flashed up on the hill.

Bright and sudden and very strange.

As the Sioux spat once more there was a burst of intense blue light beneath him. For just a split second it was like the man knelt over a skylight to a room lit with blue fire. It erased all shadows and was so bright Grey threw a hand up to shield his eyes.

But when he peered between his fingers the light was gone.

From the sides of the hills he could hear the pursuing men cry out. First in fear and then in anger.

“What in the hell was that?” Grey asked the empty air.

Picky nickered uneasily and Grey patted her neck, but he was frowning. What had the Indian done to cause that flash?

He waited to see if there was another flash.

There wasn’t.

However the memory of that one moment of azure light lingered. It burned in his eyes as if he’d stared too long at the sun, and only slowly, slowly faded.

Whatever it was, there was nothing natural about it, he was certain of that.

And there was nothing out here in the desert that could easily explain it. Not amid a pile of ancient rocks dropped by a glacier before the red man even hunted these hills. There wasn’t even any water to reflect sunlight, not that water on brown rock under a yellow sun would flash with a blue as bright as cornflowers.

He pulled Picky up short on the far side of a jutting shoulder of sandstone and slid quietly out of the saddle. The small man guarding the horses was on the other side and he was masking all sound by yelling encouragement up to his companions. He had a truly poisonous mouth and cursed his companions, called them goat molesters and worse. Damned them to hell and wished seven kinds of torment on them.

Grey was bored by the patter, so he screwed the barrel of his pistol into the man’s right ear and said, “Hush now.”

The man hushed.

The man froze solid.

Grey took a fistful of the back of the little man’s collar to keep him from rabbiting. The man held his arms out to his side.

“Good,” said Grey amiably. “Take your pistol out like it’s red hot. Yup, just two fingers. Nice, that’s the way to do it. Put it on the ground. No, no, don’t be moving quicker than common sense tells you to. Good, good. Now back up and let’s go have a quiet chat, shall we?”

With the gun in place, Grey used his hold on the collar to walk the man backward around the shoulder of rock. Then he pushed him toward the wall.

“Hands on the wall, feet wide. Yeah, like you’re trying to hold it up.”

Grey patted him down, removed a small two shot over-and-under derringer and a skinning knife and tossed them into a tangle of cactus paddles. Then he spun the man and thrust him hard against the hot stone.

His prisoner was nearly a foot shorter than Grey’s six-two and easily sixty or seventy pounds lighter. A skinny man with a bad sunburn and worse breath. He had rough, big-knuckled hands, though, which spoke of years of hard labor. A farmer or a miner. Nothing else would do it. His face was young but his eyes were old and they didn’t seem to want to meet Grey’s.

Grey stood very close, the gun barrel an inch from the man’s tobacco-stained teeth. The fellow went crossed-eyed trying to look at it.

“Now,” said Grey, smiling an affable smile, “let’s start with your name.”

The man hesitated for a beat, then said, “Riley.”

“First name?”

“That is my first name.”

“Give me the whole thing, then.”

“Riley Jones.”

“Uh huh. And, do you want to tell me who you are and what’s going on here, Mr. Riley Jones?”

Riley turned his head and snarled. “We’re sheriff’s deputies and you’re interfering with a criminal apprehension.”

“You saying you’re a deputy?”

“Yes I am.”

“Where’s your badge? I must have missed it, or’d you forget to bring it along?”

Riley licked his lips. “We were deputized by the sheriff. This here’s an official posse.”

He pronounced it “O-ficial.”

“Deputized? Ain’t that interesting as all hell. Remind me now… which sheriff’s department has jurisdiction way the hell out here?”

“Reno.”

“Maybe you need to buy a map, son, but you’re a long damn way from Reno.”

Riley Jones licked his lips again. “We… I mean…”

“Take your time,” suggested Grey. “Think up a good answer. Let’s see how much we both like what you have to say.”

On the other side of the rock and above them on the shelf Grey could hear the grunts and curses of the other pursuers. They were discovering that the route taken by the Sioux was considerably tougher than it looked, and it had looked plenty tough to Grey. He would not have tried it without rope and some time to plan.

“Who are you, mister?” demanded the prisoner.

“I’m the ghost of George Washington, father of our country come to reunite these dis — United States,” said Grey. He tapped the edge of the barrel against the man’s upper lip. “I believe it’s your patriotic duty to tell the whole unexpurgated truth.”

“Unexpur… what?”

“No lies.”

“I ain’t lying,” insisted Riley. “The sheriff’s got special powers from the territorial governor himself.”

“Special powers?” Grey smiled. “Bullshit.”

“Hand to God. Like I said, we’re out here on official business.”

Grey kept his smile in place but he began to wonder if he’d made a mistake. The moral high ground felt a little shaky beneath his feet.

“You want to tell me what that bright blue flash was?”

Riley’s eyes shifted away immediately. “I didn’t see no light.”

“Sure you did. Everyone for twenty miles must have seen it. Bright as can be, right on top of that rock. Right under that Sioux you men have been chasing. How could you not see it?”

Riley squared his shoulders. Very carefully. “What’s your interest, mister?”

“In the blue light? Common curiosity.”

“No. Why’d you step into something ain’t your business?”

“I saw six men chasing one. Didn’t look fair.”

“You saw six white men chasing a red injun.”

“I don’t care if he’s bright purple. Six to one?”

“You always bring more men than you need to for a posse. That’s how it’s done.”

“Posses usually have someone in charge,” said Grey. “Someone with a badge, and so far I’m not seeing one. What I am seeing is a bunch of damn fools trying to kill themselves while pretending to catch an unarmed Sioux.”

Riley sneered. “You’re one of them injun lovers, aintcha? Gone sweet on some squaw and now you’re standing up for all them savages?”

“You got a lot of sass for someone with a gun halfway down your throat.”

A voice behind him said, “And you got a lot of balls drawing on a deputy of the law.”

There were two simultaneous sounds. The soft, warning nicker of Mrs. Pickles. And the metallic click as a pistol hammer was cocked back. Then the cold barrel of a pistol was pressed into the hot flesh of the nape of Grey Torrance’s neck.

“Ah,” said Grey, “crap.”

Chapter Three

“Turn around slow,” said the voice. “Riley, you get his gun.”

The little man snatched the Colt .44–40 and shifted to the right to cover him with it as Grey turned to face the newcomer. The second man was as tall as Grey but not as broad in the shoulders and much wider in the hips and gut. Not fat exactly, but solid. He was one of the two men who’d circled behind the rocks. Grey figured the man must have found no way up and come back sooner than expected.

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 university 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.

Grey looked and now he saw how much it had all changed. The two shelves were gone, the jutting shoulder of rock was gone, and much of the big outcrop was shattered. Chunks of it were strewn across the desert floor. Only a small patch of ground lay mostly undisturbed and in the middle of it stood a placid Mrs. Pickles munching her grass. All around her were massive fragments of sandstone. Close to where Grey sat was a slab of stone as big as a chuck wagon. Beneath the stone, reaching out from one ponderous corner, torn and flattened, was a wrist in a denim sleeve and canvas gloves with no fingers. A thin trickle of blood had pooled out beneath the flaccid wrist and the pale fingers were curled upward like the legs of a dead tarantula.

“Oh,” said Grey. “Well… damn.”

“The men who were climbing up after me were blown to bits,” said Looks Away, and to emphasize the grizzly point he nodded toward some red and shapeless chunks that were being swarmed by blowflies. Grey felt his stomach turn over. “The other two, the ones you tied,” continued the strange Sioux, “could not get up and run, and so… well, you see what happened to them.”

“So why the hell are you still alive?” demanded Grey. “And for that matter, why am I? And my horse?”

“Why I’m alive is something we may or may not get around to. A lot depends on who and what you turn out to be. You don’t have the look of a cowhand. Your gear suggests a condottieri of some kind.”

“A con-what-er-what?”

“A free companion, a mercenary, if you will.”

“Hired gun is the phrase you’re fishing for.” Grey climbed very slowly and carefully to his feet. He was positive that even his shadow was bruised.

“Hired gun will do,” said Looks Away. Then in an overly casual tone, added, “And did you come to rescue me in hopes of my hiring you for services rendered?”

Grey got it now. This crazy Sioux thought that Grey had been attempting to rescue him from the posse and was caught in the explosion. This act of charity in helping Grey was less altruistic than it appeared and more of a fishing expedition for information.

It was an interesting problem.

Did he play along in the hopes that the man would share his secrets? And would there be some gold attached to the deal? Or, was it better to come right out and tell him the truth?

The third option, under other circumstances, would have been to hogtie the Indian and use a little muscle to open him up. Grey had done that sort of thing before, but he dismissed it. He wasn’t really that kind of person.

Not anymore.

He stalled by stretching his aching muscles and inspecting his horse. The Sioux waited him out. Grey noticed that there were several pistols and two rifles laid in a row on a flat stone. Within Looks Away’s reach. Not at all close to Grey.

Fair enough.

In the end, Grey blew out his cheeks and exhaled a great sigh and decided to be straight with this man. He owed him something for dragging him clear and giving him water. The Indian could have cut his throat and made off with Mrs. Pickles. Or simply stolen the horse and left him here to burn in the desert sun.

So, he turned back to Looks Away.

“Truth is, I’m not a gun for hire. Not at the moment,” he said. “And I didn’t step into this mess to make a buck. Not that I haven’t done that sort of thing before.”

Looks Away was not smiling now, and he edged closer to the guns. “Then why did you interfere?”

“Six against one,” said Grey.

“Uh huh. Six white men against one red savage. Is that the kind of math you want to sell? That the unfairness and intolerance sparked your inner nobility to take action?”

“Something like that.”

Looks Away studied him.

“And,” said Grey, “there was that blue flash.”

Now the Indian smiled.

“Oh yes,” said Looks Away. “There was that.”

Grey said, “I heard something when whatever it was blew up.”

“Did you?”

“Sounded like all the devils in hell screaming at once.”

Looks Away said nothing.

Grey said, “This is about ghost rock, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Looks Away. “And… no. It’s not as simple as that.”

“In my experience,” said Grey, “it never is.”

Chapter Six

“Which is it?”

Looks Away cleared his throat. “How much do you know about ghost rock?”

“A bit, same as most folks. Some kind of rare stone. Burns like coal, but hotter. With more oomph.”

“An understatement.”

“Lot of folks want it,” said Grey. “Lot of folks been killed over it.”

“In my experience,” said Looks Away, “people will kill each other over almost any damn thing. In England, in Limehouse, I saw two men slash each other to red ribbons over a slut with venereal disease and a face like the south end of a donkey. People kill over scraps of food. And, as a member of the Sioux, I can tell you what you white folks have been willing to kill for.”

“Okay, so people are a mess. Not exactly telegraph news. But I’ve seen ghost rock up close. Twice. It’s black with white veins running through it. It doesn’t burn with a blue light, at least not that I’ve ever heard of.”

“Yes, well there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.”

“That’s from that fellow Shakespeare,” said Grey.

Looks Away laughed. “A literate cowboy. I am in awe.”

“A funny Indian,” said Grey. “I’m… I’m…” He stopped and rubbed his eyes. “There was a joke there but my head hurts too much to go looking for it.”

They stood for a moment, looking at the smoking pile of rocks. The only sound was Picky munching quietly.

“So,” said Grey, “care to tell me about all this? Posse. Ghost rock. Explosion. Start anywhere.”

Grey walked over to one of the boulders, reached behind it, and came out with two heavy saddlebags. “These no longer have owners.”

He placed them on the ground, squatted down, opened them, and began removing tin cooking pans, a sack of beans, smoked beef, and a silver flask that sloshed when he shook it.

“It’s a long story that shouldn’t be shared when either hungry or sober,” said Looks Away.

Grey smiled. “Fair enough.”

They worked together to build a fire on the side of the rock pile farthest from the corpses. From the surviving horses of the posse they found enough water to cook beans and soften the beef, and even enough to make pan biscuits. As the sun tumbled behind the far mountains they settled down to wash badly cooked food down with even worse back-alley whiskey. As he drank, Thomas Looks Away told his story.

“I grew up in the Sioux Nation, of course,” he said. “Learned all of the traditional skills from my father and grandfather, and from more uncles than I can count. Hunting, fishing, stalking, fighting. I even did some fighting with patrols along our borders. I’m sure you know how it is, old chap — in this world there’s always someone who wants what you have and is willing to take it rather than buy it or earn it.”

“So I’ve heard,” agreed Grey with a laugh. They tapped tin cups and washed that truth down with whiskey.

“When I was about twenty, two things happened,” said Looks Away, drifting back into his tale. He removed his bowler hat and as he spoke, slowly turned it like a wheel, running the brim between thumb and forefinger. “First, I had a wee bit of a dispute with one of my cousins. An irascible fellow named Big Water. Hard words were exchanged, then there was a spot of violence, and, well…”

“What was the dispute about?”

“What else?” said Looks Away. “What do men always go crazy and fight about?”

“Gold?”

“Women,” corrected the Sioux.

“Fair enough.”

“We both liked the same girl. Big Water had land, horses, lots to offer.”

“And you—?”

“Not to be too indelicate, but I helped her get into the family way, as they say.”

“Helped?”

Looks Away gave him a roguish grin. “She was a very lovely and painfully naïve little thing.”

“And—?”

“Big Water took it amiss.”

“Amiss. Is that where the violence came in?” asked Grey.

“It was. I left Big Water a tad dented and felt it was a prime opportunity to see the world. Which I did. I drifted east and in Philadelphia I met a chap who was putting together a Wild West show to take to England. Splendid little fellow by the name of Barnum. He made me a rather enticing offer and before I could say ‘heap big wampum’ I was on a ship to London. Spent many happy years there playing everything from the Noble Savage to the Wild Savage to the Last of the Red Men. Often in the same show. Along the way I took the opportunity to better myself and even got a degree from Exeter.”

“A degree in what?”

“Natural philosophy, with an emphasis on chemistry and geological studies.”

Grey sipped his whiskey. “You’re a scientist?”

“Amateur natural philosopher I believe is the correct phrase.”

“Well… holy shit.”

“Indeed.”

“Let me guess,” mused Grey, “that’s what brought you back to America. Chemistry and geological studies, I mean. You’re prospecting?”

“Correct.”

“For ghost rock?”

“Also correct,” said Looks Away.

Night had fallen around them like a blanket, leeching away the heat of the day and leaving in its place a moistureless cold. Somewhere out in the blackness something scuttled across the dry sand. Above them the sky was littered with ten billion stars, but even these burning suns looked like chips of ice scattered on a piece of black basalt. Grey got up and took a blanket from his saddle, wrapped it around his shoulders and sat back down. As an afterthought, he walked over to the rock on which Looks Away had arranged all of the guns. He retrieved his own, examined the barrel by firelight, blew through it, dumped out the bullets, and thumbed them back in after inspecting them for grit. Then he slid the gun into its holster. He did not do it with any of the fancy flourishes some men use. Grey was a skilled gunman but he wasn’t a showman. He picked up Riley’s little derringer and slipped that into his pants pocket. His knives were there, too, and he returned them to belt and boot sheaths. Then he went and sat back down. He was aware of Looks Away watching him with intelligent dark eyes. The Sioux made no comment about Grey taking back his weapons, and that told him a lot about their relationship. Maybe not yet friends, maybe not allies, but definitely two men at peace with one another. Fair enough.

“That explosion,” said Grey as he picked up his tin cup, “wasn’t ghost rock.”

“It was and it wasn’t.”

“You deliberately beating around the bush, or is that a British thing you came back with?”

Starlight sparkled from Looks Away’s white teeth. “A bit of both, I dare say.” He poured more whiskey into their cups, stared into his for a moment, sipped, sighed, and began speaking. “A lot of people are studying ghost rock, you know. Not just here in America, but all around the world. It’s not unfair to say that it is the most significant scientific discovery of the nineteenth century. It’s potentially one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time, and I am not exaggerating when I say that. Of all time.”

He let that hang in the air between them. Grey waited.

“Ever since ghost rock was discovered in the Maze out in California,” continued the Sioux, “everyone has been looking for it. Men have actually left gold and silver mines in order to search for the ore. Think of that. Abandoning a working gold mine in order to find that damnable black rock.”

“Why shouldn’t they? Gold can’t make a ship sail faster than the wind,” said Grey. “It can’t make a gun fire twenty times faster than a man can work a rifle lever. It can’t make a carriage run without horses.”

“Exactly,” said Looks Away, nodding. “Ghost rock is all of that and more.”

“Hard stuff to find, though. Nowadays, I mean. After the big Quake of ’68, folks were finding bits of it everywhere including their own backyards; the supply seems to have dried up.”

Looks Away shook his head. “That’s not precisely true. A lot of people went to great — very great, I dare say — effort to collect as many pieces of it as they could. Much of that sundry supply was begged, borrowed, bought, or stolen.”

Grey nodded. “Mm. I’ve heard tales. I also heard they found a crapload of it in the Black Hills. Why aren’t you looking for it there?”

“Would that I could,” said Looks Away glumly. “But for reasons I’ve already explained I am persona non grata there. There is a considerable price on my head.”

“Really? Exactly how badly ‘dented’ was this Big Water fellow?”

“Mmmm… let’s just say that he won’t be fathering any children.”

Grey winced. “Ouch.”

“In my own defense, he did start that fight.”

“Uh huh.” Grey sipped some whiskey. “You can’t get Sioux ghost rock. And…?”

“And it doesn’t entirely matter,” said Looks Away. “As it turns out it isn’t necessarily how much ghost rock one has… but how you use it.”

“Does this get us around to a big blue explosion?”

“It does.”

“Will I like the explanation once we get there?”

“Probably not.”

“Are you going to tell me anyway?”

“It seems likely.” Looks Away poured the last of the whiskey into their cups.

“Guess I’d better hear it.”

Looks Away nodded and took a breath to tell the rest of his tale.

But suddenly he jerked erect, stared past Grey with huge, terrified eyes, and uttered a scream that split the desert darkness into a thousand jagged pieces.

A moment later pale, blood-streaked hands reached out of the shadows and grabbed Grey Torrance and jerked him backward into the night.

Chapter Seven

Grey was dragged down and pulled across the rough ground by hands that were as cold as ice. He bellowed in rage and fear and punched upward over his head, trying to hit whoever had him. He felt his knuckles strike home, felt flesh and bone yield to his blows, heard the thud of each punch, but there was no cry of pain, no release from those hands.

His hand flashed toward the handle of his pistol but his fingers only brushed the wood grips as the Colt fell into the dirt.

Grey could hear Looks Away shrieking in terror behind him. Awful growls filled the air.

Desperate and frightened, Grey flung himself backward from the hands that held him, trying to use force and dead weight to stop the pull, and for a moment he saw two figures bent over him. They were silhouetted against the stars but the firelight glowed on the edges of their features. Men. Two of them, dressed in torn clothes, hatless, their hair stringy, their faces dead pale in the bad light.

Their eyes…

Empty.

Totally empty.

Not like the hollowed sockets of skulls, but empty of all human light, all knowing, all intelligence. Looking into those eyes was like looking into polished glass.

Their skin was ruined. Slashed and torn. Blood was caked on their cheeks and jaws.

But the wounds did not bleed.

The blood looked old. Dried.

Their flesh hung in streamers and it should have bled.

Should have.

Should have.

Fear stabbed itself through the front of Grey’s chest and clamped icy fingers around his heart.

He knew these men.

For one terrible, fractured moment Grey was somewhere else entirely. For a stalled heartbeat of time he was not in the Nevada desert at all, but on the muddy banks of Sunder’s Ford, deep in the heart of the Confederacy. In that moment the faces leaning over him were those of Corporal James and Sergeant Howell.

They were the faces of dead men.

Of men Grey had failed long ago and left behind.

The ghostly faces of the spirits who dogged his backtrail. The accusing faces of the specters he saw in dreams every night of his life. The ones a fortune teller in Abilene warned him were following and who would haunt him until they caught up with him and dragged him down to Hell.

That’s what he saw in one dreadful moment.

And then the moment passed.

He was instantly back in the desert and these were different men. Not James and Howell. Not old friends whose blood was on Grey’s soul.

No.

This wasn’t them.

But Grey knew them just the same.

Yes, he did.

Not five hours ago he had seen one of these men try to climb a tumble of rocks and do it badly, holding a gun in one hand and reaching for handholds with the other. And he’d seen the other man stand at the bottom of that rock pile and yell curses and taunts up at his friends.

Their names floated through shock and horror to his mind.

The man who held his left arm was Big Curley.

The man who held his right was Riley Jones.

They stared at him with empty eyes.

The eyes of men who could not be doing this. The eyes of men who should be nothing more than buzzard meat. Feasts for the worms.

But they held him and they bent toward him, their mouths filled with broken teeth.

Open mouths.

Hungry mouths.

Dead mouths in dead faces.

Bending down toward him.

Chapter Eight

Something snapped in Grey Torrance’s mind.

It was like the chain between handcuffs yielding to inexorable force. It was like a worn piece of rope breaking when a bull jerks his head with absolute defiance.

Like that.

Big.

Sudden.

And all at once Grey felt his muscles release from the frigid rigidity of terror and become loose, become his own again. As the biting mouths of the two dead men dipped down toward his face and throat, Grey moved.

With a howl of fury he rolled onto his shoulders, bending his knees, bringing his feet up, forcing them between those cold hands and his own flesh. Then with a savage grunt he kicked up with all his force. His boot heels smashed into the face of Riley Jones and burst it apart. Shoe leather and hobnailed heels obliterated the chin and sent the remaining teeth flying. The steel spurs ripped bloodless flesh from the raw gray muscle. One eye popped like a grape.

The thing that had been Riley Jones merely staggered back, his neck tilted backward at a curious ankle.

The other one kept coming, though.

Grey bashed aside Big Curley’s hands, fell over onto his hip, and hammered at the man’s knees and calves with a brutal one-two-one-two. Bone cracked like gunshots and the big deputy canted sideways on a leg that looked like it now had two knees, both of which were bent the wrong way. His big body fell hard, and Grey had to roll sideways to keep from having it land on him.

But even as Big Curley crashed to the ground, his hands kept snatching and trying to grab. So did Riley, despite his smashed face. As if pain meant nothing at all.

Nothing.

Grey kicked himself backward, got to heels and palms and scuttled away from the two men.

If “men” was even the right word.

Over the course of a hard life Grey Torrance had been shot, stabbed, slashed, kicked by a horse, and thrown from a moving wagon. He’d broken bones and torn his flesh, and though he was a tough and stoic man, he knew for certain that he could not have endured this kind of damage and not reacted to it.

No one could.

No man could.

The two things crept and thrashed along the ground toward him.

Grey dug frantically into his pocket and came out with the two-shot derringer. He thumbed the hammer back and as Big Curley lunged at him Grey fired. The bullet caught the dead man dead center in the chest.

Big Curley twitched.

That was it.

As the bullet punched through his sternum and into his heart, the man merely twitched and grunted.

And kept coming.

Now the world seemed to be completely falling off its hinges. Grey had one round left and he jammed the barrel into the big man’s eye socket.

“Die, you son of a bitch!”

He fired.

The close contact muffled the sound of the shot, rendering it soft and wet. The gun was low-caliber and the bullet did not have enough force to crack its way out of the back of Big Curley’s skull. Instead it bounced around inside the vault of hard bone, plowing trenches and tunnels through the man’s brain.

All at once the hungry mouth fell into slackness, the body instantly flopped down. There was no intermediary process. One moment Big Curley was trying to grab and bite, and in the next he was limp meat.

Grey stared at the corpse, his relief momentary and polluted by confusion and doubt.

Then Riley Jones flung himself at Grey, ripping and tearing with his claws like a wildcat. From between the torn lips and past the broken teeth came a steady screech like an enraged mountain lion. That scream was not born in any human soul, Grey knew that at once. This was something else.

Something worse even than a dead man who didn’t want to stay dead.

This was a monster.

Monster.

The word was jammed sideways into Grey’s head as he fired the empty gun over and over again as if will and need could put fresh cartridges into the chambers. Riley swatted it out of his hand and began scrabbling at Grey’s throat, trying to tear through the skin with cracked and torn fingernails.

“Get off!” cried Grey as he began punching the man in the face.

Over and over again.

He could feel bones grind and break. He saw the man’s face lose what little shape it had. He could feel his own hand beginning to ache, to swell.

With a savage grunt he brought his knee up into Riley’s crotch. The blow must have done damage, but it did not stop the thing. Grey grabbed him by the wrists and kicked upward again. Harder. Faster. And as he did so he heaved and twisted.

Riley went up and over and down spine-first onto a slender piece of rock that stood up like the spine of a sailfish.

There was a horrible wet crack as the impact bent him nearly in half the wrong way.

Grey scrambled around to his knees and stared.

Riley kept thrashing.

With a shattered face, with a broken back, with the injuries from the blue explosion still marking every inch of his body, the man kept thrashing.

“Why won’t you die, you son of a bitch?” snarled Grey. He snatched up a stone as big as a bread loaf, raised it over his head and with both hands slammed it down on Riley’s head.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Until there was no more head to hit.

The kicking legs and whipping arms flopped down and the insane little man lay like a fallen scarecrow. Limbs and body bent in all the wrong ways.

Dead.

Dead at last.

Grey knelt there, chest heaving, sweat running in lines down his face, the bloody rock still clutched in his hands.

He heard a sound, a scuff, and he turned, fearing what was coming for him out of the shadows.

He raised the rock.

His mouth formed the words of a prayer he’d learned long ago and thought he’d forgotten.

A prayer to Mary. Something sinners say when they know they’re about to die.

“… be with us now and at the moment of our deaths…”

The figure lurched from shadows into a spill of starlight.

Staggering, torn, pale, and gasping.

A long dagger hung from one hand. Blood, black as oil in the bad light, dripped from the wicked blade.

“Are you alive…?” whispered Grey. “Or have the doorways to hell been kicked open for all times?”

The face that looked down at Grey was filled with shock and horror.

But there was light in those eyes.

Human light.

“Hell?” murmured the man. “I think we’re both in hell.”

The knife fell from his hand as Thomas Looks Away sank to his knees and vomited onto the desert sand.

Around them the night was vast and black and it loomed above them like the ceiling of some great temple of death.

Chapter Nine

For three long minutes the two of them did nothing. Said nothing.

Grey was barely able to think.

Breathing was difficult enough to manage.

Looks Away fell over onto his side and rolled away from the mess on the ground. He lay gasping like a fish and staring up, his hands clamped to the side of his head.

It took a long time, but Grey finally climbed to his feet. It required about as much strength and engineering as hoisting a freight train out of a gully. He tottered over to his Colt and picked it up. The barrel was clogged with sand, so he thrust it into the holster and walked painfully past Looks Away to the rock where the other guns had been laid out. He paused, looking down at the two corpses that were sprawled at the edges of the campfire light. Two more of the posse. One was missing his arm at the shoulder, but the wound was bloodless. A souvenir of the explosion? Grey thought so. The man had a knife buried to the hilt in his right eye socket. The other man’s head was crushed by a stone, almost exactly like Riley. The sight was sickening, and Grey turned away.

He picked up the Manhattan pistol, opened it to inspect the barrel and loads, closed it, walked over to where Looks Away was struggling to sit up.

The Sioux looked up and gave Grey a weary, troubled smile. He half laughed and shook his head. “By the queen’s lacy garters…”

Grey did not smile.

Instead he kicked Looks Away in the face.

Very hard.

The man flopped backward and Grey swarmed atop him, stepping on Looks Away’s right bicep and pinning him down with a knee to the chest.

“What the bloody hell are you—?” began Looks Away, but Grey placed the barrel of the big Manhattan right between the Indian’s dark eyebrows. Right at the bottom edge of the red lace bandana.

“No more bullshit,” he said in a deadly whisper. “I have been half blown up and attacked by men who all sense and logic tell me are already dead. I don’t know what’s going on but I believe you do. And by God and all His angels, Mr. Looks Away, you are going to tell me right damn now.”

Chapter Ten

Looks Away told him.

They sat on opposite sides of the campfire. All of the guns were arranged around Grey. He’d patted the Sioux down and taken everything he had except his clothes.

“This is about ghost rock,” said Looks Away, rubbing at the heel-shaped bruise on his face. “I was about to explain it all to you when we were attacked. You didn’t have to kick me.”

“If you are waiting for me to apologize, then I hope you have a comfortable seat,” said Grey. “Besides, it made me feel good. Tell me how this is about ghost rock.”

Looks Away grunted. “It’s complicated.”

“Uncomplicate it for me.”

“Have you ever heard of the word ‘metallurgy’?”

“Sure. Something to do with metals and such. Making alloys, all that.”

“All that, correct. The term was originally used by alchemists because some of the properties of various metals and ores were believed to be magical.”

“I don’t believe in magic,” said Grey, but his comment sounded false even to his own ears. He saw the expression his tone put on Looks Away’s face, so he amended. “I believe in God and suchlike. And… ghosts. I believe in ghosts. Not sure about a lot of the rest of it. Witches and like that. Met a couple of fortunetellers who were fakes. Maybe one who had something.” He shrugged. “I met a whole lot of people who think ghost rock is spooky. The sounds it makes when it burns. Like the screams of the damned.”

The Sioux nodded. “Do you think that’s what it is?”

“Don’t know. Only heard it burned twice. Sounds weird, sure, but if I’d never heard a kettle boil or a steam engine scream I’d have thought that was the sound of the Devil, too.”

“There is perhaps a stronger connection between ghost rock and the spirit world than you might think,” said Looks Away slowly. “You see, inventors, industrialists, and natural philosophers the world over have been experimenting with the ore to harness its power. There’s really nothing like it anywhere.”

“So I’ve heard. So what?”

“So, just as scientists are exploring its potential, so are alchemists.”

“How’s that work? I thought all that alchemy stuff was hokum that it died out a hundred or so years ago.”

Looks Away laughed. “Died out? Not even close. It was largely discredited, to be sure, and fairly so because most alchemists were charlatans. Like most fortune-tellers and other snake oil salesmen.”

“Con men,” suggested Grey.

“Con men,” agreed Looks Away. “However, just as you’ve met one fortune-teller who you thought might have something, there are a precious few among the world’s remaining alchemists who also ‘have’ something. I refer, of course, to those who have made a serious study of what some call ‘the larger world.’”

“The spirit world, you mean?”

“Yes and no. For most people the spirit world is a label they slap on everything from ghosts to demons to, say, vampires and werewolves. Most of it is fairy stories for gullible children. Gullible adults, too, I suppose.”

“But—?”

“The larger world, as viewed by those select wiser alchemists, refers to a universe where science and magic may well be two sides of the same coin. After all, our science of this modern age would look like magic to someone a century ago.” He touched his chest. “Imagine what the first peoples here in America thought of the Europeans with their great wooden ships and muskets. Think about it. Imagine that a red man who is a skilled hunter and tracker, one of the best of his tribe, who is deadly with a bow and arrow, encounters a man in a metal chestplate and helmet who can point a stick and with thunder and lightning, strike down a great elk a hundred yards away. Tell me that red man did not believe he was witnessing true magic.”

Grey thought about it, nodded.

“To the settlers who crossed this continent in covered wagons barely half a century ago,” continued Looks Away, “what would the steam locomotive have been like? Twenty years ago the thought of a horseless carriage was an impossible pipe dream, and now, with the power of ghost rock, you can see them on the streets of New York and Philadelphia and Boston.”

“I see where you’re going with that.”

“Now, step back and look at ghost rock through the same telescope. It screams when it’s burned. Sure, we all see that and it’s rather shocking. The weak-minded always want to ascribe something supernatural to the things they don’t understand. History tells us that. But what if all we’re witnessing is merely an aspect of science that has not yet been measured and quantified.”

Grey thought about it, but he slowly shook his head. “I’ll buy that as an explanation for why ghost rock sounds like the screaming damned. Chemicals hiss and pop and make all sorts of sounds. Everyone knows that. But that?” He stabbed a finger toward the corpses that were now laid in a row and weighted down with rocks. “Tell me how your science — or alchemy, for that matter — explains dead men getting up and getting rowdy? I shot one of those fellows in the heart and he didn’t blink. You hear me? He did not even blink. He just kept grabbing at me, trying to bite me. If that’s science and not magic, then everyone’s been calling it by the wrong damn name all these years. Maybe it’s all magic. That or this is a madhouse and we’re all inmates.”

Looks Away nodded. “And now you get to my problem.”

“Pardon?”

“Until tonight I was fully invested in the camp of people who believed that the qualities of ghost rock were nothing more than science that was not yet understood.” He paused and regarded the corpses, then shuddered. “Now I don’t know what I believe.”

“Welcome to the rodeo,” said Grey. “We’re both riding the same bucking bronco here. Want to tell me what was the blue flash, and could it have caused this?”

“That’s the point where all of my beliefs trip and fall on their face, old chap,” said Looks Away. “You see there was a man I met while at university in England. An American scientist and inventor. Rather a brilliant fellow by the name of Percival Saint.”

Grey frowned. “Why’s that name so familiar?”

“He was an advisor to President Grant,” said Looks Away.

“Oh, hell yes. He was a slave as a kid, but he escaped. Took a bunch of other slaves with him and went north.”

“That’s the man.”

“The papers said he went to college and got himself a degree. Went back down South after the Confederate States of America abolished slavery and helped build some factories and design some new farm equipment. I heard that he’s been making weapons, that he’s a gun maker.”

Looks Away sniffed. “Calling Percival Saint a ‘gun maker,’” he said with asperity, “is like calling Michelangelo a ‘house painter.’ Doctor Saint has more doctorates and degrees than you’ve had hot dinners. He is a great, great man.”

“Well pardon the living hell out of me.”

“I met Doctor Saint when our Wild West show visited Sweden. We gave a special performance in October for the birthday of his friend and colleague Alfred Nobel.”

“Dynamite Nobel?”

“The same. Our show was held at the Bofers Ironworks factory in Kariskoga where they make the steel for certain types of cannons. The factory used several of Nobel’s metallurgic techniques there, and there is a rumor that he plans to buy the company. We gave a show for the staff and several hundred guests. I had arranged with Doctor Saint and Mr. Nobel to use some of their experimental chemical combinations to create a fireworks display that served as our finale. It was all quite exciting.”

“And you’re drifting away from getting to the damn point,” growled Grey.

“Not really. It was during my discussions with Doctor Saint and Nobel that the subject of ghost rock came up. This was a few years ago, mind you, during that big surge to find the stuff. Naturally both men had a great interest in the rock and its potential. They both saw it as a great weapon of war. They had each done some, shall we say, casual experiments with it.”

“Casual?”

“Did you hear about the big fire in Chicago some years back?”

“Who hasn’t? The Great Fire they call it. Back in ’71.”

“The very one.”

“What about it?” asked Grey. “I thought a cow started it. Kicked over a lantern…”

“Balderdash. There was no cow in the story at all. At least not one that mattered.”

“I don’t—.”

“All of the reports by those who witnessed the start of the fire,” continued Looks Away, “described a great flash of light that was like nothing they’d ever seen.” He smiled. “Care to guess what color that flash was?”

Chapter Eleven

Grey narrowed his eyes. “Now we’re getting somewhere. This blue flash… it’s some kind of ghost rock weapon? Is that what I’m pulling from your mosey-round-the-mountain way of getting to a goddamn point?”

“In a word,” said Looks Away, “yes.”

“Shit. A weapon that raises the dead?”

“Ah, no… that would be what Doctor Saint and Mr. Nobel refer to as an unfortunate and unforeseen side effect.”

“Unfortunate hardly seems to come close to it.”

“No,” said the Sioux, cutting another uneasy look at the corpses, “it does not.”

Grey got the fixings for coffee from his saddlebag. “Might as well have something to keep us up while we talk this through,” he said. “I sure as hell don’t plan to get any shut-eye while the sun’s down.”

The Sioux made a face. “I seriously doubt I will ever sleep soundly again.”

“Blue light,” prompted Grey.

“Depending on how pure a sample of ghost rock is, it can burn with different colors,” explained Looks Away. “If there are trace amounts of calcium chloride the fire will burn orange, if lithium, it will burn red, and so on. What Saint and Nobel did was combine ghost rock with chalcanthite, which is a copper mineral. They found that by compressing tiny bits of ghost rock in a ball of cupric chloride, they get a burn of very short duration but with an exceptionally high energetic output. This discharge of energy can be directed through a metal tube such as a rifle barrel lined with copper to make a projectile. It can also be super-condensed within a sphere made of alternating layers of copper and steel to create a high-impact aerial grenade. Are… are you following any of this?”

“I’m limping along your backtrail, but, sure, I get the sense of it. Put a bead of ghost rock in a copper ball and you get a big bang.”

“Because chalcanthite is pentahydrate — meaning it contains elements of water — the resulting discharge creates a vapor of a distinct azure hue.”

“It’s blue. Got it. Stop showing off,” said Grey, “and get to the part where it raises the dead.”

“Ah,” said Looks Away, “that’s the part that neither Doctor Saint nor Mr. Nobel quite understand.”

“Are you messing with me, son?”

“Not at all, my good fellow. I am in earnest. And that is where this whole thing began. As with many of the great discoveries in the field of explosive compounds, this revelation began with a bang. A rather large bang, to be precise. It blew out an entire wing of the factory in Sweden and killed sixteen men.”

“Jesus.”

“The rescue crews were picking through the rubble — and both Saint and Nobel were right there with them,” said Looks Away, “as was I… when one of the dead men sat up.”

“Shit.”

“Everyone was delighted at first because they had counted the man as dead and here he was, clearly still alive.”

“Except he wasn’t.”

“Just so. As Mr. Nobel’s assistant rushed to help him, the injured man grabbed him and… well…”

“Well what?”

“He bit the man’s throat out. And, um, swallowed it.”

Grey was bent over with his arm extended to pour coffee into Looks Away’s cup and instead poured it on the Sioux’s foot. The Indian screamed and jumped back, and Grey jerked the pot away.

He did not apologize. Instead he stood there, slack-jawed and horrified.

“You said there were sixteen men killed?”

“Yes,” said Looks Away, wincing and slapping at his soaked moccasin.

“Did all sixteen—?”

“Yes.”

“Mother of God.”

“I seriously doubt either God or His mother was there that day,” said Looks Away dryly. He pulled off his moccasin and set it on a rock near the fire to dry.

“What happened?”

“There was a bloody great fight, what do you think happened? Sixteen corpses got up and tried to eat everyone in sight. They killed eleven rescue workers and three of Nobel’s laboratory staff before they were brought down by a Gatling gun. It took many, many rounds to do the job, too.”

Grey just shook his head. “Those fellows who were killed — the second bunch I mean — did they—?”

“What? Oh, no. They stayed dead. Apparently it’s only someone who is killed by this new compound that reanimates.”

“Reanimate,” said Grey, tasting the unfamiliar word.

They sat there and looked at the line of corpses.

“What was up on those rocks?” asked Grey. “What blew up?”

“A cache of weapons made to fire the Lazarus rounds.”

“The what?”

“The chalcanthite bullets. After the, um, incident at the factory, Mr. Nobel gave the compound a name. Lazarus. Named for the—.”

“—fellow in the Bible Jesus raised up from the dead. I went to Sunday school. Why the hell would Doctor Saint invent a gun that raises the dead?”

“Oh, dear me, no… the gun doesn’t do that. It’s powered by the gas and, well, somehow that name got attached to the weapon. It’s one of several radical designs the good doctor devised. There are others, too. Better weapons. The Celestial Choirbox, the Kingdom rifle—.”

“Now you’re just making shit up.”

“I wish I was. Although I could hardly be described as a pacifist, I prefer to avoid violence whenever possible. I came out here to find these weapons because I have some friends who could use some help. But… the cache was clearly booby-trapped and when I opened the vault built into the rocks, it exploded, as you saw. I was behind the lead-lined hatch when the bomb went off and was thrown into a Joshua tree, so I survived. The others did not. And, well, there you have it, old chap. That’s my story.”

“No,” said Grey, “that’s only part of a story. How’d you get from Sweden to Nevada? Who booby-trapped the cache? Hell, who put it there in first place? And why was that posse after you?”

“Ah, yes, that’s a much longer tale,” said Looks Away, “and to tell it I really would like two things.”

“What?”

“Some of that coffee. In a cup this time.”

Grey poured it. “And—?”

“I would feel far more comfortable sitting in the dark telling tales if I had my gun back, there’s a good fellow.”

Grey considered the request as he poured his own cup. Then shrugged. “Sure.”

Looks Away fetched his Smith & Wesson pistol and knife. He removed a cleaning kit from his saddlebag and commenced cleaning and oiling the .44 American. Grey thought that was a smart idea and did the same with his Colt.

The rest of Looks Away’s story was long and he rambled through it much the same as he had with the first part. After the disaster at the factory in Sweden, Doctor Saint and Mr. Nobel made a private agreement to do some quiet but intense research into the qualities of this new ghost rock compound. Doctor Saint returned to the United States and asked Looks Away to accompany him as his laboratory assistant, guide, and bodyguard. They traveled west as far as the rails would take them and then Saint hired a wagon and horses for the rest of the trip to the broken lands of what had once been California. There, at the edge of the new badlands known as the Maze, they set up shop in a tiny town called Paradise Falls. It was a wretched place of poverty, crime, drunkenness, and near starvation. Water was desperately short and Saint made himself a local hero by paying to have several wagons laden with water barrels brought in. And he used his knowledge of geology to locate several promising underground water sources. Those underground wells, unfortunately, ran through lands owned by a rich and reclusive man named Aleksander Deray, about which nearly nothing was known.

Saint worked for many months to mine ghost rock and develop the new Lazarus weapons. The work was slow, painstaking, and more often than not met with frustration and failure. However he did manage to make a few weapons and seven months ago held a public demonstration of his Lazarus rifles. Dignitaries and military officers came all the way from the Confederate States of America to witness the demonstration. Saint had very little of the proper compound to spare, but the brief demonstration he put on was quite impressive. He was asked to accompany the Southern bigwigs down south to meet with the War Department and President Eric Michele himself. The invitation was very flowery, and there were many gifts and medals bestowed upon Saint. There was no actual apology from any of the CSA or even an acknowledgement of the years Saint had lived as a slave when he was a child. No mention of the generations of Saint families who had lived, toiled, suffered, and died on the plantations. The current administration of the CSA was all about the future, and making friends with learned men like Doctor Saint was part of their attempt to move a solid step out of the dark ages of slavery and into the enlightened era of the coming twentieth century. After all, as one of the dignitaries kept saying, our great-grandkids will be alive to see the New Millennia, and by then no one will ever remember anything as old-fashioned as racism and oppression.

“And Saint believed all that?”

Looks Away shrugged at Grey’s question. “Hard to say with him. I rather think he’s playing along until he finds out what they really want. He is not a deeply trusting soul, bless his heart. And although he is no one’s idea of an ‘agreeable’ or even affable soul, he is forward thinking. If letting go of the past moves science forward, then he will move with the tide.”

“So he went?” asked Grey.

“Indeed he did, and according to his last few telegrams, his demonstrations were quite a success. That’s when things started to go wrong, however. Instead of coming directly back here, Dr. Saint made several stops to gather special materials for his work. His last stop was supposed to be Salt Lake City, to collect canisters of smoke from the ghost rock factories. However that’s where I lost track of him. I don’t even know for sure that he reached Salt Lake. There’s been no word.”

“You think he was ambushed?”

“If he had any trace of ordinary manners or habits I could venture a guess, but he’s an odd duck. He’s gone off on his own several times before, often with no advance warning and little explanation once he returns.”

“Which means you don’t know whether to sit and wait or plant flowers on an empty grave.”

“Just so. I wish I’d accompanied him, if only to keep track of him. He could drive an angel to hard liquor. On the other hand, I haven’t been bored. He left me behind to continue the work in Paradise Falls and to try and locate new sources of ghost rock ore that was rich in chalcanthite.

“Some weeks ago,” Looks Away explained, “while he was out digging in the hills, the laboratory was raided. Most of the equipment was undisturbed, hidden behind very strong locks. But the thieves made off with many of Saint’s blueprints and nearly all of his canisters of compressed ghost rock gas. They also took a journal in which were recorded the locations of several of Dr. Saint’s remote testing sites. My employer had small caches of supplies scattered throughout this end of the country and did much of his research in spots where he mined for ghost rock, or where he felt he could field-test his devices without attracting attention. Some of them have pretty dramatic effects. I began systematically going from one to the other and found two sites undisturbed, two empty, and two others booby-trapped.”

“Someone’s trying to kill you?” asked Grey.

“Me or Saint. Hard to say. It’s even possible all of this was an elaborate plan to get me out of Paradise Falls.”

“Why?”

“That’s a different discussion. What concerns me is their methods. When they broke into Dr. Saint’s laboratory, they killed the two men we’d engaged as guards. Slit their throats.”

“Those men were friends of mine,” continued Looks Away gravely. “All I could do was try to catch whomever was responsible, and they led me on a merry chase I can assure you. It would make a ripping yarn filled with traps, double-crosses, and all manner of devious villainy.”

“So the explosion wasn’t a trap set by Saint?” said Grey, jerking a thumb toward the shattered rocks.

“I… don’t know for sure. My guess is that it was another trap set for me by my enemy, but it could just as easily have been something set by Doctor Saint. He’s generally a humanitarian — after a fashion — but he does not like having his research tampered with. So, yes, it could have been his booby-trap.”

“Nice. He could have blown you all the way back to London.”

“Well, he wouldn’t have expected me to come out here, would he? He does know about the theft of his journal. And it’s not like this cache was something anyone could stumble upon.”

Grey’s reply was a sour grunt. He found that he didn’t much like this Doctor Saint. And he was pretty sure calling the scientist a “humanitarian” was a bit of a stretch.

“Why was the posse after you? You get some other girl pregnant?”

“Hilarious, but no. Doctor Saint has rivals and some of them are quite vicious. Not at all above hiring a group of gunmen to end the life of one renegade Sioux. Especially one who has been hunting the men who committed the murders at the laboratory. I daresay I was making a nuisance of myself, buzzing around the edges of this and someone decided to swat me.” He slapped his palm flat on his thigh.

Grey listened with great interest, but he watched the Sioux’s face for any telltale signs of deceit or evasiveness. Nothing showed, however. That didn’t mean that the man was telling the truth, the whole truth, part of the truth, or a pack of lies. Grey had played poker and faro at too many tables not to know that some fellows could keep darn near everything off their face. Even so, he had a sense that what he was hearing was at least partly true.

Partly.

He wondered what this strange English Indian was leaving out. The Sioux returned to his narrative.

“I believe I’ve been getting close to proving who is responsible,” said Looks Away as he sipped the dregs of his second cup. “This was no ordinary theft, I’m sure of it. This was well organized and well financed. Someone important wanted that science and now they have it. I was following a lead and came here to Nevada. Someone swore they saw a blue explosion out here in the desert. Naturally I thought that my enemy’s people had raided this cache.”

“What exactly was out here?”

Looks Away spread his hands. “This was something Doctor Saint made before I came to work with him. It’s not much, just a small bunker built into a natural declivity in the sandstone. He enlarged it and built a small testing laboratory. A one-man station. It was all he needed to test the Lazarus weapons without prying eyes. Doctor Saint hid it very well, and even though I had no key, I know his methods. He always creates a hidden lever that is invisible to the naked eye. The man is as devious as he is brilliant…”

“You found it, though?”

“I used some of my grandfather’s tricks for finding the hinges. It was a clever trap set to trap a clever man.”

Grey remembered Looks Away spitting on the ground and nodded. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Saint didn’t set this trap himself. Is your bad guy smart enough to set this kind of trap? He’d have to know a lot about how this ghost rock stuff works.”

“Oh yes,” said Looks Away. “And the more I think about it the more I think it was a trap set specifically for me. Particularly if my enemy was, in fact, able to effectively interrogate the guards before he killed them. He had to know that I would keep hunting, so he lured me here with false clues.”

“Lured you specifically?”

“Not to blow my own horn, but yes, I daresay he did. It was a trap that brought me to an isolated spot and one that required geological knowledge and Sioux tracking skills to find. The posse was a nice diversion. Oh yes,” said Looks Away, “that trap was very much designed to kill me. My enemy is very, very clever.”

“Do you have a name for this clever son of a bitch?” asked Grey.

“Not one I can prove,” said Looks Away cautiously. “Merely one I’ve come to view as the only person with both means and sufficient guile.”

“Who?”

He finished his coffee, sloshed the last drops into the fire, and listened to them hiss.

“Aleksander Deray,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Grey. “Pretty much figured. What are you going to do about it? From what you told me, this Deray character sounds like a bad enemy to have. Lots of money, lots of guns working for him, and like most folks he probably doesn’t cotton too well to nosy redskins.”

Looks Away shrugged. “What can I do? I can give up, head to the Sioux nation and try to make peace with my family.”

“Could you?”

“Dear me, no. I’d probably find myself buried up to my chin in an anthill. If I was lucky.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have done that much damage to your cousin’s privates.”

“Water, as they say, under the bridge.”

“Or—?”

“Or, I could go back to California, get the evidence I need, build a case and turn it over to the proper authorities.”

Grey looked at him. “Proper authorities? In the Maze? Who in the great green hell are the proper authorities in that godforsaken place?”

“Have you ever been there?”

“No, but I heard tales. Ever since the Great Quake, there isn’t all that much of California left, and what is left is no place for proper people to live. Lots of bad people doing bad things and what little law’s out there is owned by someone else. No, son, I don’t think you’re going to get any help from the authorities.”

“Correct. Which is why it’ll just be the three of us,” said Looks Away.

“You and who else?”

Looks Away gave him a smile that was every bit as cold, lifeless, and murderous as he’d seen on the dead faces of Riley and Big Curley. The Sioux held up his .44 American. “Messieurs Smith and Wesson and your humble servant.”

The fire between them popped and hissed.

Grey Torrance said, “You know… I was thinking about heading west to see if there’s any kind of trouble I can get into.”

“Are you indeed?” asked the Sioux, cocking an eyebrow.

“Yes I damn well am.”

They grinned at each other while above them the wheel of night ground on toward the coming dawn.

Chapter Twelve

Dawn found them miles away from the corpses and the blasted heap of rocks.

Thomas Looks Away sat astride a chestnut mare that had once belonged to Big Curley. Since he had no way of knowing what the horse’s name had been, Looks Away renamed her Queen Victoria, but by mid-morning that name became unwieldy so he shortened it to Queenie.

Grey gave Picky a thorough going-over to reassure himself that she hadn’t been injured by the madness of last night, and aside from a few scrapes and scratches she was fine. Three of the posse’s horses had survived the blast, and they trailed behind, laden with all of the supplies, weapons, and water the men could find.

The chill of the night burned off with disheartening rapidity and the sun began to bake the landscape in earnest. The Joshua and juniper trees were spaced too far apart to offer any hope of shade. The horses moved forward, heads down, in a plodding walk that seldom veered from an arrow-straight line except to go around a knot of creosote bushes or avoid a barrel cactus. A clutch of vultures were hunkered down around a dead bighorn sheep, and once a sidewinder whipsawed through the dry grass.

Grey had lived in a variety of climates all over the country, from the deep snows and biting cold of a Missouri winter to a swampy Florida summer, where the only thing that could move through the humidity were mosquitoes. But this desert was how he imagined the landscape of Hell must be. Nothing out here was friendly, nothing offered either comfort or ease, and everything seemed to want to kill everything else. They passed a tarantula locked in mortal combat with a scorpion, and perched above them on a rock was a horned lizard waiting to eat the winner.

The pace was monotonous, and after a while Grey drifted into a doze. But his dreams were haunted and strange.

In those dreams he walked naked across this desert, and no matter how many days or weeks passed, the horizon never got any closer. When he paused to weep or pick at the sun blisters on his skin, he’d hear a sound and turn to see a whole company of ghosts following behind. They were all broken and dismembered. Fresh wounds gaped on their skin and they left behind them a trail of bloody footprints that vanished into the far, far distance.

These were the same ghosts that had followed him for years, but now their company had grown. Riley Jones and Big Curley led the grotesque parade. Their eyes were as black as polished coal; their reaching hands as pale and mottled as mushrooms.

“Grey…,” they murmured. All of them, a chorus of spectral voices that sounded almost like empty wind drifting across the hot sands. “Grey… come with us. Come join us.”

“No!” screamed his dreaming self. “You’re dead. You can’t be here.”

“Come with us,” they cried. “Stop running. You can stop running now. It’s peaceful here. It’s quiet and cool. You don’t need to be afraid.”

The words were meant to soothe, to lull, but they were spoken by shattered mouths filled with jagged stumps of teeth. Pale tongues writhed like fat worms in those mouths, and it all conspired to tell the lie behind the soft words.

“No,” said Grey again, but each time he said it the power in his voice faded, faded…

They kept calling him.

“You’re not real!” he whispered. “You’re dead. For God’s sake stop following me. I’m sorry. God knows, I’m sorry. Leave me alone.”

“Never.”

“For the love of God, leave me in peace!”

Their voices faded as his panic pushed him up through the waters of sleep. As he broke the surface and came awake with a start, he could hear the last echoes of their ghostly chorus.

“There is no peace,” they said. “Not for you. Never for you…”

Chapter Thirteen

Looks Away snapped awake and cut a suspicious glance at Grey.

“Did you say something?”

Their horses were still moving forward with the implacable plodding gait that kept them all from dying, out in the relentless sun. Both men had slept.

Grey cleared his throat. “No. I was just studying the terrain.”

“Studying the terrain,” echoed Looks Away. “With your eyes closed?”

“How would you know? You’ve been snoring for the last three miles.”

“Sioux never fall asleep in the saddle,” said Looks Away, offended. “I was contemplating our problem and formulating various plans.”

“Sure,” said Grey. “While snoring.”

“Haven’t you ever heard of Zen meditation? That was a mantra.”

“I don’t know what that is, but it sounded like snoring.”

“You,” said Looks Away, “are welcome to kiss my ass.”

“And you are welcome to—.”

Grey stopped and suddenly stood up in the stirrups.

“What—?” began Looks Away, but then he turned as well.

They both squinted into the distance. There, so far away that it was nearly invisible in the heat shimmer, was something that glittered. Sparks of sunlight flew out from it like they would from fragments of a broken mirror, except these were above the ground.

“What is that?” murmured Looks Away.

“I don’t know. Something metal, maybe? Or glass…?”

Looks Away cupped his hands around his eyes and stared hard. “By Jove,” he exclaimed, “it’s a town.”

“A town? There’s no town way out here.”

“There is now, my dear chap. I can see buildings and one structure that looks for all the world like a theater. Or, perhaps a music hall.”

“A music hall? Out here in the middle of no-damn-where?”

“So it seems.”

Grey shielded his eyes and stared, too, but all he could see were indistinct lumps. And whatever it was that sparkled.

“You can actually see a town?” he asked.

“I can.”

“You have damn good eyes, then.”

“Well, my people didn’t name me ‘Looks Away’ because I was nearsighted.”

Grey thought about that, grunted, shrugged, and sat down in the saddle. “I know we’re on a kind of mission here,” he began slowly, “but—.”

“Oh, absolutely,” said Looks Away and kicked his horse in the direction of the town.

Grey smiled at his retreating back. “Well, okay then.”

He nudged Mrs. Pickles and followed.

Chapter Fourteen

The wooden sign across the town’s main — and only — arch had two words painted in bloodred letters.

They paused and looked up at the sign. All around those words someone had nailed hundreds of small hand mirrors to the wood, but the glass in every single mirror was cracked.

“Well,” said Looks Away, “I’m not a deeply superstitious chap, but that can’t be good.”

“Someone’s idea of a joke,” said Grey, but his tone didn’t sound convincing even to his own ears.

Beyond the sign, a single street of hard-packed dirt ran between two rows of buildings. There was a livery, a barbershop that also advertised tooth-pulling, a funeral home, a gun shop, a lawyer’s office, six separate taverns, and a brothel that rose like a shimmering tower above the others. The brothel was the only building that was more than a single story, and the top floors had long balconies that wrapped around both sides. There were girls in bright colors leaning on the rails. Down on the street level, hard-faced men and women walked or sat or stood in small groups. Maybe a hundred people. And every one of them was looking at the two strangers on horses.

“Friendly looking,” said Looks Away.

“Yeah,” said Grey, “like a nest of scorpions.”

“Nowhere near as charming as that.”

Grey couldn’t argue. No one was smiling. No one spoke or gestured. They all stood and looked their way.

“Well,” said Grey dubiously, “we’re here… might as well go on in.”

“Said the foolish pilgrim at the outer ring of hell.”

“Is that a quote?”

“No, merely an observation.”

They nudged their horses and entered the town of Fortune. The people on the streets, or up on porches, or standing in windows watched them with hostile and suspicious eyes. Except for the brothel, every store or business in town looked like it teetered on the edge of financial ruin. Windows were cracked, paint peeled from weathered boards, and in the streets there were unshoveled piles of horse dung that were thick with blowflies.

“Charming,” murmured Looks Away.

“Seen worse,” observed Grey.

“Where?”

Grey couldn’t come up with an easy reply and gave it up as a lie.

The people looked no more vital or healthy than the town. They were dirty, their clothes madly patched and mismatched. Warts and dark moles were common among them, and many had scabs or open sores. Several had limbs missing. Hands, arms, legs. Though Grey thought the missing limbs looked more like defective births than injuries. The stumps were smooth. The people were dressed in clothes of black and gray, of desert brown and dried salt. Dead colors for a lifeless town.

Only the whores on the balcony of the brothel looked whole and healthy. They were dressed in frilled silks and satins. Grey and Looks Away stared up at them, seeing every color in the rainbow, from royal purples to soft blues of Pacific evenings to the shocking yellow of new-grown daffodils. Each of the brothel’s ladies smiled down at them. Red, red lips parted to reveal white, white teeth.

“Grey,” said Looks Away quietly, “do you see any children?”

Grey shook his head. “Not a one. Don’t see a schoolhouse, either.”

“I know I haven’t been to as many American towns as you have, but is that normal?”

“Son,” said Grey, “I think we left ‘normal’ behind somewhere out there in the desert.”

“Ah.”

“Keep your eyes open.”

“Yes,” drawled the Sioux. “Capital idea.”

They stopped outside of the brothel. There was a name painted on a silk banner draped elegantly above the big batwing double doors.

Grey swung out of the saddle and tied Picky’s lead to a post over a water trough. The horse eyed the water cautiously for a moment, sniffed it, nickered in as close to a sound of disapproval as a horse could make, and reluctantly took a drink. The other horses joined her.

Looks Away lingered in the saddle for a moment longer, looking up at the smiling women. Grey followed his gaze. The women were all young, some barely out of their teens. They were all voluptuous, with soft half-moons of enticing flesh rising above the lace trim of their bodices. Their hair was pinned with flowers and feathers. Their skin was totally unmarked by disease or any imperfection.

A voice in Grey’s head whispered a warning.

Get out of here now.

But he ignored it. That voice had spoken too often in his life, and too often he’d listened. Sure, he’d survived… but that survival had always come at a cost.

Doing so took some effort, though, and if he wasn’t sunbaked, thirsty, and hungry for real food, he might have heeded the warning.

“You coming?” he asked the Sioux.

“With great reluctance and trepidation,” said Looks Away as he swung his leg over the horse’s rump and dropped to the ground.

Side by side they mounted the steps. It was cool on the porch. One of the women, a fiery redhead with emerald green eyes, rose from a rocking chair and stood between them and the door. She was a little older than the other girls. Maybe twenty-eight, Grey reckoned. Very pretty and she smelled of roses.

“By the queen’s garters,” murmured Looks Away.

“You fellows are new in town,” said the woman, making it a statement rather than a question.

“Brand new,” said Grey. “Passing through.”

“From where to where?”

Grey hooked a finger over his shoulder. “From back there to somewhere else.”

His answer seemed to kindle a light in the redhead’s eyes. She nodded, as if appreciating his caution. Then she swiveled her gaze toward Thomas Looks Away.

“Sioux,” she said, again not making it a question.

“Ugh,” he said. “Me heap big red savage.”

The redhead rolled her eyes. “That’s adorable. But I heard you talking a second ago. You sound like someone who’s traveled a bit.”

Looks Away paused, shrugged, nodded. “A bit.”

“Then you’ll feel right at home. All of us girls here have been around the block a time or two.”

It was so saucy a comment that the two men laughed. The woman laughed, but her laugh was a beat slower and, Grey thought, entirely false. Or, maybe it was that she was laughing at a different joke than the one he thought she’d made. The laugh had that kind of flavor to it.

She said, “My name is Mircalla and this place belongs to me and my sisters.” Her voice was soft and she had a faint German accent. “Would you like to come in?”

“If there’s cold beer, a hot bath, and a rare steak,” said Grey, “then we surely would.”

“A bath, a beer, and a bite?” laughed Mircalla. “And maybe a bed?”

“I haven’t slept in a bed in so long I forget what a pillow’s for.”

“Slept? Lordy-lord, gentlemen, surely you didn’t come here to sleep.”

Everyone laughed again. Same flavor as before. Once again Grey was sure there was some bottom layer to her joke that he wasn’t quite grasping.

“I think we can accommodate whatever pleases you,” said Mircalla. “If it’s your wish to enter, then come on in — we can provide everything a man could ever hope to want.”

Before he could comment on it, Mircalla turned, shimmied her way between them, hooked an arm in each of theirs, and began guiding them toward the batwing door.

As they stepped across the threshold Grey flinched. It was a strange feeling, but he did not know what he was reacting to. The brothel was well-lighted and cool, there were aromas of perfume and cooking meat, of beer and firewood. The women inside were all beautiful and they all smiled at the two men.

So, why, he wondered, did he suddenly feel that he wanted to run?

To go back outside.

Into the sunlight.

Mircalla’s arm was locked around his and he felt that he was not so much walking into the place as being pulled.

Behind him the batwing doors slapped shut with a loud, hollow crack.

Chapter Fifteen

Grey soon forgot his unease. Mircalla ushered them into an alcove furnished with gorgeous chairs decorated with red pillows. Chinese tapestries hung from the walls, their delicate floral patterns edged with gold fringe. Candles burned in silver sconces and there was a Turkish brass table laden with bowls of fresh fruits and tall glasses of amber beer.

Mircalla detached herself from the two men and pushed them down into chairs. She snapped her fingers and two women entered the alcove, both of them carrying ornately patterned plates heavy with steaks and vegetables from which steam rose like pale snakes.

Grey wanted to ask how the food could have been prepared so quickly, but before he could a crystal beer glass was pressed into his hand by a brunette with burning blue eyes.

“This will wash away that desert dust,” she said. “Drink… go on, drink deep.”

He did.

The beer was ice cold and it felt like liquid paradise as it slid down his parched throat. The woman touched the bottom of the glass and guided it so that he leaned back and drained it. She took it and refilled it. Suddenly he had a knife and fork in his hands — both heavy and ornate — and he was cutting into the tenderest piece of three-inch thick steak he’d ever seen. Blood oozed hot and red from the meat, and when he took his first bite he thought he would cry. It was perfect. Beyond perfect. So hot, so well cooked, so bloody and delicious.

“Oh, God…,” he moaned.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Looks Away with a blonde on his lap. She was cutting his steak for him and feeding him pieces she held between thumb and forefinger. Her nails were long and painted a dark and gleaming red.

He cut another piece of his own steak.

And drank more of the delicious beer.

He was so dehydrated that the alcohol went straight to his head. The alcove seemed to swirl around him as he ate and drank, ate and drank. Drunkenness came over him in waves, distorting everything. With each new glass of beer the colors around him changed. Became brighter, more garish. There was music somewhere and at first it was soft and subtle, but soon it became grating and harsh.

Off to his right, somewhere else, somewhere down a hole or on the other side of the world, he heard a voice. Looks Away. Laughing. Speaking nonsense words.

Then crying out.

In anger first.

Then in surprise.

And in…

Pain?

He felt pain, too, but Grey didn’t care. Probably a mosquito or a fly biting him on the neck.

Nothing to worry about.

Nothing to care about.

He bent forward to reach for his glass of beer, but something jerked him backward.

Hands?

That was silly. There was no one here but a couple of girls and they weren’t strong enough.

He laughed at the thought of whorehouse girls manhandling someone as big as he was.

The pain in his neck became sharper.

Harder.

Worse.

Wrong.

He could feel heat on his throat. Wet and moving.

Running in lines from where those flies were biting. If they were flies.

He tried to speak, to protest, to ask what was happening. The room spun around him. All of the colors swirled and blended together.

“I don’t understand…,” he heard himself say.

And then he felt himself falling.

Not forward.

Down.

Down down down.

The colors melted into red and then into black.

And then everything was gone.

Chapter Sixteen

Grey Torrance sat in a chair in the middle of the desert.

The sun was high in the sky but the world was draped in shadows. The wind was cold and blew out of the east in long gusts, like the exhalations of some sleeping giant. In the darkness off to the north was a blighted tree and there were hundreds of crows standing silent vigil on the twisted limbs.

Grey stared at the birds and they stared back.

“Pick a card,” said a voice, and Grey jumped, startled. He whipped his head around and saw that he was now seated at a table. It was covered with a heavy brocade in red and gold, and the surface was covered with embroidered dragons locked in death struggles with saints and angels. A woman sat across from him. Mircalla. Or at least he thought it was. She wore a veil over her pretty face, so all he could see was the faint outline of her features.

Before her, on the top of the table, was a slender taper in a silver holder, the flame burning with no heat. And beside that was a deck of cards. They were larger than standard playing cards, and the design on the back showed the death mask of some ancient and beautiful queen. Her eyes were closed and blood ran from the corners of her mouth.

Mircalla wore black lace gloves that had patterns of flitting bats on them. As he watched she drew her hand across the deck and fanned it out in a graceful arc.

“Pick a card,” she repeated.

One of the crows in the tree cawed softly. It didn’t sound like a bird. It sounded like the plaintive call of a lost child.

Grey licked his lips. They were as dry as if he had been lying all day in the hot sun. And yet he remembered drinking. A lot. And very good, cold, crisp beer it had been, too. So how could his lips be dry and cracked? Why would his throat be filled with dust?

He looked down at his clothes and they were covered with dust and clods of dirt. He no longer wore the jeans, blue shirt, and black leather vest that he’d been wearing since coming west. His clothes were his old cavalry blues. The dirty-shirt blue he’d worn into battle against the Confederates back when he was a young man, barely out of his teens.

His hands, though, were not the hands of a callow youth. They were not the hands he saw every day now, either. They were thin and wasted. The hands of an old, old man.

Or the hands of something else.

Something from which all vitality, all of the juices of life, had been leeched away.

“Pick a card,” said Mircalla once more. “Any card.”

“I…”

“Go on. They won’t bite.”

She laughed, and it was a grating sound. Like a knife blade dragged across wet glass.

He recoiled from the sound, but even as he did so his withered hand reached out to take a card. It slid from between the others with a soft hiss.

“Turn it over,” she said. “Show me.”

He turned it over.

It was a tarot.

It was the death card.

Exactly the card he expected it to be.

But Mircalla made a sound of disgust and annoyance. She picked up the card, regarded it for a moment, and then flicked it away into the wind. The card swirled in a circle for a moment and then vanished.

“Not that card,” she said.

“Why? It’s mine.”

“You need to pick a new card,” she said. “That one’s been used already.”

“I don’t understand.”

She laughed again. “Of course you don’t. Pick another card. Pick one that matters to your future.”

“My future? But the death card…”

“Has already been played. Don’t you know that?” She shook her head. “No, you don’t know it. I can see it in your face. You think you only dream about the dead. You think they’re ghosts of a guilty conscience.”

“They are—”

“Of course they’re not,” snapped Mircalla. “The dead follow you everywhere you go. You know it on a level too deep for your stupid mortal mind to realize, but it’s why you always move on. It’s why you’re never content to stay anywhere. It’s why you don’t have friends. Not living ones, anyway.” She paused. “It’s why you don’t love.”

“I loved someone once…”

“And she follows you, too, Greyson Torrance. Your Annabelle Sampson shambles along with the rest of them.”

“No!”

“Just because you don’t see her doesn’t mean that she isn’t there.” Mircalla cocked her head to one side. “You never even look for her, do you?”

“She’s buried in Pennsylvania. I dug her grave. I was there when they spoke the words over her to send her soul to heaven.”

Mircalla threw her head back and laughed.

“Heaven? Heaven? Is that where you think the dead go? To heaven to play harps and bask in the glory of an eternal God. Oh… mortal man, you are such a fool. Like so many men I have known. Like so many men who still walk this earth. You go about with your guns and your strength and your certainty that the world is what you judge it to be, and all the time the world moves in different gears. You think you understand how the clockwork of the world operates, but you don’t. You’re like monkeys staring at a fine watch and thinking it’s magic made just for you.”

She turned, lifted the hem of her veil and spat into the dust. For a brief moment he saw her naked flesh. Chin and cheek and lips. And he recoiled from what he saw. They were not the smooth features of a beautiful woman. What he saw was withered and cracked, mottled like the skin of some ancient mummy. Mircalla dropped the veil and turned back to him.

“You do not understand the world because you are afraid to know its truths,” she said. “Like so many men.”

“You’re not making sense,” he protested.

“No? Turn and look.” She gestured to the east and he turned with great reluctance. There, in the direction from which the cold wind blew, there were people. A mass of them, shuffling along, moving slowly. Pale faces and empty eyes.

He knew them.

He knew them so well. And she was there. Annabelle. With her torn dress and broken fingernails. Annabelle.

Oh God, Annabelle.

“This is a dream,” he said.

“Yes,” she agreed. “This is a dream. But they are not.”

“What?”

“The dead follow you, Grey Torrance. They have followed you since you caused their deaths, and they will follow you until you have nowhere else to run. And then they will claim you as one of their own. That is the truth of it. It is the truth you have been running from.”

“That’s madness,” he snapped. “You’re a witch and a whore and you drugged me. You slipped something into my beer.”

He remembered the pain in his neck and touched the spot. His fingers came away slick with fresh blood.

“You sicced something on me. A snake or a…”

“My sisters tasted you, mortal man,” admitted Mircalla, “and they wanted to drink deep of you. You may be damned and a fool, but there is so much power in your blood. So much. They wanted to drink you like a fine, rare wine.”

“Drink me…?”

Mircalla shrugged. “Men have some uses.”

“God! What are you?”

“You wouldn’t even know if I told you. Mircalla, Miracall, Millarca, Carmilla…”

“You’re not making sense.”

She smiled beneath her veil. “Pick a card.”

Without meaning to, without wanting to, he did.

“Turn it over,” she commanded.

Grey glanced toward the east. The ghosts were closer now. Time, he knew, was running out. He had lingered too long, even here in this dream.

He turned the card over.

The picture showed a man hanging by one foot, hands bound behind him, dangling upside down from a gallows. Unlike any gallows Grey had seen, this one was made from living wood and fresh leaves sprouted from it. Despite being so perversely executed, the face of the hanging man was serene and composed, and there was a saintly glow around his head.

Mircalla grunted in surprise. “The martyr’s card,” she mused. “Interesting. I would not have thought it of you.”

“I’m no damn martyr,” he snapped.

“You do not know what you are, man of two worlds.” She laughed and traced the edges of the card. “The man who lives between the worlds. Yes… that’s what it says about you. You do not belong to either life or death.”

There was regret in her voice.

“That means that I and my sisters cannot have you, Greyson Torrance,” she continued. “You are exempt, pardoned. Not from your crimes but from my web. So sad. Such a loss. And I suppose you must have your companion, too. My sisters will be so disappointed.”

“What are you talking about?” Grey said, and he could hear the pleading tone in his own voice. “Tell me what this all means.”

“It means,” she said, “that the universe, for good or ill, is not done with you. I am forbidden to claim you. Your journey is not over. Weary, weary journeys lie before you.”

“Make sense, damn you.”

“Make sense? You ask something very dangerous of a gifted one, my doomed young man. But you ask and the card compels me to answer and so I will.” She bent closer and spoke in such a low voice that he was forced to lean closer in order to hear. “You will walk in the land of the shadow, Grey Torrance. Deep into the heart of darkness. Worlds will turn on the wink of your eye. Worlds will fall in the light of your smile.”

“I don’t understand any of that.”

“No,” she said. “You were not meant to. The clock has not struck the hour of understanding.”

“But—.”

She swept the cards from the table and Grey immediately bent to catch the Hanged Man card. He did so, but when he looked up, the table, the other chair, and Mircalla were gone. He shot to his feet and turned. The ghosts were gone, too.

And then, so was he.

Chapter Seventeen

When he opened his eyes the harsh sun of noon nearly smashed him back into unconsciousness.

He flung an arm across his eyes and rolled over, groaning and sick. His head swam and his stomach felt like it was filled with sewer water in which ugly things wriggled and swam. He coughed, gagged, and finally gasped in a ragged lungful of dry air.

To his left he heard a low, weak groan.

Grey turned and saw Thomas Looks Away laying sprawled and sunburnt on the hard ground. Forty yards beyond him stood a tall, crooked cottonwood, and in the sparse shade cast by its withered leaves stood Picky and Looks Away’s horse. Just those two. The other horses belonging to the posse were gone. Grey looked around.

The town was gone, too.

He frowned.

The landscape looked familiar. A pair of hillocks, a dead juniper, an untidy row of chaparral cactus. All of that was the same as it was when he and the Sioux rode up to that painted wooden arch on which had been written the word FORTUNE.

But the town was not there.

He got to his feet and as he studied the land he realized that he was wrong about that.

The town was there.

But it was nothing more than broken timbers laying bleached in the sun. Nothing more substantial than the charred cornerstone of a building was left. It chilled him despite the heat because this was not a new disaster. Those timbers lay like bones of some ancient thing, half covered by the hungry sands. Somehow the town had died and been reclaimed by the desert.

How long ago, though?

Surely he could not have slept for years, and only many years of the unrelenting sun could do this.

“Madness,” he said aloud, and even he wasn’t sure if he was making a statement about the world or his own mind.

Behind him, Looks Away groaned again. Grey reluctantly turned from the impossible wreckage and hurried over to his new companion. His foot kicked something and he saw that there was a full waterskin on the ground by where he’d awakened. He uncapped it, sniffed it, smelled nothing more than water and heat. He took a pull, and although the water was warm it tasted as pure as new melted snow to his parched throat. The second sip tasted every bit as good.

Grey knelt beside Looks Away, uncertain as to whether the man was alive or dead. Or, if his luck was holding steady, something else. He placed a hand on the man’s chest, felt the reassuring thump-thump of a living heart, and blew out a sigh of relief. Looks Away groaned softly and his eyelids fluttered weakly. Then, much as the Sioux had done for him after the ghost rock explosion, Grey gently cupped the back of the man’s neck and helped him raise his head to take a sip.

“Easy now,” he cautioned, “wet your throat with a sip first. There, that’s good. Now take a real pull.”

Looks Away took the waterskin from him and took two long drinks, then, gasping, thrust it back into Grey’s hands.

“By god and all the devils in hell,” the Sioux growled as he struggled into a sitting position. “What the bloody hell happened and where the bloody hell are we?”

“God only knows. Or, maybe it’s the Devil who knows.” Grey stood up. “In either case, take a look for yourself and maybe you can tell me.”

He held out a hand and pulled Looks Away up. Together they walked over to where the FORTUNE sign should have been. Pieces of it lay on the ground, the letters faded to ghosts. Grey watched as the other man turned to look at the landscape and then looked once again at the ancient ruins.

“I don’t…,” the Sioux began, but let the rest trail off into the dust.

“Yeah,” said Grey.

They stood there for a long time, neither man saying another word. What, after all, could they say to this? Nothing in Grey’s experience provided him with a vocabulary sufficient to put what he felt into words. Sure, there were words for some of this deep in his soul, but none of those words would fit into his mouth. He couldn’t have said them at gunpoint. From the strained, frightened expression on Looks Away’s face, he was facing the same challenge. So they left it unsaid.

As one they began backing away from the town. Then they turned and ran for their horses.

However as they approached, Grey saw something that twisted an already misshapen day into an even more perverse shape. There, tucked into a fold of his saddle, was a single heavy pasteboard card.

On the back was a painting of the death mask of some ancient queen, her mouth bloody.

Grey did not want to touch it, and his hand shook as he reached for it.

“What’s that?” asked Looks Away sharply. “Is that a tarot?”

Grey said nothing. He took the card and turned it over, though he knew full well what would be on it.

A hanged man.

Looks Away saw it and cursed softly.

Without another word the two men got onto their horses and fled toward the west.

Chapter Eighteen

Grey Torrance and Thomas Looks Away did not speak at all for the rest of that day. Grey knew that they should. It was probably important to compare experiences, to try and make sense of everything.

But he did not want to.

He was afraid of the sense that it would make.

The world had become a strange place. It was like stepping into a dreamscape. Or like entering one of the fantasy worlds in the dime novels he used to read back in the early days of the war. Back when fantastical adventures were a way to turn away from the endless bloodshed, the weeks of drudgery and boredom between battles, the aches of walking hundreds of miles, the diseases that came with bad food and worse water. Back then the stories of frontiersmen braving the wilds and ragtag bands of soldiers defending small Texas forts and castaways finding treasure on deserted islands were all ways to step out of the moment. They allowed for hope of something better, even if that hope was nothing more than purple prose in some writer’s fanciful scribblings.

That time had past.

The war never ended. The nation became so fractured. The dream of a grand America had been torn apart by greedy and hateful men.

And there was something else.

Something that lurked behind the scenes of everyday life. Something people knew about but never talked about.

The world itself had changed.

Not merely the politics or borders. Not loyalties and plans of empire.

No.

The actual world was different now.

Something had shifted.

It was a darker world. And that thought was true even as they rode beneath this blistering sun. The heart of the world was darker. Its soul was darker.

It wasn’t the same world he grew up in.

Grey knew that much of this had started when the big quake tore itself along the fault lines in the West and dragged most of California into the thrashing sea. That alone might have been enough to fracture the world. At least the American part of it.

But it was only the start, and Grey knew it. Everyone knew it.

It was simply that people didn’t talk about it. The change, the darkness, was like some kind of secret.

Grey thought about that and realized that he had it wrong.

It wasn’t a secret. Not really. Nothing as simple as that. It was more like a night terror. Like a monster hiding beneath the bed. It was something that was not real, but could be real if people were unwise enough to say it out loud. To name it.

To accept that it was real.

That’s why Grey didn’t want to talk about what had just happened. Not with Looks Away, and maybe not even with himself. Every time his questioning mind tried to look too closely, tried to put labels on the things that had happened, Grey forcibly wrenched his thoughts away. He force-fed new thoughts into his head. He considered the landscape. The clouds. He counted and named the number of cities and towns he’d been to. He mentally recited old lessons from his school days, or snatches of poetry. He mumbled the lyrics to old ballads and alehouse bawdy songs. He named all of the women he had ever known and catalogued their virtues.

He did all of that to keep from thinking about the town of Fortune and the women there. If they were women at all. He tried not to think about the hanged man tarot. He tried to erase the memory of Mircalla from his memory.

He tried and tried.

The more he tried, the more he failed.

The more he failed, the more terrified he became.

He caught Looks Away staring at him as they rode, and for three slow paces of their horses, their eyes met.

Then the Sioux shook his head.

And Grey responded in kind.

The terror in his heart grew and grew.