Immortal

38

The interior walls of the tent rippled in the breeze as Ethan ducked inside, following Carson with Lopez behind. Zamora discreetly stood guard outside to keep any prying eyes away.

Lee Carson sat down on a crude wooden bench inside the tent, Ethan taking a seat opposite alongside Lopez.

‘You wanna tell me who you’re workin’ for?’ Carson asked him. ‘I ain’t agreein’ to no tests.’

‘We’re not working for a pharmaceutical company,’ Ethan said. ‘We’re just here to find out what the hell’s been going on. People have gone missing over this and we need to find them.’

‘Missing?’ Carson echoed with a frown. ‘What do you mean, missing?’

‘A medical examiner named Lillian Cruz,’ Lopez replied, ‘was abducted after an autopsy conducted on the remains of a man named Hiram Conley. We believe you were familiar with him.’

Lee Carson sighed and reached up to take off his fake beard.

‘Yeah, he was an old acquaintance of mine.’

‘Very old,’ Ethan said and leveled Carson with a serious gaze. ‘How old are you, Lee?’

Carson looked right back at Ethan as he removed his kepi hat and ruffled his hair with one gloved hand.

‘Last I can recall, I’m about a hundred seventy-two,’ he replied. He kept his gaze on Lopez and Ethan for a moment before suddenly chuckling and shaking his head. ‘Don’t seem right nor real, does it now? Gettin’ on two centuries and I can still rustle with the best of ’em.’

Ethan grinned, but the smile faded as he looked at Carson’s gloves.

‘Not for much longer though,’ he observed. ‘Your hands, something’s wrong with them.’

Carson’s own smile shriveled.

‘Yeah, I’ll say,’ he murmured. ‘Looks like our lil’ ol’ gift ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.’

‘Where are the rest of you?’ Lopez asked. ‘We need to find them.’

‘They’ll be here someplace,’ Carson said. ‘But I ain’t seen any of them yet, which bothers me. They should’ve been here afore now.’

Ethan glanced over his shoulder to see Zamora still guarding the tent’s entrance. He turned back to Carson.

‘We need you to tell us how this all happened,’ he said. ‘We know that you need help, all of you. But if we don’t know how you came to be like this, there’s not much we can do for you.’

‘Except run your tests an’ all,’ Carson said. ‘Use us like lab rats.’

‘We work for the government,’ Lopez said. ‘Sub-contracted and independent. They only hear what we report back, and right now we’re not going to be sending you to any laboratories. We’ve seen what they might do.’

Carson looked at Lopez for a moment and then smiled.

‘You sure look cute in that there uniform an’ all, ma’am.’

Ethan saw Lopez raise an eyebrow at Carson as he felt an unexpected lance of irritation.

‘Cut the small talk, Carson,’ he said. ‘This is serious. We need to know how this all started.’

Carson didn’t lose his perfect smile as he glanced in Ethan’s direction.

‘Now don’t be gettin’ all jealous on me, mister,’ he said. ‘I was just remarkin’ on how beautiful the lady is.’

From the corner of his eye Ethan saw Lopez’s features melt into a bright smile.

‘We don’t have much time,’ he said to Carson, and pulled from his pocket the old photograph of the men standing around the old cart. ‘Try starting from here.’

Carson looked at the photograph and his smile turned wistful.

‘I’ll be damned,’ he whispered almost reverentially. ‘Valverde, 1862. I ain’t seen a picture like that for many a year now.’

‘It was taken around the time of the battle,’ Lopez said. ‘Was it before or after you became infected?’

Carson looked at her, his features suddenly taut.

‘What do you mean infected? You sayin’ I ’ve contracted some kind of sickness?’

‘Yes,’ Ethan said. ‘A bacterial infection. We’re not sure yet, but the more you can tell us the more likely we’ll be able to help.’

Carson nodded.

‘That would kind o’ make sense,’ he said thoughtfully, looking again at the photograph. ‘That was taken a few days after the Battle of Glorietta Pass, after we were cut off from our main force at Fort Craig when the Confederates began their retreat toward Arizona.’

Ethan nodded encouragingly.

‘Okay, tell us how it went down.’ Carson, one hand resting on his thigh and leaning on the other with his elbow, gestured to the re-enactment preparations outside.

‘We were based at Fort Craig originally, down in Confederate Arizona, when the rebels marched up to try an’ take the fort out of our hands. Turned out that their commander, a man named Sibley, reckoned our walls were too heavy to be breached by assault so he turned north and went on by with his men over the Rio Grande to the ford at Valverde. We, that is myself and a small company of the New Mexico Militia under Lieutenant Ellison Thorne, were sent out to reconnoiter the enemy and try to find a weakness after a planned attack on the rebels using mules loaded with explosives backfired, literally. The mules came back home and blew up inside our own goddamned lines.’

‘And they were still heading north at that point?’ Lopez asked.

‘To a degree,’ Carson said. ‘But they got themselves caught up with Union forces guarding the ford, who we then began supportin’. Afore you know it, there’s a battle in full swing as the batteries opened up on each other.’

‘And you guys went into battle?’ Ethan guessed.

‘We surely did,’ Carson nodded, ‘but the rebels had organized themselves right tight, and they broke our lines and forced us into a retreat toward the fort. We lost five hundred men that day and our commanding officer, Edward Canby, lost a lot of respect, though he earned it back in the days and years to come.’

‘So you’re back at the fort,’ Lopez said. ‘Besieged?’

‘No,’ Carson replied. ‘We hit the rebels as hard as they hit us. They went north, looking to raid Santa Fe for supplies. We were sent to follow, and where possible harass them. We were in the field for almost a month when our two armies came up against each other in late March at a place called Glorietta Pass.’

Ethan dimly recalled details from his school days and military-service lectures. ‘The Gettysburg of the West,’ he said. ‘A Union victory, that pushed the rebels south back to Arizona and Texas.’

‘That was the one.’ Carson nodded. ‘Trouble was, when the battle was won, myself and six other soldiers were still positioned a half-mile south of the Confederate forces. When they began their retreat we were forced to flee afore them. There wasn’t much quarter given to captured enemy troops, especially those from the victor’s ranks, and we none of us were willing to chance moving out and round the enemy’s flanks. We couldn’t be sure of avoiding their pickets, so we pushed hard for the Rio Grande.’

‘What happened?’ Lopez asked.

For a brief moment, as Carson spoke, Ethan listened to the sounds of marching troops outside the tent and felt as though he had been transported a hundred fifty years into the past.

‘We didn’t make it,’ Carson replied. ‘Secondary Confederate forces, snipers and wagon trains were trying to link up with the retreating main force and cut us off afore we could cross the river. We kept runnin’ south, barely keeping ahead of them. In the end we were tuckered out and were on the verge of surrendering when we came across some caves down near the border. We decided to take our chances and went in just as deep as we could go.’

Ethan leaned forward eagerly.

‘Where were they?’

Carson sighed, glancing at the entrance to the tent.

‘Thing is,’ he said quietly, ‘if’n I tell you, it’s as likely I’ll be killed.’

Ethan gestured to Carson’s gloved hands.

‘If you don’t tell us you’ll die anyway,’ he pointed out. ‘There’s nothing left for you to lose, Lee.’

Carson looked at his hands and shook his head briefly before speaking.

‘The caves were near a place you’ve probably heard of. It’s called Carlsbad.’

Ethan and Lopez exchanged a glance of surprise.

‘Carlsbad Caverns?’ he echoed. ‘Everyone’s heard of them. How come we don’t already have tens of thousands of people wandering around who are a couple of hundred years old?’

Carson smiled mischievously.

‘Because they’ve never set foot in the caves that we hid in,’ he said. ‘We were there for three days living off the water inside and the mosses growing there. Most people don’t go that far into the caves or stay there for as long because it’s so hard to get in. But the real reason is that the exact location of the caves is kept secret from the public.’

Ethan raised an eyebrow.

‘By whom?’

‘Park rangers and such like, I guess,’ Carson said. ‘We haven’t been back since 1986 when they found the entrance. Poor old Hiram Conley went looking for Tyler Willis to find a cure for all o’ this.’

‘Why didn’t the rest of your comrades help him?’ Lopez asked.

‘Because they’re living in the past,’ Carson muttered. ‘They’ve all seen their families die of old age, seen their loved ones become a part of history. They ain’t so much revelin’ in their immortality as enduring it.’

Ethan considered for a moment what Lee Carson had said. The fact was, he’d never even thought about how it might feel to live forever. Everyone else would grow old and die, but an immortal man would live on, abandoned time and time again by those he loved until he might well become the loneliest individual ever to have lived. He might even crave the solace of death itself. Ethan had certainly felt that way just a few years’ previously, when Joanna Defoe had vanished without trace from his life somewhere within the dark and dangerous alleys of the Gaza Strip.

‘And none of them have thought to break the cycle?’ Lopez asked. ‘Just go ahead and search for help like Hiram did?’

‘Old man Ellison won’t let them,’ Carson replied. ‘He reckons it to be safer to stay out in the Pecos than mix with people.’

‘More than that,’ Ethan said. ‘Hiram Conley was already wounded when he met Tyler Willis at Glorietta Pass. A fresh musket ball got pulled from his shoulder, before the body was abducted from the morgue.’

Carson stared at him for a long moment.

‘You’re sayin’ he was shot by one of his own? One of us?’

Ethan shrugged.

‘Can’t imagine who else would have done it. You could be in danger by being here, Lee. We need to get you someplace safe before you’re found.’

‘Is there any way we can identify the others?’ Lopez asked Carson. ‘Anything about them that makes them stand out, that they can’t conceal?’

Carson raised a gloved hand and pointed to his own eyes.

‘We all have these eyes,’ he said. ‘They’re cataracts, but they don’t solidify so they can’t be removed. All of us suffer from them.’

‘You need to contact the others for us,’ Ethan said, ‘and bring them here so we can speak to them.’

Carson glanced around nervously and was about to speak when a deafening blast of gunfire crashed through the tent as though a thousand artillery pieces had opened up at once.