“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.