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.