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.