Tyler Willis swallowed thickly, grimacing with the pain.
‘Don’t shoot him,’ he insisted again. ‘He’s extremely old.’
Zamora was about to respond when a voice broke the silence of the pass around them.
‘Stay still. Identify yourself!’
Zamora flinched and peered up into the woods. The voice bounced and echoed off the walls of the pass, concealing its location. He could see nothing.
‘Officer Enrico Zamora, New Mexico State Police,’ he called back. ‘This man needs a hospital.’
‘There ain’t no such thing as a state police, and that man ain’t no part of the Union!’
Zamora frowned in confusion. ‘This man is injured and he needs treatment. I need to take him back down the pass.’
‘He ain’t goin’ nowhere!’ the voice yelled. ‘I got no beef with you, boy. You turn your back to me an’ I’ll let you leave, but I got forty dead men up here if’n you try to cross me!’
Forty dead men? Dispatch had only mentioned one man down. Zamora’s gaze edged upward as he searched for corpses among the trees, and he saw a flicker of movement.
It took him a moment to register what he was looking at through the dappled sunlight shimmering in pools of light beneath the trees. The man was old, perhaps in his sixties, a thick gray beard draped down across his bare chest. A navy-blue jacket clung to his emaciated frame, the sleeves marked with narrow yellow lines running from shoulder to cuffs. Across his chest was a thick band of dressing stained crimson with blood. The old man was aiming what looked like an antique rifle over the top of a boulder at him. Zamora looked down at Tyler Willis.
‘He’s killed forty men?’
‘No.’ Willis shook his head. ‘He’s got forty cartridges for his musket. “Dead men” is what they used to call their ammunition, back in the Civil War.’
Zamora frowned at the wounded man beside him.
‘Why’s he using a musket? And how do you know him?’
‘It’s a long story,’ Willis rasped. ‘A real long story.’
Zamora looked up to the woods and called back, ‘I can’t leave this man here.’
‘We had an accord, he and I!’ the old man cackled. ‘But he did betray me! No secessionist is worth a dime o’ dollar, goddamned southerners been aggervatin’ us for years! What regiment are you with, boy?’
Zamora blinked sweat from his eyes, and saw Barker’s silhouette creeping through the trees toward the old man.
‘I’m not a soldier. You?’
‘New Mexico Militia!’ the old man shouted. ‘Born and bred to the Union!’
Zamora realized the old man was either insane or delusional. Maybe from alcohol or exposure to the elements, or blood loss from the bullet wound.
‘He’s ill,’ Tyler Willis rasped from beside him. ‘He’s already been injured, lost a lot of blood. He could have shot me in the head, but he didn’t. He just needs help, he needs a hospital.’
‘You’re injured!’ Zamora shouted up at the old man. ‘Come down here, we can treat the wound.’
‘Only thing I’m gonna be treatin’s your balderdash, boy, now hike out!’
Zamora saw Barker stand up and take aim, and in that instant the old man sensed the threat and whirled the old musket around. Zamora saw Barker rush forward.
‘Barker, hold your fire!’
Two gunshots crashed out simultaneously through the canyon and both men vanished in a cloud of oily blue smoke. Barker’s ghostly shape shuddered and dropped into the undergrowth. Zamora leapt to his feet, pistol at the ready as he squinted into the swirling cloud of cordite.
An anguished cry burst out as the old man charged out of the forest, the veil of smoke curling around him. A long-barreled musket cradled in his grip was tipped with a wicked bayonet which glinted at Zamora in the sunlight as it rushed toward him. But in that terrible moment, it wasn’t the lethal weapon that sent a spasm of terror bolting through Zamora’s stomach.
The old man’s jacket had been torn off at the left sleeve, and as he burst into the bright sunlight Zamora could see the flesh of the old man’s arm, a tangled, sinewy web of exposed muscles and ragged chunks of decaying gray flesh spilling away as he rushed forward. His hands were gnarled and twisted like those of some ancient crone, his knuckles exposed like white bone beneath almost transparent skin. For one terrible instant, Zamora had the impression of being rushed by a man suffering from the terminal stages of leprosy.
‘Get back!’ Zamora shouted in surprise, raising his pistol.
‘You’re gonna be singing on the end of my pigsticker!’ the old man screamed, charging the last few paces. The ragged navy-blue uniform, kepi hat and torn pants seemed to have leapt from some hellish Civil War battlefield, filling Zamora’s vision with a nightmarish image of decay and rage.
On the ground beside him, Tyler Willis raised a hand.
‘Don’t kill him! He’s too old to die!’
The bayonet flashed in the sunlight before Zamora’s eyes as he staggered backwards, taking aim and firing a single shot at the emaciated face charging toward him.
2
‘Okay, who’s tonight’s lucky contestant?’
Medical Investigator Lillian Cruz strode down a corridor toward the morgue with a practiced stride. Tall and proud-looking, Lillian had worked in the morgue for as long as anyone could remember. She was leading the night shift, as she did twice a week. If working the small hours virtually alone in a morgue had ever bothered her, she couldn’t recall. In contrast her assistant, Alexis, was new to the facility and looked nervous, her squeaky student voice mildly irritating Lillian as she filled her in on the details of the night’s first autopsy.
‘White male, approximately sixty years of age, died from a single gunshot wound to the head fired in self-defense by Lieutenant Enrico Zamora, state PD. The trooper reported that the victim seemed to be suffering from some kind of wasting disease.’
Lillian frowned. Probably a drunk who had got himself injured, or some loser strung out on peyote buttons or crack who fancied himself attacking Injuns and heading them off at the pass out Glorietta way. In her many years as a medical investigator, Lillian had seen just about everything.
‘When did he die?’ Lillian asked as they turned the corner and approached the morgue.
‘Yesterday afternoon, time of death called in by the response team as 3.45 p.m. Victim’s been on ice since 4.20 that afternoon.’
Ten hours then. Lillian led the way into the morgue to where a steel gurney awaited them, the contents concealed by a blue plastic ziplock bag speckled with smears of fluid. Lillian checked the door was closed behind them before donning gloves, plastic face-shield and tying her surgical gown.
‘Okay, let’s get started, shall we?’ Lillian spoke loudly enough to be heard by the recorder sitting on the worktop nearby. She picked up a clipboard, ready to make notes, as Alexis grabbed a digital camera to document their findings. On cue, Alexis reached forward over the gurney and with a single smooth movement unzipped the plastic bag.
‘Jesus!’
Lillian stared at the gurney as Alexis stifled a tight scream, one gloved hand flying to her mouth. Overcoming a momentary revulsion, Lillian took a cautious pace forward and peered into the depths of the plastic bag as Alexis began taking photographs.
The body that lay within seemed as though it had been stripped of its skin, the internal organs were exposed and decayed, the slack jaw only held in place by frayed tendons and muscles that had either contracted into tight bands or fallen off the body altogether to coil like snakes beneath the corpse. The eyeballs had shriveled and sunk deep into their sockets, and what skin remained drooped in leathery tatters from the bones. Tentatively, Lillian reached out and touched a piece of skin. It felt brittle, like a leather rag left too long in the desert sun. Specks of material crumbled beneath her touch to lightly dust the steel surface of the gurney.