‘Carson!’
The old man’s head whipped round, a pair of strange blue-gray eyes locking onto Ethan’s in surprise. Ethan dashed forward a couple of steps to prevent him from fleeing, raising one placatory hand.
‘We need to talk,’ he said quickly.
Carson stared at him for a moment, then his rifle twirled violently in his grasp as the butt flashed up toward Ethan’s face. Ethan leapt sideways as the weapon whipped past his eyes, stepping in toward Carson in an attempt to wrestle him to the ground. Carson jerked back and brought the butt of the rifle smashing back down toward Ethan’s face. Ethan caught the butt in his hands, absorbing the force of the blow as he slipped one foot behind Carson’s ankle and then hurled his body weight forward. Carson reeled off balance and staggered backwards, losing his grip on the rifle as he tripped over the tent’s guy lines to thump down onto the grass. He was about to scramble away and make a run for it when Ethan spoke.
‘I’m not here to arrest you,’ he said quickly. ‘I know who you are and I know what’s happening to you.’
Carson squinted up at Ethan.
‘The hell would you know about it?’
Ethan gestured to the nearby tent with the rifle, just as Lopez and Zamora arrived from the other end of the lines to block Carson’s escape.
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.’