52
Ellison Thorne stood beside the crumbling walls of an old powder magazine and scanned the darkness with his eyes and his ears for the sounds of his compatriots. Despite the scratches of nesting animals in the rafters of ancient buildings, the whisper of the wind and the distant sounds of the desert beyond, a dozen decades of living out in the wilderness had tuned his ear sufficiently to be able to pick out the sound of a human footstep from a hundred yards.
Which was just as well, because he was no longer in any condition to run far, should he be surprised by an enemy action. He yearned for the comfort of his pipe but refrained from lighting it until the others arrived. The smell of burning tobacco would be detectable from a hundred yards, the light from the pipe twice that far.
He shifted his weight onto his other foot and felt a brief respite from the weariness aching through his bones. He was dying, of that he felt certain. Whatever blessing, or curse, God had bestowed upon him was fading and his time was coming to an end. Not before time, some might say, but then…
‘Who goes there?’
Ellison aimed his rifle into the darkness. The sound was small, a shifting of weight on loose soil, but to Ellison’s ears it may as well have been a herd of cattle moving through the ghostly silent town.
‘Copthorne, standing to!’
‘Come for’ard,’ Ellison called back, ‘make yourself known.’
From the night came Edward Copthorne, limping from a leg injury he’d sustained in 1936 when one of the newfangled automobiles had almost run him off the road near Mescalero. He would have heard it coming, as the earliest vehicles clattered along like runaway horses, but he’d lost the use of one ear after a mortar had exploded alongside him in 1861. As Copthorne approached, he called out.
‘Company, stand for’ard!’
From the darkness appeared three more men whom Ellison recognized from their shape and gait alone: Kip Wren, a forty-two-year-old sergeant during the conflict; John Cochrane, late thirties and a corporal; and Nathaniel McQuire, a private aged twenty-nine. Each carried a long-barreled Springfield rifle at port-arms. Ellison himself had been a sergeant promoted to first lieutenant, and commander of the small unit trapped into a fateful flight south after the Battle of Glorietta Pass in 1862.
‘I see you,’ Ellison called as the four men made their weary way up the steps of the powder magazine and stood in the darkness. ‘Anybody snoutin’ your trail?’
‘Not a soul out there,’ Copthorne said. ‘We diverged thrice south of the mountains since our encounter with the out of towners. We’re alone.’
Ellison nodded, and gestured to the men.
‘Stand down.’
They gratefully turned their rifles around and slung them over their shoulders before Ellison led them across the street to where the dilapidated remains of the Nannie Baird mine office crouched against the darkness. He led the way in through the open doorway, the aged timbers creaking beneath their boots as they sought the relative concealment within the building.
Ellison sat on an old upturned barrel and lit his pipe, most of the others following suit or pulling tumblers of liquor from jacket pockets.
‘You got any spare Lucifers?’ Copthorne asked him, and Ellison tossed him his box of matches.
Kip Wren drew deeply on a cheroot, the glowing tip briefly lighting his rugged features and tight gray beard. He exhaled a cloud of smoke and coughed before speaking.
‘I take it we’re all still sufferin’ the same affliction?’
A murmur of agreement drifted through a darkness punctuated by brief flares of light from the pipes and cigars, ghoulishly illuminated spectral faces watching each other.
‘We were always on borrowed time,’ Ellison said. ‘We knew that to a man.’
‘But this way?’ Nathaniel McQuire, the youngest of their number, said in horror. ‘It ain’t natural. I don’t bear to think what might’n happen to us next.’
John Cochrane, his drooping moustache framing his pipe, pointed at Ellison Thorne.
‘It weren’t right to shoot poor Carson neither. He was one of us, no regard to what you thought he might be doing in Santa Fe.’
‘Carson was likely to endanger us all,’ Ellison growled. ‘It wasn’t my desire to take his life but he left me no choice. You all saw who he was talkin’ with, the police and those hired hands from out of town.’
‘He was as likely lookin’ for help as trouble,’ Copthorne pointed out reasonably.
‘So was poor old Hiram,’ Ellison replied, ‘and look what happened to him.’
‘He was the first with symptoms,’ Cochrane said. ‘Ain’t no surprise he was panicked. God knows, I’d have done the same if’n it were me.’
‘Which raises the point,’ Nathaniel said, ‘as to what the hell we’re going to do. We can’t keep runnin’, not like this. Every time I move I’m compelled to look behind me in case somethin’s fallen off.’
A ripple of grim chuckles fluttered through the darkness, but Nathaniel shook his head.
‘I’m done jestin’. We need to do something.’
In the silence that followed the soldiers looked at Ellison Thorne, who drew thoughtfully on his pipe before speaking.
‘We do the only thing we know,’ he said finally. ‘We go back, and see if’n we can’t make it happen again.’
There was a long silence before Kip Wren spoke.
‘Ain’t no guarantee of that.’
‘Even if Lechuguilla’s still there,’ Nathaniel said, ‘Misery Hole could have been sealed off by now. Its location’s been protected by the government for years.’
‘It’s well concealed,’ Ellison agreed. ‘The scientists that found it in 1986 are long gone. Nobody got no business snoutin’ around it.’
‘Nobody got no business hunting us down either,’ John Cochrane said, ‘but it’s happenin’. And what do we do now without our supplies? We can’t last more than a day or two out here before this affliction takes a turn for th’worse.’
‘Not to mention those damned flying machines,’ Kip Wren said. ‘It’s getting’ harder to stay hidden out here, Ellison.’
Ellison nodded slowly. In the decades that had passed, they had seen remote frontier outposts become thriving towns and cities, empty wilderness skies filled with contrail streams from flying coaches that seemed as big as entire cattle ranches, and all manner of computerized gadgets that seemed able to find a man in even the most remote corners of the desert. He himself had seen some such devices: keypads attached to boxes of strange lights on the counters of stores in Santa Fe, and moving pictures on panels in shop windows that showed distant lands so realistic it seemed he could reach out and touch them with his hand.
‘We stick together,’ he said finally.
The men nodded to themselves in the brief glows from their pipes, eyes fixed expectantly on his. It didn’t matter that the army was long gone, or that the war was long over. Maintaining their discipline as a unit had kept them alive and their secret safe for well over a century, and Ellison had led them both by rank and by merit these long decades past. Only Hiram Conley’s fear, his panic, had broken their seal of silence and started them on the path to destruction.
‘We’re on our own now, boys, just like before,’ Ellison added.
‘We’re even following the same trail,’ Cochrane noted. ‘That there’s irony for ya.’
Ellison stood up from the barrel, breathing deeply on the night air as he tapped the remaining embers from his clay pipe and slipped it into his jacket pocket. There was no other way, and nowhere else to run.
‘Let’s move out.’
‘Hold on a second,’ Nathaniel said. ‘What about those two out of towners who followed us? They might’n be allies, not foes. They din’ shoot until we did.’