BUFFALO JUMP
The corn dolly sat beside the bottle of gun oil on Anderson’s desk. He wiped his hands a second time, grinning. The town of Coyote Creek had hired him as their sheriff because he could shoot a can of tobacco off a fencepost a hundred yards away, because he could hoist a drunk miner over his shoulder without throwing out his back, and because he didn’t let anybody scare him, not even if they were giving him the business end of a shotgun. Somehow they’d forgotten to ask if he had a softer side.
Assured that his hands were finally clean, he picked up his daughter’s latest construction and tucked it in his breast pocket. He could give the dolly back to her when he stopped by the boarding house for lunch. Big Bess Sandford liked to tell the sheriff he spoiled his little girl, but as far as he could tell, there wasn’t anything spoiled about his Mina. She helped Bess around the boarding house and could help her daddy out of his boots in under thirty seconds, which was pretty good for a kid with hands as small as hers. She’d knocked the socks off the school teacher at the start of school last week, too.
Anderson adjusted his battered hat and knocked his grin into the semblance of a stern expression. He had an hour or two of patrolling before he could sneak back to Bess’s place, and he’d better look the part.
The door flew open, and Max Corbin, the grocer, launched himself inside. His tongue darted out the corners of his mouth and his eyes had gone two sizes too big. He opened his mouth to talk and settled for licking his lips again, a lizard cornered by a hawk.
“What is it?”
“Bunch of men at the tavern asking about you,” Max managed. “Mean-looking.”
Max’s store had been robbed three times before the town hired Anderson. He knew what mean looked like.
“I’ll take care of it.” Anderson grabbed the box of shells out of the top drawer of his desk and shoved six of them in his pocket. If things got ugly, he wasn’t likely to get a chance to reload, but he liked to be prepared. He hurried out of the jailhouse.
Coyote Creek wasn’t the biggest town in southern Oregon, but it sat in the middle of enough successful mining towns to draw the attention of any number of bandits, rustlers, and hustlers. Farmers up in the Willamette Valley liked to brag about how peaceful and prosperous their state was. They didn’t know squat about life down here on the Californian border.
He strode into the tavern and stopped in his tracks. The black-haired man leaning on the bar was mean-looking alright; Anderson didn’t know anyone meaner. He’d been running away from him since he was twenty-two years old, and he’d prayed every night that Wallace McBurnie wouldn’t find him.
“Why, boys, it looks like Johnny Anderson done went and grown up.” McBurnie gave the dry bark that passed for his laugh. It usually meant he was about to hit somebody, and for the ten years Anderson had lived under McBurnie’s thumb, Anderson had been the nearest punching bag.
“McBurnie.” Anderson looked around the room. McBurnie’s men came out of the corners, closing around Anderson in an ugly circle. He recognized a few of the faces: Ugly James, Fat Malone, Piss-Bucket Johnson. The other half-dozen or so were strangers. “You lost both the Lee brothers?”
“Big Lee got stabbed by a whore down in Virginia City, that cheap sumbitch. Wee Lee’s serving ten years in Wasco for robbery. He never had the same touch with a safe that you did, Johnny.”
Anderson felt a surge of anger. “You let Wee Lee break a safe on a job? Are you crazy? I told you that boy didn’t have the hands for it.”
McBurnie lit a cheroot, his eyes fixed on Anderson even as his nimble hands struck the match. He had a way of rooting a man into place with his blue eyes, so pale they were like chips of ice struck from some mountain glacier. He blew a long stream of smoke. “You did tell me. But I had high hopes I could train him up the way I trained you.”
He lifted the cheroot to his mouth again, the little cigar held between the blackened stumps of the first two fingers on his right hand. He could shoot like the devil himself with his left, but he could never train it up for safecracking. Anderson’s own fingers gave a twitch.
“So why are you here?”
One of the gang spat a stream of chew onto the floor. McBurnie shot him a look, and the kid Indian quailed. He had a bruise on his jaw, no doubt from McBurnie’s fist. McBurnie hated chewing tobacco.
“Do I need a reason to look for my adopted son?”
Anderson raised an eyebrow.
“I need a safecracker. I’ve got a big score out in Malheur County, and you’re the only one who can handle the safe.”
“I ain’t opened a safe in six years, and I ain’t ever going to open one again.” Anderson’s hand went to the butt of the revolver sitting on his hip.
McBurnie followed the move. His eyes crawled up to the star on Anderson’s breast pocket. He smiled that smile of his, the ugliest Anderson had ever seen. “I’ll just give you some time to think on that.”
He beckoned to the kid Indian. The boy and the rest of the gang fell in step behind him. Their shoulders bumped into Anderson’s as they passed, a long string of hard thuds. He stood his ground.
The door thumped softly behind the last of the thugs.
“Reckon they saw me pull out my shotgun,” the bartender called.
“Reckon that was it, Lem,” Anderson called back. But he had a bad feeling things weren’t over. He patted his breast pocket. Patrolling be damned. He wanted to go give his little girl her corn dolly and a hug, right this second.
* * *
After a hasty lunch, he headed out to the Nielssen ranch. Lars Nielssen was his deputy, but Anderson would have wanted his advice even if he wasn’t. Lars had given Anderson a job and a place to live when no one else would. He and his wife were the closest thing to family Anderson and Mina had, and he had taught Anderson what being a sheriff and a father really meant. Six years ago, Anderson would have just run away from Wallace McBurnie and Coyote Creek. Today, he was looking for backup.
He found Eva and Lars in their barn, reshoeing their old mare. With the help of their hired hands, the old couple ran three hundred head of cattle through the canyons and gullies of Coyote Creek. They were both tough as nails and smart as the critters they named the creek for.
It took a minute or two to explain the situation, and then Lars clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m here for you, son. You know that.” He turned to Eva. “Beeves got to go down to the big field tomorrow. You think you and the boys can handle that?”
Eva had already taken the mare’s foot between her knees, directing a flurry of half-English, half-Norwegian orders at Lars. The big man disappeared into the house and reappeared a moment later with his rifle and his going-to-town hat.
He gave Eva a brisk kiss, and Anderson helped him load up his gear. The two men worked in silence. Lars’s stolid presence settled Anderson’s jitters. They’d faced down worse trouble than one small gang. It didn’t matter who led this one: Anderson and Lars were a good team. They could manage this.
He believed that right up to the moment they turned the corner of Main Street and he saw Bess Sandford standing in the middle of the street with blood running down her face.
* * *
Anderson crouched behind the fallen cottonwood, studying the gang’s camp on the sandy peninsula. It had taken all evening for Lars to track the devils down to this site. It was the perfect location: impossible to sneak up on, unless you could walk on water.
Now a dense thicket of brambles and the curve of the creek stood between him and the site. The rush of the creek’s current covered up any but the loudest noises, but his very bones could hear Mina calling to him for help. The flickering campfire lit up the armed men at their posts. Beside the fire, he could see Mina huddled in a nest of saddle blankets. She looked so fragile, clutching her corn dolly to her chest with her tiny bound hands. Every fiber of Anderson’s being ached for her.
He crept away from the creek to the little ravine where Lars hid, divvying up shells and checking over their weapons. “They’re ready for an attack.” Anderson picked up a handful of pebbles and began arranging them in a semblance of the gang’s camp. “It’s a good site, too—the way the creek bends, they’ve got water on three sides.”
“There’s no way to sneak up on ’em.”
“No.” Anderson rubbed his eyes. “Goddamn it! I keep trying to come up with something, but all I can think about is Mina tied up like that.”
Behind them, a man shrieked.
Anderson jumped to his feet. “What the hell was that?”
A shot echoed off the hills. Men shouted. A horse screamed. Lars tossed Anderson a rifle and ran past him. The big man could move.
Anderson ran after him, furtiveness forgotten in the chaos. A man smashed into him, screaming in pain and fear, knocking Anderson into the creek. Anderson splashed back onto the beach, his heart racing. Mina. Jesus God, what was going on in that camp?
A searing blue light flashed and the sudden stink of burned hair and flesh filled the air. Something pattered down on him, hot and sticky. It took him a second to recognize the hunk of flesh that struck his boot as a man’s hand. He kicked it off and ran faster. He passed Lars grappling a tall man. There was no time to stop and help Lars. He had to get to Mina.
“Mina!” He couldn’t hear his voice, but he could feel his anger and his fear scorching in his throat.
A stream of white light flashed past him. The smoke of his own burning hair assaulted his nostrils. But he only had eyes for one thing: his daughter, now clasped in Wallace McBurnie’s arms.
The gang leader ran through the campfire, charging toward the creek. Anderson jumped over the stack of saddle blankets and stumbled over the motionless form of Fat Malone. He just caught himself as a giant hand closed around McBurnie and Mina.
“Mina! Mina!”
For a second the pair hung suspended in the grasp of the hand—no, not a hand, Anderson realized, his mind finally catching up with his senses, a net—and then they were wrenched through the air, skipping off the surface of the creek like a flat rock. In the darkness, a tremendous slashing accompanied them, and then they were gone, vanished into the night and woods beyond the creek.
Anderson dropped to his knees. “Mina,” he whispered. “Oh, baby, I’ll find you. I’ll find you.”
* * *
It took him fifteen minutes to find Lars in the devastation of the camp. He’d only been a boy during the Civil War, but he’d grown up hearing stories of what cannon-fire did to a man, and he could only imagine that whatever that blue flash was, it put a cannon to shame. No noise, no explosion: just pure carnage. Half the gang’s horses had been reduced to scraps by it. Fat Malone had a horse hoof driven through his chest by the force of the blast.
Lars lay under the body of a tall man with the tooled boots of a dandy. Even in the dull glow of the dying fire, Anderson could see the neatly scorched circle on the back of the dandy’s fringed leather jacket. It was as if a hot awl had punched right through the man’s body, and when Anderson rolled away the dandy’s corpse, he saw without surprise that the hole continued through Lars. The look of surprise on the deputy’s face suggested death had been more surprising than painful. Anderson closed Lars’s eyes.
Anderson’s own insides felt hollow. He was alone. He had lost Lars. He had lost Mina. He knuckled his eyelids.
“Help.”
Anderson went still, listening. The voice had been very small.
“Help me!”
He turned back toward the campfire, where a heap of supplies and what must have been a tent or two lay smoking. The heap shook, and a bag of coffee slid to the ground. Anderson began tossing aside saddlebags. A bottle of whiskey smashed as he flung it aside.
The kid Indian sat up. Blood ran down the side of his face. He clutched his head and hissed.
“You okay?”
The kid tried to nod, made a face. Up close, he wasn’t quite as young as Anderson had first made him out to be— but he was maybe eighteen at the oldest. The kid looked around the stinking, blasted camp. “What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“There was a light. The horses—” The kid stopped. He looked sick. “What the hell can do that kind of thing?”
“I don’t know.” Anderson turned a bag of beans onto its side and plopped down on it. The rush of energy fear had given him had burned out, and now the long tense day had caught up with him. It wouldn’t be long until morning. He wanted nothing more than to close his eyes and sleep for a couple of hours, but he knew he couldn’t. Mina was out there somewhere. He had to find her.
“You’re the safecracker.”
“Yeah.”
The kid turned in a slow circle, studying the camp. He stooped beside the fire, studying something in the dirt. Whatever it was, he pocketed it. “Where’s your little girl?”
“Something got her. Her and McBurnie. It took them across the creek.” Anderson thought about standing up, kept sitting. “I’ve got to track them down.”
“What do you know about tracking, city slicker?”
McBurnie must have told the gang about finding him on the streets of San Francisco and taking him in. He narrowed his eyes at the kid. “I know enough.”
The kid snorted. “I heard you crashing through the brush over there, trying to hide behind that cottonwood. If you knew anything about tracking, you would have managed a little better than that.”
“So you’re a tracker.”
The kid pulled a bag of tobacco out of his pocket. “No shit.”
“Why didn’t you turn me in when you saw me?”
The kid shrugged. He bit off a twist of chaw and began turning it between his front teeth like a knot of spruce gum.
Anderson studied him a moment or two. The kid was observant, that was for sure. Anderson had to admit to himself that without Lars’s help, he was going to have a hard time finding where that net had taken McBurnie and Mina. He hadn’t caught even a glimpse of the men behind the attack, hadn’t heard any horses, hadn’t seen anything. The only thing he could be sure of was the net—the net and some goddamn terrifying firepower.
“I want to hire you to help me track down my girl. Whatever your price is, I’ll pay it.”
The boy shot a string of spit into the campfire. “Hell, no. You see what those bastards did to this camp? You really want to have a run-in with men like that?”
“With a tracker like you, I won’t have to have a run-in.” Anderson got off his sack of beans and stood in front of the kid. “Those bastards have my little girl. I know you think that’s wrong. Otherwise, you would have turned me in the second you saw me behind that cottonwood.”
“Shit.” The kid got to his feet. “It won’t be cheap.”
“How much?”
“Ten dollars.”
“How much?”
“Ten dollars.”
It would mean digging up his cache beneath Bess’s sycamore, but that didn’t matter. He’d been saving that money for Mina. If something happened to her, that silver may as well rot.
“It’s a deal.” Anderson put out his hand. “What’s your name, son?”
The kid shifted his plug of chaw into his cheek. “Billy Novak. And I ain’t your son, Sheriff. Let’s keep this business only.”
“All right, Mr. Novak. Get your gear and we’ll go back to my camp for horses.”
“Wait a second.” Novak held out his hand. “You should have this.”
The corn dolly sat on his palm, ash-streaked and crumpled, but still whole. Anderson felt a surge of gratitude.
“Thanks.”
The kid grinned. “You’re damn lucky to have me.”
* * *
As the sun nosed up over the hills, Novak helped Anderson wrap Lars in the remnants of the gang’s tents. There’d be time to bury him later, Anderson promised himself. He and the kid piled the gang’s gear around the grisly bundle. He hoped it would be enough to keep the body safe from buzzards and vultures until he could take better care of it.
After that business, it was a relief to walk away from the camp. In the dark, it had been bad. In the cold light of dawn, it was worse. Every bit of sand and stone had been pelted with blood and meaty bits. The stink was impossible. Anderson’s stomach, luckily empty, turned around itself. He changed course, hurrying toward the place where he’d left his horse.
“Wait,” Novak whispered, holding Anderson back.
A body lay in the shallows. A big man, taller than Anderson and twice as wide. He clawed at the mud and then fell back, gasping.
Novak’s eyes narrowed. “Piss-Bucket.” His hand went to his cheek, where a second fresh bruise shone.
Anderson waded to the big man’s side and grabbed the back of his collar. “Morning, Piss-Bucket.” He hauled him a foot higher up the beach. He’d never liked Piss-Bucket Johnson, not even when they’d worked together. He hadn’t recognized the fat man when he’d knocked Anderson into the creek last night, but he wasn’t surprised he’d run away in the middle of a fight.
He glanced at Novak. The kid folded his arms against his chest, his face dark. Anderson remembered his own time in the gang. Piss-Bucket Johnson had his own way of making life hell for a teenaged boy.
Piss-Bucket groaned. Anderson worked his boot into the man’s fleshy ribs and flipped him onto his back. The smell of burned meat overpowered Piss-Bucket’s eponymous aroma. The remnants of his coat and shirt hung in rags off his scorched chest.
“What happened?”
Piss-Bucket’s eyes shot open. His mouth opened and closed, fish-like, as he gasped in pain and fear. His burns were too severe for him to last much longer. Any other man, Anderson might have felt bad for.
“A ghost,” Piss-Bucket gasped. “A ghost!”
“What’s he saying?”
Anderson slapped the fat man’s face. “What did you see, Johnson?”
“A ghost.” Piss-Bucket’s eyes fluttered, then widened again. “I saw a ghost wading through the crick. An invisible ghost, splashing around.” He twitched, jerked.
“I didn’t see anything,” Novak mused. “Not a thing.”
“A ghost!” Piss-Bucket went stiff and then his head fell back.
“Good riddance,” Anderson said.
Novak drove his boot into the fat man’s side. “Yeah.”
They didn’t say anything else until they were well away from the campsite and its horrors, the warm September sun drying the clothes they’d rinsed in the creek. Anderson kept slipping in and out of memory, the bad old days with the gang weaving into moments from Mina’s childhood. He’d tried so hard to grow up and be a decent man for her, only to have his past come back and bite him in the ass.
“I didn’t see anything,” Novak said again. “I thought it was just the darkness, the explosion, the noise. But now I wonder about it.”
“You’re not saying Piss-Bucket was right about you being attacked by a ghost.”
Novak shook his head. “No, of course not. If a spirit wanted revenge against McBurnie, it wouldn’t have carried him off in a net.”
Anderson couldn’t argue with that logic.
“Plus, spirits don’t leave footprints, and whoever’s dragging that net definitely is.”
“What?”
Novak pointed to the ground. “I haven’t even had to get off my horse—that net is leaving more traces than a mama grizzly on a rampage. But that there is definitely a footprint.”
Anderson pulled up his mare and dismounted. Novak joined him on the ground. “You sure it’s a footprint?” He’d never seen a print like this in his life. No man’s foot had ever been this shape. The toe area was far too wide, and the whole thing was nearly twice as long as Anderson’s.
“Maybe it’s some new kind of caulk boot?” Novak pointed out the strange indentations around the footprint, punctures in the earth like nothing so much as the imprint of four forward-pointing claws and one backward one.
Anderson raised an eyebrow.
“Hey, just trying to make sense of what I’m looking at.” Novak gave the print one last look and then got back in his saddle. “I think it’s headed into the next canyon.”
“At least it’s away from town and the mining camps.” Anderson frowned. He knew that canyon all too well: he’d helped Lars move cattle through it every fall.
And Eva was bringing the herd there today.
* * *
The canyon followed the creek for two miles before it began to widen, the hills peeling back to let the sun play on the packed surface of the Nielssen’s road. Novak kept his eyes on the ground, following the scuff marks the invisible attackers had left. Anderson had chafed at waiting for sunrise, but he knew even a good tracker would have lost the trail in the dark. If the invisible men had left the creek and gone into the hills, they would have just vanished.
Anderson opened the gate that marked the end of Lars and Eva’s property. The big field stretched out ahead of them, the most open stretch of ground for miles. Here the net holding McBurnie and Mina had cut a swathe even Anderson could follow.
A massive rumbling shook the ground, followed by a horrible clank and whine. Then the field went silent again.
“What the hell was that?” Anderson slammed the gate behind him and climbed back on his horse.
“Some kind of engine maybe? It doesn’t sound like it’s working very well.” Novak patted his horse’s neck. The mare was high stepping, its nostrils flared. Anderson had never seen the creature look so nervous. “I don’t like it. The trail goes over to that side of the field and then just stops.”
A white horse caught Anderson’s eye. Its rider was pushing it hard. He recognized the diminutive figure in the saddle from her slight build and the blue scarf tying her hat on tight.
“John,” Eva called out, still a good ways away. “Where’s Lars?”
A quail shot up from the ground, startled by the horse, and she cut toward the edge of the field to avoid the beating wings. The flapping cut the air like gunfire, and just like that she was gone. No horse, no rider, just grass and sky. The quail soared away, tiny as a sparrow.
“Eva!” Anderson burst into a run. Had she fallen into a sinkhole? Had the ground simply swallowed her whole? “Eva!”
With a resounding clang, the top of his head hit something hard and he toppled backward into the grass. He lay still, his head spinning. His neck felt as if it had been stretched double.
“John, are you all right?” The woman knelt beside him, her craggy face worried. She held up three fingers. “How many fingers?”
“Four. No, damn it.” He tried to sit up and let his head fall back again. “Three. What are you doing out here?”
“Looking over the field before we move the herd.” As if in response, somewhere farther up the canyon a cow let out a bellow. “I’ve got Smokey and Gene rounding them up in the upper field.”
Anderson winced. Here he was, laid out cold, and in a couple of hours, this field would be filled with cattle. He and Novak didn’t have much time to search out where they’d lost the net and its owner.
The kid Indian’s face filled his field of vision. “It’s a ghost wagon.”
“What the hell is this kid talking about? You’re the one who hit your head, but he’s the one talking crazy,” Eva growled.
Anderson forced himself upright. He rubbed the side of his aching neck. “What do you mean, Novak?”
“Piss-Bucket called it a ghost, the thing that attacked us last night. Remember? And I didn’t see anything. Not a thing.”
“You two are looking for a ghost?” Eva looked from one to the other. “And where the hell is my husband?”
“Oh, Eva.” Anderson reached for her wrinkled hand. He told her what happened during the night. His eyes filled up with salt. Lars was gone. His friend and deputy was really, really gone.
She pulled her hand out of his grasp and covered her face. For a moment, she was motionless. Then she brushed her cheeks dry. She gave a fierce sniff.
“I’m so sorry, Eva.”
She shook her head. “There’ll be time for that later. Your little girl is still out here somewhere. We’ve got to find her before something happens to her.”
“I think I know where she is,” Novak said.
Anderson had almost forgotten about him. He turned around to see the kid lying on his belly, his face close to the ground.
“The soil’s dry enough it doesn’t take much of a print, and the ghost was walking careful here. It wasn’t dragging the net at this point.” He pointed at something Anderson couldn’t make out. “He stood here a moment, waiting for something.” The kid sprang to his feet. “I can picture it.”
“What?” Eva snapped.
“I spent some time on the docks when we were in ’Frisco,” Novak said. He jumped back a few feet, nodding. He pointed to a patch of broken grass, then a gopher hill. “I’m sure you did, too, Anderson, back when you were a kid.”
Anderson got to his feet. “Yeah. So? What’s your point?”
“The ships put out a gangway so they can load up their cargo, right? Like a big tongue coming out of the ship.”
Eva got up, running her hands along the air beside her, stroking something she could feel even if she couldn’t see it. “A ghost gangway for a ghost wagon.”
“Right!” Novak grinned at her. “I was doing the same thing, Mrs… erm…”
“You can call me ‘Eva.’” She rounded a corner and the top half of her disappeared. “You can’t see it, but you can feel it.”
Anderson put out a tentative hand. “A ghost wagon.” He stroked the side of the thing. A slippery kind of warmth bit at his palm. He could feel his nerves crackling in his skin, as if he’d touched a very tame form of lightning. “You’re saying Mina and McBurnie got loaded up in this invisible ship like a load of beaver pelts.”
“Yeah.”
“We’ve got to get in there.” The angry cow bellowed again. It sounded closer. Anderson smacked his hand against the invisible ship. They didn’t have time for this shit.
Eva reappeared. “How? There’s not exactly a door to knock on.”
Novak grinned. “I might have an idea.”
* * *
The back end of Eva’s herd looked more formidable than Anderson remembered. The times he’d ridden beside Lars urging his cows into the big field, the work had seemed boring, frustrating, the mass of cattle a wall of balky, plodding flesh. Now Anderson saw them as Novak had described them: a wall, alright, but a wall that could pulp a man in its path. A wall that could break open anything, even a ghost wagon.
Novak grew up listening to stories about walls of flesh like that. His Shasta grandmother had married a Sioux miner who’d come down out of the Dakotas looking for gold in the rush of 1849. The great herds of buffalo dotting the Dakota plains dwarfed Eva’s herd by a thousandfold. His grandfather had been only a boy when he’d helped process the massive meat harvests, but he’d never forgotten it, and now Novak wanted to repeat history.
“They call it a ‘buffalo jump.’ They’d just stampede the buffalo right off a cliff,” he explained. “Like a waterfall of animals.”
Eva had held up a hand. “Is this going to wipe out my herd? I’m counting on taking these to auction next week.”
Novak shook his head. “You felt what the ghost wagon is like. Top heavy. When the beeves hit it, they’ll knock it over. At the speed they’ll be running, it ought to smash right open.”
“What if that doesn’t do anything?” Anderson asked. “Or what if Mina gets hurt?”
“You got a better idea?” Novak shot.
Anderson had to admit he didn’t. Even right now, facing three hundred head of cattle, he couldn’t think of anything.
He swiveled in his saddle. Novak stood beside a long, low heap of straw and wood that all but closed off this end of the field. He gave Anderson a nod and struck a match.
Everything was ready. Anderson pulled out his revolver and shot three times into the air, startling the animals nearby. Novak dropped the match into the straw.
The match hit the dry tinder and caught immediately. In less than a minute, flames began to run along the side of Novak’s firewall. Anderson shot at the sky again, but it wasn’t necessary. The cattle were already surging forward.
Anderson urged his horse forward. The pounding hooves vibrated his very bones. Eva’s hired hands whooped and waved torches, encouraging the cows into the side of the field where the ghost wagon sat.
The terrible grinding and whining sound repeated itself, frightening the cows into a more desperate run. A blue crackling lit up the first wave of cattle.
For a second, Anderson hardly understood what he was seeing. Something had appeared where the invisible wagon ought to be, a vehicle twice the size of a Conestoga wagon with a smooth, arched back. But what dazzled his brain was the gigantic man emerging from the trap door in its roof. His hair—was it hair?—swirled around his strangely deformed face as he sighted down the ugliest rifle Anderson had ever seen.
Bolts of white light shot out at the first wave of cattle. A cow’s skull burst. The animals screamed and ran even faster.
They hit the ghost wagon in a crash and shriek of metal and hooves. Anderson covered his ears, reeling at the sound.
The giant man—no, by God, that face couldn’t belong to a man—appeared in the middle of the herd, firing lightning bolts like a god with a vendetta. Anderson’s revolver was suddenly in his hand. The tusked monster’s head was a hell of a lot bigger than a can of tobacco.
The revolver bucked in his grip and the thing dropped. The cows trampled on, headed for the open grass.
“Mina!” Anderson dug his heels into his horse’s side. The river of cattle had flowed on by the ghost wagon, and he had to get inside.
He didn’t bother tying his horse, he just jumped off, running right into the dark mouth of the wagon’s hatch.
It was as if he’d entered the steaming mouth of hell. A low red light suffused the space, and a dense, acrid fog filled the air.
“What the hell is this?” Novak whispered. Anderson hadn’t heard the scout catch up with him.
“Mina!” Anderson shouted.
Novak shook his arm. “Look.” The kid pointed to a clear box lying at their feet. “That’s a man’s, ain’t it?”
The raw meaty thing in the box took a moment to resolve into a familiar shape. If Anderson hadn’t helped Lars with the butchering, he might not have recognized the string of knobby bones running into the still-bloody skull. How you got a man’s spine out of his body without disconnecting it from his skull, Anderson didn’t want to know.
“Anderson! That you? Help me!”
McBurnie’s voice came from the other side of the strange cargo hold. Novak kicked aside a pile of boxes full of more bloody trophies, revealing a black crate made of some slick material Anderson couldn’t identify. A few narrow slits revealed McBurnie huddled within. He pushed his fingers out through one of the gaps, desperate for human touch.
“Is Mina in there?”
“I don’t know what that thing did with her.”
Anderson dropped to his knees. “Oh, God. Mina.”
“Daddy?” A tiny figure popped out from a dark spot in the wall—an open cabinet or a ventilation shaft, maybe. “Daddy!”
Dirt coated every inch of his little girl, but when he swept her into his arms, she felt whole. She trembled and clung to him.
“Mina.” The voice came from behind them.
Anderson spun around. The figure silhouetted in the open hatch was far too large to be human. Novak reached for his rifle.
“Mina,” the thing repeated, its voice a perfect mimic of Anderson’s. It stepped inside but made no move toward them. It took another step sideways, moving into the darkness beyond the foggy cargo space. “Mina,” it said yet again.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Anderson said.
“Wait! Don’t leave me,” McBurnie begged. His fingers closed on the fabric of Novak’s jeans.
Novak wrenched away. “I’m done with you, McBurnie, you murdering, kidnapping bully.”
Anderson grabbed Novak’s arm. “Let’s go!”
The creature made some kind of sound as they passed it by, but they were moving too fast to understand if it was words or a threat or some bizarre alien call.
They burst into the sunshine, gasping for air. The hatch closed behind them. There was another horrible grinding, whining sound, and then a rushing whoosh. The ghost wagon vibrated and shook. Then it leaped into the air. It hovered for a moment, and then it streaked into the sky, a bird, a star, gone.
Eva walked toward them, her face streaked with smoke. “You all okay?”
Anderson nodded, not sure of his voice. Not sure of his eyes. What had he seen in there? What did that thing want with McBurnie? Why hadn’t it hurt Mina? The whole day and night had the weird unreality of a nightmare.
Mina squeezed her arms tighter around his neck. “I knew you’d come for me, Daddy.”
He tightened his grip on her. He’d changed his life to give her a better one, and his past had nearly gotten her killed. He wasn’t sure if he deserved any of her faith, but at least he hadn’t let her down. “I love you.”
Novak looked from Eva to Anderson. “Either of you have any whiskey? Because I sure could use some.”
Eva laughed and put her arm around the kid’s shoulder. “You’re all right, Novak.”
“Yeah, but now I don’t have a job.”
Anderson looked up from kissing Mina’s head. Eva was giving him a hard look.
He’d been just like Billy Novak once, a lost, scared kid looking for a better life. And Lars Nielssen had convinced the town of Coyote Creek to give him one.
“I’m down a deputy,” he said. “And I could use someone who knows a thing or two about tracking.”
Novak’s mouth opened and closed, but no words came out. Anderson understood. It was a big jump from outlaw to law enforcement.
While the boy flapped, Anderson settled Mina onto his horse. “I brought something of yours.”
He pulled the corn dolly out of his pocket and watched her cover it with kisses. The smile on her face could’ve touched the heart of any kind of monster. He glanced at the sky.
Any kind of monster.