It was a good thing ghosts were tireless. Because as much as it hurt, as tired as he got, Doc never had to let go and rest. Even dead, Doc couldn’t swing any fifteen-pound hammer, but he could hold the spike and trust John not to miss, and together they could bust this dam.
John never missed. His face got shinier and sweat flew from his fists and elbows and chin with each roundhouse swing, and the chips flew and the cracks shivered wider and wider with each blow, until a trickle of water no wider than a pencil slipped inquisitively through. A moment later it was a geyser, finger-thin and jetting with enough force to cut a man in half, Doc thought, if he were unfortunate enough to step before it.
“John,” Doc bellowed, and John pulled his hammer back again.
John hesitated. “The dam’s not through, Mister Holliday.”
“John, it’s time to stop. The dam will take itself down now. All it needs is a crack. We need to climb out of here now.” Doc took one hand off the spike, and let it sag. He put that hand out to touch the ropes of the high-scaler’s swing they’d used to come down.
“It won’t fall fast enough,” John said, watching the edges of the crack he’s made flake away in the running water. “It’s gotta come down now.” He hefted his hammer. “And Mister Holliday, this is how my story ends. Always has, always will. I win and I die.”
Doc tossed the spike aside, heard it ring and saw it roll on cement before it settled. “You’re already dead, you damn fool. I’m not going to be a party to you blotting yourself out because you think it’s how the story goes. Maybe we need a better god-damned story.”
“Mister Holliday, you better get on that high-scaler’s chair,” John said. “Jackie and the others, they’re going to need you.”
Unwillingly, Doc retreated. “John—”
“Mister Holliday, I’d get in that chair if’n I was you, sir.”
“Dammit, John,” Doc said. “Call me Doc, would you?”
“Give me a cool drink of water before I die,” John Henry said, and turned away to raise his hammer.
Doc scrambled for the high-scaler’s chair as John Henry brought his hammer down.
One-Eyed Jack and the Hungry Land.
Saint Thomas, Nevada. Summer, 2002.
Up at the Valley of Fire, there’s an overhang called the Atlatl Rock. It was marked with a road sign by the Anasazi, when the Anasazi were still here—before the Mojave ate them, too. The archaeologists are very careful to explain that they don’t know the meaning of the petroglyphs, but they seem pretty plain to me, and probably would to anyone who’s ever studied a five-year-old’s drawing.
They were meant to be plain.
The river is that way, it says, and it’s a good long walk. Here is yucca, and here is desert, and here are men, and there is meat if you can catch it. Bring water. The sun is hot, and the desert will kill.
As I said, pretty plain.
As plain as Tribute’s voice raised up in song, and the rattle of his chains in time to the ghostly thunder of John Henry’s hammer, ringing the thirty or forty miles from the dam as loud as if he were hammering just up the bluff. The opposition had to be able to hear it; there were no two ways.
The spies went left towards Main Street; I scurried forward toward the church, trying to figure out some fragment of magic I could work to keep a vampire from smoking and burning on hallowed ground. I had nothing; calling up ghosts was just a matter of knowing how. Most ghosts don’t mind being called, or they wouldn’t be ghosts. It was working
with
the essential nature of things, rather than working against.
But hallowed ground rejected vampires for the same reason sunlight did—as the body fights infection. And the primal underpinnings of the universe weren’t something I felt empowered to tackle just then.
I crouched against the foundation, nerving myself and thinking. If subtlety was removed, that left brute force.
Very well.
So mote it be.
Tribute’s singing voice sounded strained, and the crack of the hammer and the rattle of the chains came faster. I edged up over the foundation and stole a quick look. He had a rhythm going, throwing all his weight against the chains, propelled by the strong muscles of butt and thighs. Putting his back into it, face squinched up with effort, grunting between lines of his song as the assassin popped up over the wall on the far side of the church and drew a bead. Not at Tribute. Past Tribute.
At me.
Tribute threw himself at the chain again. A bolt cracked and he sagged. He was grimy and smeared, black fluid running down over his hands, caked blood or mud or both plastered across his face and through his hair. He looked up at the assassin, gave a funny little shake of his head, like a cat, and heaved at the chains one more time.
Before I knew what I was doing, I was over the wall and running toward Tribute, trusting to luck because luck was all I had. The assassin’s bullet stung my neck; I wondered if it had nicked anything important, but there wasn’t time to worry about it, because Tribute’s chains came free and he fell backwards, and I could smell scorching flesh as strongly as if flames were curling around him. Another bullet whined by, a different sound than the assassin’s gun, and as I got my hands into the collar of Tribute’s leather coat I glanced up and saw James standing there, sideways for a narrow profile, his confiscated pistol in his hand, firing as coolly and calmly as a cowboy laying out tin ducks at a shooting gallery.
The assassin ducked, and I got Tribute over my shoulder—and damn, he was light as a feather pillow, a leather sack of bones and knotted silk scarves and no flesh at all to speak of—and ran for the wall while James, frowning under his bowler, laid down covering fire. I felt something snap as I vaulted over the wall with the vampire slung over my back dragging chains, bouncing and rattling, and dove into the tamarisk on the other side. I couldn’t have said what it was, just then, but it felt like—it felt like when you straighten a locked-up elbow, and it pops, and it hurts so bad, but somehow at the same second it feels better all at once, and the range of motion comes back like it was never locked at all.
Only on a cosmic scale.
James was beside me almost instantly, dragging Tribute under cover until Tribute got his feet under him and helped drag himself. “No good,” the vampire said. “Sun will be up in fifteen minutes. But I appreciate the thought.”
I thought of the Mylar and packing blankets back at the van, and cursed. Nearby, a machine gun rattled, and we all hunched down into the tamarisk, although not so much as a wood splinter grazed us. It’s amazing how fast you can learn respect for automatic weapons.
James nudged me and said, “Did you have a look down those wells, Jack?”
“Wells?” Tribute looked up.
“More like cisterns,” James said. “They’ve a narrow wellhead, but the underground chamber is perhaps four or five feet in diameter, judging by the echoes. Bigger than the well shaft, in any case—”
“Sir, I could kiss you,” Tribute said, and smiled, showing chiseled teeth behind black, bleeding lips. And then he glanced at me. “You’re bleeding, Jackie.”
I swallowed and touched the graze on my neck. Slick fingers and a wet collar, but not much more than that. “It’s not bad. Do you need? . . . ”
“Lord, don’t offer,” the vampire said, and drew his knees up. “It ain’t like in the movies, Jackie—and not with my mouth bleeding, even if it were. Already enough damned vampires in this town.” A sad attempt at humor, and even he couldn’t manage a laugh. He held his blistered hands up to his blistered face, and sighed. “Just a minute, I’ll be fine. I’ll stick around as long as the night holds—”
“Don’t put yourself out,” I said, and patted his shoulder.
When he lowered his hands, he looked better. “I’ve got to get these chains off,” he said.
James crouched beside him, a bent thread of wire in his hand. “I can do that.”
While he worked, Tribute struggled out of the shredded leather coat, and left it lying on the ground. “Did you feel the dam break?” he asked me.
I blinked. “Is that what that was?”
“John Henry, right?”
I nodded, and it struck me to wonder what the ghost of a river could do to the ghost of a man. “Yeah. I’m not sure—“
Well, I couldn’t say I wasn’t sure if he survived, now, could I? I bit my tongue, and shook my head. “I’m not sure.”
The manacle on Tribute’s left wrist opened under James’s ministrations, and he grimaced and rubbed it with his right, and looked down. “I’m not sure either,” he said, and then he hummed a note and murmured, “A man ain’t nothing but a man.”
And then something else hit me, and I looked over at James and frowned. “Hey. Wasn’t Stewart with you?”
The American and the One-Shot Kill.
Somewhere in Saint Thomas, Nevada. Summer, 2002.
Sebastian didn’t like the tamarisk thicket one bit. It covered smell and sound, the head-high feathery stalks as obscuring as August corn. You couldn’t even crawl under it well; the fronds touched the ground and the stalks grew close together, so it was difficult to force a path between them and you couldn’t quite see where you were going, anyway. The twigs broke into spikes; it was like pushing through a rose thicket.
But he was following his partner, and he’d cheerfully follow Nikita into hell.
They were still only halfway around the church when the gunfire started. Sebastian heard the hammering clearly by then, and he recognized and approved the defiance in Tribute’s singing. He slid his replacement weapon into his hand as he came up into a crouch. It was a Sig P-229, an ugly, plastic-handled, rectangular chunk of metal as unlike his own elegant Walther as a tank was unlike a fighter jet, but Stewart had assured him it was also more durable and more accurate, and he wasn’t going to complain about .40 caliber loads.
He had a feeling he was going to miss the silencer before the night was out. And he wasn’t sure he was comfortable with the semiautomatic’s lack of a safety lever, even as he took advantage of the rattle of Tribute’s chains to squeeze the trigger once, cocking the weapon against immediate need. Oh, hell, it was probably just as well, with the unaccustomed way his hands were shaking. He glanced up to see his partner doing exactly the same thing with an identical weapon.
He grinned as Nikita’s eyes came up and met his. He pointed left, around the foundation. Nikita nodded and gestured him on. “Age before beauty,” he murmured, caressing the butt of his pistol with something suspiciously like affection.
“Got a new crush?” Sebastian asked as he sidled past, and Nikita snorted.
“It’s a craftsmanlike weapon,” he said. “I think we’ll get along—Sebastian.”
Sebastian froze with one foot raised. “Partner?”
Nikita pointed with his chin, and hissed. “
Stewart
.”
Sebastian peered through the gray predawn, and only picked out Stewart’s black-clad form when he turned at Nikita’s call and the whites of his eyes flashed in the dark. Stewart gestured them forward and down with an abrupt hooked gesture, and Sebastian went, Nikita crouched beside and slightly behind him half a second later.
“Where’s James?”
“Covering Tribute,” Stewart said. He had a firearm in his hand as well, a weapon that looked like it was manufactured by Tupperware, from a company Sebastian had never heard of. Still, Stewart seemed happy to have it.
“And you’re covering James?”
The genius nodded. “Smart boy. Where’s Jackie?”
Sebastian looked at Nikita for support. Nikita was studiously ignoring him. “He, ah—”
Gunfire cut him off, and before he could finish, Stewart said “Aw, shit,” and rocked up on his toes, scurrying crabwise through the tamarisk without a sideways glance. Sebastian sighed and followed him, knowing Nikita would be at his heels.
He heard the opposition pushing through the tamarisk, secure in the killing potential of their automatic weapons, and wished he dared pick off a couple.
Yep, it was a fact. He missed his silencer, and the flash suppressor, too.
Stewart lead them toward what must have been the front of the church. They arrived in time to see a familiar figure swing down off the steps and bolt into the tamarisk, clamshells crunching under his shoes. Nikita dropped one knee, raised his pistol, and squeezed off two shots despite the danger. Sebastian didn’t think he hit the assassin, but he did draw a couple of bursts of automatic weapon fire, for which Stewart cursed him good-naturedly as they flattened themselves once more.
Sebastian tasted chipped mud. Tamarisk bark showered his head; he caught a glimpse of muzzle flash through the thicket, peered through the fixed sights of the Sig and fired at the same moment Stewart did. A double-tap apiece, and at least one of them hit because the next burst out of that gun arced skywards and ended with the slumped thud of a falling body.
“Lucky shot,” Nikita said, and wormed his way toward the foundation. “Sun’ll be up soon.”
His tone was conversational. Stewart snorted in answer. “Did Jackie get the bloodsucker out?”
“On three,” Nikita said, and as Sebastian held his breath and watched for any sign of hostile movement in the thicket, he popped up, glanced over the wall, and dropped. A three-shot burst slit the vacated space. “Nobody in the church,” Nikita said, as Stewart returned fire. “I want one of those AR-15s.”
“M16,” Stewart corrected. “A1, I think. We’re lucky they’re not A2s. The older flash suppressor doesn’t work so well.”
“I want one anyway,” Nikita said, dryly.
Stewart barked a laugh. “Let’s get you one, then. You saw where I drilled that guy?”
“Where
who
drilled him?” Sebastian asked. It was starting to feel right, again; he could sense the energy flowing, the banter, the adrenaline. His hands stopped shaking. He knew how to do this.
“Go on three,” he said, for Stewart’s benefit, not Nikita’s. Nikita wouldn’t need to be told.
He weighed the unfamiliar Sig in his hand and stood, laying down fire as Nikita gathered himself and ran. The second machine gunner stood, just a few feet away from where he’d been last time, and Sebastian unloaded what was left in the clip into his chest as Nikita dove for the first casualty’s weapon.