Westward Weird (InCryptid), page 10
“I’ve heard talk about this,” John said. “I expect Boss Cooper has heard, too. I don’t imagine those gunfighters in his employ will take kindly to your preaching war against the Company.”
“It’s ain’t war,” the other man said. “It’s revolution. It’s freedom! The Company ain’t never done nothing for us but eat our lunch. Imagine what we can do without them. We’re running the Company’s looters and enforcers out of Acidalium for good. Tonight. We got to hit them before the cargo-ship leaves, before the new Company men get dug in. We’re planning to ship all the Company men back to Earth where they belong, at least the rotten ones. But we need more men to make that happen.” He looked intently at John.
Keep out of this, John. A little breeze gave John the excuse to look away from the man’s piercing green eyes and set his solar compass onto his papers to keep them from blowing away.
“We need men with guns,” Lucius said. “I know you’re no fan of the Company since what they did to Billy.”
John remained quiet. He peered through his scope alidade to pick out the red-iron balls he had discovered atop the mesa. His mouth tasted of rust.
“I respect you wanting your solitude. I’ve respected how you stay out of things. But you know we need boys like you. Boys who harbor in their hearts hate for the Company. And more than that…” He gestured at John’s gun-belt. “I heard tell that you know how to use those Peacemakers. I heard—”
John abruptly turned to face the man. He savagely pulled down his own bandana so he could speak more clearly. His face felt on fire.
“What did you hear, Lucius?”
Lucius was about to speak, then looked down.
“I don’t know, John,” he finally said, quietly. His face was shadowed beneath his hat. “None of us really know what to do with these.” He fondled his pistol’s old hardwood grip.
Stolen by Chinamen to start a war, said John’s father.
“But those enforcer boys,” Lucius said, “they know what to do with theirs.”
“That’s right, Lucius, they do. You’ve gotten a bunch of ranchers and miners and Chinese box-haulers all riled up so they’re willing to make a stand against the Company’s gunfighters. What do you expect will happen? Even if you kill them all, then what? The Company will just send a new crew when the cargo-ship comes back again in a couple of months. Are you going to kill every new enforcer who comes to Mars?”
“There’s no other way!” Lucius’s eyes were bright with angry tears. “Sure, you know what it’s like to lose a father and a brother, but you don’t know what it’s like to lose your baby girl. Martina and I do! Martina’s one dream in life was to raise a family. The Company stole her dream. Ben Perry knows what it’s like to possess a whole city and watch it taken away, the only thing of any worth on his homestead, and now he’ll watch his pretty wife starve to death and his little boy starve to death unless the rest of us do something about it.
“Well, we’re going to do something about it.” Lucius’s cheeks glowed red.
“I implore you,” John said, “don’t do this. Shooting someone never solved anything. It festers like a disease that produces more spite that someone else needs to let out by the blood of another. If you know I can shoot these,” he patted his Colts “you know that I know they don’t solve anything.”
“But your brother! He—”
“He stuck his nose in somebody else’s business.” John felt so angry now he shook. It had been all he could do to heed his father’s words and not go looking for the man who had murdered his brother in the cold. He wanted to repeat his father’s words: You can’t see a man for what he is when you’re pointing a gun at him. But he becomes a man again right quick when you see the pain in his eyes. After he dies, you never stop seeing him that way for the rest of your days.
But all John could manage was, “Guns didn’t do Billy much good.”
“Sometimes you got no choice but to fight,” Lucius said as he began to turn away. “If you’re a man, you’ll lend us your guns tonight. Right after sunset, outside the Company office in Acidalium Town.”
He walked away, retracing his path in the dust.
You’re right to stay out of this, son, said John’s father. It’s not your business. Killing someone doesn’t make you a man.
A breeze began to hiss across the brim of John’s hat. It was a cold summer.
John did not go to town. He sat atop the butte, near a fire made from bundles of dry stalks. Sunset lasted for an hour or more. Rainless storms coming in from the north cast up dust, pink and luminous in the twilight. When the wind settled down, the stars blazed overhead the way they do in fever-dreams, millions of them like milk spilled across a glass sky, white and blue and red like Mars in the daylight. Somewhere up there, one of those blue stars was Earth, source of all that ailed them, where the body of his father lay dead and rotting in the ground, and no amount of killing could ever bring the man back to life.
Daddy, what am I supposed to do? He got no answer.
Later, when his fire had died to cinders and the bitter cold began to claw at his toes and fingers, John heard the unmistakable thunder of a gunfight in the distance. He wondered if it was his imagination getting the better of him, the way he could see Captain Grunwold sitting across the fire, two scabbed-over bullet-holes in his blue Army uniform. The dead man stared at John with unreadable brown eyes, those eyes he could never stop seeing even when he looked away.
John’s father joined them, wispy white hair tousled in the breeze, surrender in eyes sunken from seeing the horrors of too many years in the Army during the Indian Wars. He used to talk about the weight he carried on his conscience. The last thing John’s father had told him, lying on a cot that stank of dried blood, was The West is built on taking away from someone else. I’ve surveyed it all, and it’s nothing but men here now, men so full of greed they’ll climb over anyone who was here first, over women and children even, men so bad their hearts depart their bodies for fear of turning to stone in such hard chests. Ride that Martian ship to the only free place left, where no one has to die or kill to build a home.
Little flashes of light in Acidalium Town told John the thunderstorm existed not just in his mind.
John was glad at that moment for his father’s death prior to seeing even this distant land spoiled by the stony hearts of men.
The next morning, John awoke to the sound of hammering at his cottage door.
“John Mulberry!” shouted a man on the other side of the concrete slab. “You come out here!”
John didn’t recognize the voice, but he could tell there were two other men outside with him. They spoke to one another in hushed tones. John pulled on his coveralls over the liner-underwear he slept in, stepped into the boots that he kept beside the cot, fitted the knitted-wool cap that he kept on the night-stand, strapped on his gun-belt that hung on an iron hook near the bed, and then fitted his deerskin gloves. The man pounded on the door again.
“We know you’re in there. Come out!”
The Martian who’d lived here before John sat pressed into the far corner beneath the one round window, its tentacles quivering, its intelligent black eyes fixed on John’s as he crossed the blue-and-green checkerboard floor to the door. When John first found this cottage, he’d discovered the Martian’s body, dry skin stretched across the globe of its ribs. It had left the heater on and door open when it perished, dumping warmth into the icy fall air. John had buried it at the base of the mesa. A framed photographic print on the front wall portrayed the creature standing upright with its cluster of tentacles supporting it, and beside the thing stood another Martian, half-turned toward the first who looked out at the viewer. It was taken outdoors on the plains. In the distance, a third Martian squatted among blocks in the sand, looking like a fat octopus rather than jellyfish balanced on spidery limbs. The Martian ghost never spoke, but neither did it seem to disapprove of John sharing its cottage. John had left the photograph where he found it out of respect for the dead.
He swung the door open on creaky hinges. He stood on the stoop and evaluated the three men standing in the pale sunshine. Company enforcers, two newly arrived a week ago that he recognized, and the gunfighter Gerry Ake, former bounty hunter out of Oklahoma.
The bastard who shot me dead, said Billy. John’s heart raced.
Their mounts chewed dry creeper leaves down near the Martian’s grave; these long-legged variants of Martian cattle refused to climb slopes such as the staircase carved into the stone of Jacob’s Mesa, though they seemed not averse to bearing men upon their long, narrow backs. John noticed that there were four mounts, though only three men stood before him. John felt a relief, for if they intended to kill him here, they would not have brought him a mount. He reached for the dial beside the door frame, the one that controlled the Martian heaters that kept the place comfortable through the bitter winters. He turned off the heaters.
“John Mulberry, Martian Public Land Surveyor?” said the young blue-eyed enforcer.
“I’m he.”
“You’re a known associate of one Lucius McCrady, settler four miles east of town, and his wife Martina McCrady, former sporting woman from the saloon. They are fugitives from justice, having led a gang what murdered four employees of the Cydonia Company and injured six others.”
“He’s not here, nor is Martina. You’re welcome to look around inside.”
“We ain’t here for them,” said Gerry Ake, stepping forward a bit between the two younger men.
At Ake’s instigation, the blue-eyed enforcer fumblingly drew a battered .44-40 Winchester pistol from its dry leather holster and pointed it at John.
“Put your hands up and get out here!” the boy shouted.
“You aim to shoot me?” The barrel wobbled just a foot from John’s face. “Because it’s a hell of a thing to kill a man and have to live for the rest of your life with the emptiness you manufactured in that act.”
John, look at his hands shake! said John’s brother. You can take him. He ain’t never killed a man.
That’s just it, Billy, John replied. He ain’t never killed a man.
The enforcer boy glanced down at John’s guns, then back into John’s eyes. His rapid breathing made clouds of steam that whipped away in the morning breeze. The cold, dry air of Mars was greedy for the moisture harbored in a man’s lungs.
“You prepared for that?” John asked.
The boy blinked, his Winchester lowering a bit.
“I got no problem killin’ outlaws,” said Gerry Ake. He smiled, baring tobacco-stained teeth, and rested his gloved left hand on the hilt of his Colt .44-40 Bisley target revolver, pristine with mother-of-pearl grips.
“I know you don’t,” said John, raising his hands to chest-level. He didn’t look at the gunfighter. “I wasn’t involved in the shootout you mention.”
“Don’t care,” said Gerry Ake. “Boss wants to talk to you. Now keep your hands away from those Army cannons you like to wear.”
The quiet third enforcer unbuckled John’s gun belt and slung it over a shoulder. John pulled the door to his cottage closed and led the way down his gritty stone steps to the Martian mounts waiting in the gulley below.
When the blue-eyed enforcer beside him stumbled, John said, “You’re new to Mars. It’s best to move deliberately until you find your Mars-feet, else you’ll spend a lot of time brushing dust from your knees.”
They took the long way back to town, riding along the dry gully until it merged with the high country beyond the mesa-land. If a man didn’t want to walk, he let his mount pick its own path. They moved more like dogs than horses, round shoulders and hips rising and falling with each loping stride. The early morning’s bite faded as the sun rose higher into a turquoise-blue sky.
As they approached the last mesa, they could see the vast hull of a Martian cargo-ship, destroyed in a war that burned out before men arrived. It was split open like a steel watermelon hit by a sledge-hammer, the cables and plating of its innards filling with dust and wind-blown brush. In their exploration of the planet, the Army Cavalry men had discovered that the cargo-ship the people of Mars now used to ferry people and materials back and forth to Earth was the only one of some dozen to have survived the Martian civil war. Three ruined vessels still held ten invasion-cylinders each, like huge rounds in a revolver, ready to fire their War-Tripods at Earth.
As they rounded the mesa, more of John’s Town became visible across the plains beyond. Some of the horrible Black Dust that the Martians had used in their invasion of England was still visible in the wind-lee between the buildings, like stubborn shadows. John couldn’t shake the memory of the first time he explored the town: desiccated Martians spilled out of buildings, some shuddering in the streets like terrible tumbleweed. He’d found a corral full of heaped bodies of those simple, man-like creatures, surely no smarter than monkeys, that looked to have starved when their masters died. Scientists back home had determined that the Martians kept them for food: They drank their blood—transfused it, actually. John was glad he never met a live Martian.
What the Martians had done to England was nothing compared to what they had done to themselves. The Black Dust had found its way into every crevice all across Mars. They had flooded their world with the stuff. John’s Martian room-mate had no answer for why they had done this. John wondered if they’d decided to invade Earth because they’d made Mars uninhabitable to their own people, to escape the war, or out of the same breed of self-hatred that makes men keep killing once they start along that path.
As they drew nearer, John was startled to see activity within John’s Town. A dozen or more men were using picks and pry-bars to find their way into the cluster of buildings that weren’t smashed like the rest of the town. Four large Martian horseless carriages waited near the edge of town, floating a few feet above the ground with the power of Mars-stone.
Company men, said brother Billy. Looting your property.
John watched the men carting off equipment that rightly belonged to him. His cheeks grew hot, even in the icy morning breeze.
“What are Company men doing in my town?” he asked.
“That ain’t nobody’s town no more,” said Gerry Ake, a few steps behind him. “New rule is that all Martian technology belongs to the Company.”
“John’s Town is on my homestead claim,” John said.
“Ha! ‘John’s Town,’ eh? Don’t make no difference where it is, that’s the new rules. Anyhow, you got no claim while you’re in custody of the law.”
John felt his heart pound in his throat.
This is what Company men do, said Billy. They grab until there ain’t nothing left, then make new laws so they can grab more. You gonna stand for this, John? Oh, right, you’re done with killing.
How did listening to Lucius and McCrady’s ideas work out for you? asked John. There are other ways to make things right.
Tell that to Gerry Ake, said Billy. Tell that to the nine men and three women he murdered in Oklahoma and Kansas. Tell that to the men he murdered here.
They rode on in silence. A horseless carriage—a big platform with a propeller mounted on the rear—whooshed past them, loaded down with all manner of Martian apparatus looted from his town.
John stared straight ahead for the rest of their journey to Acidalium Town.
“Talk to me about your friends and associates,” said Monty Cooper, Company Boss on Mars. He indicated a swivel chair situated in front of the wide oak desk. “And how you’re not part of their murderous gang.”
John didn’t want to sit. He wanted to face his ruin with as much dignity as he could manage. Gerry Ake and the two young enforcers leaned against the office paneling on the far side of the room, behind John, near the door to Main Street. All this wood—everything in the room, desk, chairs, lithographs on the walls—had been ferried to Mars.
John said nothing. Cooper waited a bit, eyes peering out from his soft face. A breeze rattled the single window-pane that provided a view across the Chinese and Irish laborer shacks surrounding Lowell Space-Port. A storm was brewing from the north, whipping up dust. The laborers pulled their wide-brimmed hats low over faces obscured with masks and bandanas against the weather. Finally Cooper sighed and looked outside.
“Make it easy on yourself, Surveyor,” Cooper said. “We’re planning a hanging tomorrow, and it might as well be McCrady or his whore wife than you. My boys took care of most of their gang, and several of my men were killed or wounded. I notice you bear no injuries. Fancy that.”
“I wasn’t involved in the gunfight,” John said.
“So you say,” said Cooper, nodding. He held John with a piercing stare, then leaned back in an overstuffed green leather chair that creaked beneath his mass. “Can you corroborate that claim?”
Again, John had no answer. He lived alone, as had always been his wont.
Cooper sighed. “Put him in the cell,” he said to Gerry Ake. “John Mulberry, you had better hope that Mr. Ake finds that damned Irishman and his murderous Mexican whore before tomorrow noon, else you’ll be dancing above Main Street.”
John sat on a cold stone slab in the town’s only jail cell. Steel bars separated the tiny space from a door that led to Cooper’s office. The cell smelled of mold and piss. Someone had scratched into the stone the image of a naked lady.
How’s pacifism working for you, brother? asked Billy.
Outside, the storm seemed to be growing fierce until John recognized the sound, not as blowing debris but the steady thumping of a Martian Tripod’s legs against the cobbled street. It grew louder and then stopped outside the building. Soon after, John heard the front door open and close, then voices. The voices grew loud enough for him to hear:
“This ain’t none of your business, nigger!” Gerry Ake’s voice.
John could hear Cooper’s low rumble, then another man’s booming voice: “Yes, it is my business. The U.S. Army is the law here, and that boy you arrested was not in town last night. I saw who was involved in the shootout, and John Mulberry was not.”
