Phantom Drive 1869
by Douglas Christian Larsen
Wind wailed
through the fluted rock configurations, twisting and twining and echoing in a
long drawn-out moan. Four men standing near their mules fidgeted and started uneasily,
glancing and frowning about them. When the wind surged and the low moaning noise
rose above the scrub, the men crowded together, and their mules grew
increasingly uneasy. The steadfast animals could pass a buzzing rattlesnake
without twitching an ear, but the nervousness of the men increasingly spooked
the beasts, and the wind across the red rocks made stranger music still.
“It’s the
wind,” Marshal Diego snapped, startling the men as he suddenly appeared around
the corner of a rocky tower that resembled two giant hands praying. “I don’t
want no stupid talk, boys. You’ve been deputized, and you are official U.S.
Marshals deputies, and that’s how I expect you to behave yourselves. I want you
all to display some backbone.”
“Ain’t a
lawman,” Yon replied, but only half-heartedly, as he gave the marshal a dirty
look from beneath his slouching miner cap. He didn’t like being startled that
way, especially when he knew he was mostly being spooked by the wind. It didn’t
look good to the boys. The boys made their discontent known by spitting tobacco
juice in the general direction of the marshal.
“Well
you’re a man, aren’t you?” Marshal Diego said, the sides of his mouth quirking
out the corners of his huge moustache. He was a tall, thin, hard man, and in
the last several days the men had learned not to push him too far. He was
tough, and good with his fists, and his guns, and you never know which he would
draw. The men did not know if he was laughing at them, or challenging them to
some kind of ruckus, but they all felt way too low in spirit to rise to any
sort of mayhem. Maybe the marshal was just trying to break their spell of
increasing unease. They all just wanted this job to end.
It was
the other man, the one in the long black coat, that spooked them most. The fact
that he was out of sight spooked them more than his lurking presence. This
other man was a Government man from back East, and there was just something
frightening about the glint in his black eyes, and this whole scheme just did
not settle right with the men. Sounded great in Denver City, at a lowly saloon,
half drunk, but out here in Ute country, it got downright eerie.
First
they had come upon the massive excavation beneath the twisted rock formations,
a man-made arroyo that was a vast canyon when you went down deep inside. Maybe
two thousand men could mull around in there without bumping shoulders. A lot of
miners had spent a lot of time excavating all the rock and rubble that was now
piled high above the excavation, on huge posts now strung with dynamite. This
ain’t about cows, Yon thought, sickly. Especially when you considered the vast
amount of explosives planted at the end of seven mini-mines—thirty-foot tunnels
carved in volcanic rock—you knew there was some Government secret involved.
Something they wanted buried, and that would remain buried, forever.
There had
been rumors about the horrors at Gettysburg ever since President Lincoln’s
assassination, and now with the Government looking to fire President Johnson,
it was looking more and more like those rumors were true. Supposedly the man in
black worked for the president waiting in the wings, that general from the war,
Grant.
When
Marshal Diego deputized these miners, they thought they would be setting out as
a posse to run down desperadoes—something exciting—instead they spent the day
here setting charges of dynamite. And the amount they distributed was enough to
bring down a mountain.
When they
were finished with their work, and thinking it might be time to head back to
base camp, the marshal distributed the shotguns.
“It’s
almost night,” Billy said, the youngest man present. He was skinny, raw-boned
and burned by the sun, and only sixteen years of age. He generally ran errands
for the miners, and now his eyes were jerking about, certain he saw lurking
Indians at every bush and tree.
The
oldest man, Bert, a yellow-eyed geezer who was unused to being away from a
bottle this long, coughed, spat out his tobacco and said with real worry in his
quavering voice: “Marshal, it ain’t safe out here at night. The Ute don’t like
us here, this be sacred ground.”
Marshal
Diego laughed. “Well, I don’t know about Indian superstition, but this will be
sacred ground, after the long drive. Gettysburg finally ends, boys, tonight.
That’s the plan.”
“They
really Johnny Reb, that who’s coming?” old-man Bert said in a low voice. He had
not fought in the war, and he did not wish to participate in any delayed
closure to it.
The
marshal was about to speak when his eyes flicked up and he remained quiet. The
men followed his gaze. The man in black sat quietly upon his black horse,
watching them from about twenty yards away.
Everyone
remained still, watching the man in black watching them. The wind moaned
especially loud.
“Guess I
better go and see if he needs anything,” Marshal Diego said, not sounding as
confident as he usually presented to the deputized greenhorns. They thought
they heard him muttering Spanish slings and arrows, things that sounded like pinch hee, or pinchie, as well as some of the more common cuss words that they
all new. His jaw jutted squarely and he set off at a brisk stride, hands
gripping the butts of his twin horse pistols, calling back to the miners:
“Better keep your splatter guns ready, but don’t shoot off any toes.” He might
have laughed, or it might have been the wind.
The
miners grumbled and lifted up their shotguns, each of them checking their loads
and calming their mules and spitting tobacco juice.
Bert
said, “El Capitan’s gone dark. It’s
night, boys.”
“Pikes
Peak,” Stanley, the only educated man in the group, said. “They renamed it
after that soldier went up there. The Spanish and Indians still call it Capitan.”
“Shut up,
perfesser,” Yon snapped. He kept
pacing, shaking his head, glowering and spitting.
The irony
was that Stanley actually was a professor in New York City before he came to
Colorado to try his hand at finding silver and gold. Now, shivering, glancing
nervously up at the peak above them, he wished he had never left New York.
They
could hear the sounds of horses and the marshal and the stranger were no longer
in sight, and the night was now coming on very fast. They thought they might
hear shots, carried on the wind, both rifles and pistols. At the base of the
impossibly tall mountain above them, it was growing cold, and the twisted
shapes of the red rocks seemed to emanate a baleful glow in the twilight.
“What is
it we’re supposed to shoot at with these shotguns?” the kid asked. “I don’t
wanna kill nobody, even bandits.”
“You know
what they said happened at Gettysburg,” Stanley suggested, timidly, as he did
not wish to rile Yon again.
“You mean
about them angels?” Billy said, wide-eyed.
“No! He’s
talkin’ bout the Rebs, how they wouldn’t stop fightin’,” old-man Bert said in a
low voice. “Even after they was dead, they got back up again. They couldn’t
kill Johnny Reb. Sumpin about the slaves they was tryin’ t’keep, and a curse
from Africa.”
“You are
talking about Voodoo,” Stanley said, trying to keep his voice low so as not to
provoke Yon again. “I think that’s what you mean. Voodoo.”
“It’s
cows, idiots, cows we gunnin’ for, that’s all, that’s what the marshal said,
sick cows they drivin’ over from Kansas,” Yon said. That is what they were
told, and Yon needed to cling to the explanation, even though everyone knew it
just wasn’t so, because the boys were giving him the willies, and it was spooky
out here in this weird, twisted landscape. There were many legends about the
Ute in these parts, and Yon did not want to be here, shotgun or no. “The cows
keep fallin’ over, been goin’ on for a while, and they say people who eat’ em start
walkin’ funny, then they die too.”
“Someone’s
comin’!” the kid squeaked, backing into his mule.
They all
heard it, the sounds of horses, jingling spurs, creaking leather, and as the cacophony
of sounds intensified the ground shook, and then up over the rise where the
marshal had gone to meet the stranger came a looming wave of riders on
galloping horses, the riders hollering and whistling. The four men with
shotguns shouted in surprise and backed into their skittering mules, and within
seconds the riders went pounding by, Mexican vaqueros many of them, all shouting
such frightening urgings as: “Cora!
Rapido! Arriba!”
Strangely,
as the riders passed beyond earshot, one last word came drifting back.
Muertos.
Even
though none of the men spoke Spanish, they each had a smattering of miner-speak,
and knew that last word. That was not a good word to hear in this alien
landscape of rocks the color of blood.
“We
should go,” Billy whispered. “I feel something bad, something real bad!”
The
mules, as one, pulled loose from their inept handlers, and sped in the
direction of the retreating riders, and Billy, yanked off his feet was dragged
for more than ten feet by his mule, the boy lost his shotgun and screamed in
terror and pain.
The men
stood around, waving their shotguns, peering into the night, and nobody went to
help the boy as he continued to lie screaming in the scrub brush.
“Get up
here, muy pronto!” came the voice of
Marshal Diego. They could not see him, but it was distinctly his voice, and he
sounded panicked, something they had not witnessed as yet. “You men, up here
now, fast! Rapido! Rapido, you
idiots!”
They
started up the rise. Even Billy shut up, scrambling around to find his weapon
with bleeding hands, and was up dashing behind the men in the dark. There was
no way he was going to wait out here in the dark. He thought he saw
rattlesnakes at every step. And something that was not an owl was making a
weird noise, like a siren calling in the night. As they broached the short
knoll they spotted Marshal Diego with several Union soldiers. Several lamps
revealed two shiny Gatling guns, great big machine weapons on wheels that
looked like nothing more than rings of death, big impossible monsters that
could spit the bullets of a whole army, just two men could do that with these
things, with another two men to load up the bullets.
“Spread
up here,” Marshal Diego commanded, miming with his hands to the four miners,
instructing them to point their shotguns. “If any of the—cattle—get within ten feet of the big guns, here,” he said, patting
the wheel of a Gatling gun, “you use your shotgun. One shot per cow, comprendo? Push it back in with your
boot, if it gets up this high. Don’t touch it. Not with your skin. Understand?”
In his obvious nervousness, he said skeen,
don’t touch it, not with your skeen.
They
nodded, swallowing nervously. Already, they could hear the approach of
something new, echoes of something terrible, reverberating through the ground.
“You
better understand,” the marshal continued, drawing one of his extremely large
horse pistols, “because if you disobey, or turn to run. I shoot you.” He nodded
at them and snapped the pistol back into the holster. “Stay and do you duties,
deputies.”
Many
lamps glimmered down in the excavation, and though nothing could be seen the
length of the channel for about fifty yards, strange shadows flickered in the
dark cavern. There should be crickets, loud symphonies of crickets, but there
was nothing, except for a low moaning noise just at the edge of your hearing,
and everyone was jumpy, eyes huge and rolling. Eyes played tricks in the
haunting light. Shadows seemed more real than the small lights.
A horse
came charging up the channel, the iron-shod hooves sparking on the red rocks.
It was the stranger, the Government man, all dressed in black with his great
coat flapping behind him, his big black hat pulled low over his eyes. He reined
the horse up rearing, and fired back behind him with a very loud pistol, and
then he was riding forward again, toward the group at the top of the knoll. The
Union soldiers began cursing, hunkering down around their guns.
“Exciting
times,” Marshal Diego laughed, drawing both his pistols. “It comes, amigos, it
comes.”
The black
horse came up the steep rise and the man in black erupted over the cusp at the
top. Again he reined in his horse, and dismounted. He led the large stallion
back to a supply wagon and tied the reins there, and came slowly back with a
rifle slung low in his arms
Everyone
peered into the pit.
“What is
that?” Stanley, the ex-professor, inquired as the first shapes came stumbling
into the light of the first lamp below. The other men grumbled, and even the
soldiers at the big guns began a low-pitched complaint.
“Just
wait, and remember these are cattle,” Marshal Diego said, weighing his pistols
up at about neck level, nervously thumbing the hammers halfway back. He looked
excited, almost happy, pretty much up on the pointy tips of his cowboy boots.
Figures
moved in the shadow, some of the shapes looked like people, just people, but
every additional glimpse revealed the wrongness of the figures, the unnatural
movements, the darkness clinging to the shapes, and now you could hear, it was
them, the figures of shadows, making the noise, the terrible growing noise, it
was voices, inhuman voices, cloying, cold, devoid of all empathy and feeling,
it was a noise, a hunger, hunger craving and calling like a siren, come to the
dark, come to the teeth, come.
“That’s
not,” Stanley began, gesturing with his gun. Then retreated a few steps, only
mumbling: “No. I want to. I’m. I’m sorry. But no.”
Stanley
the ex-professor dropped his shotgun and turned and fled back down the path,
away from the lights and the guns and the things below. A shot rang out,
deafening, and the fleeing man dropped to the ground.
Two
soldiers appeared from the shadows and lifted Stanley up, dragged him to the
top of the knoll, and tipped the still squirming man down tumbling into the writhing
darkness below. The man became a scream, and then a violent rush of sounds that
was not screaming, but the edges of sanity where human voices cannot go. And it
seemed he screamed on an on.
“You
can’t just—” Yon began, taking a step backward.
“You are
deputies,” Marshal Diego told them and they stood frozen in their boots. Yon
stopped, and stepped forward again to the edge of the precipice.
The
soldiers began firing, finally, and the impossible mass below kept coming,
stumbling, falling, rising again, hardly impeded by all the gunfire. There were
shapes that must be children, and shapes stumbling forward on stumps, waving
stumps. Like a great creature composed of many parts it crept on thousands of
bare feet up toward where the Gatling guns bucked and fired, the spirals of
smoking barrels clanking around and around, blasts of smoke accompanying the
whirring bullets.
The
Gatling guns fired, each weapon blasting away continuously at 150-180 rounds
per minute, soldiers on each side of the guns loading bullets into the
gravity-fed hoppers. The deputized miners huddled together, lifting their
shotguns more like shields than offensive weapons, and now they could not look
away from the faces turned up to them, the moaning, yearning faces of the
shadows.
After an
hour of continuous firing, the squirming mass of things were only fifty feet from
the top of the excavation. Then the miners fired their shotguns at the beings
attempting to scale the almost sheer cliff face. Mechanically, the miners
loaded, fired, and reloaded, working as if locked inside a night terror from
which they would never awaken.
A
streaming flare shot up into the sky, lighting the whole area, but briefly.
The
churning things below looked up with blank hungry faces. Eye sockets seemed
hollow and cavernous.
The
strange Government man in black stepped forward.
“The last
one is in,” he yelled. “Roll in the stones and then fall back. The other end is
being sealed right now. We have to get around the standing stones before
detonation.”
Soldiers
rolled forward a massive stone taller than a man, and it clumped noisily down
and boomed against rock face as it half-slid and then toppled into the massed
death below. The moaning continued, unbroken, unchanging, hungry and sad and
inhuman.
Everyone
ran, the miners and soldiers and even Marshal Diego. Last came the Government
man on his black horse. Within moments of rounding the towering wafer-thin rock
formation, the ground seemed to inhale. Men cast themselves face-down upon the
ground. The Earth shuddered. And only then was the blast of tons of dynamite
heard, exploding mightily. The ground lifted again, and then slammed down, as
if a giant were rattling the very world.
Then a
rain of stones dropped from the sky. Thankfully, the shower of rubble was well
beyond where the men lay against the sheltering rock formation.
“Is it
done?” Marshal Diego yelled, leaning against the rocks, his face pale and weary,
his fingers massaging inside his ears. It seemed they could all still hear the
moaning of the damned, but if so, it was not with their physical ears, which
echoed from the blast. This was something deeper, the knowledge of what
squirmed buried beneath tons of rock and gravel, something yet yearning,
something still struggling hungrily, forever squirming, shadows in the
underworld.
“It’s
finished,” the man in black said. “In a year or so, this might be a National
park.”
Marshal
Diego laughed. “They should call it The
Garden of the Devils.”
Read Vestigial Surreality Online FREE:
01 02 03 04 05 06 07
08 09 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31 32 33 34 35
36 37 38 39 40 41 42
43 44 45 46 47 48 49
08 09 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31 32 33 34 35
36 37 38 39 40 41 42
43 44 45 46 47 48 49
Douglas Christian Larsen FREE Short Fiction
Available on Kindle, Nook, iBook, and Kobo
The Dragon & The Wolf - Free Novella by Douglas Christian Larsen
Available on Kindle, Nook, iBook, and Kobo
The Dragon & The Wolf - Free Novella by Douglas Christian Larsen
Read FREE Sample Chapters of the Douglas Christian Larsen Novel:
Read FREE Sample Chapters of the Rodolphus Novels:
DCLWolf Links:
