Dust Devils Read online

  Acknowledgments

  I love westerns. The three writers responsible for my love of this underappreciated genre are Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, and especially the late Elmore Leonard. It has been Elmore Leonard most of all who has shown me how captivating the genre can be, and without his incredible western fiction this book would never have been possible. We miss you, Mr. Leonard, and we’ll remember you always.

  Also to thank are my wonderful agent, Louise Fury, and my incredibly supportive editor, Don D’Auria. When I approached Don with the idea of a horror western, he responded with unmitigated enthusiasm. So thank you, Don, for encouraging me and for allowing me to blaze new trails.

  Author’s Note

  Those familiar with New Mexico’s geography might notice that I have taken several liberties with the locations of towns, mountain ranges and other landmarks. The vampires, however, are real.

  Dedication

  This one is for you, Jack. You’re the best son a dad could ever ask for, and you’ve filled the past eight years of my life with joy and wonder. I’m thankful beyond words for you, I’m proud of you for being the amazing person you are, and I’ll love you and cherish you forever.

  It is the nature of vampires to increase and multiply, but according to an ascertained and ghostly law.

  —Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

  For all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God.

  —Romans 3:23

  Part One

  Somewhere Outside Las Cruces

  Chapter One

  New Mexico, 1885

  Cody peered over the rim of the cliff and felt his throat tighten. Jesus Christ, he thought. Jesus Christ Almighty.

  There, cupped in the rocky basin far below, were the devils. Stripped of their acting garb, the five powerful men capered about the fire like cackling demons. Blood slicked their chests, their rugged chins glinting like sloppy jewels. Over the broad, seething fire revolved the corpse of an old man, spitted from anus to mouth on a cottonwood pike. Price, their leader, was thrashing something on the basin floor, pounding it as though in the thrall of some childish tantrum. And though Cody’s mind revolted at the very thought, he realized the object Price wielded was a human leg. As the scene wavered out of focus, the fire heat shimmering the naked men, Cody saw the ragged bone stub jutting out of the severed leg. It was all he could do to keep his gorge down.

  He was so transfixed by the grotesqueness of the scene that he hardly noticed the boy on the ledge below him. Small, frail-looking, aglow with moonlight, the boy resembled some creature of the desert, a lizard or a scorpion washed pale by the sun. The boy crawled forward, toward the lip of the outcropping, and Cody realized how skinny the kid was. A slender cage of ribs stood out under a shirt that might once have been white. The wool pants didn’t come close to touching the ratty shoes. Cody figured the pants for hand-me-downs.

  Below, one of the men—Horton, Cody now saw, the youngest of the devils—kept time on a metal wash drum, dust puffing from his strong hands as he slapped out his arrhythmic tattoo. It was a damn good thing the men below were occupied, for the boy on the ledge was sitting straight up and peering openly at them now, making no attempt at all to conceal himself.

  Cody thought, What’re you doing, kid? Get down before they see you.

  But the kid didn’t, only continued taking in the scene, his legs dangling over the ledge as if he were watching a carnival sideshow. Jesus, if the boy didn’t watch out, he’d lose his balance and plummet straight down at them, and if the impact didn’t kill him—which was nearly a sure thing; the drop was a hundred feet easy—the devils sure as hell would. They’d enjoy it, too. Cody had seen them slaughter ones almost as young.

  The distance between Cody and the boy was only fifteen feet or so, yet it was a sheer drop down bald sandstone. He could no more make it to the boy unobserved and unhurt than he could bring Angela back from the dead.

  The thought of his wife blurred his vision, made his nose run. He ran a savage wrist along his upper lip and choked back the tears. No, by God. Now wasn’t the time for that. He’d come all this way to study them, to learn their tendencies. Not to shed more tears over the woman who’d betrayed him.

  The little boy below—the stupid son of a bitch—had rolled over onto his stomach, head toward Cody now, clearly intending to slide down the verge on his belly. And then what? Cody’s mind demanded. Become their next meal? Serve yourself up on a platter? If they spotted the kid, they might well spot Cody too, and he knew once they saw you, there was no escaping.

  Not knowing why he was doing it but knowing he had to do it just the same, Cody mimicked the boy’s movements, lay flat on the stone ledge and lowered himself down, hoping to God the drop wasn’t as sheer as it looked, hoping he’d slide down and land gracefully instead of free-falling toward a broken leg or much, much worse.

  As Cody’s hips grated over the scabrous edge, he did his best to cling to the rock wall, but the perpendicular drop eluded his reaching legs. Damn it all, he thought. Here I go.

  Chapter Two

  A vertiginous drop through black space, then a fearsome pain in his back. Cody lay still a moment, staring up at the pinprick stars in the inky night sky. He’d landed decently enough—his legs were numb but unbroken—but his lower back felt like it had been flayed open. He reached down and fingered the area just above his tailbone. His hand came away wet. He reached down again and touched the warm, sodden gash. A superficial wound, but painful all the same. He listened for the washbasin drum, the hellish voices howling their terrible dirge, but there was nothing now. The valley had fallen silent.

  Please, Cody thought. Please let them resume without seeing me. I’ll turn back and leave them to their hunting. I won’t chase the devils anymore.

  Then he remembered: the boy.

  Cody rolled over and beheld the frightened face, the tiny hands pawing at the gritty ledge for purchase. The child was about to fall, but Cody knew any noise would alert them, draw them up the verge like a pack of ravenous wolves.

  The plea in the boy’s eyes broke Cody’s trance. He leaped forward and seized the chicken-bone wrists. Rearing back, he hauled the child toward him. Without thinking, he embraced the boy—more to calm himself than the kid—but the boy’s hands lashed out, furrowed Cody’s cheeks just under the eyes.

  Cody shoved the boy away. “Jesus, kid,” he hissed. “I risk my tail for you and you try to claw my eyes out?”

  Cody froze, remembering the devils below. He scrambled toward the edge to see if they were coming.

  They weren’t. Ranged in an undulating half circle, they feasted before the fire, most of the old man’s corpse still steaming on the spit. Idly, Cody noted that both the old man’s legs were intact, which meant the leg Price had been swinging belonged to someone else. Was it Angela’s?

  Cody heard a whimpering and, looking up, saw the child’s small eyes shining out of a dirt-grimed face. The kid was fighting the tears but losing. Some of Cody’s asperity faded.

  “You know that man down there?” he whispered.

  The kid looked at him but didn’t reply.

  “The one they’re roasting,” Cody said. “The old man.”

  For a moment the kid seemed to look through him, beyond him, to the terrible chapter that had just concluded in his young life. Then he nodded. Moments later he joined Cody at the edge of the cliff.

  The smell of seared flesh drifted up to them. Though Cody tried hard to breathe through his mouth, its acrid stench insinuated itself anyway. Growing up, one of their hogs had gotten caught on barbed wire once, and the wound had turned gangrenous. The smell of the old man’s flesh reminded him of the hog’s, though this odor was somehow worse, the wrongness of the cannibalism somehow communicating itself in its sce
nt.

  Price placed the leg on the ground beside him like a gory walking stick and sank his white teeth into a bit of shoulder meat he’d ripped off the steaming corpse.

  In response, the boy whimpered louder.

  “Shut the hell up,” Cody said, but the kid only shook his head and moaned.

  He seized the kid by the collar. “You want them to hear you?”

  When the kid didn’t answer, Cody grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, shook him. The boy glared at him as though about to strike again, but Cody stayed the child’s hand with his fiercest stare.

  He brought his face close to the boy’s. “You shut up now or I’ll toss you over this cliff.”

  The boy’s eyes widened.

  Cody nodded. “That’s better.”

  They watched as the biggest devil, the one called Penders, rose and lumbered over to the edge of the flickering firelight. Grasping his penis with an immense paw, Penders voided his bladder into the dust.

  Cody remembered the huge man, his black-stubbled face grinning as he fondled Angela in front of a roomful of men.

  As if reading his thoughts, the boy asked, “They kill your kin too?”

  The thickness in Cody’s throat prohibited speech. In answer he turned and spat.

  “Bastards,” the boy said, a break in his voice. Suddenly, Cody was desperate to get away from the smell of scorched flesh, the monosyllabic chatter from below. How different these men were from the characters they portrayed. How different they were now than they’d seemed upon entering Tonuco that afternoon three days ago.

  Cody remembered the premonition he’d had, that sense of fatedness that caused him to stop in midspeech, Angela staring up at him curiously. Try as he would, Cody could not look away from the six black quarter horses—their blinders as dark as their hair—towing a black carriage car with red-curtained windows. It seemed a rolling piece of hell, an emissary of darkness come to shatter the uneasy truce he and his wife had constructed. And when Angela, too, beheld the dark carriage with the gilded cursive letters spelling Adam Price and His Traveling Players, Cody knew something catastrophic had been set into motion.

  Almost as though it had been waiting for Angela’s attention as its cue, the carriage stopped, the black horses obeying a half-obscured driver, in front of the Crooked Tree Saloon. For several moments nothing happened. The carriage remained as motionless as the mares that powered it. Cody took a hesitant step in the direction of the general store—the intended destination of their visit to town that afternoon—but Angela was transfixed.

  Then Adam Price stepped out of the carriage, and Cody felt his wife slip away.

  Price had smiled winningly and beckoned them over. The tall man was hatless, but wore a long black cape. Eyeing his tailored clothes, Angela asked him if he was really an actor. Price had indicated the wooden sets stored beneath the coach as proof of his thespian profession.

  “I’ve always wanted to act,” Angela had said.

  Price’s grin broadened. “It happens that we’re in need of a female lead for our two weekend performances.” Smiling grandly, Price had proffered a hand.

  “Angela,” Cody said.

  “It’s just for fun, darling,” she answered. “Don’t be so solemn all the time.”

  “Angela.”

  “Two little shows,” she said. She slid her hand into Price’s.

  And without a backward glance, Angela had followed the tall actor into the Crooked Tree Bar.

  Remembering it now, Cody’s chest went as hard as stone. Though the night air up here on the ledge was cool and crisp, he found it nearly impossible to breathe.

  On the ledge beside him, the kid whispered, “You keep your mouth open that wide, a bird’ll come along and shit in it.”

  Cody jerked back to the present, fixed the kid with an annoyed look. But the kid just grinned and said, “My grandpa always used to tell me that.”

  The feast continued below. The twins—Dragomir and Dmitri Seneslav, they were called, though Cody had no idea how you could tell them apart—were grappling a few feet from the fire, some dispute having broken out between them.

  “What are they doing?” Cody asked.

  “Fightin’ over the tongue,” the kid said in a sick voice, the glimmer of good humor having quickly evaporated.

  “The old man’s?” Cody asked and immediately regretted the stupid question.

  He regretted it even more when the boy answered, “Grandpa’s.”

  Cody couldn’t even look at the kid as he broke down into quiet sobs. What the hell could he say? I’m sorry about them eating your grandfather?

  Horton finally ceased drumming on the basin. He stood and stretched, his body roped with muscles. He looked like a wrestler or a runner—not a cannibal percussionist. Horton bent and came up with a fillet knife and, unmindful of the intensity of the fire, reached out and proceeded to excise a bit of rib meat from the kid’s grandpa. Cody had to look away. He was thankful to see that the kid hadn’t witnessed the latest atrocity. The boy was lying on his stomach, his small face buried in the crook of his arm.

  “Come on, kid,” Cody said and dragged the boy away from the lip of the ledge. Out of sight from the devils, Cody already felt better. Though he could still hear the men laughing and snorting, not seeing them was a relief.

  The kid slumped against the sheer rock wall down which Cody had, moments before, descended. The boy looked very vulnerable, very pathetic like that. His small, freckled face was difficult to discern tucked away in the shadows, but the moonlight shone on his tattered pants, his worn-out shoes.

  Cody sat next to him, asked in a low voice, “What’s your name, kid?”

  The boy mumbled something.

  “Come again?”

  “Willet Black,” the boy repeated.

  “Where’d you get a name like that?”

  As if by rote, the boy said, “My daddy taught me my letters early. His name was Theodore, so my middle name’s Theodore. My handwriting’s not very good, so when I wrote my name at school—Will T. Black—the teacher thought the first two names were connected. ‘Willet?’ she asked me, and all the students thought that was hilarious. ’Specially my brother. He was in the same class as me even though he was older, but he got killed last night too.”

  A chill coursed down Cody’s spine. At length, he said, “Pleased to meet you, Willet. My name’s Cody Wilson.”

  Willet didn’t answer, only continued staring at nothing in particular. As the silence drew out, Cody surveyed their surroundings, realized at once their only chance of escaping was a meager outcropping on the western corner of the ledge. If they could make it onto that and avoid falling—it extended no more than a foot from the sheer rock face—they might be able to follow it gradually up until they reached the top of the wall. Then they could get on Sally, Cody’s old mare, and get the hell gone.

  Willet was sniffling.

  “Soon as you collect yourself, we’ll get moving,” Cody said.

  “I ain’t going nowhere.”

  “You aim to sleep up here tonight?”

  “I aim to get my daddy’s leg back.”

  Cody searched the kid’s face for signs of insanity, but other than appearing really tired, Willet seemed in his right mind.

  “You got some sort of plan?” Cody asked.

  The kid spoke in a tight, controlled voice. “I don’t have a plan. I’m going down there and get my daddy’s leg.”

  The child’s audacity rankled him. Misplaced as it was, it was still a stark contrast to his own paralyzing terror. Cody said with more heat than he intended, “And I suppose you’re going to do that by reasoning with them. I suspect they’ll respond pretty well to that sort of thing.”

  Willet’s brow creased. “You don’t need to make fun of me.”

  Cody sighed, an enervating weariness seizing hold of him.

  Willet glanced at him, defiant. “You wanna run so bad, why’d you follow them?”

  Cody looked away. “I’ve got
my reasons.”

  “They got something of yours too?”

  If you only knew, Cody thought. My life, my manhood. What goodness I thought there was in this world.

  He said, “What they took I can’t get back.”

  “So get out of here,” Willet said. “I can deal with this myself.” The tinny sound of his voice, the curl of his upper lip, the boy sounded fifty years old. Fifty and full of bitterness.

  The kid’s petulance awakened something in him, a ghost of his former pride maybe. “What are you gonna do to them, Willet? Hit ’em with rocks?”

  The boy reached down, drew up the front of his shirt. Protruding from the baggy waistband of the boy’s wool pants was the pearl handle of a gun.

  “It’s a thirty-eight,” Willet said. “Daddy kept it hidden in the hayloft.”

  Eyeing it, Cody felt a chill. “I suppose you’re gonna kill all five with that.”

  Willet held it up so the starlight played over its smooth silver barrel. “It’s a hammerless,” the boy said, sounding even older. “I can hit damn near anything with it.”

  “Let me see it.”

  Willet appraised him with baleful eyes.

  Cody held out his hand. “Jesus Christ, if I was gonna kill you I’d have already shoved you over the edge so those bastards could eat you for dessert.”

  “I wouldn’ta let you push me,” Willet replied, but he handed the gun over. Cody scooted forward enough so the shadows weren’t in the way but not far enough for the men below to see him. The Smith & Wesson was a double-action automatic, far nicer than Cody’s own .32. He wondered fleetingly if Willet’s family had money, a gun like that stashed away for emergencies. Then again, the kid’s clothes were so old, so shabby…

  “Give it back,” Willet said.

  Cody regarded him. “How old are you, kid?”

  “That don’t matter,” Willet said. “Give me my gun.”

  Cody watched him with raised eyebrows.

  “Twelve,” Willet answered. “Now gimme my goddamn gun back.”