Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  Dust of the Damned

  “Dust of the Damned is a damnably fun ride through a West that never was, in the company of fine folks who should have been. When the West gets weird, Peter Brandvold is the best trail guide a reader could ask for.”

  —Jeff Mariotte, author ofDesperadoes

  “Supernatural,. 45‑caliber Western mayhem at its best! Brandvold delivers a no‑nonsense, blood-and-guts foray into the unknown.”

  —Shannon Eric Denton,

  Harvey Award–nominated coauthor of Graveslinger

  “A rip-roaring, weird Western adventure, told with Peter Brandvold’s excellent eye for detail and bristling with action. If you start reading it at night, you’ll probably be too scared—and too caught up in the story—to sleep. Brandvold is one of today’s top Western writers, and he’s better than ever in Dust of the Damned.”

  —James Reasoner,

  Spur Award–nominated author of Redemption, Kansas

  “Dust of the Damned is a breath—or should I say ‘dragon’s breath’?—of fresh air. Part Western, part fantasy, part adventure, and all action, it shoots off like a comet and never lets up. Its conclusion leaves you wanting more. Well told and action-packed, Dust of the Damned is an invigorating read and another winner for Peter Brandvold.”

  —Tom Roberts, publisher, Black Dog Books

  “A full chamber of horrors and .45 slugs for things that go bump in the night.”

  —Beau Smith,

  author of Wynonna Earp: The Yeti Wars and 200 People to Kill

  Dust

  of the

  Damned

  PETER BRANDVOLD

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2012 by Peter Brandvold.

  Cover photo © David Tipling, Getty Images.

  Cover design by Richard Hasselberger.

  Text design by Laura K. Corless.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY ® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley trade paperback edition / January 2012

  Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data

  Brandvold, Peter.

  Dust of the damned / Peter Brandvold.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-425-24517-0 (pbk.)

  1. Werewolves—Fiction. 2. Supernatural—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.R3236D87 2012

  813.54—dc23

  2011038301

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  With a tip of the hat

  to the cross-genre pulpsters of old

  who published their yarns in the pages of the great

  Weird Tales.

  And in memory of cover artist

  Margaret Brundage,

  1900–1976.

  Dust

  of the

  Damned

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 1

  DEVIL’S LAIR

  “Sun’ll be down in an hour, Uriah.” The old prospector’s voice had a tremor in it.

  The big man riding the rangy palomino stallion he called General Lee slanted a hazel eye at the sky vaulting over the towering canyon walls. “An hour and a half, I ’spect.”

  “That ain’t enough time,” said the prospector, Junius Webb, riding a mouse-brown burro along a narrow trail meandering through a deep, high-mountain, stream-threaded canyon in the Sawatch Range of central Colorado Territory.

  The big man, ex‑Confederate ghoul hunter Uriah Zane, glanced at him skeptically. “You said the cave was just over the next rise.”

  “We still don’t got enough time. It’s too damn late in the day, Uriah.”

  “Stop whizzin’ down your leg, Junius,” Zane said, his voice low and gravelly and pitched with the soft, rolling vowels of his North Carolina origins. “This ain’t my first spin on the ole merry‑go‑round.”

  “You ever spin on it so late in the day?”

  “Later,” Zane said as they topped the rise. “Keeps the fear up, and that’s a good thing in this business.” He drew back on General’s reins.

  Zane was a tall, dark, powerfully built man with thick arms and shoulders. A little past thirty but with a hard wiliness that made him appear older than his years, he wore smoke-stained buckskin pants and a tunic, a long, charcoal-colored wolf vest, and knee-high wolf-fur moccasins. He had a handsome but rough, square face that from a distance appeared hand-hewn from knotted oak. Closer up the lines and planes looked finer, less severe, but the eyes, not without tenderness, gave the impression of great age.

  His cheeks and jaws were carpeted in a thick, black beard. His long, hazel eyes, slightly slanted and owning a wry intelligence, turned color throughout the day—green, gold, yellow, brown, sometimes the blue of a high mountain lake. His hair was long and nearly black as an Indian’s thou
gh he himself was of Scotch-Irish and French Huguenot descent. He’d been born and raised in the red-dirt heartland of North Carolina. He’d been born into the Southern gentry, his people having arrived on the New World’s shores in the 1750s, then traveling to the savage, Indian-teeming North Carolina wilderness via the Pioneer Road. His family had grown wealthy raising bright-leaf tobacco, a skill handed down from father to son.

  Even as a young man, Uriah Zane had betrayed his singular, solitary nature. He had preferred stalking the surrounding mountains, hunting bears and panthers and fishing remote streams alone for sometimes days or weeks at a time. He found such activities far more fulfilling and exhilarating than bedding down in the tobacco barn to gauge the furnace temperature during the long, painstaking process of preparing the rich golden leaves for market.

  Neither had he cared for the debutantes’ coming-out balls and large gatherings so characteristic of his moneyed, socially conscious class. Early on, he’d earned a reputation for taciturnity and reclusiveness but also one as a formidable backwoodsman, acquiring hunting and survival skills equal to those of the Amerindians he often found himself fighting and killing, though he felt nothing but respect for the natives, knowing he and his kind were the interlopers on their territory.

  A necklace of wolf claws dangled from a rawhide thong down the hunter’s broad chest, which was clad in buckskin that a Ute woman he’d holed up with one winter had beaded in sun, moon, and star designs across both breasts.

  Horn-handled bowie knives jutted from sheaths strapped inside the tops of his moccasins, and on his shell belt he wore two Colt Navy pistols, while a stout, savage-looking LeMat pepperbox revolver jutted from a shoulder holster under his vest. He wore two cartridge belts, one appointed with lead slugs, the other with silver. Down his back hung a quiver and a heavy wooden crossbow that Zane had fashioned himself not long after the War, when he’d headed west to hunt ghouls for his personal satisfaction as well as for a living.

  Ghouls ran amok on the western frontier, and a man who could bring in a few werewolves or blood-swillers or the infernal living devils known as hobgobbies and collect on the bounty the U.S. government was offering could make a fair living for himself. If he lived, that was. Or wasn’t transformed into the very beast he hunted, which was always a risk.

  Zane knew that risk better than anyone.

  The same curse had befallen a few friends of Uriah Zane, and Zane himself had undertaken the unenviable task of running them down. He’d thought that was only right. In their places, he’d have hated being taken down by a lucky shot from a thirty‑a‑month-and-found local badge toter, say, or, worse, allowed to live forever in a form he’d once shunned. Cursed for all eternity.

  All in all, a man like Zane, broken by the civil strife and the ghastly tools that Lincoln had used to win the War at Gettysburg, could do worse for himself.

  He had no home, no family. The plantation at Rose Hill had long since been taken over by carpetbaggers, and those of his family who hadn’t fallen under tooth and claw at Gettysburg were battered and broken husks of their proud former selves, defeated not only by the deaths of so many of their own but by the way those soldiers had died…or been cursed to live forever like those who’d cursed them.

  Now Zane stared out from beneath the brim of his black, bullet-crowned sombrero banded with woven eagle feathers. His eyes, set deep in leathery sockets, narrowed slightly at the corners as he surveyed the canyon before him with the keenness of a raptor’s gaze.

  He sniffed the breeze, wolflike, listened closely to every weed rustle and branch squawk, to every tumbling pinecone. It was hard even for his keen ears, however, to hear much above the river rollicking down its rocky bed to his left, chugging, churning, and spitting white foam over its pine-clad banks.

  But he hadn’t made it nearly ten years in the ghoul-haunted West by striding wildly into swiller-haunted canyons. His friend Junius Webb, who’d been prospecting here in Colorado for nearly thirty years, had informed Zane of the swillers holed up here high in the Sawatch Range. Webb had stumbled on the lair when, picking and shoveling along the banks of the Taylor River, he’d sought refuge from a violent summer thunderstorm in a cave at the base of the northern ridge wall. He’d shared knowl-edge of his grisly find with the stipulation that once the swillers were sent back to the hell they hailed from, Zane would pay his old friend half of the money doled out by the nearest government bounty office.

  Detecting no sign of danger—though one never knew what besides swillers was lurking in these dark canyons—Zane touched his heels to the palomino’s flanks and continued on down the rise. His makeshift wagon clattered along behind him, and Junius Webb found himself eyeing the contraption grimly, for it was far from your usual buckboard or spring wagon. In fact, it wasn’t really a wagon at all but a coffin, of all things, on wheels!

  Yessir, a pine coffin showing the wear and tear of many ghoul-hunting jaunts, with a heavy hinged lid with a stout cross carved into its top. Webb shivered and looked away, saw the sun hovering near the crest of a distant western ridge wall, angling dark shadows down the steep, pine-clad canyon walls, and shivered again.

  “Yep, gettin’ damn late,” he muttered, though he was well aware his protestations were falling on deaf ears.

  Zane glanced over a bulky shoulder at his unwilling partner. “Lead the way, Junius.”

  “You sure know how to torture a feller, Uriah,” Webb said, batting his heels against his burro’s sides and riding on ahead down the narrowing, darkening path between ridge walls that bulged and knobbed and sometimes leaned inward, sometimes backward.

  Ten minutes later, Zane followed Webb off the trail to the right, and climbed the steep slope spongy with forest duff and fragrant with balsam and spruce. The cave appeared at the base of a bulge in the granite cliff that jutted two thousand feet straight up into the slowly darkening sky. The cavern’s ragged opening was just high enough for a man of Zane’s height of six and a half feet to enter bent forward at the waist.

  Zane halted General Lee and, patting the palomino’s long, gold neck soothingly—the General always got his blood up around swillers—slung his two-hundred-and-thirty-odd pounds out of the saddle, walked over to the cavern mouth, and dropped to his knees to get a look inside, one gloved hand on the edge of the opening. The darkness was too dense to penetrate much farther than a few yards.

  He sniffed. Cool smells of damp stone, mushrooms, and the fetor of bird shit. A bear had investigated the cave’s opening some time ago—Zane could still smell its rank sweetness. But it hadn’t ventured far inside. The faint tracks led away from the opening.

  He turned to where Junius Webb stood in front of his burro, holding the beast’s bridle up close to the bit. “How far does this go into the mountain?” Zane asked him.

  “Deep. About sixty yards to the swillers’ lair.”

  “What compelled you to venture that far in, Junius? I never would have suspected you of bravery.”

  “I’m a prospector, Uriah. Might be a mother lode of silver in there…though I’d never mine it now, after what I seen in there. Got some good color in the walls, though. I reckon that’s what lured me in so far.”

  Webb’s Adam’s apple bounced in his turkey neck as he slanted another cautious eye to the west. “You sure you wouldn’t rather we got an early start tomorrow?”

  “It’s ten miles back to your cabin.” The big ghoul hunter strode resolutely toward his wheeled coffin. “And I for one don’t cotton to bivouacking in swiller country after dark. Nope, we’ll take care of this situation right here an’ now. Why don’t you hold these torches?” He pulled a couple of relatively straight cedar branches, their ends wrapped in burlap and soaked in coal oil, out from the storage rack beneath the casket, and tossed both to his sallow, patch-bearded, weak-kneed partner.

  He flipped the hasp on the casket lid and opened it to reveal a brass-canistered Gatling gun nestling among its wooden tripod and other tools of the ghoul hunter’s trade—wooden ar
rows, steaks, hammers, a spare LeMat, a shuriken that Zane was still learning to throw and that worked well against the nasty hordes of hobgobbies that roamed certain regions of the West. There were several coiled bandoliers containing.45‑caliber shells for the Gatling gun, which Zane had managed to swipe one night, drunk, his pockets emptied by a run of hard luck at craps and red dog, from an Army paymaster’s storage shed.

  He’d chewed himself out the next morning for resorting to common, albeit federal, thievery, but the shed was open, and after he’d stumbled into it and passed out on a pile of flour sacks, the gun was there in all its potential ghoul-killing glory—glistening and attainable—so he’d appropriated it and hadn’t looked back. He needed the gun worse than the Army did, as they’d proved next to worthless at running ghouls to ground. Mostly, the blue bellies turned at the first sign of a yellow fang or wolf snarl, and ran like hell back to their fort, soiling their drawers.

  Junius whistled. “Whoo‑ee, look at all them silver bullets. Good Lord, Uriah, you must have a couple thousand dollars there, with silver prices as high as they’ve climbed in the past few years!”

  “I got a secret source. And sometimes Uncle Sam pays my bounties in silver and I have it melted down for bullets.”

  Zane slid a few stakes aside and lifted the Gatling gun from its grisly housing. As he did, a burlap sack spilled its contents into the nest the gun had occupied. Junius gasped at the head with its ragged, bloody neck staring up at him, pale blue eyes glassy in death, fangs bared beneath a curled upper lip. The ears were large and porcelain blue.

  “Christ!”

  “Ah, shit. Here—hold this.”

  Zane handed Junius the Gatling gun, which the old prospector accepted after he’d dropped the torches. The vampire head was already beginning to smoke where the sun touched it, the flour-white skin turning waxy and ready to melt, as Zane opened the bag and nudged the head back inside with his fist, saying, “Get back in there where you belong, Mortimer.”

  “Nasty damn business,” Junius said, scowling down at the bloody sack.