Some were dressed in the smoke grey or butternut brown of the Confederacy. Others were dressed in Yankee blue. Hundreds of them. All dead.
The stench from their rotting flesh was appalling.
The bodies were clearly battlefield dead. Every man carried evidence of the wounds that had killed them. Black bullet holes. Ghastly shrapnel wounds. Knife slashes. They lay there, face up, their uniform blouses torn open to expose their bloodless chests.
“What is this?” said Looks Away, recoiling from the stench and the gruesome violence.
Grey could not answer the question. Instead he stood there, not looking at the bodies on the ground but instead staring in abject horror at the mound of cargo on the nearest hopper.
He had originally thought it might be coal or raw ore heading for the ghost rock smelting fires.
He wished that was true.
What he saw was far, far worse.
The hopper was piled high with more bodies.
Hundreds of them.
Thousands.
Every hopper was full. Mountains of the dead were crammed into the cars. The corpses had been dumped in with no thought to the people they’d once been. They were — what?
Surely Deray had not brought them to bury them.
Then what?
Even as he asked himself the question, he realized that he already knew the answer.
And it was a terrible answer.
“Grey—?” asked Looks Away softly.
Grey didn’t answer. Couldn’t.
“Grey, do you understand what this is?”
He nodded.
He had thought he’d seen the depth of horror, that he knew its outer boundaries. That he was aware of its rules.
All of that was wrong.
Deray had no rules, no limits.
Grey dragged his wrist across his mouth.
“How many?” he murmured.
Looks Away glanced up at the hopper, then at the others, then down at the corpses laid in a long row here. “Two thousand? Three? Maybe more.”
Grey shook his head. “I think it’s a lot more.”
A gleaming black beetle crawled across the face of the nearest corpse. The soldier was from the South. A boy, no more than sixteen. He had a bullet hole in his abdomen and the crust of dried blood. A gut shot and proof that he hadn’t died right away. Dead men don’t bleed. Bullet wounds to the stomach kill slowly and the pain is enormous. This boy had fought for his flag and probably died screaming and alone. Probably called for his mother rather than God in those last hours. Men do that. They know their mothers will mourn them; God seems to enjoy the slaughter.
Looks Away moved down the line of hoppers and then Grey saw him stagger as if struck. He hurried over.
“What’s wrong?”
All the Sioux could do was point. The side door of the last hopper was open and a mass of bodies had fallen out to form a ragdoll mound that spilled across the rail bed. These were not soldiers. Instead of blue or grey, they wore buckskins and breechcloths. Their ruddy skin was now pale from loss of blood. Their hair was black and much of it was caked with dried blood.
They were Sioux.
All of them.
With a trembling hand, Looks Away reached for the nearest corpse and saw the distinctive body painting of the Sioux. However there were a few dots of black paint on the left side of the man’s face.
“See those marks? They were with the border patrols,” he said.
Behind them, on the far side of the train and across the plain, Deray laughed again.
“This is madness,” growled Looks Away. “Madness.”
Madness it might be, but Grey thought he understood the genius buried within the madness. All of these cars were heaped with rotting corpses from the War Between the States, and the border conflicts with the Sioux Nation. Maybe even some from the Rail Wars. A few of the corpses on this car wore dusters. Deray was clearly having bodies shipped to him here in this forgotten, hidden place. He had his dark magicks, and he clearly had his dreams of conquest. He had the weapons and a vast supply of ghost rock.
He wasn’t just supplying the armies of the world. He was building his own army.
An army of the dead.
For the third time Grey said, “We have to warn people.”
Looks Away nodded. “I have a terrible feeling we are too sodding late.”
“We have to try.”
They looked at each other for a long moment. “Yes,” said Looks Away. “We bloody well do.”
They turned and fled. But as they ran, Grey thought he saw movement off in the shadows, back near the rocks that had served as their hiding place. He fancied he saw a group of people there. Not trying to hide, but apparently not being seen. They looked like figures seen through a fog. Hazy, indistinct, nearly featureless. Except for one. A woman. Not Veronica, but like her she was someone lost to violence.
Annabelle.
Grey swore that he saw her standing there with the others.
With the ghosts.
But for once — for this one moment — they were not looking at him.
Each ghostly face was turned toward the spirit of Veronica and the necromancer.
Then Grey and Looks Away passed behind a row of stalagmites and when they emerged from the other side the ghosts were nowhere to be seen.
If, indeed, they had been there at all.
Deeply troubled, Grey ran faster, desperate now to find the tunnel, the basement, the house, and then the world. He needed to feel sunlight on his face before he lost all hope that he would ever see daylight again.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
It took them hours to find their way out.
Care and caution take time and they could not risk being found out. Apart from the simple truth that they were ill prepared to fight an army of men and machines, they did not want Deray to know that they had witnessed anything. There was no way of telling how that madman would react to the threat of having his plans — his alliances — discovered.
Grey was certain that the necromancer would leave the earth scorched and barren where Paradise Falls now stood.
They did not speak of this. They said nothing at all until they reached the tunnel that had been burrowed through the bedrock into Chesterfield’s basement. Only then did they pause. Looks Away touched the slimy walls and shook his head.
“As a geologist I’ve come in contact with some of the world’s strangest creatures,” he said. “Those dinosaurs and pteranodons and all that — frightening as they are, they belong to some part of the natural world. Things that once lived and were believed to be extinct. But this…” He shook his head again. “I don’t know what could have done this. If this were something tiny, a little hole, I would speculate that it was some kind of worm with highly acidic secretive glands, but… no worm ever lived that could make a tunnel this size and cut it through solid rock.”
Grey nodded. He didn’t touch the walls and didn’t want any of that slime on his skin.
They looked back the way they’d come and for a moment Grey felt a deep sadness sweep through him. It was a stew made of equal parts dread and acceptance. Deray was coming, that much was clear. He had the weapons, the numbers, the science, and the bloodlust.
What did Paradise Falls have?
A few hundred farmers. Most of them old people and children. Some men who could probably handle a gun. Some women, too.
And what else? What did they really have that could be used to mount a defense against Deray? What was there in town that could stop one of those tanks? What could even hope to stop the metal giant, Samson?
And even if the impossible could be managed, there were still whatever that flying machine had been that Grey had seen during the storm, the soldiers, the dinosaurs.