“Like you? How?”
Godfrey was slow in answering. He walked over to a puddle of burning oil and stared into it, and by that light Lawson caught the red glare in the eyes of his battle-scarred face. “Ex-Captain Lawson,” he said, “that war you refer to with understandable bitterness is over. Yet there is another war that has been going on for years…centuries…that shows no signs of abatement. You are either on one side or another, and I will term those the dark and the light. May I call you Trevor?”
Lawson nodded. He realized he owed his continuation of existence and the life of the others to this man, to Wilder and to Smoke, but…Achilles Godfrey? One of the most malicious and hate-filled officers to ever wear the Union blue? The story of the sixty bodies and the well had been verified, but what of the other tales? The quick execution of prisoners both by firing squad and hanging? The burning-to-the-ground of Southern villages removed from any military purpose? The placement of severed heads atop fenceposts as markers to show where the troops of Major Godless had passed through? And the skinning of the two camp followers who were proven to be Confederate spies…
All those things Lawson had read about in newspapers in the aftermath of the conflict, as more witnesses had come forward and facts revealed. But who knew where Major Godless had disappeared to? He was one of the many hundreds missing from the battlefield, yet his legacy was still a matter of heated discussion in the papers of the day. Lawson recalled sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Sanctuaire not a year ago and reading that a new common grave of Confederate dead had been found on farmland west of Fox’s Gap. Of the thirty or so soldiers most were headless, yet it appeared a few had been buried alive with their arms severed at the shoulders. This was reported to be the work of Achilles Godfrey and his troops from a drummer boy who had escaped the carnage.
“Trevor,” said the major, “this war is one we cannot lose. We have decided to fight the inhumanity that is attempting to consume us. We drink animal blood, not human…except for the occasional freshly-dead body we must dig up from graveyards. We portion that out in shares. The body is returned to the coffin and the earth, and no one is the wiser. We can hold out for a few months between feedings. As I say, we subsist mostly on animal blood.” His gaze sharpened as he looked upon Lawson. “I suspect your so-called life is the same?”
“I haven’t sunken to grave-robbing.”
“You mean…you haven’t sunken to grave-robbing yet.”
“You’ve started drinking the ichor? That sustains you?” Lawson recalled his own brief and bitter taste of LaRouge’s ichor at the mansion in Nocturne.
“We have been victorious in a few small skirmishes and have learned to drink from our enemies when possible,” Godfrey said. “It’s a particularly vile liquid but we’ve found that it does give strength…though not anything like the power of human blood. You’ve never tasted it?”
“Only once.”
“Listen…please…maybe I shouldn’t oughta be hearin’ this?” Rooster asked.
“I don’t think I ought to be, either,” Mathias added. “It doesn’t sound too healthy for a regular man to know.”
“We need to get this girl to the hospital in Helena,” Lawson told the major. “Rooster, can you drive this train?”
“I can drive, but can you shovel coal?”
“I can try,” said Eric. He had wrapped cloth torn from his coat around his wounded shoulder. “I’m not hurt bad enough to want to just sit here and wait.”
“The track’s still blocked,” Mathias said. “What about that?”
“It’s nothing we can’t move,” the major answered. “As I say, we’ve brought others. They’re standing guard around the train…what’s left of it.” He looked back and forth along the car. “I expect we should remove these bodies before you get to Helena. There’s going to be enough to have to explain to the sheriff and the railroad company as it is.”
“Holy Lord!” said Rooster, with renewed alarm. “And me the only one left of the crew! They’ll split me in four pieces and hang every one of ’em!”
“We’ll figure something out,” Lawson said. “Ann and I will stay in Helena as witnesses to a bandit raid.”
“What…bitin’ bandits? They’ll laugh me right into the prison hole!”
“I’ll have a talk with the sheriff. I can be very convincing when it’s necessary.” One benefit of his condition was that the Eye could be used to sap a victim’s strength of will and turn his or her mind into clay that could be shaped to suit the purpose. Even so, it seemed he and Ann would have a lot of claywork to do in Helena.
“I’ll verify whatever Lawson says,” said Easterly. “We are not going to let anyone suffer any further.”
“We?” Lawson lifted his eyebrows. “We?”
Easterly came toward him and stopped only a couple of feet away. He cast his gaze upon Wilder, Smoke and Godfrey before it came back to Lawson.
“I am everything you already know,” he said. “I have lived in the blackest of shadows. I have done terrible things, in my own name and in the name of God. I have lost…the most precious gift that was given to me: my family.” He lowered his head, and it was a moment before he could speak again. “I have nothing now,” he said, his voice strained by emotion. “I have been a thief, a charlatan, a wife-beater, a drunk, a joke of a father, a false prophet, and a back-shooting bounty hunter.
“But, Mr. Lawson,” he said, and he lifted his eyes to the vampire’s, “I have never been a soldier. Would you allow me that honor?”
“A dubious honor,” Lawson replied. “One that may kill you…or present you with something worse than death.”
“I am already beyond that point,” said the reverend. “I am dead now…and I would like to return to something that might be called life.”
Easterly meant it. Lawson didn’t have to throw his Eye to see that.
“We’ll talk in Helena,” he said.
“Shall we start removing this trash?” Godfrey asked. “Then we’ll get to work on the rocks.”
Lawson was still in no shape to be moving bodies, as his broken right arm had not yet mended. He sat down on a bullet-nicked seat as Godfrey, Smoke, Wilder, and Easterly began to haul the dead vampires out of the car and throw them into the woods below. Ann sat on a seat facing him. Tears had rolled down her cheeks, but her expression was still eerily composed. She had to break sometime, Lawson thought. It might be tomorrow or the next few days, but sooner or later she would break.
Then he would help Ann put herself back together again, and they would go on.
“Trevor?” Her voice seemed distant. “Trevor?” she repeated.
“Yes?”
“Did I kill my father?”
He looked her square in the eyes, trying to give her as much of his strength that he could spare. “You know the answer to that.”
She nodded, but even as she did two fresh tears spilled.
He reached out with his good arm and took her hand. There was nothing more he could say, and nothing more she could ask. She shivered from the cold, and the snow blew into her hair and the puddles of lamp fuel flickered, and the bodies of the vampires were thrown into the woods and at one point Ann removed the pistol from her holster, put it on the seat beside her and stared at it as if it were the most hateful enemy she had ever faced. Then after awhile she put it back into its holster, where it belonged.
When the bodies were cleared out, the vampires along with Eli Easterly began the removal of the rocks. Eric and Rooster went out to watch, and Rooster wanted to go over the process of bringing the locomotive up to steam. Ann informed Lawson that Blue was waking up, and he went back to kneel beside her.