Red Dreams Jonathan Maberry Wyoming Territory 1875 McCall saw the star fall. Like a match struck against the hard dome of the sky and then dropped, trailing sparks, burning out. It fell slowly, though. Not like other falling stars that were there and gone, mostly caught out of the corner of the eye. This one wanted to be seen. For a moment McCall thought it was an angel, but then he blinked his eyes clear and shook cobwebs from his head. An angel, maybe, he thought bitterly, but if so, then it’s sure damn coming for me with a flaming sword. He wanted to tell himself that he didn’t deserve fiery justice or burning retribution, but McCall wasn’t much good at lying to himself. Besides, the light from the falling star was dropping toward the east—the way he’d come—and by its bright light it wouldn’t require divine perception to see the truth. So many bodies. Animal and man. Red and white. The stink of gunpowder still burned in McCall’s nose. That smell and the death smells. The copper of blood, the outhouse odor of shit and piss. And, just as the sun set an hour ago, the first sick-sweet stink of rot. Bodies out here in the Wyoming heat didn’t wait long before they turned foul. So many dead. And at the end of that crooked trail, one last survivor. A guilty man and his blood-streaked horse, both of them alive by chance or miracle. Alive when they should have been as dead as everyone else. The last survivors of a massacre, now required to sit and witness the death of this piece of cosmic rock. The comet moved slowly across the sky, so big and so bright. Going down in a blaze of glory, firing its last as it died, declaring itself bold and powerful even while the world was poised to snuff its fire out. “Now ain’t that a sight?” McCall asked his horse, a big paint named Bob. His voice sounded thin even to his own ears. It sounded sick and old. Old before my time, he mused, but that wasn’t true, either. A preacher once told him that a man aged according to what he did, not by how many years he lived. A good man lived forever. A bad man? McCall was a short footstep over forty years and felt like he was ninety. Before the fight—before the massacre—he’d felt younger, but that was a relative thing. He couldn’t remember ever feeling young. Maybe back in Philadelphia when he was a boy. Before he signed on to guard wagons heading west. Before he went to work killing red men. Before he began chipping days or maybe weeks off of his life every time he pulled a trigger. Weeks or maybe years. Far above, pieces began breaking off of the comet. Like people jumping out of a burning building. McCall had seen that once. Way back in Philadelphia when a hotel burned right down to the ground. People from the top floors jumped out of the windows. They weren’t trying to escape the flames. Not really. Most of them were already on fire. They just wanted it to end. They wanted the hard pavement below to
punch the suffering out of them, to get it all over fast so they didn’t have to live through their own deaths. That was how McCall saw it. People who didn’t have the guts to go all the way down to the end. McCall couldn’t understand that. He could never have jumped out of that building. Death wasn’t a destination he wanted to get to a second or a step sooner than he had to. No, sir. When his time came to go into the big dark, then he was going to fight every step of the way. It wouldn’t be cowardly kicking and screaming, either. Jonah McCall was going to make death come for him. He’d make death work for it, earn it, sweat over it. More and more debris fell from the comet, but the heart of it was still intact when it suddenly vanished behind the eastern wall of red rock mountains. There was a huge flash of white and green, and for a moment McCall fancied that he could see the bodies sprawled on the plain. The Cheyenne dog soldiers with their breech clouts and war bonnets, the rest of McCall’s team of riders, and the horses from both sides, all torn and broken and splashed with light. But that was crazy. The battlefield was miles to the west and all that light really showed was the lumpy terrain. McCall waited for the sound of the impact to come rolling across the hardpan toward him. He’d seen a lot of stars fall; you couldn’t help see them out here. Only twice had they been this big, though, and each time they hit hard and hit loud. He waited, his tin coffee cup an inch from his mouth, holding still to keep his own sounds from hiding any that were trying to find him. Nothing. He cocked his head and listened harder. Nothing at all. “Must have burned itself all up,” he told Bob. McCall felt vaguely disappointed. He was kind of looking forward to that sound, to the rolling echo of it. It would have been like hearing thunder. It’d been a long time since he’d heard thunder. It had been a long, hot summer, fraught with drought and dust storms. Even on days when the clouds stacked up all the way to God’s front porch and they turned black as shoe polish, it never rained. The hot wind always pushed those storm clouds into someone else’s sky. They went west, like fleets of ships, but none of them landed on the shores of the Wyoming desert. McCall and his boys had been riding this land for sixteen weeks and hadn’t felt a drop of rain on their faces. Not one. He was a thin man. The last time he’d looked at himself in a mirror he saw a scarecrow wearing his old cavalry trousers and a Pinkerton duster he’d bought secondhand after its owner had been killed. The woman at the general store mended the bullet holes in the back, but even with the fine stitching the fingers of the wind wriggled through each hole. He sipped his coffee and cradled the cup in his palms, taking its warmth. Movement in the corner of his eye made him turn, but it was only the wind pushing a piece of bloodstained rag along the ground. A sleeve, thought McCall. Torn, frayed, slick with wetness that was as black as blood in this light. Most of the cloth was dry and that part whipped and popped in the breeze; but the wet parts were heavier and they kept slapping the ground. In the variable wind, the effect was like some grotesque inchworm lumbering awkwardly across the landscape. Whip, pop, slap. Over and over again as it crawled toward the shadows and out of his line of sight. “Damn,” he said, and the sound fled away to chase the tattered sleeve into forever.
McCall shivered. The open range was always so damn cold at night. Hotter than Satan’s balls during the day, though. Something scuttled past him in the dark, a quick scratchety-scratch sound. Probably a lizard chasing down a bug, or running from something bigger. Night was a lie out here. During the day, under all that heat, it was easy to think about dying because everything you saw looked like it was dying. Plants and trees dried to brown sticks; bones bleaching themselves white. And all those endless miles of empty nothing. Under the sun’s brutal gaze you expect things to die. He thought of the fallen star as he sipped his coffee. Out there behind the hills it had died. Died in its own way. Died, as sixteen of his men had died. Died, as thirty-four of the Cheyenne had died. As this star now died. McCall poured some hot into his cup and tried to chastise himself for that fanciful notion, but it was hard to hang scorn on yourself for any strange thought when you’re in the vast, cold night all alone. And it was easy to think of things dying, even chunks of rock from outer space. Who knows how long it had been out there, flying free in the big empty of the endless black. Then it took a wrong turn and came to the desert sky, and that desert sky killed it as sure as McCall had killed Walking Bear, the war chief of the Cheyenne dog soldiers. It had come down to the two of them. Walking Bear on a chestnut gelding, a Winchester ’73 in his hands; McCall on his paint with a Colt he’d just reloaded. McCall suddenly shivered. It was so abrupt and so deep that it rattled his teeth and caused some coffee to slop onto the ground. His whole body shuddered worse than when he’d had the ague down in Louisiana after the war. The shiver was so violent that it felt like cold hands had grabbed him and were actually shaking him back and forth. Then just as suddenly it was gone. McCall stared at the night as if there should be something at hand to explain what just happened. “The hell was that?” But his voice came out all wrong. It startled him because… He listened to the night. And heard absolutely nothing. No insect sounds. No scuttle of animals or lizards across the sound. Not a single cry from a night bird. There was nothing. Nothing. And there was never nothing. McCall shifted the coffee cup to one hand and with the other he touched the handle of his Colt. He could actually hear the rasp of his callused palm against the hardwood grips. Like sandpaper. He closed his hand around the gun, as much to stop the sound as to seek comfort from the weapon’s deadly potential. That gun had killed at least nine of the Indians today. Nine, including that big son of a bitch Walking Bear. It had taken five rounds to put the Indian down, and the bastard fought all the way, working the lever of his Winchester. The rifle rounds burned the air around McCall, and one hit the big steel buckle of his belt and knocked him right out of the saddle. McCall had landed
hard and for a wild few moments the world spun around him in a kaleidoscope of red and black. Then the world went away. !