Zombie Fallout 5: Alive in a Dead World (44 page)

“Hey where you going?” the old grizzled man
at the bar asked. “You’ve already paid for two drinks, I promised
you the entire story.”

“Buy yourself a third,” Tomas said, flipping
him a nickel and heading for the door.

The old man continued as if his drinking
buddy had remained behind. “So they say that this white witch took
the colonel’s family for some devilry until the colonel brought her
the head of a great Indian chief. And when he came back without it,
she had killed his family and then him. And then she cast some kind
of spell on the men in the platoon. Seems they started killing each
other. I think the witch part is made up. I think it’s more the
medicine man sent some bad medicine.” The old man snorted and
laughed at his own word play. “The Indians are some tricky ones.
You have to be real careful how you kill them or they can rise up
out their grave and get you.” He cackled. “Barkeep! Another drink
for me and my friend,” the old man said, waving the nickel
around.

The bartender shook his head and poured two
more glasses. Who was he to judge? A nickel was a nickel.

Tomas bought the best horse he could find in
the region and pushed the animal as hard as he dared. After five
days of hard riding, and asking anyone he could for information on
the battle site, he finally found himself amongst the ruins. Not
much was left. It was mostly just pieces of shattered pottery here
and there. After nearly a month, any bones of the Indians still
left remaining from the scavengers had been picked clean. The
village was nearly reclaimed by the land, save one large teepee.
Tomas alit from his horse and strode purposefully towards it.

He said a small prayer upon entering. He
noted the many footprints of animals that had entered in here
previous to him, nearly obscuring the soft prints of the white
witch.

“Eliza,” he said as he pressed his palm down
onto the heel of the print. He looked over to where the shriveled
husk of a man lay. He walked over to him. “Why have the scavengers
not taken your sustenance?” Tomas asked. “And more importantly,
what did my sister want with you?”

Tomas gently turned the man onto his back.
His facial muscles had pulled up and dried into a perpetual smile.
Tomas grabbed the blankets that had been strewn around the large
teepee, almost shattering an ornate bowl as he grabbed the last
one.

He turned the bowl over and over. “This is
ceremonial,” he said to himself. “That makes you the shaman,” he
said as he picked the man up and placed him on the blankets he had
piled up. “Eliza, what trouble have you gotten yourself into now?”
he asked as he left the ghost town with bowl in hand.

Tomas’ next destination was Durango, Colorado
it was where the Cavalry 3
^rd
Regiment was stationed at
Camp Foster. He needed to find out more information and the best
place was always the local saloon. Liquor tended to make tongues
wag, as did his power of persuasion.

“Who’d you say you were again?” The soldier
slurred, trying his best to focus on the person in front of him.
“This is some powerful whiskey.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Tomas said pouring the
man, boy really, another shot. “You were saying about the curse?”
Tomas asked.

“Nuffin’s been the same since we attacked
that Injun village. Now I don’t normally care one way or the other
about killing them, but these ones weren’t doing anything, they
weren’t near to any settlement or anything. And there was something
about that place.” The soldier shuddered just thinking about it.
“It was dead there. Does that make sense? I mean before we even got
there, you could just sense that something wasn’t right. Like the
angel of darkness himself had settled upon the place.” The young
soldier took another gulp of liquid courage.

“It was no angel and he was a she,” Tomas
said, pouring the man another shot in his drained glass.

“What?” the man asked looking up from his
glass. When Tomas didn’t answer right away, the soldier continued.
“The Indians put up a good fight, but it almost felt like it was
for show. That doesn’t even make sense to me.” The soldier paused,
trying to grasp the correct words. “I…I mean they already seemed
dead like they had nothing left to live for. Damndest thing though,
we wiped out that whole village and there wasn’t a woman or a child
among them. I mean normally, your first thought would be, yeah,
raiding party, but it was their summer encampment. You could tell
by the large gathering tent, that things means everything to them.
They wouldn’t take it on raids.”

“Could the woman and children have left
before you got there?” Tomas asked.

“I asked myself that,” he said, wiping the
back of his hand across his mouth. “But we hit them so fast and so
hard, they couldn’t have escaped. And I know we surprised them
because most of ‘em were coming out of their teepees when we hit.
It wasn’t like they had any advance warning or anything.”

“And this Colonel Broward, he led the
charge?” Tomas prodded.

“Yeah, funny thing that.”

“How so?”

“The colonel never went out on a mission,
ever. And he was hell-bent on getting out to this little fly shit
of an Indian village and destroying it. We barely slept, or hardly
ate. Eight horses died from being pushed over the edge of
exhaustion. Those were some good horses.”

“To say nothing of the Indians that died,”
Tomas added.

“What are you trying to get at, mister?” The
soldier said. “I lost four friends out there,” he said as he rose
up.

“Nothing, I meant nothing by it. Please sit;
have another drink,” Tomas said, smiling.

“I think maybe I’ve had enough,” the soldier
said, about to turn and walk away.

“You’ll leave when I say you can,” Tomas said
forcibly.

The soldier stopped mid-stride and began to
size Tomas up. He quickly sat back down. “One more drink for the
road sounds good,” the soldier said as if he had been thinking that
all along.

“You were saying?”

The soldier was smiling as Tomas poured him
another drink as if the last few seconds had not happened at
all.

“I mean not only did the colonel come with
us, he led the charge. He looked like a man possessed. Like the
devil himself was on his tail.”

“Probably was,” Tomas said seriously.

The soldier paused to reflect on Tomas’
answer. And then nodded his head in agreement.

“The colonel almost left without even burying
our dead. I think Staff Sergeant Reddings would have shot him. So
we buried our men, said a few short prayers and headed back, almost
as fast as we had headed out there. Would have too, if the horses
could have taken it.”

“Was the colonel looking for anything?”

“Looking? No. Like I said, the colonel
couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there, like he was late for
his own death.” The soldier laughed at his own quip. “Which I guess
he was, considering he came home to a dead family. Then he killed
himself.”

“So he didn’t kill them?”

“Why would he kill them? There were rumors
that he had, but I was the one on the burial detail. I had to help
get those bodies out of the house. I’ve seen a lot of dead. The
colonel’s brains splattered all over his portrait will be something
I can never drink away,” he said brandishing his drink. “But the
kids and the wife? There was something wrong there; they were all
shriveled up like peaches left out in the desert sun. None of them
had a drop of blood in them and there wasn’t a drop of any spilled
anywhere in the house. And I got the same feeling I did at that
damned Indian village, something bad had been there, it was like I
could feel the evil still lurking in the shadows.”

“Did the colonel leave a note or
anything?”

The soldier merely shook his head from side
to side. “I have fourteen months left on my enlistment. I need to
get out of this unit before it gets me,” the soldier said
desperately.

“Before what gets you?”

“The curse. We’re cursed now.” The soldier
sneered as if to say ‘how do you not know?’ “I’ve been hearing that
the medicine man of the tribe we killed had cursed the colonel for
something and that was why the colonel wanted to kill him, but the
curse didn’t die with the medicine man. He was able to do some
magic that made the colonel’s family dry up. And he somehow turned
friend against friend.”

“How so?” Tomas asked.

“Gentry and Tenson have been friends long
before I ever joined the unit. And then one morning, neither one
shows for revelry. Of course, it’s me that gets to go and check in
on their tent. Tenson’s still in his rack, but I know he ain’t
never going anywhere again. His blanket is soaked in his own blood
and Gentry is gone. At first, I just can’t believe that Gentry did
it. They were as close as brothers. But he was gone and so was his
stuff. I need to get out of here,” the soldier said, placing his
head between his hands.

“How long ago was that?” Tomas asked.

“Almost a month,” the soldier said, looking
up. “You want to see it?”

“See what?”

“The tent, it’s still there. The captain is
waiting for a magistrate to come out here to witness the crime
scene.”

“Yes, very much so.”

Ten minutes later a swaying, Private Bucks
was at the tent flap, looking around for anyone that might catch
them, unwillingly to go in where he would be less noticed. Tomas,
did as the private asked and did not move or pick up anything. He
could sense Eliza’s presence here, but in a much more muted form.
He could not explain what he felt, just that in some shape, way or
form she had been here.

“My sister was here,” Tomas said more aloud
to taste the tangibility of his question in the open air.

“Your sister?” Bucks asked.

Tomas looked over to the private. “Someone
you would be better off never meeting.”

“Your sister is the white witch?” Bucks asked
as he let go of the tent flap and began to back up.

Tomas moved quickly to halt his retreat.
Bucks barely had time to register how strong the boy was.

“What do you know of this ‘white witch’?”

“Nothing. I don’t know nothing. Let me go. I
knew there was something wrong with you,” Bucks said, trying his
best to release the iron grip around his forearm.

“I will let you go when you tell me what you
know,” Tomas said as he dragged the wide-eyed private back into the
confines of the tent.

“Fine, anything that makes you go away. The
night before we rode out against those Indians, I was in the tavern
with Gentry and a couple of other guys. And we saw the colonel over
at the far end of the place, talking to one of the prettiest women
I had…or any of us had ever seen, but there just wasn’t something
right with her. I wanted to get a closer look at her, but she
scared the bejesus out of me. I never did get much closer than
about fifteen feet. She looked up at me once, I…I felt like she
wanted to kill me. And not that she ‘wanted to’, but that she
could. All that beauty and she was just so cold, so deadly cold.”
Bucks made a show of wrapping an imaginary jacket around his
shoulders to shield himself from the memory.

“And you haven’t seen her since that
night?”

“No, she’s not a face you would forget; but
if I did see her, I’d be heading the other way.”

Tomas had fragments to this puzzle. Eliza had
engineered a cavalry raid on the Indian village, but why? Was she
looking for something? Was she afraid of someone?
Impossible,
Tomas thought, answering his own question. He
hadn’t seen fear in her eyes since the day she bit him. Some five
centuries previous. There was no doubt that something powerful that
belonged to Eliza had been in this room.
Is that what she was
looking for? But why not come back and get it? Why go through all
the trouble of setting this thing up and not following
through.

“Did Tenson or Gentry say anything about the
day of the raid?”

Bucks looked confused.

“Did they talk about finding anything?”

Bucks had not yet shaken the look off his
face. And then a thought he might have never have retrieved, popped
to the fore. “I don’t think it meant anything, but Tenson was
always kind of a glum person. Always the first to bed, griped about
everything, even the food, and sometimes that was actually pretty
good. But after the raid, even while we were burying our dead, he
was smiling from ear to ear. I thought it was strange as hell. But
I was tired and we were, like I said, burying our dead. I didn’t
much pay attention to him.”

“How long after you got back did Gentry go
missing?”

“About a week. Come to think of it, Tenson
started talking about places where he wanted to live and what he’d
do when he got out of the cavalry. He even started coming to get
drinks with us. He was actually turning into a pretty decent guy
before Gentry gutted him like a fish.”

“Do you know where Gentry was from?” Tomas
asked.

“Pretty sure it’s Louisiana. Yeah, New
Orleans because he was always going on and on about the Cajun food
and how he misses shrimp.”

Private Bucks thought he must have passed out
for a few minutes. When he sat up, he realized he was on Gentry’s
rack and the stranger was gone, if he had ever been there at all.
The only thing he could focus on was the mounting headache starting
to take root in the base of his skull.

Tomas headed east. Even without getting a
location from Bucks, he would have been able to follow whatever
Gentry was carrying. It was a faint trail, but it was there if you
knew what to look for, and now he did.
Did Eliza?
He pushed
his horse harder, but Gentry and possibly Eliza had three weeks on
him.

It took Tomas nearly a week to get to
Gentry’s family home. It was a ramshackle hut built of varying
pieces of wood and held together more from force of habit than
anything else.