Voidstalkers Chapter One

One

 

Earth, Sol System. 1867. Larnwick, Madison County, Missouri.

 

 

     “I’m tellin’ ye’! It was the Chupacabra!” insisted old Mr Hershall loudly “Small and mean, with great big glarin’ eyes and razor teeth! Done ate my goats apart! I seen it!”
      Colby’s eyes sprang open from where he dozed. His skinny limbs jerked awake and he brushed the messy fringe of dark brown hair from his eyes. It was always messy and tangled, no matter how much his Aunt brushed it straight for church Sundays. His face would be grimy from the dust, beneath his mismatched eyes. One green, one blue. Colby yawned and stretched. He’d give his face a scrub later.
     Mr Hershall always said things loudly, given the ancient, sun wizened man was half deaf. Colby listened from where he half lay, half sat in the dry, warm dust behind a stack of splintery wooden barrels in the alley behind the general store. Everything seemed dry and warm here, especially in the summer. But He didn’t mind. Unlike a lot of folk, Colby liked the heat.
     “And I’m sayin’ it was varmints! Nothing more, you old coot!” Argued Samson, the general stores labourer. He couldn’t see the two from his hiding spot, but Colby could imagine the them, one old wrinkled and leathery, chewing tobacco as he leant against a wooden pallet, the other young, a bull of a man, stripped to the waist in the heat and darkly skinned, sweating as he moved impossibly large sacks of grain from the back of a cart into the halfhouse out back where they stored the stuff too big to put out front. It was a ritual, almost. Like holy communion at the church, except more entertaining and didn’t leave a rank, cloying taste in Colby’s mouth.
     As if on que, the steeple bell tolled loud and clear from within the town, and Colby jolted in the dust where he lay, drifting off again in the warm afternoon sun that slanted down between the ochre brick sides of the alley. His heart skipped a beat. Despite the heat in his limbs ice formed in his stomach. How long had he dozed? Sunday school was over. If he didn’t get his behind over to the church hall in time, Aunt Gracie would surely know he’d skipped. Again. And she’d have his hide with that great wooden spoon back home. Far, far worse than that, he’d never be allowed to go see the circus.
     He’d spied the white-striped-red canvas of the big top being hoisted to its zenith by a dozen sweating men just that morning as he and his uncle had trundled into town in their cart, dressed and headed for church and market. He’d watched in awe as the huge grey elephants were led from their straw-lined cages inside, listened, strained at the faint hint of a lion’s roar on the wind. Chuckling, his uncle, grey-bearded, red nosed, and wearing his usual peaked straw hat had watched his wonder. He’d promised then, that if he’d behaved, that if he’d gotten his chores done that afternoon, they’d trundle on back down from the farm to see the circus together. Colby had almost been able to smell the hot peanuts on the very breeze. But that was the hitch. If he’d behaved. Which meant going to Sunday school after church when his uncle had rolled off into town with the cart stacked high with produce.
     Colby sprang up from his spot, bare feet sending up fine plumes of dust as he lurched down the alleyway between the buildings at a run. Old Mr Hershall, face leathery and sun-dark nearly fell from where he leant against the mule-drawn cart in surprise. Samson looked up, his brawny arms glistening ebony in the sunlight and dripping sweat, matting the black hair to his scalp.
     “What’s the matter Colby?” he called, laughing, face lopsided in a simple half-smile. “You seen a Chupa-cabra?”
     Colby didn’t bother to turn and yell back a reply. The bell tolled high and clear through the air overhead. He reckoned had before it ended its chime to get across the town to the white towering steepled building, at which time was when his uncle pulled up alongside to collect him in his cart every Sunday. Like clockwork. Colby put his head down and sprinted the last few meters of the alleyway. The drab faded overalls he wore over a mustard linen shirt were soiled and caked in the dust he’d been lying in. As he ran he tried frantically to beat at the heavy cloth and shake it loose, but the fine grains had worked deep and stained the fabric in brown splotches. He’d have to think of a good cover story about tripping and falling in the road by the time he got back to the farmstead, or his Aunt would have him scrubbing the lot himself, from sun-up till it was pristine again. The thought made him run harder.
     Colby rounded the corner of the brick-sided buildings and into the avenue proper. Larnwick opened up before him, the double-wide street bustling with people going about their late Sunday afternoon business, catching up after the labour of the mornings church service. Brightly coloured shop and store fronts lined the dirt avenue running the length of the town. Raised from the lead mining boom recently come to the area in the last decade, Larnwick was fast becoming a working town in truth, the bare skeleton of scaffolding and wooden beam cranes towering over the horizon of the rooftops, testifying to the development the new money had brought to the once quiet, unimportant backwater.
     Not bothering with the crowded wooden walkways out of the dirt and horse muck of the road, Colby dashed down the avenue, bare feet flying like twin zephyrs.   Two middle-aged farmers, their balding heads winged with white jumped at his sudden appearance around the corner while they wrestled a heavy iron-bound barrel out of the general stores open door. The curses they muttered darkly in his direction would have made his own foul-mouthed uncle shave his head and turn celibate, yet Colby spared them no second glance in his flight. He’d heard much the same before.
     The plank walkways fronting the various stores of the town were clogged with folk coming and going to the shops and services lining the street. A gaggle of laughing women in their Sunday best hoop skirted dresses and frilly bonnets took the entire width of the walkway to his right. Continuing a shrill-toned story that had them all giggling, they entered a dressmakers single-file. To his left a smith and his young, skinny apprentice were busy heaving at a great cast-iron anvil in the centre of the walkway. Their leather aprons flapped about as the weight of the thing made the planks beneath groan and shift. A cart nearby haltered to a bored looking donkey sat immobile and waiting as the beast chewed lazily inside its feed-bag. It looked like it had been there for some time already. The walkways were always bustling with traffic and obstacles. Colby knew from experience that the fastest way to get across town was to run directly along and through the broad dirt road running its length. It was also the most dangerous.
     As if to emphasise the point, a black lacquered carriage thundered down the avenue towards his sprinting form. The six-strong horse team rode at a gallop, chomping their metal bits with mouths frothing. Colby had to leap aside into the other lane of the street to avoid the oncoming hooves, the horses towering darkly above him. The chauffer at the reigns stared on ahead, tall black hat gleaming dully in the sunlight. It was likely that riding Colby down wouldn’t have phased him in the slightest. Brilliant gold letting embossed on the side of the carriage between its huge turning wheels identified the owner as a tailor merchant from out of town. As the team and carriage roared past the running boy Colby spared the lot a poked tongue and a raspberry for his trouble. Trough a little side-window on the side he saw the eyes of a grey-moustachioed gentleman widen in affront. Fighting back a laugh, he kept running.
      It was lucky he’d looked back ahead again to narrowly avoid another horse, a lone one with its rider crossing the street from one of the adjacent thoroughfares. He leapt sideways just in time to dodge a savage kick from the dirty white mare. Colby didn’t look back at the angry ‘Hoy!’ shouted at him from the horses back.
     Halfway down the busy avenue a high-pitched whistle cut the air distantly. A train was coming in to the station on the far side of Larnwick. Colby picked up the pace, lungs burning. If the train stopped across the tracks at the station between him and the church, he’d be doomed. With no way around the locomotive, he’d be trapped on the wrong side of the tracks with no other option than to go around.
     A cart wheeled backwards out of nowhere in front of him. Instead of stopping, Colby dove beneath the wooden bed and under the axles, rolling messily though a deep pie of manure left on the street from passing traffic. Leaping upright again he cursed silently to himself and continued to run. Another stain on his already filthy overalls. Hopefully the tripping story would still cover it.
     He could see it ahead in the distance. The white granite of the stone train platform seemed to glow dully in the ruddy afternoon light cast from a rapidly sinking sun. The molten ball, now sluggishly sinking towards the horizon, was casting vertical beams of light between the gaps in the buildings as Colby fled past, flashing bright in his vision with every passing. He blinked rapidly, trying to clear the purple after-image from each one. It was during one of these brief moments of darkness with his eyes closed that Colby’s legs collided with something below his knees and he went sprawling, tumbling into the dirt where he rolled several times with momentum.
     Swearing aloud this time he gingerly got up, hands braced against the ground to raise his head. A mangy slat-ribbed dog panted at him forlornly a few meters away, wide brown eyes rolling in a hurt, dopey manner.
     “Get!” Colby hissed at it angrily.
     The dog scarpered. There were a collection of sniggers and he looked up, to his right at the nearby wooden walkway.
     Mary-Anne and her posse of immaculately porcelain-faced friends were hiding their amusement behind frilly fans, though their eyes shone with laughter beneath their tight bonnets. For all their stares and giggles, they might as well not have been there at all. Mary-Anne’s deep blue eyes were wide and innocent, looking down at him concernedly where he lay sprawled in the dirt like a common ruffian. Though, truth be told, that’s exactly what he was.
     Mary-Anne was the daughter of a rich prospector-turned-trader who’d struck it big in the mining rush one year. Though he himself had started from humbler beginnings than Colby and his family, the wealth his success had bestowed upon him had elevated his daughter far above the possibility of courtship from a country hick like him. She was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. Dark auburn curls, sky blue azure eyes and cheeks that made a rose blush. More than once he’d sworn in secret to himself that he’d marry her.
     “Colby? Are-are you alright?” She asked in that astonishingly timid manner of hers.
     He realized he’d been staring. He hoped there was now enough dirt covering his face that she and her friends couldn’t see the bright crimson now creeping across his face and ears.
     “I-uh-“
     “Ew, don’t talk to him, Mary.” Sneered Priscilla Monroe, a hoity pig-faced constituent of the gathered girls.
      “He’s just a dirty Bumpkin.”
     Colby glared at her. Then he looked closer. All the girls, including Mary-Anne were in their Sunday best dresses and bonnets. A chill ran through him. The church bell had stopped chiming. He had no idea when it had ended its toll during his flight. He was too late.
     Colby picked himself up and roughly shook his dirt-caked overall trousers. Without further ado to the gawking and sniggering girls, he threw one foot in front of the other and pushed off, hard. The other foot followed. Very quickly he was flying along the avenue of the town again, towards the quarried stone of the train platform, away from stupid Priscilla Monroe and her pig-face.
     The high scream of the trains steam whistle cut the air again. Colby ran harder, head down, arms pumping furiously. If he made it over the tracks in time, all was explainable. All could be excused away as a short jaunt to the platform to see the train come it. Everyone loved the sight of the steam engines when they rolled into Larnwick, belching their plumes of coal-fed smoke and jetting steam, bringing people and goods from all over the country. He couldn’t have helped tripping over that stray dog as he heroically lugged the rich lady’s luggage to her awaiting carriage. He’d been doing his civic duty as a local, was all. Unfortunate circumstances borne of a child’s curiosity. The lie formed in his head and resolved, becoming more and more believable the more he rehearsed it.
     Colby was so enraptured with his own genius that before he realised it, the white gritty blocks of the train platform were beneath his feet. He cast around. The train was just a scant few dozen meters distant, the jet-black boiler roaring down the line towards the platform running parallel to it on the far side of the double tracks.
     He could made it. He had to. Colby raced across the scratching rough stone and leapt down onto the sharp gravel of the tracks. The very stones beneath his feet vibrated with the oncoming locomotives wrath as it thundered on, bearing down on him. He raced across the vacant set of steel rails towards the second juddering ones. The loose gravel began to jump around his running feet as Colby sprinted the last few intervening meters. The train, now just a carriage width-distance away gave a deafening blast of its whistle. Colby leapt.
     And rolled heavily onto the platform on the opposite side of the tracks. The train, huge and screeching down the tracks as its brakes bit down hard, flew through the space where his vulnerable running form had just been scant moments earlier. There was a soft wicker. Colby sat upright.
     Sitting astride an angry-looking stallion blacker than deaths own cape, a Sheriff’s Deputy looked down at him. Desert-tan uniform immaculately pressed and displaying a brightly polished silver star, the serious-faced officer stared down into his eyes with a face like thunder. The handle-bar moustache adorning the stone face beneath its wide-brimmed peaked hat made his surveying frown all the more terrible. A shining silver Colt .44 revolver sat on his hip in a darkly polished leather holster. Colby’s eyes flicked from the gun to the man’s face and back again nervously. Slowly, impossibly, the Deputy tipped his head in an assuring nod, and simply turned his head back to watch the slowing train.
     Colby’s heart fluttered. With a crash of reality, he realised why he was flat on his back yet again, centre of a rumbling train platform and cowering before the cold stare of the Deputy. He leapt up onto his feet and spun.
     There, across a dirt road rutted with the passage of a thousand carts over a hundred years, the church stood pristine and gleaming white in the descending sun. Colby lurched towards it, legs shaking and breath coming in gulps from his long flight through the town.
     The long stretch of dusty road in front of the steepled church was blessedly empty. Head down and still breathing hard, Colby staggered across the bumpy bare earth and towards the steps leading up to the brightly painted sky-blue double doors of the church. He couldn’t believe his luck. His uncle wasn’t there yet. The absence of his cart said as much. If he was lucky, he could hurry inside and clean up some before he rolled down the road. Less dirt and manure might make his concocted story more believable.
     Something small and hard smacked into the side of Colby’s head, and he bit down on his tongue, hard. One hand to his wounded scalp, he looked up.
     The reason why Colby skipped Sunday school so often stood at the church steps, hefting another rock to throw from a collection in his other hand. Daelin O’connor was a thickset youth three years older than Colby, neckless with fat and with hard, mean little beady rat-like eyes. His cronies stood to either side of him, Harry Leichfeild and Nate Osmund, the former a skinny rake of a boy with almost fang-like buck teeth, freckles and flame-orange hair. The latter was short, the youngest of the three, with a laughing, sneering face and a propensity to do the other older boys’ bidding. All three cradled more rocks prepared to throw.
     “Where you been Col? Eating horse dung again with your friend Stupid Samson?” Jeered Daelin to the loud guffaws of his mates beside him.
     Colby’s fists balled at his sides. It was a town joke that Samson, the kindly bull of a man who worked as a labourer for old Mr Hershall at the General store was a few pails short of a well-full of water. One day when he’d been hiding, out the back of the store in his favourite spot to catch the best of the afternoon sun, Daelin and his gang had found him. It’d taken Samson hauling the fat boy off him to stop him from mashing Colby’s face into a particularly gooey mound of manure on the dirty ground of the alley. The three had never let him live it down ever since.
     “Oh yeah? What’s that mark on your face eh Daelin? Pa been thrashing you again? He lose at the tables again?”bColby shouted back.
     Daelins face burned red and the smile slid from his face into a glower. His beady rat-eyes narrowed and burned with embers of hate.
     “Get him!” He screeched.
     The rocks flew thick and fast. Despite their accumulated ammunition, the bullies’ aim was lousy. Over half landed a foot wide either side of the darting Colby as he dove for cover, rolling across the grassy verge next to the road. Too many for his liking thudded and thumped against his back, arms and legs, leaving sore impacts. Two glanced again across his short hair, bouncing from his skull, dull cracks sounding in his ears as they connected with bone. He winced at the pain but screwed his eyes up, determined not to cry. Not again. Not like last time.
     As violently as they’d begun, the falling hail of stones ceased. Colby lowered his arms from where he’d been covering his head in defence. He straightened up and tried to put on a show of being unharmed despite his forming bruises.
     “Come on! You lot couldn’t hit your sows of mothers with muskets!”
     The faces of the three boys turned dark and murderous. Colby realised too late that he may have goaded them too far, and was about to pay for it. Dearly.
     “I’m gonna kill you, s**t eater!” roared Daelin shrilly.
     His cronies to either side hurled similar abuse. The three charged towards him, across the short expanse of emerald grass that surrounded the pristine church.
     Colby crouched down and frantically raked his hands through the grass. Three decently sized rocks, recently thrown collected in his grasp. He rose back up again with his ammunition. His arm drew back, and he let fly.
     The first stone went wide, thudding into the grass weakly far to the left of the approaching trio. The second he slung scored a decent hit, smacking into Leichfeild’s nose and mouth, likely chipping one of his buck teeth. Hoping for another solid score, Colby let the last stone fly. It arced high over the boy’s heads on a wild trajectory, hard and fast towards the church.
     There was a resounding crack of breaking window followed by a faint tinkle as a segment of stained glass window from the front of the tall building was caved inwards to shatter upon the floor below. Colby winced.
      A Whip-crack like a gunshot split the air.
     “COLBY HARPER!” Roared a voice.
     Veins turning to ice, Colby turned. He knew that voice. His uncle, face murder beneath his straw hat, rolled to a stop upon the road just shy of the children before the church. His huge bullwhip was in one hand and his eyes held wrath.