Dead Reckoning by Mercedes Lackey, Rosemary Edghill Page B

this way or not, he could find no sign of tracks. He could continue southward and try again to pick up the trail there, but before he did there were some things he wanted to investigate here.
    “When I approached the dormitory buildings, I could see what had been invisible at a distance. The buildings have shutters, but they cover only wood.”
    “No windows?” Jett asked. “The chapel’s windows were bricked up too. Why?”
    “I have no explanation,” White Fox admitted. “But when I went to see if all the buildings followed the pattern of the first, I saw the original bunkhouse’s windows had been boarded up as well. And further, the door was barred—from the outside.”
    He’d listened carefully at the door for some minutes, and when he was certain the interior was empty, he’d removed the bar. Just as he’d been about to open it, he’d heard the bell ring for dinner, and ducked hastily inside.
    “It was empty of furniture,” he said. “Even the stove had been removed. And in the center of the floor there was a second set of doors—chained shut.”
    “Sounds like you had more fun than I did,” Jettobserved. “But why bar the door from the
outside
? And if you did, why chain the inside doors shut? Where do they go, anyway? No bunkhouse I’ve ever heard tell of came with a storm cellar.”
    “Once more I have no answers, Jett, only questions. Yet I can tell you this much: the trail we followed from Alsop stops at Jerusalem’s Wall. Once I saw all the members of the ‘Fellowship’ had entered the ranch house and were likely to remain there, I spent more than an hour casting about to see if I could find the trail once more. I could not.”
    “Well, if you couldn’t find it, odds are it wasn’t there to find,” Jett said. She inspected the sky. “I suppose we could wait around until night,” she said reluctantly. “Do some more poking around when everybody’s asleep in their beds.”
    “I do not think that would be prudent,” White Fox said. “Without the key, the doors in the bunkhouse floor will remain locked. It is true that you might shoot the lock off,” he added with a faint smile, “but that would be certain to attract just the attention we both hope to avoid.”
    “True enough,” Jett said. “Back to town, then. If that fool Yankee hasn’t either blown it up or burned it to the ground by accident.”
    “I believe you’re wrong, Gibbons,” White Fox saidmildly. “If she has done any such thing, it will be with all deliberate intent.”
    * * *
    The telegraph machine began chattering precisely at the appointed hour. But even though Jacob Gibbons’s communication filled several dozen yards of recording tape, it didn’t provide much enlightenment to his daughter. It seemed there was blessed little in the way of useful information to be had. It was said a hoodoo doctor or hoodoo queen could cause a newly dead corpse to rise up and do his or her will. Some said the body had to belong to a suicide, others that it had to be someone who’d died of a curse. Some said a zombie could be killed by feeding it something containing salt. Other means of zombie destruction included feeding them holy water, or blessed wafers, or bringing them within the sound of church bells on a Sunday morning. But Jacob could tell his daughter little more than that.
    All useless
, Gibbons thought in exasperation.
I am willing to believe without a scrap of further investigation that there is not one hoodoo sorcerer within a thousand miles of where I’m standing. And I am not dealing with a story of
one
zombie, but of an entire zombie army!
    She wondered if there was any practical hope of getting a reliable count of the Alsop “zombies” out of either Jett or Mister Maxwell. The
Llano Estacado
wasn’t particularly well-settled. It would be hard to hide an army of any size here—let alone a
zombie
army, which (logic insisted) would need to be replenished at frequent intervals as decay and putrefaction