A Lust For Lead Read online

  The jibe was unexpected and cut Buchanan where it hurt. His face twisted into a monstrous grimace of rage and his eyes blazed furiously. Shane tensed, expecting to die there and then, but instead Buchanan twisted away. He bowed his head and Shane heard him breathe deeply for a count of ten. He was calm when he straightened again, although the fury still simmered behind his eyes.

  He controls himself better than he used to, but only just, Shane thought.

  ‘Too bad.’ Buchanan growled. ‘It might be better for you if you didn’t.’ He drew a Bowie knife from a scabbard under his arm and used it to cut the ropes that bound Shane’s wrists. Shane drew away from him, rubbing the circulation back into his hands.

  Buchanan sheathed the knife and mounted his horse. ‘We’ve a long way to go Shane. Some old friends are waiting for you.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘You’ll figure it out soon enough.’ He kicked his heels and the horse trotted away.

  Shane sat, watching as Buchanan rode off. The desert was wide and vast and he thought about making a run for it, but that, he suspected, was exactly what Buchanan wanted him to do. Buchanan was under orders to deliver him somewhere, alive. He was inviting Shane to cause trouble, to give him a reason to kill him.

  And Shane was not going to do that, not when it seemed that he had been granted a few more days to live at least.

  The dime novels had once called him the most dangerous man in America. Shane Ennis had been a killer so efficient that men had said he was Death itself, given form and sent among the sinners to kill the unworthy.

  Those days were long gone. Shane had not so much as touched a gun since Santa Morgana and the stories that were told about him now spoke of a coward who had lost his nerve. That was not the way of it. Shane had his reasons for laying down his guns, but they were reasons that few men would understand.

  Buchanan understood them all too clearly and he took every opportunity to show his contempt. He slowed his mount and rode close by Shane’s side with his revolver carelessly exposed for Shane to grab it if he chose. Other times, he rode far ahead out of sight, tempting Shane with opportunities to escape from him, but Shane never took them. He had resigned himself to his fate and he had no wish to hasten it by giving Buchanan cause to shoot him. His one satisfaction lay in watching Buchanan grow increasingly irritated the more his games failed to illicit a reaction.

  They rode steadily on a north-westerly heading, winding through barren country far from settled lands. Buchanan spoke often but said little. He gave no indication of where they were going or what would happen to Shane when they got there.

  They made camp that night and the following morning they rode on, ever northwest. There was no sign of the three riflemen and Buchanan seemed in no mood to wait for them. Likely they were making their own way toward whatever secret rendezvous lay ahead. That Buchanan seemed unconcerned for the safety of the money confirmed something that Shane had begun to suspect: that the money was not his but belonged instead to his employer. Somebody else was holding Buchanan’s leash, somebody else who had a vested interest in Shane; though who that somebody was, Shane could not imagine.

  They rode for days. One night as they sat around a spitting fire, Shane broke his silence and asked Buchanan where they were going. Buchanan answered him with a sneer: ‘You should know that by now.’

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘I’d have thought you would. Where else do you know lies all the way out here?’

  It hit Shane then what he was talking about. ‘Covenant!’

  Buchanan smiled to himself. ‘I’m taking you back where you belong,’ he said.

  Covenant was a ghost town way out in the badlands, so wrapped up in legend now that it was hard to separate the fact from the fiction. Some folk didn’t even believe that it ever existed.

  In its day, the town had been prosperous and the land surrounding it had not been nearly as bad as it had since become. August Third, 1879 was the day that had marked the end of Covenant’s fortunes. On that day, a gunfighter by the name of Jacob Priestley had ridden into town and, seemingly without provocation, had proceeded to shoot everyone that he saw. Afterwards, he had walked out into the desert and shot himself in the head. At least, that was what the story claimed. His footprints had ended abruptly beside a rock, just high enough for him to have sat on, and beside it had been a long splash of blood and a piece of skull with Priestley’s coal-black hair hanging from its scalp. The rest of him had never been found.

  Things had never been the same in Covenant after that. There were folk who said that the town had become haunted by the ghosts of those whom Priestley had slain, that gunshots and screaming had been heard in the middle of the night. Ghostly figures were seen. Suicide and murder had become a daily occurrence.

  The town had been abandoned soon after. People just couldn’t stand to live there any more and the place had acquired such a bad reputation that it was struck from the maps.

  But that had only been the beginning.

  The fire spat, throwing hot embers into the night sky. Shane glared at Buchanan over the top of the flames. In all his worst imaginings he had not thought that he would be taken to Covenant. He did not want to believe it now.

  ‘They’ll kill you just as surely as they’ll take me,’ he said defiantly.

  Buchanan shook his head. ‘I think they’ll make an exception this once. There’s another tournament, Shane. Or hadn’t you heard? How grateful do you think they’ll be if I see to it that you take part this time?’

  Shane curled his lip. ‘Bullshit!’ he said. It was not possible that another tournament was being held at Covenant. He would have heard about it if there was. Even though he had turned his back on the Fastest Guns, he had still kept his ear to the ground. Surely he had not become so out of touch?

  The first tournament had been held six years ago. More than a hundred of the best gunfighters in America had been invited to prove their worth in a series of duels to the death, intended to determine which of them was truly the best of the best. Shane and Buchanan had both been invited but neither had gone. The gunfight at Santa Morgana had taken place just weeks before the tournament was scheduled and had seen the end of both their gunfighting careers. The decision not to attend had been the hardest that Shane had ever made and he had regretted it ever since, however much he tried to tell himself otherwise.

  He found it hard to speak. ‘You’re lying,’ he croaked.

  ‘You’d like to think I am.’ The firelight reflected in Buchanan’s eyes, making them blaze. ‘You should have known they’d never let you go.’

  Chapter 3

  Shane did not sleep at all that night. He lay with his back to the hard dirt and stared up at a sky so vast that it made his head spin with vertigo.

  Covenant.

  A second tournament.

  The idea of it was so abhorrent that he didn’t want to accept that it was true. But of course it’s true. Buchanan, with his perverse knack for finding just exactly what it was that would hurt a man had found the perfect way to avenge himself on Shane. The question now was how had Shane not heard about it sooner?

  To many, the Fastest Guns were, like Covenant, a myth. Rumour spoke of a secret society of gunfighters who fought with each other in ritualised duels to the death in order to prove their superiority. Their origins dated back to the duellists of the Eighteenth Century but it had only been recently, in the wake of the August Third Massacre at Covenant, that the Fastest Guns had become consolidated into a formal institution. Jacob Priestley was revered as their posthumous messiah and Covenant was their unholy Jerusalem. In 1881, with the memory of the slaughtered still fresh in the town’s deserted streets, the Fastest Guns had held their first tournament and a hundred gunfighters had killed each other until only the six best remained.

  Nobody had seen or heard of those men since.

  Covenant was not much further away and early the following morning, Shane and Buchanan entered one of the many ghost towns
that surrounded it.

  The town was a small cluster of buildings, half-buried in the sand. Balls of tumbleweed rolled listlessly across the empty street, blown on a breeze that whispered like far-off voices in the sand. The whole place had the feel of something not quite dead.

  Glancing around, Shane noted a strange uniformity in the way the buildings all leaned on their foundations. All of them were pitched at almost precisely the same angle towards the southeast, as if all were straining to uproot themselves and move further away from where Covenant lurked beyond the northwest horizon.

  The ghost town was one of about a dozen that surrounded Covenant like desiccated husks in a spider’s web. They had all been abandoned within three years of the August Third Massacre, their inhabitants driven out by a mixture of drought and ill-fortune. Covenant’s curse had spread since 1879, reaching out like an enormous hand to steal the vitality from everything it touched, poisoning the land and bringing death and destitution.

  Shane’s horse grew increasingly nervous the further they rode. She flared her nostrils and needed constant correction; a correction that Shane himself was reluctant to enforce. He knew exactly what it was that she could sense around them and shared her unease. Buchanan’s horse was unaffected, he noticed. Besides an occasional shaking of its head or worried snort through flared nostrils, it behaved perfectly well.

  It’s had chance to grow accustomed, Shane realised. My God, he’s not only been here before, he’s spent time here.

  It seemed unthinkable. Shane had heard stories of men who had travelled to Covenant. Mostly they were gunfighters, as he had once been, who went there seeking the Fastest Guns. The stories always spoke of the grisly end that befell those intruders. Shane had never once heard of anyone going and being allowed to leave.

  But things had changed. It was late in the afternoon when Covenant appeared on the horizon and the first thing that Shane noticed about it – the first thing that jarred with his expectations – were the men who guarded its perimeter. They occupied rooftop nests, stood at balconies and upper-storey windows and were armed with heavy-calibre, long-distance rifles.

  The Fastest Guns, it seemed, had secretly increased their numbers, though again Shane could not understand how they might have done so without his hearing of it.

  The guards issued no challenge as they drew closer; they recognised Buchanan. Shane looked up at them as he rode by. Their eyes were hard, the thoughts behind them clipped and professional. They reminded Shane of the marksman who had lurked on Cantle Ridge. Each had that same killer’s edge.

  Shane was back among his own kind.

  They rode into town along the wide thoroughfare known as West Street. Covenant was a corpse of a town. Its buildings slumped on their foundations, their dirt-encrusted walls sagging, sloughing strips of old paint like rotting skin. Its windows had been mostly boarded-up or smashed. Those that remained intact were coated in a layer of hard, scabrous dirt. In places, the rooftops had caved in. In others, whole buildings had collapsed on themselves.

  The air was hot and fetid. Shane smelled gunsmoke, as if a full-on battle had only recently been fought. Eight years on and still the memory of August Third remained, leaking out of the town’s every pore.

  Further in, some of the buildings began to show signs of being lived in. Wooden boards had been torn from the windows and the dirt scrubbed from the glass, admitting light into the rooms beyond. Men watched him suspiciously as he passed. By the hungry look in their eyes, he judged that they were contestants, sizing him up in preparation for the tournament. A few of them were men that he recognised, at least by their reputations.

  Shane felt as though he was watched by other eyes as well, though he saw nothing more. The sensation made his flesh creep.

  West Street met with the South Street thoroughfare at the exact centre of town in a crossroads. The old town hall stood on one corner, its clock tower looming over the junction like a sentinel. The hands on its clock face had long ago rusted solid and become stuck at the strike of noon.

  Buchanan hitched his horse outside a building that had once been the finest hotel in town, the Grande. It was a majestic building that still clung to a faded dignity even as it slumped into decay. The steps of its wooden porch flexed under Shane’s weight as he followed Buchanan inside, into a lobby that had been built with the hotel’s name in mind. Sunlight slanted through tall windows, lighting on the tarnished frame of a chandelier and an ornate stair that climbed the wall to a gallery overhead.

  A brass bell sat on the front desk and Buchanan slapped his hand against it repeatedly, breaking the austere silence. After a short while, a door opened upstairs and a tall black man appeared at the gallery. He stared down at Buchanan with a look of cold disdain.

  Grinning, Buchanan sauntered to the foot of the stairs. ‘Is your master at home?’ he asked.

  The man did not answer him but flicked a curious glance towards Shane. The faintest suggestion of a grin twitched at the corners of his lips. Shane did not like that grin; it had a distinctly predatory look about it and he instantly decided that he did not like this man. This man was dangerous.

  He descended the stairs with smooth, graceful steps, seeming to glide, the hem of a long, grey overcoat dragging on the steps behind him. A delicate, long-fingered hand brushed against the handrail, stirring up flakes of dust. Buchanan stepped out of his way as he reached the ground floor, affording him space the way a lone wolf avoids a bear. It was only when they stood side-by-side that Shane realised just how tall the man was: he towered a full head above Buchanan, who was himself over six feet tall.

  The giant glided past Buchanan and Shane caught himself instinctively backing away as he drew closer. ‘You must be Shane Ennis,’ he said. His voice was soft and had a strange accent that Shane could not identify. Shane forced himself to meet the stranger’s gaze, and found himself staring into eyes that were as fathomless as his own.

  ‘I got him.’ Buchanan said proudly.

  ‘So I see.’ The man turned and beckoned for them to follow him into a dimly lit hall.

  ‘Have the other contestants arrived?’ Buchanan asked.

  ‘Ennis is the last,’ the giant replied.

  ‘How many have tried to kill each other already?’

  ‘None.’

  Buchanan snorted derisively. ‘Well that’s no good. They’re supposed to be killers, aren’t they?’

  The giant stopped beside a door and gestured for Shane to pass through. The room beyond was murky with dust. Tall windows dominated the far walls but their surfaces were so encrusted with years of accumulated grime that the light that shone through was stained a dirty shade of brown. In the centre of the room was a semi-circle of armchairs, each covered with a muslin cloth. Other furniture – broken and mouldering – had been stacked against the walls.

  A man stood at the window, facing out through a small circle that he had wiped clean of dirt. He turned as Shane entered the room. He was grey-haired with tanned skin and a trimmed moustache and beard. His boots were made of soft leather and were worn with brown woollen pants, a white shirt and a brown waistcoat and jacket, all expensively-tailored by the look of them. At his side was a bone-handled Colt 1873 Single Action Army revolver, rigged for a right-handed cross-draw. The look of the man said that he was no stranger to the weapon, although his bearing did not indicate that he was a gunfighter by trade. He lacked the constant wariness that men in Shane’s former profession learned to possess. Judging by his confidence and the authority in his stance, Shane guessed that he was a military man, or had been once.

  This was Buchanan’s employer, the man who had fronted the money to buy Shane’s capture. Shane was slightly disappointed that he was nobody he recognised.

  ‘You got him. Excellent,’ the man congratulated Buchanan. ‘Noonan gave you no trouble?’

  ‘None at all.’ Buchanan answered with a smile. ‘Penn and the boys will be along with your money shortly.’

  ‘Good. If there’s one thing
that I appreciate, Mister Buchanan, it’s not having to pay for the things I want. Mister Ennis!’ He extended his hand warmly. ‘I’ve been very much looking forward to meeting you, sir. My name is Colonel Hartshorne.’

  Shane had never met him but he had heard of him by reputation. Nathaniel Hartshorne had fought for the Union under General George McClellan and had earned himself an unsavoury reputation for being a butcher. During the Battle of James Point in 1861, rumour had it that he had pressed an attack upon Confederate forces despite their surrender, and had slaughtered an entire company of unarmed men.

  After the war he had gone on to amass a considerable fortune on the stock market. Asked once how he picked his investments, he had confessed that he regularly consulted with a medium and that he cast his own horoscopes before embarking on any new venture.

  Word in occult circles was that Nathaniel was secretly a practitioner of the black arts and that it was no medium he consulted, but a demon instead. It was rumoured that he had found something during the war – or that something had found him – wandering the battlefield among the dead and the wounded. It was to secure a deal with that something that he had led his brutal assault at James Point, and because of that deal that he had since become the thirteenth richest man in America.

  But money wasn’t enough for Nathaniel. For the past eight years he had invested thousands of dollars into archaeological expeditions around the world. He had plundered tombs and ancient cities in Egypt, Africa, Tibet and India, supposedly searching for some form of supernatural power.

  So far as Shane was aware, he had no connection to the Fastest Guns. What he was doing in Covenant was a mystery.

  Shane ignored the occultist’s proffered hand. After a moment’s embarrassed hesitance, Nathaniel withdrew it.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse the means by which I brought you here,’ he said. ‘As I’m sure you can appreciate, I very much doubted that you would have come had I simply asked you. Won’t you take a seat?’