grotesque green snowfall from hell.
Wampus was rolling wildly, digging his shoulders into what should have been ground but was, instead, two inches of grasshoppers, the thick brown exudate—tobacco juice, as the cowboys called it—staining his coat. He snapped futilely at the hordes, accomplishing nothing but filling his mouth with hopper parts and guts. Will and Ray slapped at themselves ineffectually. Even with pants tucked into boots and bandannas tight to their necks, the cursed hoppers got into their clothing and the sensation of the beating wings, the sharp-edged legs, and the seeping flow of tobacco juice was enough to drive a sane man ’round the bend. Will tried rolling on the ground— forgetting there was no ground, beyond millions of grasshoppers. He stumbled to his feet with more hoppers touching his flesh than he’d had before he attempted rolling.
It was impossible to see; the cloud of insects was so thick that there was no space between them. They were a writhing sheet of foul, tremendously destructive creatures that brought forth a driving, atavistic fear in man and animal alike.
The onslaught ended abruptly. One moment the very air was crawling with hoppers and the next only a few stragglers leapfrogged past. Even the mass of hoppers on the ground moved after those in the air—except for those that’d been crushed, rolled on, or stomped into paste. Dead and dying snakes littered the ground; dead prairie dogs and jackrabbits were scattered about. There hadn’t been many scorpions—at least that the men could see. They’d stamped on those.
The men stripped down and shook their shirts and pants vigorously, emptying their clothing of hopper corpses. They picked the crushed ones off their skin as if they were scabs, often gagging as they did so.
Will tossed his bandanna on the ground in disgust, first holding it out in front of him. “Lookit this goddamn thing,” he said, “dripping with ’bacco juice. Damn! It’d make a shit fly puke.”
They looked around them, awestruck. There was nothing green—or even brown and dessicated by the sun— left on the prairie. It was as if a giant scythe wielded by a demon spirit had attacked the area as far as the eye could see.
The horses, still hobbled, hadn’t gotten far and now stood together, heads hanging, breathing heavily, insects glued to their panicked sweat. Will and Ray cleaned their mounts using the edges of hands as scrapers. Wampus, finally standing erect, cleaned himself, except for those his paws and teeth couldn’t reach. Will took care of those for him.
“Ya know,” Ray said, “as bad as this was, some good’s goin’ to come out of it.”
“How so?”
“Think about it, Will. The whole wampus thing. See, the redskins believe a wampus can control nature, control the weather. They gotta see the hopper attack as a plague ordered by the wampus.”
Will considered that. “Then we oughta plan an attack real soon—hit ’em while they’re still seeing visions of hoppers an’ wampus comin’ after them.”
“Right. The grasshoppers headed right for Olympus. The outlaws could stay in their saloon, but most of the windows—maybe all of ’em—were shot out, so that cesspool was just a-crawlin’ with hoppers. We know how they react to your wolf dog, an’ if you up an’ add that to a plague of bugs they figure the wampus set on ’em, well, we got us a buncha scared enemies—real scared.”
“I dunno, Ray. One Dog jus’ hired on a herd of new guns. We don’t know where they come from or who they are—or what they can do with a pistol or rifle.”
Ray grinned derisively. “Sure. I ’magine they hired on the Earp brothers, Billy Bonney, John Ringo, Bill Hickok, ol’ Doc Holliday, all them Clanton boys, an’ the goddamn Pope, right?”
Will laughed heartily. “Thing is, the Pope could never fan a .38 or .44 worth a damn. But yeah, you’re right. Still, they got a army and we got us. We’re better an’ faster an’ a whole bundle smarter than they are, but they can put a awful lot of lead in the air.
“Seems to me you got a plan, Ray.”
“Oh, yeah. An’ a damn fine one.”
“Tell me.”
“First I gotta show you somethin’.” He led Will over to their saddles, their boots crunching on dead hoppers. The grasshoppers hadn’t had time to do any real damage to the saddles, although both were splotched with amber saliva from them. “I got some neat’s-foot erl,” Ray said. “We’ll clean our tack later.” He crouched down and opened his saddlebag, from which he removed a wooden box about sixteen inches long and six inches wide.
“What’s that?”
“Now, jus’ hold on an’ I’ll show you.”
Ray worked the three latches on the box and swung its top open. There, on a layer of straw, were six flat, blunt-ended darkish brown strips, each about a half inch wide. “This here is black powder,” Ray said, “mixed with some chemical or another, so it ain’t loose—ain’t really a powder. A feller named Du Mont or Du Pont or some such come up with it for the Union Army. Then the war went an’ ended an’ he kinda give up on the idear.”
“But what’s it for?”
“I’ll show you in a minute. But first, when I went to send them wires, I seen posters nailed to the wall of the depot on three of the boys I was lookin’ for. Then, the ol’ buzzard runnin’ the ’graph key tol’ me two of the boys was dead an’ he knew it for a fact. Anyhow, we got to jawin’ an’ I mentioned One Dog. I tol’ him me an’ my group was Pinkertons disguised as reg’lar saddle tramps an’ cowhands, an’ our job was to kill One Dog. Well, that lit up the ol’ fella. Dog had killed some relative a his, a farmer. He—”
“Jesus, Ray, will you cut the horseshit an’ tell me what you’re thinkin’ an’ what them sticks are for?”
“Porky sumbitch,” Ray mumbled. He took one of the sticks and hurled it overhand out into the prairie. “Now you pop that fella with a rock,” he said.
Will drew his pistol.
“No, dammit! Toss stones ’til you hit it.”
“Look here . . .”
“Jus’ do it an’ keep your yap from flappin, OK?”
Will waited for a long moment and then gathered up a good handful of pitching stones and began throwing. Will didn’t have much of an arm for throwing stones—he had the strength, but his accuracy was abysmal.
“Gonna be dark in a few hours,” Ray remarked.
Will grumbled some obscenities but kept on pitching. Finally, one of his stones ticked the very end of the stick. The explosion blew him off his feet and onto his ass on dead grasshoppers.
“Holy God,” he said reverently.
“See, a decent-sized man’s weight—a single step—will set one of these sonsabitches off. All we gotta do is slide in there and plant some sticks an’ we got them outlaws by the eggs, no?”
“Sure! We plant some ’round the saloon, some where their horses are—lots of places. Damn, Ray, you’re a genius!”
“Ahh, hell,” Ray said modestly, “ain’t nothin’ the great Bobby Lee couldn’t have did, had he these sticks.”
It was a long wait until full dark. Will leaned against his saddle, smoking a cigarette after clearing the insects out of his space, thinking.
Chapter Nine
