A Fistful of Horror - Tales Of Terror From The Old West (22 page)

“How often do you cut and burn?” John asked.

“As often as needed.”

John pressed. “I need a better answer than that.”

The man looked on the magnitude of the work ahead of him and back at the lawman. John began to breathe through his mouth. The putrid, sweet odour that came when they were in groups or when he was too close to them invaded his nostrils again.

He was too close and they were most assuredly in a group.

I always forget until I’m back in the thick of them again.

“All these are from the past few days,” the man answered. “Afore that…it had been more than two weeks…maybe sixteen days? We have a process here that protects folks in town…from this anyways. The doctors inspect the newcomers from the east and the regular miners when they come back into Scratch from the rivers and gullies to the north. These here fell to a mess of Injun spirits that wandered down from the savage hills west. When did your query, come down this way exact, marshal?”

He used the word for a question and not the word for an animal being hunted. I wonder if he did that on purpose or if he misspoke, John thought.

John took a deep breath through his mouth. “If he came this way, he’d be in here.”

“He might have been turned away at the posts.”

“No,” John said, “He’d be in here or he never came through at all.”

“All right then…”

There’s nothing all right about this business, John thought.

He walked forward between the bodies in the front row of hooks. He felt his boots slide in the sticky earth.

Don’t fall or they’ll put you on a hook, Saint California.

The fingers of one grazed gently over the denim below his knee and then creaked aside on the hook against the rack overhead. The other connected its crooked elbow into John’s hip in front of his gun. The arms shifted down slightly and the chain clinked and popped once as the wrists tried to pull apart below the metal links, but failed.

John turned slowly while standing up straight and stiff between the second and third rows. He reached out and up with the poker to turn the face of one of the bodies to where he could view it. The eyes were open and lined with dark blood below the surface. They were rolled up shock white and looking past the body’s open scalp down at the toes of John’s boots sinking in the muck.

That’s not him.

He hooked the others by their ears, arms, or collars as he turned them to see their faces. Some of the bodies stopped turning as the loop of their hooks reached the bar of the rack and were halted. He squatted and looked around to see the curve of their chins or the set of their jaws. He had to imagine the rest of their faces from the swatches of flesh still attached to the bone that had been split or crushed by boards, blades, or bullets.

None of these were his target. He moved back between the two least bloody slabs on the third rack to investigate the fourth. He heard the horse snort and hoof the ground behind him. John turned to look, but a curtain of twice dead flesh blocked the view of his horse back in the real world near the street from this humid, sticky world of disease that didn’t end with simply dying.

He poked the bodies to turn them. All of them were strangers to him even if they had meant something to their mothers once. He spotted the first of the red men that was more of a dusty grey tone in appearance. His leathers were darkened and pinched into hard, gory lines from the wash of fluids that had escaped from various wounds and orifices. John didn’t bother moving him.

One of the Indian’s legs hung loose from the metal hook. There was a length of twine around the free ankle with a splintered, wooden stake dangling from the other end.

As he pushed through the row, the Indian was bumped by the pendulum of the others. A spill of black tar was released from some pocket in the dusty grey man’s open skull and poured out into the mud splattering filth up on to the dangling arm of the pale man next to him.

He tried to move quickly through the remaining rows, but he got his poker caught on a flap of skin on the face of one of the men. John panicked and tried to wretch the tool free. The flesh pulled up with a moist, tearing noise. The body rocked hard forward waving the arms and bending slightly at the waist. The rack above him bowed and groaned loudly against the support posts at the end.

Don’t make it worse trying to fix it, John lectured himself in a voice he knew was not his own. He wasn’t sure if it was his brother’s voice or his estranged father’s words this time.

He waited looking up at the rack as the hooks protested against the wooden dowel. It suddenly seemed too thin and flexible to do the job of holding death above the ground. John imagined the entire set coming forward and down as he watched the corpses bury him beneath poisoned flesh.

Your hat brim won’t protect you from that, Saint California, John thought.

The racks held. The slabs continued to wave with the vibration of his heartbeat through the tool or the remains of his previous struggle. He still did not trust the apparatus.

John slid the tool back and forth gently until the torn skin released from the curve of the poker.

John tried to walk to the edge of the racks, but there wasn’t space between the battered wood of the shack and the footing stakes of the racks’ posts. He worked the bodies aside as he slogged through the spillage under their leaking brains.

There are more of them than when I started, John thought, I will walk through bodies for the rest of my life.

He suddenly felt light-headed. Black dots invaded his vision and his throat felt full.

Then, he came out to the black man, his raw apron, and his one glove.

John breathed the air from the street, but he still smelled the hellish gasses behind him. The meat man held the reins and waited.

John held the poker pointing down with the handle still in his fist. The iron knob at the end was up in the air. He held it out for the man to take.

The man said, “Marshal, we might do well to just have you drop it in the dry dirt away from the horror in the mud.”

John stared at him for a moment and then released it. The curved point speared into the dirt with a drift of dust that rose up to escape from the alley into the rutted street. The street here was less travelled for a variety of reasons, so the washed out earth was caked and drying solid again. The handle tilted slightly, but the tool held the ground.

The meat man stared down at it as he spoke. “Did you find your cursed man?”

This fellow with his unsavoury work was the nicest man John had encountered on this journey and that meant something to John, especially in these circumstances.

John said, “No, sir, I’m bound farther west.”

“I’m sincerely sorry for you on that account.”

***

John waited in the trees in the hills west of Scratch’s Backside. He knew they were coming. They had followed him out of town and through the hills. This had happened to him on occasion before this leg of his quest.

Bearing the badge had distinct advantages, but this was part of the disadvantage.

He crouched next to the tree in the brush off the trail. He waited and prayed for them not to discover him.

Hide and seek was not John’s game. Campbell had told John that he breathed too loud, that he hid in the open where he was easy to see, and he made bad choices about when to move.

Nothing has changed.

The first one walked up the trail past John’s tree with his pistol drawn. He looked to both sides, but kept walking. John remembered seeing him in town, but wasn’t certain where. He looked down the side of the silver gun in the hunter’s grip as he passed.

Then, John saw the second one. He was a barrel of a man with a moustache and a scatter gun. These were the men from the gate.

John breathed out through his nostrils and the broad mercenary turned toward John’s hiding place. He aimed the gun into the trees and looked back and forth through the brush.

“Come here, Bon. I’m gonna need your help on this one,” the other man called from up the trail around the next bend.

Bon called back, “Quiet up, Taylor. I got something back here.”

Bon took two steps forward. John rested his hand on the butt of his pistol, but was afraid to move to draw it.

“Bon, come on!”

Bon turned his head up the trail. “Shut your trap a minute!”

John drew his gun and knife. Bon turned his head back as John charged out and struck the man above his right eye with the butt of the pistol splitting the brow. John was surprised when the broad man fell back to the ground.

John jumped on top of him. Bon turned his shot gun on John. The side of the shotgun’s barrel clipped the peacemaker and spun it out of John’s hand. John drove his thumb into the trigger guard of the scatter gun. He moaned as the metal cut into the flesh of his thumb without allowing the gun to fire. Bon pulled harder and pinched the bone of John’s bloody thumb.

“Bon, damn it, man!”

Bon turned his head on the ground toward the other voice and opened his mouth. He inhaled as John drove the point of the knife into Bon’s throat. Bon heaved and gurgled. His eyes rolled up to white and John thought about the bodies on the racks staring at the toes of his boots.

Bon reached for the knife and John pulled it back out of reach to a wash of blood from the open wound. Bon opened and closed his hands in the air as he heaved up once, then a second time, and more weakly for a third gurgling gasp before he went still.

His hands remained above his open throat.

John started to stand up, but pain raced up his right arm as the shotgun tried to come with him. The back of the trigger was still locked into the flesh of his thumb. John dropped his knife in the dirt and pawed at the trigger trying to move it back the wrong way.

“If I have to come back there, there’s going to be trouble!”

John pulled his sliced thumb free with a hiss. He looked around the ground for peacemaker, but couldn’t find it. He grabbed up the knife again and ran forward.

The man had his back to John looking up the trail when he rounded the bend. “What do you make of this business, Bon?”

John brought the blade around and sliced it through the skinnier man’s throat. He stepped back as the man doubled forward and clamped his hands over the gush of fresh blood.

The man’s mouth was open as he turned around and stuck his tongue out at John. He reached down slowly and drew his own pistol where he had apparently holstered it after passing John’s hiding place. John swiped the knife wildly across the man’s fingers knocked the gun from his grasp. The man doubled over again as John kicked the gun away into the bushes off the trail.

The man staggered forward two steps and John stepped back to the bend. The man reached out at John and John backed up another step. He came forward again and John backed away from his grasp glancing back once to be sure he wasn’t going to trip.

They continued this way back down the trail with the man bleeding between the fingers of one hand into the dirt until John stumbled and fell backward over Bon’s chest. Bon’s elbows were against the ground and his hands still hung open in the air over his bloody throat.

John’s hand came to rest on the peacemaker and he snatched it up from the dust. He dropped his knife as he used both hands to thumb back the hammer. The man reached out to John with both hands as blood soaked into the front of his shirt. John aimed up at him with his legs propped over Bon’s body.

Don’t make it worse trying to fix it, John heard inside his head.

The man dropped to his knees still reaching out and still bleeding. John pulled his legs off of Bon and staggered up to his feet again.

What the hell am I trying fix here? John asked the empty air.

The man folded to his side and his eyes slid closed as he bled into the dirt next to Bon.

John pulled the skinny man named Taylor by his arms off into the bushes on the opposite side from where John had been hiding. He tried to pull Bon, but couldn’t budge him. He ended up rolling him across the blood soaked trail into the bushes on top of Taylor.

He dropped the shotgun on top of them without searching the bodies. He didn’t go back to look for the gun he had kicked into the bushes.

John went back into his hiding place and crouched against his tree again. His horse snorted. John turned and looked as the animal bobbed its head. He looked away again.

“You breathe too loud.”

He slept sporadically through the night without moving away from leaning against the tree.

***

John mounted up the next morning and rode around the washes of gore from the previous evening’s massacre. He rounded the bend and then pulled his horse to a stop. It tried to circle away, but John reined it in and held firm.

Damn it, he thought, they weren’t coming for me at all.

He looked on the scene with disappointment. His mouth tried to curl up at the corners the way it did in situations like this.

The smell of the blood was driving them to pull harder against their restraints. They were not human enough anymore to think to untie their ankles from the twine. The bonds cut into their dusty grey skin as they reached out for John and his horse. Fluid that wasn’t red anymore and wasn’t really blood anymore seeped from the tears in the morbid flesh. Beads clicked where they were tied to the leather skins as the four of them writhed about trying to walk forward with one foot each tied and staked to the ground. On one of them, he could see the deep bite in its neck around the rotted wound. White paint had been used to create patterns of lines and dots around their exposed skin and over their snarling faces.