Shadow Falls: Badlands (11 page)

Had he been a younger man, still in his fighting prime, he would have gone after Tom Holt himself.

That’s not even his real name
, he remembered. The eye had told him the deliveryman’s true identity, but now all of it was clouded by the bourbon and anger.

It still burned inside of him: an outlaw, a deserter, a traitor who had cheated justice during the war got the best oh him, a national servant and hero.

Dunburton slammed his fist against his desk hard enough to knock his near empty bottle to the floor. He’d be damned if he wasn’t going to see justice served. From his desk, he withdrew a sheet of paper. Steadying his hand with another sip from his tumbler, he began a letter to the only other man he knew who would want to do something about it.

***

The weeks passed as Galen drifted toward the Mexican border. The closer he got, the slower his pace seemed to become. Galen knew why, of course. It had been years since he’d been in Texas— years since he’d been a soldier who had fought for his country in the name of Manifest Destiny, and then shortly thereafter the fight against his country to preserve decency as he saw it. His time in Texas had been nightmarish from the start of his service—and his time south of the border hardly better. But he had heard rumors that those who served under the Mexican flag with General Santa Ana in the brigade of St. Patrick’s would be given a hero’s welcome in Mexico had they lived.

As far as Galen knew, he was the only surviving San Patricio—the only one who could genuinely testify to the reasons for his desertion.

Perhaps we were killed to keep us quiet
, he often thought; though Galen knew the dead often found ways to tell their secrets.

Of everything that had happened—everything he had seen and been part of—the atrocities committed against the Mexican civilians scarred him the deepest. If there was a place to somehow begin to atone for what he’d done—and what he had been unable to prevent—it was Mexico, Galen thought.

A new life, a new start—he imagined.

By his best guess, he had crossed into Texas a few days earlier and would soon make it across the border. He gazed out past the shimmering heat rising from the expansive desert floor before him before the creature crumbled underneath him.

The horse, stolen during his quick departure from Kansas City, had hardly taken to him during their weeks together and had become increasingly sullen. The last two days it had barely eaten and finally, with one final weakened step, collapsed, throwing Galen onto the ground.

Galen thudded hard, face first. He pushed himself up to his elbows, spit out a mouthful of dirt and looked back at the horse, which now lay dead behind him.

He got to his feet and brushed himself off. The border was close. He’d just steal another horse to get there.

How hard could that be?
He reckoned.

At half past noon on May 12th, the postbag was delivered to Fort Jones. The mail had been routed west via stagecoach to an outpost in Scottsburg, in the California territory. The coach itself had been delayed a week during a scheduled stop in the mining town of Hooperville when after reports of a “hostile Indian attack” further up the trail just a few days earlier.

This postbag, when it finally arrived at Fort Jones, was met with a crowd of soldiers—it being the first delivery mail in two months. Nearly all the men stationed there were expecting letters or packages from somewhere and, more importantly, someone—all the men but one: a lieutenant who had no family other than the Army. Hence his surprise when a slack-jawed private handed the lieutenant a letter with his name on it.

The envelope had been posted some weeks back from Kansas City, the home of one of his former commanding officers. Given the advanced age of the man, the Lieutenant figured the letter contained a notice of the great man’s passing. Instead, he was pleased to discover the note had been penned in the old man’s own, albeit shaky, hand.

“My dear friend,” the Lieutenant read, “it is with great consternation that I report this news, but I have discovered something that I believe is of great interest to you. As I live and breathe, one of the last surviving betrayers to the flag known as the San Patricios has crossed my path. Though his real identity initially eluded me, I am positive this man is the last of the traitorous mob you have diligently brought to justice. I am an old man unable to do this duty for his country, but I trust that, as one of the soldiers formerly under my command, you still have the desire to follow my lasting orders: hunt down any surviving San Patricios so they may answer for their crimes.”

Quietly, Cyril read the rest of the letter containing the details he’d need to begin his hunt. After he was done, he folded it neatly back into its envelope and tucked it away inside his tunic. He took his hat in his hands—the hat of an officer of the U.S. Army— placed it upon his head, and stepped out into the sun He grinned, wide.

***

When Galen finally opened his eyes, the flash of his past had ended; he had returned to the present. He was there in a dry riverbed, a day’s walk from Sagebrush. Yet she was there, holding the lamp and staring back at him across the dim firelight: the girl whose life he had done nothing to save back in Veracruz—her face ghastly and rotting.

Galen had run from so much over the past few years; it was all he knew. But that was about to end. Deep inside, underneath the fear he felt in his heart, Galen sensed that the running was over. After tonight he would move forward—though toward what he was unsure. The uncertainty terrified him much more than any concrete reality from his past. And now it was in front of him, staring.

“What if you aren’t real?” Galen asked the apparition.

The answer came physically, as the girl from Veracruz raked her boney and splintered fingers across his cheek. Galen reacted, stunned, by covering his cheek with his hand. He pulled it away to find it wet with blood.

“The powers that wish you to take this journey are stronger and more unforgiving than you can ever imagine. What you left behind in Sagebrush will be nothing if you choose to disobey fate’s warning,” she hissed. “If you do not take the path that has been laid out for you, death will follow in your wake, taking with it the innocent.”

“And what, exactly, is waiting for me at the end of this path?”

“If you wonder if you will be saved then you labor to ask the wrong question.”

“Will I be damned, then?”

“You are already damned, Galen Altos—but tonight there is reason to believe your fate has not been completely written.”

She turned her face away and, with a puff of breath, the dead girl from Veracruz blew out the lamp and plunged the both of them into total darkness.

*****

PART II

Alone
by Edgar Allan Poe

From childhood’s hour I have not been

As others were—I have not seen

As others saw—I could not bring

My passions from a common spring.

From the same source I have not taken

My sorrow; I could not awaken

My heart to joy at the same tone;

And all I’d lov’d, I loved alone.

Then—in my childhood, in the dawn

Of a most stormy life—was drawn

From every depth of good and ill

The mystery which binds me still:

From the torrent, or the fountain,

From the red cliff of the mountain,

From the sun that round me rolled

In its autumn tint of gold,

From the lightning in the sky

As it pass’d me flying by,

From the thunder and the storm—

And the cloud that took the form

(When the rest of Heaven was blue)

Of a demon in my view.

CHAPTER 8

T
hat orange ball of fire hung in the sky, having just risen only hours earlier. Galen scratched his beard; the growth on his face itched like mad. He'd let the beard sprout over the last two months for no other reason than he'd come to consider himself a different person. Truth was, though, that he had begun the exile from himself a long time ago.

While he had sat in a cramped and fetid cell in a small town whose name he could now no longer remember, he recalled being repeatedly referred to as the “Stranger.” It was a moniker that had stuck, even though at the time of his arrest he gave his name as something even different than his previous—then current—alias of “Tom Holt”. That false name eventually escaped him as the townsfolk came by to gawk at the condemned man, referring to him by his nickname. His true name and identity would die on the gallows, he reckoned, as he now assumed the “Stranger.”

Blue followed closely behind as Blue tended to do, wandering no further than a half dozen paces back, often bumping his wet nose disgustingly against Galen's left hand.

Galen had come to accept this somewhat bothersome behavior, figuring it to be the only way the burro knew to get around; its failing eyes were going the way of its failed ears.

“Time has not been kind to either of us,” Galen said out loud to the burro.

Galen had not seen another human being for nearly a month, the last being a group of families headed west along this trail to satiate their lust for gold. His contact with them was brief, lasting only a few hours while they swapped traveling conditions. Galen had little to tell, since he himself had only been on this particular trail since leaving Texas. The traveling group's leader, a stout man named Lindstrom, had inquired about conditions west of the Rockies and the land’s passability come later months. Galen responded that he did not know—and wondered moments later why he had lied.

They shared a meal together before going their respective ways and, as the Lindstrom party departed, Galen watched the sullen and haggard faces on some of the women and children, knowing they had no idea how much more trying their journey would become.

The story Galen had not shared with the Lindstroms was that of the Donner party. The Donners, another family stricken with the “westering fever” of the last decade, became snowbound in the Sierra Nevadas and, to stay alive, resorted to cannibalism. Galen had served with several men who had been part of the Army rescue team sent to find the Donners’ campsite—men who told stories of finding piles of gnawed boned cut with human teeth marks before into the eyes of the survivors who consumed the human flesh of their own family members in order to stay alive. Galen spared the Lindstroms this grisly tale for fear of terrifying the weary travelers—a courtesy he, himself, had not received.

Galen often wondered about the Lindstroms and hoped they were still surviving their journey, though the conditions of the trail often worked against larger groups moving slowly. Groups who were easy prey for the many predators on the path—predators who spent their waking hours lying in wait for throats to slit.

Shortly after the sun reached its peak in the midday sky, Galen came upon a wooded bluff, being extra careful to yank on the rope around Blue's neck to keep the nearly blind burro from going over the edge.

“Whoa there,” Galen told Blue, staring over the hilly terrain below the rim. He unslung his waterskin and took a sip. The view was magnificent, but from this elevation the path seemed to wind on forever without end, disheartening Galen. His journey had barely begun and he could already feel the toll it was taking on his body. He needed a horse, but dared not consider trying to steal another given the last time he ended up rotting in a Texas jail.

Perhaps there are worse things than dying
, he thought. Given the choice between the gallows and what he feared lay ahead, Galen wasn't quite sure which was preferable.

The road broke off in the woods sometime late in the day. The Lindstroms had mentioned this possibility, citing to heavy rains and other travelers’ search for the shortcut, causing them to forsake—and not further beat—the beaten path. Galen sighed and pulled Blue along as he looked for another fresh trailhead.

He spotted fairly recent ruts in the dirt from another wagon. “What do you think?” he asked Blue who, as usual, gave no response.

Now you have yourself talking to a deaf burro
, Galen thought.

From the look of the tracks, there had been more than one wagon. Galen knelt down and ran his hand over the ruts; though not a tracker, he reckoned they were very fresh. He began to relish the possibility of catching up with whoever it was. Human conversation would be nice—as would a cup of fresh, hot coffee.

It was sunset and Galen still hadn’t found where the trail picked up, nor had he any sign of the travelers whose wagon tracks he’d been following through the woods. His feet ached and he sat on a rock to take off his boots, which were now falling apart after weeks of abusive walking. At some point they’d have to be replaced, which meant going into a town—which meant deciding whether or not to drink whiskey. He couldn’t even remember the last time the thought of a drink had even crossed his mind—a though that now raced as he sat there looking at his worn out boot. He took the other boot off and placed them on the ground before walking barefoot back to Blue. He unstrapped the saddlebags from Blue’s back; even without the bags, the curvature of the ancient burro’s back made old Blue look as if he was still carrying a heavy burden. Galen hunted around inside his bag and pulled out a hunk of jerky, which Blue noisily began eating.