Shadow Falls: Badlands (4 page)

“Whose side?”

“The Coyote.”

William stepped back from Miles. “I have known for a very long time of our family’s legacy and have tried to deny it, even trying to find refuge in God. But the truth cannot be hidden any longer. What God created is not worthy. Their time has passed. It’s time for the darkness to return to this world.”

William raised the gun. Miles wanted to run, but couldn’t.

“Close your eyes, Miles.”

“No.”

“Then keep them open.”

His father thumbed back the hammer on the pistol.

Miles’s voice trembled. “Y-y-you’re the Coyote.”

“No, my boy,” William said, a serene smile crossing his face. And that’s when Miles could feel the pain in his hand. He looked down at the gash his father had sliced with his dagger, which had split open once again and began to bleed. And as the blood poured from the wound Miles could see a light inside, growing from a point into a glowing ball. The vision came to Miles, endless images flashing by his eyes as if time were rocketing past him while he was standing still. There was flame and smoke. An earth scorched. The sky opening. A battle of darkness and light.

“I’m not the Coyote,” William said as he pressed the barrel to his own temple. “You are. And you will be victorious.”

And with a steady hand, he pulled the trigger.

*****

PART I

Spirits of the Dead
by Edgar Allan Poe

Thy soul shall find itself alone

‘
Mid dark thoughts of the grey tomb-stone

Not one, of all the crowd, to pry

Into thine hour of secrecy.

Be silent in that solitude

Which is not loneliness—for then

The spirits of the dead, who stood

In life before thee, are again

In death around thee, and their will

Shall overshadow thee; be still.

The night, though clear, shall frown,

And the stars shall not look down

From their high thrones in the Heaven,

With light like hope to mortals given,

But their red orbs, without beam,

To thy weariness shall seem

As a burning and a fever

Which would cling to thee for ever.

Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish,

Now are visions ne’er to vanish;

From thy spirit shall they pass

No more, like dew-drop from the grass.

The breeze, the breath of God, is still,

And the mist upon the hill

Shadowy, shadowy, yet unbroken,

Is a symbol and a token.

How it hangs upon the trees,

A mystery of mysteries!

CHAPTER 1

June 22, 1850

I
t was easy to watch them burn. To watch their bodies roast as the flames first licked, then consumed them whole.

He stood his ground as man and woman, adult and child perished in the fire, dying in unspeakable agony. From his vantage point, the Stranger could see and smell everything. Those who had not succumbed to the thick, acrid smoke begged for help, for a mercy that would not be forthcoming, their cries muffled only by death itself. He wasn’t sure if some screamed willfully or because their lungs sought to release the pressure caused by the super-heated air; they were expanding, inevitably to burst. These victims drowned in their own blood, which simmered in their bodies.

His feet were unmoving; no matter how hard he tried. Night after night he could not escape this macabre nightmare as those around him, trapped in the charnel house of his mind, pounded on the locked doors of the church that was to become their tomb. Even on the rare morrow that he would awake not drowning in night sweats, he could still feel the presence of the horrific vision in his mind, seared into his brain as if branded with a red-hot iron.

The sun had barely risen, though the Texas heat was already unbearable. At least inside his cell, the Stranger was directly in the shadow of the gallows being erected for his hanging the following day. Truth was the Stranger wasn’t sleeping, but had taken to closing his eyes and pretending he was. During the moments he was noticed to be awake, he was subjected to non-stop barrages of verbal and physical harassment by the jail’s proprietor, who used the Stanger’s sentencing to justify his cruelty—insisting that the prisoner deserved no better. After all, he was to be the town’s guest of honor in what would serve to be the only real entertainment in weeks.

To a certain extent, the Stranger didn’t believe he deserved any better than the promised hanging, either. His had been a life of unrepentant sin fueled by anger, jealousy, greed, and every extreme of emotion felt by a man with no direction or boundaries. He had stolen, murdered, robbed, raped, and taken the Lord’s name in vain—sometimes all while even in service of his own country. He often used spirits to self-medicate and flee the world around him—although this liquid escape only lubricated the wheels that perpetuated his path of destruction.

His past—what he could slowly remember of it—had been soaked in the blood of the innocent and not-so innocent alike. After two sobering weeks in a stifling cell, barred from whiskey as the heat soaked up the remaining drops left in him, his past quickly filled up with regret.

Regret of a life wasted; of loves never found; of promises left unfulfilled.

But even the regret, he reckoned, would be temporary, given his date with the gallows in less than twenty-four hours.

With a creak, the Stranger could hear the front door of the sheriff’s office open. Someone was coming in. He kept his eyes shut and his back to the cell door, hoping that continuing to feign sleep would keep whomever it was from bothering him during what few hours he had left. Along with the sound of boots on the rotted wooden floor came misplaced giggles, which were unmistakably female.

“Thar h’is,” spoke the bug-eyed, rail-thin deputy, the one who the Stranger discovered everyone called “Kentuck” for no better reason than that’s where he’d claimed his kin had migrated from. Along with Kentuck was a nearly toothless whore who, though only in her twenties, looked two decades older from the years on her back and a five year habit involving laudanum.

“Git up!” Kentuck yelled through the bars. When the Stranger didn’t move, Kentuck sucked a wad of tobacco-stained saliva into his cheek and spit onto the Stranger’s vulnerable back. “I says, ‘Git up!’” he repeated.

His incarceration here in Sagebrush, Texas, this small border town just north of the Rio Grande, had been marked with similar and regular abuse. The night he had been arrested, Kentuck and the sheriff, a stocky and cantankerous man named Overton, beat the Stranger into unconsciousness in this very cell while the Stranger’s hands were still cuffed behind his back. The charge had been stealing a horse—of which he was definitely guilty—and killing the man who owned the now stolen horse. The latter was a debatable charge at best, since the Stranger claimed he’d just been firing a warning shot, and the “hapless geezer in question had impeded the passage of said bullet with his foolhardy head.”

After the Stranger had been caught, instead of calling in a marshal or a judge, Sheriff Overton deemed the situation one that was to be handled without the “meddlin’ of outsiders,” as he liked to put it. Besides, he reckoned, given the chance, a proper hanging would be a spectacle that would be good for morale, especially if the condemned danced that agonizing mid-air jig for several minutes at the end of a rope that he enjoyed so much instead of dying quickly from a neck snap.
That would be right entertaining, it would,
he thought, and would go a long ways to help him get reelected sheriff come fall.

“Git t’yer feet!” Kentuck yelled at the Stranger. He repeated it, and with his mouth wet with chaw it came out more like “Gitcherfeet!”

The Stranger obliged, if only to prevent provoking the young into any shows of bravado in front of his female guest. The Stranger also had one other reason to stand: to get a glance of what may be the last woman he would ever see up close. Not that Cherokee Sue—as the locals called her on account of her mixed blood—was any real specimen of beauty. There’d been a tale the Stranger overheard shortly after his arrest about Cherokee Sue giving birth to a child to which no less than a half-dozen men claimed paternity. What the Stranger wanted to know—and had the sense to keep to himself—was how many men in town had denied being the father? The child had passed in its third day and, given the conditions of the town and the prospects of its upbringing by Cherokee Sue, this was likely a merciful fate.

“He don’t look orn’ry,” Cherokee Sue hooted. She spat onto the wooden floor between her and the cage.

“He ain’t,” Kentuck hooted in return, almost in one syllable.

“Not after we got through w’him,” he finished. Kentuck made it crystal clear that he was proud of the beating he’d put on the restrained man.

“You wanna see one las’ cunny before ya die?” Cherokee Sue was grinning, already raising her dress above her knees. “I’ll show it t’ya.”

She took a step forward, standing right in front of the cell. As the hem of her filthy dress rose to her dirty and blood-stained thigh, the Stranger leaned closer, enough to smell the booze and grime soaked into her body. One lesson he’d learned early on was you had to take whatever little you could get, no matter what it was.

Just as the tattered hem of Cherokee Sue’s dress came just above mid-thigh, she leaned back and spat right into the Stranger’s face, cackling her toothless laugh at him as the liquid trickled from his eye to his mouth.

“D’ya see that?” she laughed at Kentuck. “He was so mezm’rized, I coulda walked up and put a blade in his eye.” She dropped her dress back down to cover herself, flattening the front with one hand, as if restoring an air of respectability to her appearance.

“Can’t wait t’see you dance,” the whore cackled again as she and Kentuck left arm in arm. “Bett’r make it a good one.”

The Stranger sat back down on the bunk when something caught his eye as the door closed: the face of a man, one he hadn’t seen since...

It was burned in his mind. An August day, 1847, three years prior. A battlefield shrouded in smoke. It was the last day the Stranger had worn that uniform, one decidedly not too different from the one worn by the man whose face he just imagined.

Another ghost from the past come to torment me in my final hours
, the Stranger thought to himself.

It was obvious that what little time he had left on this earth would certainly not be spent in peace.

He stared at the door for what seemed to be hours, waiting for it to open once more; to see if that face, one no less chilling than that of Beelzebub himself, was still there waiting for him. The door remained closed. The jail there in Sagebrush was no hub of activity, especially given Sheriff Overton’s proclivity of holing up daily in one of the town’s three saloons.

At midday, Overton finally entered carrying a yellowed plate topped with a grayish stew and a hardened biscuit, which he wordlessly gave to the Stranger. No sooner had Overton sat at his desk before a bearded man unknown to the Stranger walked into the jail. He was nattily attired in a black suit, contrasting sharply with the skin of his face, which had the color and look of an apples’ fleshy interior.

“Stand up,” Overton told the Stranger before opening the cell door. Putting down his plate of rotten food, the Stranger obliged—but as the bearded gentleman in the black suit proceeded to remove a measuring string from his pocket, it became clear the purpose he served here.

“Just about six feet tall,” the hangman said, reading the markings of his string dangled from the crown of the Stranger’s head to his feet. He examined the Stranger up close, eyeing the prisoner’s build. He grabbed the Stranger’s shoulders and squeezed.

“Solid, I’d say about two hundred pounds, give or take.” The bearded hangman made some notes on a small pad of paper.

The Stranger thought the number sounded low and would have argued the point if he’d known his actual weight. What he did know was that if the Hangman’s eyeball calculation was too light and the rope too short, he’d drop from the gallows floor and bounce up and down like a yo-yo, indeed slowly strangling to death.

“Coffin?” the hangman asked. “For an extra five bucks?”

Overton shook his head without taking a moment’s hesitation. “I say we leave ‘im strung up for the birds as a warnin’ to any others comin’ into my town fixin’ to be horse thieves and murd’rers.”