Shadow Falls: Badlands (5 page)

Great
, the Stranger thought. Overton was sparing no effort to make an example of him. Of all the towns to steal a horse, he had to pick this one.

The hangman charged Overton a dollar for the rope, which the Sheriff gladly paid, given it was an investment toward his re-election. When the hangman’s grim business was over, he left with a touch of his hat brim in Overton’s direction—but barely a glance toward the Stranger, the man whose body he just examined. As the Stranger sat back on his bunk, feeling a rancid stew churn in his belly, he stared out at the dry Texas sky through the bars of his window; it had been a sky he’d carelessly stared into many times as a free man. Today he cherished every last moment of daylight he could see, marveling the shades of blue he’d never taken the time to notice before.

As the sun disappeared below the horizon, the Stranger could hear the unmistakable sounds of nightly revelry drifting down the street from the town’s saloons. He figured he was the topic of conversation while Overton was in there buying drinks, slapping backs, and reminding everyone to show up bright and early to get a good view of the gallows.

The Stranger even imagined Kentuck would be cashing in Cherokee Sue’s toothless gratitude that night for her chance to spit in the face of a murderer.

If they only knew
, the Stranger mused.
If they only knew
.

Inasmuch as he fought it—not wanting to cede one precious moment of consciousness—the Stranger fell asleep, his body finally surrendering to the exhaustion. His eyes closed, bringing with them a fractured sense of peace.

On his wooden slat bunk he tossed and turned once more, his bothered sleep tormented again by spirits of darkness that had returned with a concussive thump in the night. Of all the nightmares that had come in the last few years that leeched into his subconscious mind, this one was different.

“Brother Thomas, please do something!” the woman shrieked at him, her eyes boring into his as the firelight danced across her frail features. Her mouth had curled in agonizing panic. The Stranger recoiled from her hands, pawing at his coat. The sounds—screams for mercy, screams of unbridled fear—rose around him as they pounded against the locked door and the fire licked greedily at their heels.

There was no mistaking the crucifix on the wall, even as fire reclaimed it as ash. This was a church all right, but not the burning house of God from his previous nightmares. That one—a recollection of a memory seared into his mind—he had seen with his own eyes. This new vision, a similarly twisted tableau, was somehow keenly different: all about him was the agonizing helplessness embedded in the thick smoke of charred flesh and bone. Though as he himself became helplessly paralyzed with panic—his mind exploding to find his own escape from this flaming incarceration—he spun to find the face of a man whose grinning mouth stretched below blackened eyes, reminiscent of a abysmal well.

“Yes, Brother Thomas,” this grin laughed at him. “Please do something!” The bellow coming from this mouth chilled the Stranger to the bone while the flames rose all around them to consume them back into the earth.

As the sun broke through the bars of the cell and fell upon his face, the Stranger stirred, then awoke.

Damnit
, he thought. It was morning and he began cursing himself for his lost night—what he figured would be his last. Any moment he expected Overton and that rat-faced sidekick deputy, Kentuck, to come in, cuff his hands, and lead him to the gallows. The Stranger sat with his feet planted firmly on the floor and his eyes shut as he tried to remember any kind of prayer from his past. When they came for him, he would neither beg nor cry; he would take every last step with whatever dignity he had left.

Minutes passed, then what seemed like hours. His stomach grumbled from hunger. Finally the Stranger got to his feet and peered out the window of his cell. The gallows were still in plain view, a brand new ten-strand hemp noose awaiting his neck.

But there was nobody there.

No men. No women and children perched upon buckboards awaiting the spectacle of his slow execution.

And that’s when he noticed it:

The door to his cell was unlocked and slightly ajar.

*****

CHAPTER 2

E
ternity passing through his mind, the Stranger stared at the pathway to his seemingly obvious freedom before finally accepting it. What had appeared before his eyes was no illusion, for, while he’d been sleeping, someone had unlocked his cell.

He rose from his bunk, ebbing fear still in his subconscious from some forgotten dream—though whatever it was had left behind a dark and sticky residue of uneasiness in his mind. His feet brought him closer, shuffling across the wooden planks, when it hit him: a flash of white tearing through his mind like lightning.

The flash had taken him back—the sharp crack of rifle fire, its cordite fresh in his nostrils. In the wavering heat of midday, he sees a marching infantry advancing toward them across the plain, bayonet at the ready. Behind him, the rapid cannonade of artillery roars defiantly, lessening the enemy front line, hurtling shattered bodies into the air.

He turns to the soldier next to him—another face from his past; another ghost from a time buried in his mind—a green recruit picked up just three weeks prior while his regiment had been on the march. The rookie’s face was pale, stricken with fear, unlike the face of the other soldier he’d seen the day before, which had the look of a predator eyeing its prey.

The Stranger remembered both men quite well, being diametric contradictions of one another. The recruit, with his shock of red hair and crooked mouth, had expelled a certain sense of panic from the first second the Stranger had laid eyes on him. This moment in time, now exhumed from the shifting sands of his memory, was no different.

From the recruit’s throat come the breathlessly spilled words of the 23rd Psalm.

“The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want; He maketh me lay down in green pastures—”

His neck stretched so far, the muscles coiled so tightly, that each vein was clearly visible through the skin—which is exactly where the lead ball fired from a Mexican rifle struck him. His young body hit the ground, bringing with it another flash in the Stranger’s mind—one that returned him to his place in his cell, standing halfway between the bunk and the door.

Just a random visitation to one of the many horrors stored inside the crumbling vault of his mind, the Stranger reckoned. One of those buried away under so many nights of alcoholic anesthesia; one of those that somehow excavated itself time and again.

The Stranger shook off the memory and stepped toward the cell door, curious if that too was some kind of figment of his weary mind. As he swung the door open—listening to the iron hinges creak—an absence became very apparent.

There was not a single sound coming from outside.

He froze.

Even in a small town such as Sagebrush, there was horses and foot traffic, buckboards and wagons traversing the main thoroughfare with expected frequency. There were children laughing and raised voices of the drunkards stumbling out of one of the town’s saloons.

But not today.

Today there was only the stillness inside the Sheriff’s office. With every step across the wooden floor came a deafening creak that resounded through the prison. Reaching, the Stranger opened the door and stepped outside, taking large droughts of hot, fresh Texas air into his body. And as he filled his lungs, his eyes confirmed his ears: save for the very slight breeze, he was completely alone on the street outside the jail. There wasn’t anyone there to stop the silence anxious silence from closing in on him.

Run
, he thought.
You’re out. Escape before anybody sees you.

Standing in the dirt behind the town jail was the wooden skeleton of the gallows he’d been sentenced to hang from on this very morning.

Run!
His mind yelled at him.
Before you hang from the rope!

“Hello!” his voice called out.

“Hello!” he called out again, more urgently.

Again no answer came; he felt a knot of panic squeeze tighter in his chest. Finally, he began his tentative, unprotected steps down the thoroughfare.

Protection from what?
his mind asked.

The Stranger had some sense of the answer, but he dismissed it as another figment. He stepped past the edge of the jail toward the livery when he saw them.

Feet. Bare and still, dirty toes down in the dust.

Two years in light infantry trained the Stranger to know what he would find there. Two years had trained him to know what unmoving feet planted on scarred earth meant.

Even before turning the corner, buzzing filled his ears: the silence was broken. Flies had descended upon what was left of the man, lighting upon the tacky surface of his blood-soaked back. What was left of his clothes had been shredded as if—

Attacked
, thought the Stranger.

The smell caught his nostrils before he even pushed past the saloon doors into the dank building townies called the “Gulch.” His first step allowed him to catch the expired gaze of a man draped across a nearby table—on his back, arms spread and dangling off the edges. Blood dripped from the mouth of the corpse and ran down its chin, ultimately collecting in a sticky puddle on the floor.

From one end to the other, the Gulch was strewn with bodies—some obviously felled where they had once stood. Others, given the scarlet trail behind them, had been forcibly dragged.

The Stranger turned away, squeezing his eyes shut as his mind flashed back to a Mexican afternoon. He had stumbled upon a similar massacre, unparalleled in its brutality—until now. The scene in his memory populated by young faces—boys, girls...

Immediately his thoughts rushed to the sound of a bell—one he’d heard every day in that jail, tolling once in the morning and again in the afternoon.

When he turned back toward the door, his eyes fell upon the body of Cherokee Sue–-face down, sprawled across the wooden staircase, her eyes glassy. Her throat laid open from ear to ear, the wound still glistening in the dust-filled rays of sunlight reaching in through the Gulch’s front door. With her body upended, her dress had fallen open, revealing, in death, the knowledge she had withheld from the Stranger in life.

As fast as his feet could carry him, the Stranger ran toward the schoolhouse, remnant carnage marking his flight. Heart pounding, he pushed himself further, though every fiber in his body told him to turn and run the other way—that what he would find would not be pleasant.

Turning the corner past the bell post, his feet caught upon something—a dog lying dead, its face covered in foam, legs splayed unnaturally in separate directions. The Stranger’s hands were skinned from the dirt but he didn’t wane. He sprang back to his feet. With a trembling hand, he pushed open the schoolhouse door.

And found it empty.

Of course
, he thought. It must have happened at night. Momentarily, a sense of relief washed over him, for he had expected to find the young bodies of Sagebrush’s children torn and shredded, given to the same horrible end as Cherokee Sue.

But all the children were tucked safely in their beds...

His throat dried to dust. Not a child’s cry or plaintive wail could be heard. And as the Stranger went from house to house, building to building, he found why: bodies, faces, mouths shredded, most rendered unrecognizable as human. The horror that visited under the cover of darkness had come with teeth bared. Its hunger did not discriminate young from old, helpless or innocent.

In the afternoon he found Overton, face down in the livery, sometime after the flies had. The sheriff was sprawled naked across a girl who looked no older than a teenager. Her eyes stared through him, looking past him to the door behind him. She seemed to search for an answer that would never come.

The Stranger took the sheriff’s gun, lifting it carefully from its holster while turning away from the slashes dug into Overton’s back.

No horses remained—not even as carrion.
Perhaps all the horses were stolen
, the Stranger thought, which led him to the more reasonable idea it had been men—bandits—who had done this. In his experience, there was no question men were capable of such bloodshed and brutality.

But then why was I saved?
He wondered yet again. He searched for anybody, any sign of life, but located only corpses. All he found, though, was Kentuck, or at least most of his rail-thin frame.

Even though the deputy had beaten him, the Stranger sat and wept for Kentuck, a naked chill clutching his spine once some kind of finality hit him.

As the Stranger stumbled back to the street, he fell to his knees in the dirt, squeezing his eyes shut and balling his fists, covered in dust. His breath hitching, he could not make a sound—finally arching back his head and letting out a scream concealed in a torment beyond reason. He felt as if his jaw would rip from his face as his mouth stretched open further to let out his anguish for in the entire town of Sagebrush: he was the only one left alive.

Perhaps they left you so there’d be someone to take the blame
, he thought.