Skull Moon (2 page)

Longtree turned quickly and let him have both barrels. The impact threw Weiss through the doors, his midsection pulverized. He hit the ground a corpse. Only a few ripped strands of meat held him together.

The killing done, Longtree sat down and smoked.

Later, after he'd hauled the corpses to the undertaker's and arranged for their burials using the outlaws' horses and guns as payment, Longtree hit the trail. He rode up to the camp of the Flathead and gave Swift Fox the horse and gun back, thanked the man.

And then he was gone.

Longtree didn't like Bad River. It had a stink of death and corruption about it. And if the truth be told, there were few frontier towns that did not. And the reality of this brought a bleak depression on him.

So he rode.

He headed east to Fort Phil Kearny where orders from the U.S. Marshals Office would be awaiting him.

And that night, the air stank of running blood.

The switchman was a big fellow.

He went in at nearly three-hundred pounds and though some of it was fat, much of it was hardened lanky muscle accrued from a lifetime of hard work. His name was Abe Runyon and in his fifty years, he'd done it all. He'd driven team and rode shotgun on a stage in the Colorado Territory. He'd been foreman for the Irish gangs that laid track from Kansas City to Denver for the Kansas Pacific Railroad. He'd logged some. Trapped some.

Of all things, he liked railroad work best.

And tonight especially. A storm was hitting southwestern Montana with a vengeance. The sky was choked with snow and already some six inches had fallen, propelled with gale-force intensity by winds screaming down from the Tobacco Root Mountains. Runyon was sitting in a signalman's shack, playing solitaire before the glow of a lantern. Outside, the wind was screaming, making the little shack tremble.

Runyon cursed under his breath, knowing he'd have to spend the night out here. Knowing he'd been a damn fool to be inspecting track with the clouds boiling and belching in the first place.

There'd be no whiskey tonight.

It would be just him and his cards and the little wood stove that kept him warm.

"Damn," he said.

He bit off the end of a cigar and lit it with a stick match, spitting out bits of tobacco. Snow was beginning to drift in the corner, forced by the wind through any available crevice. Runyon stuffed a rag in there. It would serve for a time.

Swallowing bitterly at his luck this night, he wiped his hands on his greasy overalls and sat back down to his card game.

And this is when he heard the sound.

Even with the howl of the wind and the rattle of the shack, he heard it: someone out back rifling through the woodpile.

Runyon knew who it was.

Getting up, he grabbed his light Colt double-action .38 and opened the door. Snow and wind rushed in at him. And despite his size and strength, he was pushed back a few feet. Gritting his teeth and squinting his eyes, he forced himself out, pounding through the drifts that came up to his hips at times. Out back, he caught the thieves in the act.

"All right, goddammit," Runyon shouted into the onslaught of wind and snow. "Drop them logs!"

The thieves, as it were, were three scrawny-looking Indians dressed in raggedy buffalo coats and well-worn deerhide leggings. They dropped the wood, staring at him with wide, dark eyes. A lean, starving bunch, slat-thin and desperate.

"Please," one of them said in English. "The cold."

His English was too good for a redskin and this made the bile rise in Runyon's throat. He had no use for Blackfeet and Crow savages and especially those that considered themselves civilized enough to use a whiteman's tongue. Runyon, a well-thumbed catalog of intolerance, hated Indians. Raised in an atmosphere of anti-Indian sentiments, Runyon was born and bred to hate anything just this side of white. They'd never actually given him any personal grief but he knew that a raiding party of Cheyenne had killed both his grandparents in Indian Territory and that his father had watched the bastards scalp the both of them from his hiding place.

"Cold, are you?" Runyon said.

The one who spoke English nodded. The other two just stared. And Runyon knew what they were thinking, knew the hatred they felt and how the sneaky, lying devils would sooner slit his throat as look at him.

"We were caught in the storm," the injun said. "We need wood for a fire. In the morning we will replace it."

"Oh, I just bet you will. I just bet you will."

"Please." The voice was sincere and had it been a white man, even the lowest murdering drifter, it would've touched Runyon.

But these were savages.

And Runyon knew the moment you showed them any mercy, any compassion, was the moment they laughed in your face. And that they'd come back and kill you first chance they got. The heathen red devils didn't respect compassion; they saw it as a weakness.

"If you're cold, injun," Runyon said, leveling the .38 in his face, "I can warm you up with some lead right fast."

"Please,"
the Indian said and seemed to mean it. Hard-won pride cracked in his voice; it was not easy to beg for a few sticks of wood.

"Get out of here!" Runyon cried. "Get the hell out of here before I kill the lot of you!"

The three of them backed away slowly, not taking their eyes off the white, knowing it was not a good idea to do so. Too many times had members of their tribe been murdered by turning their backs on armed whites.

"We will die," the one said. "But so will you." With that, they were gone.

But they weren't moving fast enough for Runyon's liking.

Spitting into the wind, he took aim on the stragglers and sighted in on the one who thought himself the equal of white men. He drew a bead on the savage's back and pulled the trigger. The chamber explosion was barely audible in the shrieking, biting winds. Visibility was down, but Runyon saw one of the savages fall just as a wall of snow obscured him.

"Damn heathens," Runyon cursed and made his way back.

Sitting by the wood stove and warming his numbed hands, Runyon grinned, knowing he'd freed the world of a few more thieving redskins.

The bastards would freeze.

Runyon smiled.

It was much later when the scratching began.

Runyon had been dozing in his chair, a game of solitaire laid out before him, the .38 still in his fist. He'd been dreaming he was down in Wolf Creek, warm and toasty, having a drink and eating a good meal. Then he opened his eyes. He wasn't in Wolf Creek. He was out in the goddamn signal shack waiting for morning.

Something that never seemed to come.

Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he set the Colt down and listened. He'd heard
something.
Some unknown sound. He knew this much. Runyon wasn't one to wake without reason. Cocking his head, he listened intently. The wind was still shrieking, the snow still dusting the shack and making it tremble.

But something more now.

A low, almost mournful moaning noise broken up by the winds.

And scratching. Like claws dragged over the warped planks of the shack.

Runyon swallowed, a trickle of sweat ran down his back. It was the injuns. It had to be the injuns. Somehow, they had survived the subzero temperatures and had come back now. Maybe with a raiding party. At the very least with guns, knives, and evil tempers.

What had that injun said?

We will die...but so will you.

Runyon shivered.

He shouldn't have shot that one...
he should've shot them all.
He should've tracked the bastards through the snow and killed them. Shot them all down and saved himself a hell of a lot of trouble.

But now they were back.

Runyon lit his cigar back up. He wished he'd brought more bullets for the Colt, but, hell, he hadn't expected any trouble like this. He should have known better. Those savages were always on the look out for a lone white man they could murder and rob.

They were circling the shack now. Moving with quiet footfalls. He could hear them scratching at the shack. But what he heard then made no sense: growling. A low, throaty, bestial growling. No man made sounds like that. Maybe they had brought a dog. He could hear it sniffing, pressing its nose up against the boards, growling low and snorting like a bull.

Runyon aimed the .38 at the door.

The first one in was a dead man.

The door began to rattle, to shake as someone pulled at it. The boards were shuddering, groaning beneath great force. Nails began popping free. The entire shack was in motion now, swaying back and forth as something out there clawed and tore at it. It wasn't built for such stress. The roof was collapsing, snow raining down as planks fell all around Runyon.

The lantern went out as it was engulfed in snow.

With something like a scream in his throat, Runyon began kicking at the rear of the shack, knocking boards free. Just as he pulled a few planks clear and squeezed his bulk through, the door was shattered to kindling.

Runyon plowed through the drifts, his ears reverberating with the deafening howls of the thing that could not be a man. Runyon ran through the swirling, blowing snow, tripping, falling, dragging himself forward. Behind him, there was an awful low evil growling and something that might have been teeth gnashing together.

He turned and fired twice at a blurry, dark shape.

A huge shape.

He could smell the beast now. It came on with a stink of decay, a reek of rotting meat and fresh blood.

Runyon screamed now, a high insane screech that broke apart in the wind.

And something answered with a barking wail.

Down in the snow, breath rasping in his lungs, fingers frozen stiffly on the butt of the Colt, Runyon saw a great black form leaping at him. Much too large to be a man. A giant. Runyon fired four more bullets and the gun was knocked from his hand.

But the wetness.

It steamed from his wrist.

In the numbing cold he hadn't even felt it, but now he saw. The thing had sheared off his hand at the wrist. And as these thoughts reeled in his head with a quiet madness, the black nebulous shape attacked again.

Runyon saw leering red eyes the size of baseballs.

Smelled hot and foul breath like a carcass left to boil in the sun.

And then his belly was slashed open from crotch to throat and he knew only pain and dying.

Runyon was the first. But not the last.

By dawn, the storm had abated.

The wind was still cool and crisp, but only a few flakes of snow drifted from the clear, icy sky. In the Union Pacific Railroad yards in Wolf Creek, it was business as usual. Just before nine a flagman discovered the wreck of the signal shack. Searching around out back, he saw a single blood-encrusted hand jutting up from a snowdrift.

Within the hour, the law was there.

"What you make of it, Doc?" Sheriff Lauters asked. He was rubbing his gloved hands together, anxious to get this done with.

Dr. Perry merely shook his head. His hair was white as the snow, his drooping mustache just touched by a few strands of steel gray. He was a thin, slight man with a bad back. As he crouched by the mutilated body of Abe Runyon, you could see this. His face was screwed tight into a perpetual mask of discomfort. "I don't know, Bill. I just don't know."

"Some kind of animal," the sheriff said. "No man could do this. Maybe a big grizz."

Perry shook his head, wincing. "No." Pause. "No grizzly did this. These bite marks aren't from any bear. None that I've ever come across." He said this with conviction. "I've patched together and buried a lot of men in the mountains after they ran afoul of a hungry grizz. No bear did this."

Lauters looked angry, his pale, bloated face hooking up in a scowl. "Then
what
for the love of God?" This whole thing smacked of trouble and the sheriff did not like trouble. "Dammit, Doc, I need answers. If there's something on the prowl killing folks, I gotta know. I gotta know what I'm hunting."

"Well it's no bear," Perry said stiffly, staring at the remains.

Abe Runyon was missing his left leg, right hand, and left arm. They hadn't been cut as with an ax or saw, but
ripped
free. His face had been chewed off, his throat torn out. There was blood everywhere, crystallized in the snow. His body cavity had been hollowed out, the internals nowhere to be found. There was no doubt in either man's mind--Abe Runyon had been devoured, he'd been killed for food.

With Lauters' help, Perry flipped the frozen, stiffened body over. The flannel shirt Runyon had worn beneath his coveralls was shredded. Perry pushed aside a few ragged flaps of it, exposing Runyon's back. There were jagged claw marks extending from his left shoulder blade to his buttocks.

"See this?" Perry said.

He took a pencil from his bag and examined the wound. There were four separate claw ruts here, each ripped into the flesh a good two inches at their deepest point. On the back of the neck there were puncture wounds that Perry knew were teeth marks. They were bigger around then the width of the pencil, and just about as deep.

"No bear has a mouth like that," Perry told the sheriff. "The spacing and arrangement of these teeth are like nothing I've ever come across."

"Shit, Doc," Lauters spat. "Work with me here. Dogs? Wolves?
A cougar?
Give me
something."

Perry shrugged. "No wolf did this. No dog. Not a cat. You know how big this...
predator
must have been? Jesus." He shook his head, not liking any of it. "Hell, you knew Abe. He wasn't afraid of man nor beast. If it was wolves, they'd have stripped him clean. And he got off five shots from his .38, so where are the dead ones?"

"Maybe he missed," Lauters suggested.

"He was a crack shot and you know it." Perry stood up stiffly with Lauter's help. "Well, I'll tell you, Bill. No bear did that, no way. Those teeth marks are incredible. The punctures are sunk in four, five inches easy." He looked concerned. "I don't know of anything in these parts that could do this. And I hope to God I never meet it in the flesh."