October Skies (55 page)

Grace turned their way, confused by Rose’s call. She turned to Shepherd, her gravelly voice raised urgently as she asked them what the hell was going on.

Julian watched in horror as Shepherd’s hired killer swiftly raised his pistol and shot the old woman point-blank.

‘NO!’ screamed Rose.

They watched in shocked stillness as Grace flopped lifelessly to the ground. Shepherd casually reached down and scooped up her gun.

‘Oh shit-shit-shit . . .’ Julian muttered. He grabbed Rose’s hand and pulled her after him. ‘Come on!’

They scrambled up the hillside, alternately weaving their way through dense clusters of undergrowth and brambles that scratched and grabbed at them, then bursting into small isolated clearings encircled by a thick, tall wall of dark green fir trees.

Julian stopped in one of them and turned to look downhill, through a gap in the trees towards the clearing. He could see the Day-Glo colours of their tents clustered together in the middle, and amongst them the darker, navy-blue anoraks of Shepherd and Barns. They seemed in no immediate hurry to pursue; instead Barns was picking through his backpack, and Shepherd was slowly scanning the hillside, a hand cupped over his eyes to keep out the low-angle glare of the morning sun. Suddenly his other hand shot up and pointed directly towards them. He heard the distant bark of the man’s voice a second later.

‘Shit!’ snapped Julian. ‘He’s spotted us.’

‘Jules,’ Rose whispered, ‘look at us.’ She pointed at her anorak and his. One was lemon yellow, the other orange. ‘We’ve got to lose these.’

‘You’re right.’

They pushed their way out of the clearing back into dense foliage, and there, hidden from view for the moment, they shed their anoraks. He tucked his into a small bundle and pushed it under his jumper, creating a pregnant bulge.

‘We need to hang onto them,’ he said. ‘It gets cold at night.’ She nodded and did likewise.

‘Okay, then,’ he said, gasping for air after the last few minutes of exertion. ‘You’re better with directions - which way?’

Rose nodded up hill. ‘That way is west, I think . . . and perhaps we’ll get a signal on your BlackBerry at the top.’

‘Right.’

They pushed on again, stopping to rest momentarily in a small rock-strewn glade a few minutes later. Julian looked back down at the camp clearing and saw the dark outlines of both men walking calmly across it, towards them and the tree line.

‘They’ve stopped fucking around down there, now. They’re coming for us.’

She turned to look. ‘Can they find us?’

Julian shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s possible we’ve left tracks behind us that could be followed . . . shit, what do I know? I doubt it, though.’

‘Yeah,’ she whispered. ‘It’s not like he’s some Indian master-tracker, right?’

He watched them as they disappeared from view beneath the forest canopy below to begin their ascent up the hillside, towards them. He didn’t like the calm, unhurried way they had made their way out of the clearing. If Shepherd’s body language said anything, it was: I know exactly where you two are, and I’m coming for you.

‘Let’s just hope not.’ He grabbed her heaving shoulder. ‘Come on! Let’s move.’

Rose nodded wordlessly. They turned and continued scrambling uphill.

 

An hour later, the trees thinned out before them and they found themselves standing in the open, three-quarters of the way up one of the bare peaks that looked down on the valley in which they’d camped. Above them, dry brown tufts of grass gradually gave way to a sharp and steepening slope of bare rock that rose to culminate in a jagged horizon.

Rose sighed with relief to see a break in the peaks to their right, a quarter of a mile along the side of the slope - a narrow pass.

‘There,’ she said, pointing to it. ‘I guess that’ll take us into the next valley.’

Julian nodded as he pulled out his BlackBerry and tried for a signal.

‘Anything?’ Rose asked hopefully.

He shook his head.

‘Let’s go,’ she rasped between breaths. ‘Maybe we’ll pick up a signal on the other side.’

The pass was little more than a modest gulch, hacked like the very first cut of an axe into a tree trunk. It was just about wide enough that a 4x4 might have made it through, if it weren’t for the many fractured boulders and slides of rubble that clattered noisily and shifted unnervingly beneath their feet.

The sun was high in the sky as they emerged and looked down on a much broader valley.

‘Anything now?’ asked Rose.

Julian snapped his phone shut and shook his head. ‘No.’

She scanned the world below looking for some sign of civilisation - even an empty road would have been worth heading for. Then she spotted it.

‘Look!’

Julian followed her finger. ‘What is that?’

A wide, shallow, slow-moving river wound its way westward down the valley, and on a major horseshoe bend in the river, they could see a row of squat wooden buildings.

‘Looks like some kind of logging camp,’ said Rose. ‘Abandoned, though, do you think?’

‘Yeah.’

‘We should still make for that. There might be something there. There might be someone there.’

Julian nodded.

 

‘My God! Keats, you’re alive!’ cried Ben. The old guide clung to the shoulder of Broken Wing as they hobbled out of the woods into the open. Ben rushed towards them, the gut-wrenching, plummeting sensation of fear he’d been experiencing a moment earlier replaced by an energetic surge of relief.

‘Oh bloody Christ!’ he yelled with a grin smeared across his face, as his feet carried him across the snow towards them. ‘I thought only the three of us had managed to esc—’

Then his eyes took in the pertinent detail. A broad strip of Keats’s long-faded, polka-dot shirt was crudely wrapped around his waist, soaked with his blood and almost as dark as ink. Keats looked up at Ben; his face, normally the rich golden tan of worn saddle leather, was now ashen.

Broken Wing helped him across to the fire, then gently laid him down. Keats groaned with the pain, holding his hands protectively against the front of his body. Several new dark blotches of crimson bloomed across the material, as beneath the wrap a large wound flexed and opened.

Ben looked up at the Shoshone, his face a question mark. Broken Wing understood and uttered a rapid burst of Ute, gesturing back at the dark apron of trees from which they’d emerged, his hands telling a story Ben couldn’t quite decipher.

Something back in there did this to Keats.

Ben needed to know more. ‘Keats, what happened?’

The old man breathed deeply, gathering his wits and what was left of his failing strength. ‘I seen it, Lambert. I seen the fuckin’ thing,’ he gasped desperately. His eyes, normally narrow flinty slits, were wide and dilated with fear. They flickered from Ben to the trees then back again.

‘Seen what?’

Keats puffed clouds and clenched his eyes shut, grimacing at the pain from his torso. Ben noticed there was even more blood coming down his left leg, soaking through the deerskin. A torn gash in the worn hide above his knee revealed a protruding tatter of bloodied skin.

Ben knelt down beside him, knowing instinctively there was not a lot his medical knowledge could do for the old man.

‘Let me have a look at this for you. The bandage needs re-wrapping. ’

Keats shook his head vigorously. ‘Leave it be!’ He held a hand out. ‘Only thing holdin’ me in one piece is this here bandage. ’ He looked down at it and grimaced. ‘You loosen that an’ everythin’ inside’ll come tumblin’ out.’

Ben suspected it was the same kind of wound he’d seen on the Paiute boy who had carried Emily into the camp. The same deep, horizontal gash that would have lacerated the organs, opened up the stomach lining and intestines, spilling digestive acids and faecal matter inside him. Even if he could completely staunch the flow of blood now, Keats was going to die painfully from the internal damage.

Looking at him now, however, it was obvious most of the dying was done.

‘What happened to you?’

Keats licked his lips, dry and chapped. ‘We heard them Mormons durin’ the early mornin’,’ he wheezed. ‘The ones followin’ after us. There was screamin’ an’ shootin’ behind . . . every now an’ then. Kept happenin’ through the dark hours. And we got to seein’ less an’ less of their torches. Until eventually there was none.’

Keats opened his eyes again, scanning the tree line. He panted like a winded beast, struggling with the effort of talking. ‘Me, Broken Wing and Weyland . . . kept movin’ uphill. Thought maybe it was others of our group . . . who had escaped, was fightin’ back or somethin’.’

Broken Wing squatted down and muttered something in his language, nodding towards Emily. Keats replied in the same language, falteringly, slowly.

‘What? What did he say?’

Keats shook his head, ignoring the question. ‘We was near the pass . . . when it happened . . . when it came right out the darkness at us.’

He closed his eyes again, panting rhythmically, replaying something in his head. Ben noticed he was shaking; his leathery, tobacco-stained lips trembled. The sight of that rattled Ben. He considered Keats unflappable, his gruff, unpolished demeanour impervious to anything. And yet here he was looking frail and frightened and, all of a sudden, a very old man.

He leaned closer to him. ‘Come on, what? Tell me, what was it?’

Keats’s eyes flickered open, focused on something a thousand miles away, then his gaze drifted across to Ben’s face, the here and now. ‘I saw it with my own eyes, Lambert. Ain’t no man . . . ain’t that son-of-a-whore Preston did those killin’s - like you was sayin’.’ He licked his dry lips again. ‘Saw somethin’ I can’t explain.’

Broken Wing spoke a word Ben had heard the Paiute men utter sombrely amongst themselves over the last few days.

Keats nodded weakly. ‘That’s right . . . Goddamn right. It ain’t nothin’ natural - nothin’ that by rights should be walkin’ this world.’

Ben heard Mrs Zimmerman gasp. ‘The angel,’ she whispered, ‘come down to punish us.’

‘White-face ssspirit,’ said Broken Wing.

‘That’s what I saw, Lambert,’ gasped Keats. ‘Goddamned fuckin’ demon - no angel. Came out of the trees and took Weyland’s head clean off.’

‘What did it look like?’

‘Bones, an’ a skull . . . Goddamned graveyard come to life,’ he snorted with a dry scaffold smile.

Bones.

‘Fuckin’ thing moved so fast. I got me a little powder, but no shot left . . . might’ve put a ball in it if I had. If I got me another few—’

Ben placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘Keats, listen to me. I think it might be Preston. It has to be.’ He looked around at the others. ‘Preston in some sort of . . . of a disguise.’

Keats grabbed his side and cackled. ‘Ain’t . . . that . . . fuckin’ zealot fool,’ he grunted. ‘Maybe them Paiutes was right . . . after all.’

‘What do you mean?’

Keats smiled. ‘Mebbe . . . we took a little madness into the woods with us.’ Keats grunted painfully, looking down at his seeping bandage. ‘Gonna have me a one helluva fuckin’ scar to show off.’

Broken Wing spoke, and gestured with some urgency towards Emily.

‘What? What’s that you’re saying?’ he said, looking up at the Indian.

He gestured to the trees. ‘It comess. Iss come for Am-ee-lee.’

‘What?’ Ben looked to Mrs Zimmerman. ‘Why? Why would Preston want her?’

She shook her head, confused. ‘Emily is his daughter . . . most of the children were his.’

Broken Wing shook his head. ‘Not Presss-ton.’

‘Then it’s the angel!’ whimpered Mrs Zimmerman. ‘The angel wants us all . . . all of th-those that followed Preston!’

‘It’s nothing of the sort!’ snapped Ben. ‘It’s a man, that’s all! And if it isn’t Preston, then it’s someone else amongst your group, someone who’s gone mad!’

‘It come,’ uttered Broken Wing, ‘it come this way.’

‘You’ve been followed?’

Broken Wing pointed to the fire, the column of smoke. ‘It seee sssmoke.’

‘Oh God have mercy on us,’ cried Mrs Zimmerman, burying her face in her hands and sobbing.

Ben turned back to Keats, perhaps the only other person here he felt he could engage with rationally. ‘Keats, what the hell do we do?’

There was no reply. The old man was lying perfectly still.

‘Keats?’

Broken Wing knelt down and held a hand above the guide’s nose and mouth, feeling tentatively for the warmth of his breath. Ben could see by the pallor of his skin that it was too late.

The Shoshone’s expressionless eyes met Ben’s. ‘Kee-eet . . . isss . . .’ He splayed the fingers of one hand. Instinctively, Ben comprehended the unfamiliar gesture.

Dead.

Broken Wing anxiously looked over his shoulder, back into the woods. Speaking rapidly in Ute he pointed at the fire, the rising smoke, and then gestured towards the trees. And Ben realised what he was pointing out.