Shadow Falls: Badlands (6 page)

Immediately his mind raced from one long-forgotten face to another. Enemies from the past—those causing him to live life running and hiding like an animal, traveling only under the cover of night. One of these faces had finally caught up with him; he was certain.

Which was even more reason to get out of Sagebrush as soon as possible.

Even more so than you being surrounded by nothing but dead folks?
his mind replied.

The Stranger looked over his shoulder toward the west. The sun had reached its zenith hours ago and was headed back toward the horizon; he had four to five hours of daylight left at best. Having no horse meant limited supplies; and with oceans of sand and scrub between here and everywhere else, he began to think his prospects looked slim.

The air around him began to reek of death, which weighed heavy upon his mind, crushing his sanity.

“Better than staying here,” he said to himself, making the decision to leave Sagebrush as quickly as possible.

Frantically, he searched again for a horse. As he turned the corner past a house on the edge of town, he heard it: tied to a pole was an aged grey and brown burro, its back sagging with a deep curvature. Upon the creature’s face sat the most fixed and blank stare he’d ever seen on an animal—a stare, he remembered, his father had a name for.

Dumb.

He took toward careful steps the animal, although it didn’t even seem to notice his approach. Burros were slow but often ornery, in the Stranger’s experience. As he came up to the beast and ran his hand along its neck, the burro startled and turned its lumbering head toward him slowly. It was at that point the Stranger realized the burro had not heard his approach.

“Great, you’re deaf.” He spoke and the burro didn’t react to his voice. Considering the condition of the scarred animal, the Stranger couldn’t decide if its disability was a product of age or years of abuse. He’d once seen a man take a red-hot poker to the ears of a mule that, after becoming deaf, didn’t startle too easily anymore either.

The burro stared at the ground as the Stranger untied him. True to its stubborn roots, the animal didn’t initially move. But after a few sharp tugs on its rope, it clomped off, following its new master away from its old home—which it would never return to again.

By mid-afternoon the flies had descended on Sagebrush in thick, ungodly, black-winged clouds of high-pitched buzzed. Scavengers approached from any surface they could use. As he exited the general store carrying an armful of canned goods, he noticed three vultures on the ground standing in a circle, squawking loudly—as if trying to decide where to feast first.

To the burro, the Stranger affixed an old saddlebag—its ends hanging low to the ground, it meant for a large, stout horse. On one side he loaded the satchels with jerky, coffee, and as much food as he dared burden the animal with. On the other he packed as much ammo as he could find—two horns loaded with black powder, a small box of bullets and a can of chamber grease.

Behind the counter of the general store he’d found a pair of brand new Colt Dragoons in their original holsters, the kind meant to be strapped around a horse’s neck. In the service, the Dragoons had been called “Horse Pistols” for this reason. Given the size of his burro, the holster belt hung slack. It would have to do. Finally, the Stranger strapped four canteens of water over the burro’s already overloaded back. He then placed a mostly new hat on his head to protect him from the beating Texas sun.

It was getting late and he itched to put miles between him and this town full of nothing but the dead. He pulled on the burro’s lead but the animal continued to stare at the ground.

“C’mon! Damn you, stupid thing. Let’s go!” He growled, his voice booming against the stillness of the air. Then a chilling thought ran through the Stranger’s mind. If whatever had committed the atrocities overnight was still out there, he’d do best to leave quietly.

He pulled on the burro’s lead but the animal continued to stare at the ground.

“Now!” the Stranger hissed; and when the burro refused to budge, he balled his fist and struck the beast right between the eyes, recoiling from pain after connecting with the burro’s thick nasal bone.

No matter. The burro would not move. Angrily, the Stranger shook the beast by the reins—again to no avail, Frustrated, he struck out at the dirt on the ground with his hand.

The setting sun scorched the Stranger with the immediacy of the coming night. He did not intend to fight the animal to the horizon’s precipice of nightfall. Letting out a long sigh, he got to his feet and unstrapped one of the saddlebags, reaching in for a piece of jerky, which he held out under the nose of the obstinate beast.

The burro first licked, then took the entire piece of jerky into its mouth, chewing in loud wet bites that sounded like a butter churn.

“C’mon,” the Stranger said, leading the burro down the thoroughfare of this, dead town last known as Sagebrush. As night began to fall, the Stranger became worried. He looked over his shoulder across the dry plain—back in the direction of the town he’d left only hours before. The town itself had long vanished in the haze of sun beating down upon the ground, swallowed up by the rippling heat.

He pushed himself but the burro—which he’d taken to calling “Blue,” due to the unchanging glum look on its face—would only go further at the cost of jerky. They kept pace with the setting sun until reaching the slight crest of a shallow ravine—a river run dry, chased away by the brutal Texas summer. It was here on this arid shoal the Stranger decided to stop for the night.

He built a small campfire using scrubwood and shared a meal of jerky with Blue. Briefly, he thought of tying up the burro to prevent him from escaping—but given the nature of the beast, and its sheer stupidity, escape seemed very unlikely. Instead, Blue stood just outside the rim of firelight, closed its ancient eyes, and fell asleep on its feet.

As the fire dimmed and the Stranger laid back to rest, he stared up at the stars—a pitch-black field almost illuminated with millions of glowing pinpricks in space. He was a free man, but again he was on the run—this time not only from the enemies of his past, but from something he couldn’t understand: a fear; one so gripping that it shook his heart with its mighty hand. And though every fiber in his body was worn to exhaustion, he could not bring himself to shut his eyes, as he was truly afraid of what lay behind the closed doors of sleep.

Finally, his will to fight it any longer gave in to his body’s desperate need for rest. His slumber came quickly, pulling him downward into the full depths of unconsciousness.

The respite was brief though, as the Stranger shot bolt upright, eyes open. But this time it was not the hammer-strike of nightmare that awoke him but something that—even asleep—his ears caught.

Slowly, he turned his head to blindly listen again.

He heard it: the dry snap of desert brush under someone’s boot—an unmistakable footstep coming toward him in the darkness.

*****

CHAPTER 3

I
t was the third week after the Americans landed in Veracruz—March of 1847, invading in special landing craft custom built in the naval yards of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for exactly this purpose. As his fellow members of the First Division rowed into the port, the Mexican artillery roared from the hills above them, firing fifty-pound shells that exploded all around them.

Once or twice, the cannons on the hill would somehow find their mark among the densely packed craft, erupting in blooming sound bursts of shattered oak and human flesh. Those soldiers upended from their boats suffered similar fates as most could not swim, especially when packed with all their heavy gear, and were relegated to sink to the Gulf of Mexico’s thick mud several fathoms below. The Stranger saw one such man, his face disappearing below the rough surface of the water, his fingers reaching in vain toward a vanishing sun.

Ahead, the first boats touched the beach under the lead of General William J. Worth, who had jumped out in shoulder-deep water and marched ashore. The Stranger served with Worth’s First Battalion after seeing his first action the previous fall in Monterrey under Taylor’s Army of Occupation.

For three weeks they battled the 3,300 Mexican army regulars defending Veracruz, when the heavily fortified Mexican garrison finally surrendered to overwhelming forces. The battles were no strangers to a fixed bayonet, pouring blood on a soldier’s shoes.

But on this night, with the jubilation of the enemy surrender still fresh, he’d left camp with several other men on the hunt for alcohol—months ago banished from the service by General Taylor himself—and fresh food to atone for the horrid rations they’d been receiving. They figured that, as conquerors, the town was deservedly theirs.

Especially since they’d brought their rifles, lest any of the locals forget who they were.

Their first stop had been a closed store, its front guarded with only a flimsy door—easily kicked in. The man who’d become the pack leader—a loutish bullying type who’d gone by the name of Cyril—entered first, destroying everything in his way until he found a cask of liquor.

“Tequila,” he said, explaining to the other three in detail the nature of the fermented agave. To Cyril, it held none of the stature of whiskey, but tonight it would have to do.

A thin screaming man entered through the busted front door, his weathered brown face contorted as he rattled off a fusillade of angry Spanish. The Stranger noticed him first and, given the thin man’s gesturing and enraged demeanor, it became obvious they had broken into his shop.

Cyril’s eyes narrowed as he lowered a recently emptied glass from his lips.

“Shet yer mouth!” Cyril shouted above the din.

And as the shop owner continued to bark, Cyril fired the heavy glass in the old man’s direction. The glass exploded just above the shop owner’s eye, knocking the man to the ground as blood poured down his face.

Strolling over, his boots resounding against the floor, Cyril hovered over the wailing shop owner. With a quick draw, Cyril unsheathed the Bowie knife slung to his belt and slit the old man’s throat, stepping away as the gush of blood neared his boots.

Without remorse, Cyril wiped his blade on his pants and slid it back into its sheath.

“When I says, ‘shet yer mouth’, I mean, ‘shet your stinkin’ mouth!’”

One of the other soldiers, a mere boy of fifteen named Coffey, hooted and laughed.

“You show’d ‘im,” beamed the kid, stumbling drunk.

“Let’s git,” Cyril told the others, not waiting for a response as he headed for the door.

Having seen his share of blood, the Stranger didn’t even blink, instead just downing the rest of his glass of tequila before following the others out.

It was outside in the dark street when they saw the others who had come. What was, presumably, the family of the shopkeeper waited angrily for the intruders. When Cyril came through the front door, an old woman grabbed his arm and spat on him.

Angrily, he shoved her aside; her tiny body no match for his soldier’s arms. With a crunch, her head slammed into the adobe wall of the shop’s exterior before she collapsed to the ground.

From the crowd came a shot. The black powder clap of an ancient pistol—firing wide, perhaps meant more to frighten than kill—but it was all young Coffey needed to life and fire his own rifle. His bullet found its way into a young man wielding a club.

As another young Mexican wailed for his fallen family members, he came at Cyril with his fists, beating upon the killer’s thick chest. Suddenly the boy’s eyes bulged; his head tipped backward as he was lifted onto his toes. Cyril’s Bowie knife thrust upward into his gut, his shoeless feet dangling inches from the dirt sidewalk.

Cyril dropped the mortally wounded boy to the ground, where he laid futilely trying to hold his entrails in with his hands, screaming with the pain. With another single slash, Cyril silenced the boy.

The Stranger stood his ground. His rifle pointed outward toward the crowd, watching them flee for their lives. But one person remained—a girl, no more than a child. She stood as the others fled, weeping for her dead mother and brothers. Her soft brown eyes were full of tears, which pooled running down her dirty cheeks and onto her neck.

“Let’s git!” Coffey said—his young blood now as sober as the rest.

“No witnesses,” Cyril huffed as he stepped toward the little girl.

“No,” said the Stranger, moving in front of Cyril.

“I says, ‘No witnesses’.” And with that Cyril put one hand on the Stranger’s shoulder and pushed him aside, knife raised, grin across his face.

As the Stranger blinked his eyes in the darkness more than three years later, hearing the footsteps approaching in the blinding night, he thought of Cyril’s cold eyes. His fellow soldier became a man whose sole motivating force was to cause as much pain and chaos as possible. The Stranger realized now that it was those eyes and that face he had thought he’d seen momentarily through the closing door of the Sagebrush jail.

And Cyril was no ghost. As far as the Stranger knew, Cyril was still out there—and still searching for him.

He thought again of that moment on the street in Veracruz, watching in horror as Cyril took the little Mexican girl by her long, dark hair while he cut into her head with the bowie knife.