Hell Snake

by Bernard Schaffer

  “They’re eating my food!” Rena hissed.

  Jesse waved for her to be silent. She traded Rena the shotgun for the can of lantern oil and matches and crept toward the pantry. The creatures inside had ransacked the shelves, eating whatever they could get their hands on. The floor was littered with flour and sugar and cracked eggshells.

  Jesse unscrewed the cap and tipped the can over to leak lantern oil onto the floor. She kept dripping it as she backed away.

  Rena stared at her in disbelief. “What are you doing?” she mouthed.

  Silently, Jesse motioned for Rena to follow.

  She scattered lantern oil across the kitchen floor, then dumped more onto the tablecloth that the creatures had ripped off the dining room table and spread it out in front of the back door. She splashed lantern oil into her palm and smeared it across the curtains on the back windows.

  She jerked her head at Rena to start toward the front door, and once Rena went past, Jesse crouched back down and began dripping the lantern oil down the hall. They heard footsteps and both of them braced themselves against the stairwell and looked up.

  The creature descending the stairs stopped to sniff the air. It looked puzzled at the faint odor of lantern oil, unable to recognize it. Something loud crashed above them and it set the ones who were upstairs to screeching.

  The creature on the stairs ran back up to join the fray.

  Jesse dripped oil on the bottom few wooden stairs. She then headed into the sitting room and dripped the oil on the sofa and the rest of the furniture there. The curtains had been ripped off the windows and she smeared them both with oil. She spread one curtain in front of the windows and kept the other one with her.

  The front door was busted open and the night was cool and dark outside. There were no torches or horses or anyone in robes that she could see. She waved for Rena to go onto the porch and laid the second curtain at the threshold of the front door.

  They both grabbed their boots, which had been left near the front door, and pulled them on as fast as they could. Jesse picked up the can and was about to splash the front porch with the last of its oil when Rena stopped her and pointed up at the porch’s roof. “If they got in that way, they can get out that way, can’t they?”

  “You’re right,” Jesse said. “Can you lift me up?”

  At the bottom of the steps, Rena set the shotgun down and squatted as deeply as she could. She folded her hands together in front of her belly and said, “Come on.”

  Jesse put her foot into Rena’s hands. Cradling the can in one arm, she used the other hand to grab the roof’s ledge. Rena grunted quietly as she lifted upward high enough for Jesse to set the can on the roof and swing her leg up onto it. Jesse rolled onto the slanted roof and lay on her back for a minute. Through the window she could see that her bureau had been overturned and her mirror shattered. Her bed was flipped on its side and the headboard had been ripped off. The creatures had gone through all of her personal things, as well as the things of William’s that she’d kept in the room.

  Clothes had been tossed everywhere. Some had even come through the open window and landed on the porch roof. Jesse grabbed the item nearest to her and realized it was one of William’s shirts. A white one that she’d always loved to see him in. For a man who mostly dressed like a working rancher, he had certainly cleaned up well.

  She doused the shirt in lantern oil and sat up just enough to toss it toward the window. It landed across the sill and one of the creatures standing near it raised its head to look around. Jesse froze. She would be easily seen if any of them turned around completely. Instead of turning, the creature went back to what it was doing and Jesse rolled over and dumped what oil remained in the can onto the roof, in front of the window.

  She handed the empty can down to Rena and climbed back down. When she was back on the ground, Jesse went back up the steps and pulled out the box of matches.

  She and William had built this house from nothing. They’d built it together. They’d made Connor there. Their entire lives were supposed to have been spent together, in this place, their home. A home they would pass down to their children.

  “No way to get to the horses from here without being seen,” Jesse said. “We’ll have to run for it on foot.”

  “I’ll do my best,” whispered Rena.

  Jesse struck a match and flicked it into the house through the open door. The flame ignited the lantern oil puddled on the floor.

  She lit a second and tossed it at the staircase, then another, and threw it through the open window at the couch, then another and another until she threw one at the curtain spread out in front of the open front door. She raced down the steps and lit another match and tossed it onto the porch roof. A line of flame arced across the roof toward the bedroom window.

  As screams of terror erupted from the creatures inside, she and Rena lit the rest of the matches and tossed them as fast as they could. They threw them at the roof and inside the front room, and then finally, Jesse threw the rest of the box and the can through the front door and the two of them took off running.

  By the time they reached the edge of the property, the house was engulfed in flames and all the creatures trapped inside were burned to death. “Where do we go now?” Rena asked.

  “Come on,” Jesse said, and pulled her toward the woods.

  They ran into the darkness until they could run no more and finally had to brace themselves against a large tree and try to catch their breath. It wasn’t until Jesse stood up and was ready to get moving again that she realized Rena’s hands were empty and asked her where the shotgun was.

  PART THREE

  MURDER

  WAKE

  SPEAR

  AND

  SNAKE

  CHAPTER TEN

  The town was called Cruel Rock. It was a dismal place, one of many would-be boomtowns that sprang up when some nugget of gold was found in a nearby creek. There would always be enough nuggets to bring people from all over the west but never enough to make anyone rich. Gold prospecting was a cruel pursuit and the town’s founders had named it appropriately.

  Chris Periwinkle had been going bad a long time. On the day he broke into the home of Mr. and Mrs. O’Connor, he’d been going at it hard the night before. It had all started off well enough. He’d shown up at the Gold Dust Saloon poker tables flush with cash. No one knew where the money had come from. Periwinkle was not a prospector, nor was he a gambler, and he did not work in any of the local stores. The general consensus was he’d stolen it, whether by way of horses or robbing people on the highway or looting drunkards in an alley. Maybe it was all of those things. No one was sure and Periwinkle didn’t say.

  All that was clear was that on the night before he broke into the home of Mr. and Mrs. O’Connor, he walked into the Gold Dust Saloon eager to play poker and eager to drink whiskey. Play he did, and drink he did, and as the night wore on, he grew drunker, bolder, and stupider.

  With the sun rising through the saloon’s windows, Periwinkle handed a dollar to one of the working girls and told her to get him a bottle of whiskey. She came back and set the whiskey down on the table, and Periwinkle grabbed her by the wrists and pulled her into his lap. He uncorked the bottle, spit out the cork, and guzzled it. Whiskey bubbled up inside the bottle as he chugged it. He slammed the nearly empty bottle back down on the table and said, “Deal!”

  The dealer laid five cards down in front of Periwinkle and everyone else at the table. Scott Reynolds, the dealer, asked a player named Bunt how many cards he wanted, and Bunt said, “Give me two.” Reynolds turned to ask Periwinkle the same, except Periwinkle hadn’t picked up his cards to look at them yet. He was just sitting there, glaring at everyone, waiting.

  “How many cards do you want, Chris?” Reynolds asked.

  “None,” Periwinkle said.

  “Must be a hot hand,” Bunt said.

>   “I’m gonna beat you playing blind,” Periwinkle said. He shoved his entire pile into the middle of the table and said, “All in.”

  “You’re all in playing blind?” Bunt asked. “Well, I guess now I’ll just have to see how your luck plays out, then.” He shoved his entire pile into the center of the table to match Periwinkle.

  “I don’t need luck,” Periwinkle said, grinning. “I got right on my side.”

  Bunt laid down his cards and said, “Well, I’ve got three kings on my side. How about you?”

  Periwinkle picked the bottle up and guzzled the rest of it until it was empty. He wiped his mouth and nudged the working girl in his lap. “You turn ’em over.”

  She leaned forward and flipped the cards one by one. “Ace,” she said, and Periwinkle smiled. “King,” she said.

  “That’s right,” Periwinkle said. “Ace, king. You feeling nervous now, Bunt?”

  “Nine,” she said. She turned over the second-to-last one. “Three.”

  “Two hearts, a spade, and a diamond,” said Bunt. “No chance for a flush.”

  “Just keep watching,” Periwinkle sneered.

  The working girl flipped over the last card and called out, “Ten!”

  She clapped her hands as the men leaned forward to look at Periwinkle’s hand. “Did we win?” she asked.

  Across the table, Bunt laughed. “Well, that was anticlimactic.” He leaned forward to embrace all of the money in the pile and said, “I have to admit, that would have been amazing if it had worked, Chris.”

  Periwinkle slammed his fist on the table so hard the empty glass bottle fell off and smashed on the ground. “You son of a bitch!” Periwinkle cried. “You took all my money!” His hand flew to the pistol at his side, but he was too drunk to get the strap off the holster in time, and Bunt drew his own weapon instead and cocked it.

  “Now calm down, Mr. Periwinkle,” Scott Reynolds said. His hand had been wrapped around the handle of the sawed-off shotgun mounted beneath the table ever since Periwinkle had let the girl turn over his last card. Now both barrels were aimed squarely at Periwinkle’s abdomen. It was going to make a hell of a mess if Reynolds pulled the trigger. At that range, parts of Chris Periwinkle would splatter everyone in the room.

  Later on, after what happened, Reynolds told the press that he wished to God he had fired and said damn the consequences.

  Instead, it was Bunt who talked him down. He decocked his pistol and put it back in its holster. “It’s just cards, Chris. No reason to get upset.”

  “It ain’t just cards!” Periwinkle cried. “It’s all I had! You took everything from me!”

  “Tell you what I’ll do,” Bunt said. He patted the money on the table and said, “I’ll let this sit right here for one hour. I won’t spend a nickel of it. You go get some more money and come back and I’ll give you another chance to win. How does that sound?”

  A thought formed in Periwinkle’s mind and suddenly the despair seemed to lift from his face. “That’s fine,” he said. “One hour?”

  “One hour,” Bunt said. “After that, I’m going to leave, but I’m sure I’ll be back and hopefully we can play again.”

  “You stay right here,” Periwinkle said. “Don’t you move.” He snatched a full bottle of whiskey off the bar before the bartender could stop him and hurried toward the door.

  “I’ll buy that bottle, don’t worry about it,” Bunt said. He waited for Periwinkle to leave, then turned his head toward the bartender and said, “As a matter of fact, buy everyone in here a round on me. That fool ain’t never coming back.”

  Periwinkle stumbled through the streets, drinking from the bottle he’d stolen. When it was finished, he threw it down an alleyway and listened to it smash on the ground. He kept going, past the buildings in town, out toward the makeshift tents where most of the prospectors lived.

  He walked through the maze of shacks, with their smoking chimneys and the stench of rank human sweat in the air. The prospectors were mainly Irish and they sat on stools in front of their shacks smoking from long-stemmed pipes. They eyed Periwinkle as he walked past.

  Next, Periwinkle passed through the maze of tents set up by the men who were too drunk or too sick to work, who could no longer afford to pay the rental fee on their shack and had taken to sleeping on the cold ground. Some of them just needed to hang on long enough for their luck to change. Some of them would be found stiff and dead in the morning and be carted out to the prairie and buried in an unmarked grave. Usually, one of the priests from the local parish would come out and say a few kind words for the man and pray for his immortal soul.

  Beyond that neighborhood of tents, at the edge of town, were the small houses where people who had done fairly well for themselves lived. These weren’t the fancy homes of the wealthy landowners or the bankers. Those were located on the other side of Cruel Rock and normally Sheriff Ryan had a local deputy or two patrolling the area. These were the homes of the people who owned and worked in the local stores, or in some cases, of prospectors who had done well enough to move out of their tent and lay down more permanent stakes.

  Mr. and Mrs. O’Connor lived in one of those homes. They owned the Emerald Grocery Store that all of the prospectors shopped at. It was well known that Mrs. O’Connor was extra kind to the hardworking Irishmen and always made sure to put an extra treat or two in their bags. Both she and her husband put in long hours at their store, working long before the sun came up and long after it went down, keeping it stocked and clean and making sure everyone in town was able to buy what they needed to feed their families.

  They should have been at the store that day when Chris Periwinkle broke into the house through an open rear window. As it turned out, Mr. O’Connor had broken his arm unloading a wagon the night before and both he and his wife were home.

  Periwinkle went into the sitting room first to find more liquor. There wasn’t any. Instead, he found a curio cabinet with fancy white plates displayed, and in a fit of rage, he grabbed the cabinet by the back and hurled it forward. The glass and the plates smashed against the hardwood floor and Periwinkle kicked his way past it and went to go upstairs.

  That’s when he saw Mrs. O’Connor. She was standing at the top of the stairs, clutching her shawl to her throat, looking down at him with wide, terrified eyes. Periwinkle snarled at her and went up the stairs. She screamed and tried to run, but Periwinkle was too fast and too strong. He knocked her to the ground in the upstairs’ narrow hallway, and even as she screamed, he forced himself on top of her.

  From behind, Mr. O’Connor came out of his bedroom to help his wife. He grabbed hold of Periwinkle with his good arm and got the intruder around the throat. He was able to pull Periwinkle back enough for his wife to escape, but did not have the leverage or strength using one arm to win the contest.

  Periwinkle was able to break free, kick Mr. O’Connor between the legs, then draw his pistol, and shoot the man in the head.

  Mr. O’Connor slumped onto the floor with blood leaking from his head. There was so much, the sheriff later said he saw it leaking over the side of the stairwell like a red waterfall.

  Periwinkle turned to see where Mrs. O’Connor had gone and found her hiding in a rear bedroom. She’d locked the door and thrown open the window and stuck her head out to scream for help. “Help! Murder! Chris Periwinkle shot my husband and he’s going to kill me next! Help! Please, somebody help me!”

  Periwinkle kicked the door in just as Mrs. O’Connor was coming back in from the window. He shot her in the chest and the impact knocked her backward through the opening, and the last thing he saw was her feet going up in the air and out through the window.

  Periwinkle laughed at the sight of that. He shook his head and holstered his pistol and he walked back down the steps, making sure to step around the blood cascading down from Mr. O’Connor’s leaking skull.

  He went outsid
e and closed the door behind him. It wasn’t until he heard someone shout, “There he is!” that he realized something was wrong.

  Men were running toward him and most of them were carrying guns.

  Periwinkle turned and ran around the back of the house. He ran as fast as he could manage through the backyards of other houses, but more and more people were coming out at the sound of their neighbors yelling, “Get him! Murderer!”

  He came to the last house and realized his only option was an abandoned storage building at the farthest corner of town. He ran for it, barely able to dive through the front door and slam his body up against it to keep it shut, even as the townsfolk stormed toward him.

  Sweat streamed down Periwinkle’s face and he could not get any air into his lungs. He heaved for breath and waited for the townsfolk to trample the door behind him, but as he stood there, bracing himself, he realized he was not alone.

  There were two children in the storage building with him, a boy and a girl, and both of them were Indian.

  * * *

  * * *

  The boy looked around nine and the girl was younger than that. He kept his arm around her shoulder to keep her close. The girl trembled. She had long black hair that hung down to her waist. She was dressed in a plain brown dress and wore a necklace of colorful beads. The boy’s hair was long too, and he was dressed in a plain white shirt and brown pants with leather fringe down the sides. The girl trembled at the sight of Periwinkle. The boy did not. His eyes were steady and they stayed on Periwinkle as he paced back and forth in front of the door.

  There were two windows on either side of the door, and through them, Periwinkle could see the large group that had formed outside. He had his gun out and he swung it as he walked. He felt like he was going insane. He lowered his face into his hand and moaned a deep, shuddering moan, and felt himself about to burst into tears. Then he raised his face and screamed until his voice broke. He pounded on the door and cried out, “Why are you doing this to me? Go away!”