Hell Snake

by Bernard Schaffer

  The man screamed as he ran, trying to draw as many acolytes toward Mirta and Connor as he could. “Give me the matches!” Connor said.

  Mirta snatched an arrow from her quiver and fired just as the man made ready to throw. The arrow burst his right eye in a splatter of yellow fluid and he toppled backward.

  His tactic had worked, though. More acolytes were coming. Several raced from the camp, all of them armed, and Mirta grabbed another arrow as fast as she could.

  “Matches!” Connor shouted.

  “I’m busy!”

  “Fine, I’ll get them!” Connor grabbed her by the waist and grunted as he stuck his hand inside her pants, trying to find the matches. “Where did you put them?”

  Mirta fired, killed another acolyte, and grabbed another arrow. Now more were coming. “The box fell inside,” she said. “Stop it, I must aim!”

  “Here we go,” Connor said, digging deeper into her pants. Mirta growled and Conner froze. “That was an accident,” he said meekly.

  “They are on the other side, you idiot!”

  Connor found the box and pulled it free. He struck a match and lit a stick of dynamite. The fuse’s varnished jute sizzled rapidly and Connor hurled the stick at the men running toward them. It landed in a sudden explosion of light and dirt. The entire group was thrown backward, their backs and legs blackened and shredded.

  “Again!” Mirta shouted as she shot another arrow.

  Connor lit another stick and threw it as far into the camp as he could. It vanished behind one of the tents and there was a tremendous boom. He hurled another one at the altar and it exploded into the air. The crossbeams on the right side of the gibbet shattered into fiery splinters. The entire structure groaned and collapsed, sending a group of acolytes scattering.

  Mirta laughed aloud as she grabbed a stick and said, “Light me!”

  She let the fuse burn down halfway, then hurled it at the nearest cluster of tents. Three of them exploded into fragments. Flame and black smoke churned through the camp and all of the acolytes were screaming.

  A woman came running out from behind the tents, her arms raised. Her red hair was on fire and the robe she was wearing had melted to her charred skin.

  “Wait!” Mirta said, remembering what Folsom had told them. “There is a girl inside the camp who is a prisoner of the Red Priest. We cannot hurt her.”

  “All right.” Connor tossed the dynamite aside and pulled both pistols from their holsters. Fire from the burning camp reflected in the silver engravings and the snakes twisting around the barrels gleamed bright red. “Let’s go get her, then.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The gibbet exploded and Jesse and Folsom dove back behind the tree, ducking and covering their heads. Clumps of dirt pelted the trunk and chunks of fiery wooden shards flew past their legs and arms.

  “It’s the marshals!” Folsom shouted. “They’re firing cannons at the camp. We have to run!”

  “It’s not cannons,” Jesse said. She sniffed the air, then stuck her head around the tree to get a better smell. “It’s dynamite.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Dynamite smells like burned sugar.”

  Folsom sniffed to see if she was right, but then came another explosion. The acolytes inside the camp screamed as they burned. “Who is throwing lit dynamite at a camp full of people?”

  Jesse popped open the revolver’s chamber and dumped out the empty casings. There weren’t any to replace them with. “Only one person I can think of.”

  Folsom drew out his knife and said, “Good. Then let us finish this.”

  Jesse picked up the shotgun and said, “After you.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Connor worked both snake guns with precision, cocking and firing with one hand, then the other. Men in robes ran at him and men died. He split their heads down the top of their skulls like scooped-out melons. He gutshot others and left them curled up on the ground howling. A woman screeched and snatched a spiked poleaxe from a dying man’s hands. But by the time she raised it, an arrow had spiked her through her throat.

  Mirta drew another arrow from her quiver. “Go ahead!” she yelled to Connor.

  “What’s this kidnapped girl look like?” he called back.

  “She’s Native!”

  An acolyte charged through the black smoke, roaring. Burning embers covered his thick forearms as he barreled toward Connor. Connor pivoted out of the way, stuck the barrel of a gun into the man’s abdomen, and fired. A chunk of meat blew out the man’s back and Connor shoved him aside. “Long hair?”

  “How should I know?” Mirta turned and fired. Her arrow sailed across the camp and struck one of the acolytes in the chest.

  They pressed through the smoke and fluttering ash toward the ruined altar. The last of the acolyte defenses were formed there, a half-dozen men armed with poleaxes. John Deacon stood behind them with his back pressed to the fallen crossbeams.

  He saw Connor Sinclair and Mirta and he cried out, “There! My enemy approaches! We have drawn in the snake! I want him taken alive!”

  At Deacon’s command, the acolytes charged forward with their spearpoints aimed at Connor and Mirta. A spear hurtled through the hazy air above them and landed impaled in the ground, just inches from Connor’s side. Another acolyte had his arm cocked back to throw his spear when a shotgun erupted from around the side of the smoking crossbeams. Its blast peppered three of the acolytes’ robes with small black holes and sent them spinning into one another.

  Jesse Sinclair walked toward them with the shotgun at her side, firing the second barrel at their midsections until their white robes were riddled with blood.

  The rest of the acolytes charged with their spears raised and Connor raised both guns to face them. He cocked back their hammers and fired again and again at the crowd of acolytes running toward him. He laid them down in a furious burst of gunfire until there was only one left, then he centered the snake gun in his left hand and shot that one through the face. He pulled the trigger again and the gun clicked, empty.

  Smoke wafted across the camp from the burning tents and stung Connor’s eyes as he tried to see. Standing near the altar was the form of the Red Priest, but he was not alone.

  His right arm was curled around the throat of a squirming Native girl. She struggled against him, but in the same hand, he held a curved dagger with its point turned in toward the center of her throat, keeping her in place.

  “Kakìdsha!” Edwin Folsom cried.

  “Come no closer!” Deacon shouted. He backed toward the altar, using Kakìdsha’s body as a shield.

  With his left hand, Deacon reached for Ash Sinclair’s skull and picked it up. “Let us see if we can come to some sort of an understanding. Blood will flow through this skull one way or the other. It can be the girl’s blood or it can be thine,” he said to Connor.

  “Or it can be yours,” Connor said.

  Kakìdsha cried out as the knife pierced her skin. Folsom aimed his knife at Deacon and said, “I will make you pay if you harm her any further.”

  Deacon grinned. Blood trickled down Kakìdsha’s neck across the front of her robe. Deacon raised the skull and said, “Do any of you even know what this is?”

  “A skull you dug up in my backyard,” Connor said.

  “You pathetic, ignorant fool,” Deacon said. “This is power! Power over your entire family line. With this, I will tear Ash Sinclair’s immortal soul to pieces. His torment will echo throughout all eternity. I am your master. You have come to me, just as predicted. You will surrender yourself to me and I will bathe in the hot springs of your open veins.”

  “And why would I do that?” Connor asked.

  “Because otherwise I will slit this girl’s throat,” Deacon said.

  Connor’s eyes flicked toward Kakìdsha’s. She�
�d stopped struggling. Both of her hands were laid against Deacon’s forearm, not moving. She did not look afraid.

  Connor holstered his guns and said, “Fine.”

  “No!” both Jesse and Mirta shouted.

  He looked toward his mother sadly and said, “I’m out of bullets anyway.”

  “Don’t do this, please,” Jesse cried out.

  “It’s all right, Ma,” Connor said. He stepped toward Deacon and said, “I give myself up to you and you let the girl go?”

  “Yes,” Deacon said.

  As Connor came closer, Deacon shifted the girl to keep her between them.

  Connor looked at the skull in Deacon’s hand. There was something carved into the center of its forehead. “And then what? You use my grandfather’s skull to do some kind of magic to his immortal soul?”

  Deacon groaned at the idiotic description of such a sophisticated ritual. “To explain such things to you would be akin to expecting monkeys to understand the stars.”

  “But you need the skull,” Connor said.

  “I suppose you want me to thank you for preserving it for me?” Deacon asked.

  “No,” Connor said. “I see there’s some kind of squiggly thing there in the forehead. Did you do that, or was it there already?”

  Deacon bit his lower lip in frustration. He raised the skull to show Connor and said, “This squiggly thing—”

  Connor snapped the snake gun out of his right holster and fired at the skull. His bullet struck it in the forehead and shattered it into pieces.

  Connor’s bullet had sailed through the skull and struck the meat of Deacon’s breast. Bone shards had embedded themselves into the flesh on the side of Deacon’s face and eyes. Deacon cried out in shock at the broken skull in his hand and the searing pain that had left him unable to see.

  Kakìdsha shoved Deacon’s arm away from her neck and grabbed him by the wrist. She wrenched the curved dagger out of his hands and shoved him toward the altar. Deacon collapsed to his knees and Kakìdsha slammed the blade down into the center of his back.

  Deacon’s head shot up in agony. Kakìdsha ripped the knife free and grabbed Deacon by the top of his head to hold him steady. She slashed the blade across his forehead through the center of his scar, then dug her fingers into the fold of severed skin and ripped the flap of flesh off of the top of his head.

  She thrust her hand up toward the sky, holding the wet clump of Deacon’s scalp, then she raised her head and screamed.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  At daybreak, Hank Odell and Istaqa arrived in the wagon. They climbed down from the driver’s seat and surveyed the wreckage of the camp. Odell wiped his forehead with the cuff of his sleeve and said, “I guess we won’t be needing those marshals after all.”

  Crows had already taken up residence in the branches of the nearby trees and were keeping watch over the corpses, waiting for them to ripen.

  Jesse wiped soot from her cheek and chin. “You think we’ll have any trouble explaining this? We’ve got a dead lawman here. What’s to stop them from thinking we killed him?”

  “There will be no question once they see the bodies of the two outlaws,” Folsom explained. “I will file my report once we reach the reservation. That will suffice.”

  “What about the girl? Will she be all right?”

  Folsom looked over his shoulder and sighed. “I do not know.”

  Kakìdsha was sitting away from the others, refusing to speak to anyone. He’d tried to tell her how worried her parents were and how glad they’d be to see that she was alive, and she’d simply walked away from him. “She has been through much,” Folsom said. “I sense deep shame in her.”

  “You think she won’t want to go home?”

  “She is going back to her parents,” Folsom said. “She has no other choice.”

  Jesse laughed. “Spoken like a man.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means good luck,” Jesse said. “Let me try talking to her.”

  “No,” Folsom said. “That is not wise.”

  “Why not?”

  “You do not understand.”

  “What do you mean I don’t understand? I got kidnapped by the same people she did. They tied me up and tried to torture me. I think I understand far better than you, Mr. Folsom.”

  “It is not the same,” Folsom said. “You mean well, I see that in your face, but you must leave her be. Whatever you want to say to her, she will not want to hear it from you.”

  “I can help her.”

  Folsom shook his head. “It is not your place.”

  Jesse looked over her shoulder at the girl and Kakìdsha turned her head and looked away. “Fine,” Jesse said, and she went back to work.

  * * *

  * * *

  Connor Sinclair was on his hands and knees, sifting through the ash near the destroyed altar. He touched something hard and sharp and pulled it up to look at it. It was a piece of cheekbone from his grandfather’s skull. He blew the dirt off it and set it aside to keep searching.

  “What are you doing?” said Mirta, coming up behind him.

  “Trying to find pieces of the skull I can take back to his grave.”

  She knelt beside him and stuck her hands into the ash to search with him. Soon she pulled out the complete upper jaw with the teeth intact. She brushed it off and handed it to Connor, who set it next to the other piece.

  “You did well,” Mirta said.

  “I was just afraid of being shown up by you, that’s all,” Connor said. “You’re the best fighter I know.”

  Mirta sighed and said, “Well, that is true.” She grinned at him and they laughed together.

  * * *

  * * *

  Istaqa walked past the bodies to Kakìdsha, who was sitting alone in the shadows at the edge of the encampment where no fires burned. Her eyes were fixed on the smoking wreckage. She had her arms crossed over her chest, trying to warm herself. She saw him coming and turned her back. Istaqa sat down on the ground, cross-legged, near her. “Before you ask, I am much younger than I look,” he said.

  Kakìdsha did not respond.

  “You are of the Modoc people,” Istaqa said. He closed his eyes and touched his nose with the tip of his finger. “Give me a minute.” He suddenly snapped his fingers and said, “Gelídanka! Is that correct? If I got it wrong, forgive me. It has been a long time since I spoke Modoc.”

  Kakìdsha drew her knees up to her chin and dragged her finger across the ground. “Where did you learn it?”

  “Oh, back when I was a child,” he said. “It was long before the war. We were passing through Oregon and my father took me to see the lava beds. Kintpuash was there. You know Kintpuash? Even then, men followed him.”

  “I do not know Kintpuash,” Kakìdsha said. “He is not at our reservation.”

  “No, he never was there,” Istaqa said. “He died many years before you were born. The white man tried to turn Kintpuash into something he was not. Like you, he would not let them. This is the Modoc way. Your ancestors’ strength runs through you as well.”

  Kakìdsha cocked her head toward Jesse and Connor and said, “The whites who fought the other whites tonight. Who are they?”

  “Friends, I suppose,” Istaqa said.

  “What does this mean, I suppose?” Kakìdsha asked.

  “It means, I think they are friends, until they give me reason to think otherwise,” he said. “Unless they don’t, which would be a pleasant surprise. I have seen too many things to give away my trust easily.”

  “That makes sense,” she said.

  She saw Edwin Folsom hovering nearby, pretending to work while he watched her from the corner of his eye. She curled her lip at him in disgust. “I know him,” she said. “He is Agent Pepper’s dog. Why is he here?”

  “Your parents aske
d him to find you,” Istaqa said. “Edwin is a man of honor, so he came.”

  “I do not want him to look at me.”

  “Why?” Istaqa asked.

  “Because he is a servant of the white man.”

  “If that were true, I think you would be dead right now,” Istaqa said. “He is the reason you are found and will go home to your family.”

  “My family will not want me once they find out what has happened to me.”

  “You are wrong about many things, shiwága,” Istaqa said. “Of course they want you home. Do not be foolish. The good news is that now, because of Edwin, you will have the chance to grow up and become not-so-old and beautiful like me.”

  She laughed and covered her mouth with her hand.

  “What are you laughing at?” Istaqa demanded.

  Kakìdsha shook her head at his foolishness, then shivered and covered her bare arms with her hands and rubbed them briskly. “Where are your clothes?” he asked.

  “The bad man took them,” she said. “This robe is all I have.”

  Istaqa sat forward and pulled his arms out of his coat sleeves. He handed the coat to her and said, “Put this on.” Once she was wearing the coat, he cupped his hand to his mouth and said, “Edwin!”

  Folsom hurried over, doing his best not to look like he’d been waiting to be called. “Yes! Hello,” he said. “What can I do?”

  “This girl is cold and I am bored of sitting here in the soot. When are we leaving?” Istaqa said.

  “We?” Folsom asked.

  “Yes. First we must go to the Bailiwick. I have clothes she can wear. We cannot take her back to her parents in this robe. I want to leave now.” He looked at Kakìdsha, “Do you want to leave now?”

  “Yes.”

  “We want to leave now,” Istaqa said.

  “You are coming with us?” Folsom asked.

  “Of course I am coming with you. Why would I stay here? Kakìdsha is going to introduce me to her parents and I am going to tell them the story of how their daughter defeated the Red Priest and took his scalp.”