by Tim Marquitz
Mathias lifted his arms, stretching those tendrils taut. “While we may not be worthy of you, oh Lord, with not your mark upon our heads, please have mercy and send your tenth angel to seal up those things which this evil has uttered, as the tenth will do at the End of Days.” The priest lifted his eyes, gazed up through the ripped canvas to the ruby sky, and shouted into the rain. “It is not your right to pass judgment, Liao Xu. That right is reserved for the Lord!” With that, the slimy tentacles in his hands dried up, hardening, then flaked apart like ancient parchment.
Father Mathias continued his versing. Whatever wicked tendril he grabbed withered and fell away, disintegrating into clouds of dust. Soon, the wagon was clear, and Mathias stepped through the rubble of the wagon, over Greta, past Jasmine, and over the broken rear gate.
The Black Robe priest stepped outside. He fell to his knees and punched his hands into the gunk. An upheaval shook the entire road, sending everyone in the wagon sprawling, then Mathias swooned and keeled over in the mud. All was quiet but the kisses of red rain against the shredded canvas cover.
MATHIAS LOOKED PALE, BUT ALIVE. He sat in the mud, eyes glazed, while Pa and Buck leaned over him, checking him over. They had been the first ones over the rear gate, and because it felt like a tomb inside the wagon, Nina was the next out.
Her boots squelched in the red mud as she scanned the mist's edge, her head spinning. Then she saw it, a wide circle of ground all around the wagon, devoid of everything but mud, the wagon’s husk, and the dead horses. No rain fell within the circle, nothing moved or wriggled or slithered. It was as if the land had been cleansed—made sacred by Mathias's prayers.
She wanted to feel relief, but Liao Xu would not give up so easy. He still had ‘em dead to rights, and nobody had a blamed clue how to turn the tables on the sonofabitch. How do you chase a damn ghost?
“Everyone stay within the circle,” Mathias muttered.
“The circle?” Cato asked, climbing out from beneath the broken ribs of the wagon bed. He assisted Rachel up and over the canted gate, then took up his hook spear. He looked like a mountain of a man next to the girl, his shirtless torso glistening black and red.
Nina indicated the circle’s edge with a sweep of her hand, and folks took in the gesture, realization dawning quicker for some more than others, but they all got it soon enough. They gathered outside the wagon…and waited. How long, Nina couldn't tell. The sun was up there somewhere, hard to say where, lost behind all that roiling gray and red.
They couldn't very well charge out into the rain or leave the protective circle. Even if they knew where to find Liao Xu—the real Liao Xu—what would they do then? How could they defeat him?
Manning came to stand beside her, still holding his gut gingerly, pale as a ghost, but his expression hard—a sort of ragged indignation. It was a look she'd grown to appreciate. “I reckon everyone's out of ideas.”
“We been out of ideas for a while, James.”
He nodded. “So…reckon we just wait it out.”
“I don't know.” Nina shook her head. “I don’t know…”
“You still got a line in on those spirit people of yours?”
She sighed. “My spirit people ain’t all that receptive of late.”
“Have you tried?”
She looked at him, trying to hide her sudden annoyance. “What do you think?”
“Have you…maybe thought about talking to Red about what to do? He knows all about that…I don’t know…that stuff.”
“I've shut my eyes a dozen times. I've screamed at the sky. Red Thunder...he's helped guide me as best he can, but ain’t nothing he can do now. Even if the boha gande heard my question loud and clear, I never seem to get answers anyone’d call straight. It’s always a goddamn puzzle.”
“Maybe you should clarify your needs better, or be more demanding…”
“And maybe you should mind your goddamned business and not preachify about shit you got no fuckin’ clue about.” Nina pursed her lips as she looked at him. On the inside she regretted her words even as she was saying them—and now even more so considering the look that spread across Manning’s face, conflicted with being dressed down and bruised at the same time in front of the Daggetts, Strobridge, and Rachel, who all seemed to be paying attention now.
James’ eyes fastened on her, his jaw muscles tightened.
“Look,” she said, peering up into his face, wanting to ease the tension away. “It ain't that easy. Hell, I just figured out I had this...whatever it is. What would you do if all the white folk in the world started knocking on your dreams, tellin' you to climb that there mountain without telling you why? Or why you should be the one to do it?”
James shook his head and sighed. The tension fell away from him a little, his stance softening. “I'm sorry. I…I shouldn't have said it that way. I’m not a hundred percent, Nina. You came through for us before. You'll do it again. I don’t doubt it.”
“That's just it, James.” Nina looked away, looked at her pa and Buck, helping Mathias to his feet. “I ain't comin' through for us this time. I feel empty.”
James said nothing, he just took her hand in his and squeezed it near to painful, yet it felt just about right. Like any man, he had the capability to be a real horse's ass, but other times, he did exactly what the moment called for.
“Guess they made up,” she heard Mason say to someone; likely George, but whatever words that followed after she ignored.
They stood in the rain for some time, leaning shoulder to shoulder, until Nina stopped looking for anything that might come out of the mist, until she stopped caring what happened next, just happy for the contact, content to soak up the warmth James Manning passed on through to her with that simple touch.
The silence was broken by Greta Ramdohr, who'd been squatting on the wagon’s tailgate with her ax in her lap. “What's that?” She pointed down the road. A man limped through the rain, one leg dragging wretchedly behind him.
As the figure neared, she could see it was a deadun, but there was something familiar about him. Nina’s guts roiled once it came into plain view at the edge of the blood mist.
It was Woodie.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LESTER WOODRUFF TEETERED ON UNSTEADY LEGS. His mouth was a dry slit of swollen flesh. Hair and bone still stuck up from where the bullet had exited his head, giving him the ruffled look of someone who'd just rolled out of bed. His eyes were wider apart than they were in life, on account of his skull being all deformed from the blast. Those cocked-up eyes focused on Manning.
“Why you do thith, Mathing? I dun nuthin' to you.” The voice was a croak, attempting to sound human, but with awkward little pauses between each fucked-up word spilling out from between those broken teeth. “Juth wan’ folk to ‘thpec me. Juth wan’ akthep-enth.”
Sweat-soaked and looking exhausted, Manning swallowed hard. His teeth gnawed at his bottom lip, hand still against his stomach. Nina noticed fresh wetness there.
“Liao is just fuckin’ with our heads,” Nina said to him. “That ain’t Woodie.”
Manning nodded a little too vigorously, wiped his coat sleeve across his mouth. “Right.”
“You seen better days there, Woodie,” Strobridge said from his place near the wagon. “Sorry about your luck. I always kinda liked you…some.”
“That ain’t Woodruff.” Pa took a few steps toward the deadun. “Are you?”
“Pa, no,” Nina said. “Don’t.”
Woodie’s pale eyes flickered at her, then at her father. The deadun’s head turned to the side and he showed his teeth in what seemed to be a grin, but hard tellin’. It clacked those teeth once, then made a noise like a dying man’s last gasp.
“Mister Xu, seems we've had a misunderstanding since all this started,” Pa said, hands out in a placating gesture. “We didn't mean to get in your way, and I think you might admit maybe you’ve underestimated us some. We’ve cost you lots of...of your troops, so…I guess we've all lost something. What say
we call a truce? End the fighting for a spell.”
“I have lost nothing that cannot be replaced. The corpses of the world are at my beck and call. I am a lord of realms you cannot even begin to fathom, and I have waited long enough. I will take divine pleasure in your sequestration into my ranks. It is quite a painful process if undertaken while one is still alive.”
Pa fell to his knees, the act as unnatural to Nina as the deadun standing before them. “Won't you have mercy? Please…my daughter, she—”
“My only mercy is to ask one more time. Any of you may join me at my right hand. Or my left. Even behind me would be more desirable than your present position.” Liao chuckled through Woodie's mouth. “Make your choice. Will you join me in building my new world? Or do you prefer to see what awaits you in the mist?”
No one spoke, although Nina expected them to, twice over in the case of the Daggetts and Strobridge. She kept her hand on her Colt just in case.
“Not even you, Mister Strobridge?”
Strobridge gazed around at the motley group. His eyes lingered on Jasmine, cowering in the wagon's darkness. The railroad boss shook his head, smiled his shitty grin, and raised his middle finger. “I choose this, you piece of shit.”
“And what of you, Thomas? I see you hiding back there.”
The priest looked white as a sheet and weak as a foal calf. He needed Buck and Cato both to lean on, just to remain standing. “Let us finish this terribly long chapter, Liao. Nobody is going to join you in this madness. You have damned yourself for all eternity…”
“You have been a worthy adversary, Thomas. I will reserve a special place in my new world for you as one of my heavenly subjects.” Woodie stepped back into the mist as the edges stirred in agitated swirls. “You are correct. This chapter should have ended days ago. Now your time has finally arrived. Let us close this book.”
Nina heard George murmur, “Maybe we shoulda enlisted, Mase.”
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Mason punch George in the shoulder. “Don't matter what side we're on. The war should have taught you that, ya moron. Only thing a man can do is die the way he wants. That's the only real choice we got.”
“Just tryin' to buy a little more time is all. One more shot of whiskey, one more poke…” George laughed. “Damn, I'd provender one of my beans for one last glorious piece o’ snatch.”
Nina caught George's glance. “Don't look at me.”
“You can look at me,” Rachel said, and despite the circumstances blood rushed to her cheeks.
George peered at her as if taking the girl seriously, causing Nina to bite her tongue. They were about to be in the shitstorm of their lives, she reckoned, so words didn’t much matter none anymore.
She noticed Strobridge fishing around in a tool box affixed to the side of the wagon. He pulled out a chisel and hammer and seemed to test their weight, before rejoining the group. “Arm yourselves, everybody,” the boss man said.
That’s what it had come down to. Fighting for their lives with wood chopping axes and hand tools.
As one, the group formed a tentative unit at the rear of the wagon. Nina stood between Pa and Manning. They were marred with fear and doubt—Nina glanced to her right and left and caught glimpses in everyone’s eyes: the Daggetts’ with nervous-set jaws; Strobridge, licking his lips and gazing everywhere at once; Red Thunder and Buck, tense, weapons at the ready; Mathias, gaunt and seemingly lost in a haze; Rachel, wide-eyed, clutching a broken board as her only means of defense; Jasmine, still lingering inside, near comatose and likely sick with fever; Manning, determined, but his posture was weak with exhaustion and blood loss; Cato looked nervous, eyes darting about on his blood-crusted face and twisting the haft of his spear-hook; and Greta, who wanted so badly to be brave, but could just as easily high-tail it soon as she saw whatever was coming.
And what could she say about Pa? She looked down at the bloody mud-stains on the knees of his trousers, thought of him begging Liao Xu for her life. She put her arm around his waist and gave him a squeeze.
Red Thunder and Buck stepped to the fore, side-by-side. They clapped one another on the shoulders and readied knife and tomahawk; blood brothers to the end.
Nina fed off their energy. She growled at the group, “Hey! Let’s make the bastard pay.”
When they didn't immediately give her their attention, she pulled her gun and shot one into the sky. The waft of black powder smoke beat back the stench of rot from the blood-soaked ground. The acrid smoke was almost comforting, for it had been black powder and lead that had mostly kept them alive till now.
George answered her. “Look, I ain't afraid to die, but we ain't gonna win this. There’s, like, ten thousand of them fuckin’ things out there.”
“Then let’s make that bastard pay with blood!” she yelled at him.
Red Thunder glanced back over his shoulder at her. “Alignalghi means shaman, but you are also daigwhani.” The Shoshone word for leader. “Lead us, Fire-Eater.”
Nina nodded at Red, then closed her eyes…yet her sight remained. Through lids as transparent as glass, she watched the ten thousand things approach through the fine, red mist. Ten thousand cawing, crooning things. Things stitched from vine and twisted grass, things re-fleshed on the bones of animals long ago gone and buried in the great basin. Things she wished she could unsee.
Yet, even as she clutched her knife and waited for the shambling forms to close, she was slipping from the world. Her color faded, dissolved with every breath. And the world faded alongside her, like the stitches of some great tapestry unraveling.
A crack of thunder shook her soul, and Nina popped out of one world and into another. Flutes filled her head, her senses alive with them; she smelled the echo of sound, tasted the melody, felt the vibrato in her bones.
A breath of honeysuckle touched her cheek.
Nina sobbed. “I'm home.”
“Welcome, Ninataku. You have journeyed long in such a short time. How do you feel?” A familiar voice. The boha gande. His old form was seated before a simple fire, hands on his knees, two tall urns standing one at each shoulder.
Nina sat down across from him, grinning, barely able to contain her relief. She was still covered in days of gore, her bones ached, and her head hurt, but she was here, surrounded by love and warmth and safety. “I feel good.”
“What about your companions?”
“About to die. All of us. In fact, they're probably dying now. And I'll die as soon as you boot me out of here.” Nina frowned. “My heart feels like it's being torn apart, yet hard as a piece of ice. Does that make sense?”
The shaman took the urn on his left shoulder, began filling a bowl. “You've seen much for one so young. And you have come through many times where others would have failed. Do not worry, Ninataku. Time is a lazy river here, it courses slowly. We could remain what would feel to you an hour, yet only a minute or two will have passed on the other side.”
“I don’t think they have a minute.”
The boha gande nodded. “Then our business must conclude sooner than later, one way or another.”
“Our business?”
He offered her the bowl. “Anything rushed becomes business. Drink.”
She did. Warm tea, a hint of orange. Sweet. Her gut welcomed it as she gulped. She was ashamed to discover she had drained the bowl. She handed it back empty. “Sorry.”
“They make more, Ninataku.”
Nina wiped her bloody sleeve across her chin. “Is there anything can be done, boha gande?”
“Indirectly, I can provide you with a way.” The shaman's visage burned all catawampus in the firelight, filled with a pride Nina hadn't seen in those ancient eyes before. “Daughter, you have earned a spirit guide, should you accept it.”
“Why wouldn't I?”
“As you may know, most spirit guides are the spirits of animals who return to befriend and protect the People, to guide them when they think they have no one to turn to. They help us make the right decisi
ons when the wrong ones lead to darkness. A warrior always receives a special spirit guide, one to protect him as he protects the Land.”
“Red Thunder told me somethin' like that.”
The Shaman’s voice took on an ominous tone, as if he wanted to make sure she understood. “There are other spirit guides. They are anirniit; powerful entities who were once real people. They are willing to forego the spirit world in order to touch a special person. Usually, it is because of a great need, a great hardship.”
“I reckon this hardship’s reasonably great,” Nina said.
The boha gande nodded his head once in a barely perceptible motion. “The Land has never been more threatened in a hundred hundred lifetimes.”
Nina sensed the shaman's reluctance to pass along this powerful spirit to her. “And this entity...it wants to help me?”
Again, that nearly imperceptible nod. “But it will always bring you pain.”
“I can handle pain.”
The boha gande's big, dark eyes became sad. They measured her, searching Nina's soul for something. Nina felt a sudden flash of anger. He didn't want her to be worthy. Didn't want her representing the People, her People…her tribe. Well, he could judge if he wanted, but let him come out with it. Let him be straight. “If I ain’t worthy, then pray tell who is? Who must I follow?”
“Easy, Ninataku. You do not hunger for the power yourself, but would be willing to follow another in order to bring peace back to the Land.” He gave her a yellowed grin, opened his arms. “There is none more worthy.”
Humming in his old, withered voice, the shaman recited a delicate incantation, just a few simple words with a deep inflection, which twisted into a slightly higher pitch, down to a rhythm she could barely hear. He sighed, his breath passing over Nina like winter wind, carrying the scents of pine needles and dead leaves, wet logs and snow. The boha gande closed his arms.