His Ragged Company
Page 21
“Kallum and I have our agreement, and that’s about where it stands. We don’t spend much time in one another’s company.” We circled the coyote’s shredded body, leaving hoofprints in the blood. “I reckon if he hasn’t told me anything about a well, he doesn’t have any plans to.”
“Nope,” Curtis said. “I reckon he don’t. Mayor Kallum might be an inhospitable bag of shit, but what he ain’t ever been is stupid. If the man’s got money and bodies, he’ll dispose of them in the general direction of whatever it is he wants. How long you been in Blackpeak, Faust? Three years, give and take?”
“Along those lines. What’s that matter?”
“You got no idea how it works,” he muttered. “Christ, you just as daft as a mole-rat. Your head’s floating up so high over that town, you haven’t even taken a chance to see what’s happening under your feet. You got no idea how it works, but you’ll learn. Believe me, you’ll learn. The Well, that’s all that matters.”
He tightened his grip around the reins of his horse, dug his heel into its ribs, and sauntered up a few paces away from the corpse of the coyote.
I looked at the coyote, and the uncut guts waggling out of its belly and laying like spilled meat on the hard peat. I looked into its dead eyes. The black pits reflected a message at me that didn’t come with words, but instead with feelings, instinct, and intuition. I kicked my horse into a canter.
The coyote wasn’t a fluke. We were supposed to find it.
It was a warning.
We pushed the horses almost twenty miles that day, putting a big chunk of the trail behind us. We leveled out into easy-riding plains where both of our horses could be let to run when they wanted to. Come sunset, the sky looked like the inside of a blood orange sprinkled with stars. Curtis and I found a dead but sturdy tree with branches like sky-bound snakes. We tied our horses to it by the halter. Tinder, branches, and four matches later, I cooked beans. “Western Elbow ain’t but a few hours off,” Curtis said as he shoveled beans into his mouth with his knife. “I put us there by mid-morning.”
When we were finished eating, we hunkered down over the fire. When I got bored, I read The Collected Works of Shakespeare. I read about Hamlet and guessed he’d turn out to be a pretty good king in time.
When I was distracted, Curtis removed the dirty bandage from around the side of his face, finally revealing his other eye and the damage that had been done to the skin there. One side of his mouth sagged like a loose bag. A permanent splash of scar tissue darkened his neck and face. “This is what you did to me,” Curtis said, tapping at the skin.
I closed the book. “You expect me to feel sympathy for you?”
“I ‘spect you to feel responsible for turning me into a fuckin’ freak, Faust.” When Curtis sneered, the side of his mouth that looked like ripped ribbons and wet fabric revealed the shards of teeth. “Out here you’re just a cold turd with bad aim and nuts the size of a jack-rabbit’s eyeball. Out here—“ he motioned out to the sprawling plains, “—you don’t have any of the comforts and laws and clever little rules. Best bet for you, Faust, is to get out of Blackpeak before that place gets its fangs in you and starts pulling. You don’t know the place like I do.”
“I know it from a different side,” I said.
“I’m tryin’ to help you.” With calm hands, Curtis pushed aside his slicker and drew his revolver. He worked the action and pointed it over the fire at me. “Get out of Blackpeak, Faust, before it drags you down like it did for all of us.”
Have a gun pointed at you enough by Curtis Gregdon and it starts not really frightening you. It uneases you, sure, but you don’t exactly start fearing for your life when you’ve stared enough times down a cold, black barrel. “Why so adamant?”
“Shit I don’t want to tell you,” he said. “You won’t believe me.”
“What I got to believe from a lunatic?”
“You stay in Blackpeak long enough and you’re going to die, Faust.”
“That’s marshaling,” I said.
The gun shook in his hand. “I know what happened to the marshal before you, Faust. You didn’t see that. I bet you didn’t even hear about it.” He waved the barrel at me and tightened his fingers on the handle. “ You’re going to run out of clever quips and witty words one day, Faust, and then you’ll sit there and think to yourself, ‘Curtis tried to warn me,’ and you’d have wished you’d ran when I did.”
“Get your gun out of my face, Gregdon.”
“Not until you tell me you’re going to run. Until I know I did something good for once.”
“Tell me about the last marshal, Gregdon. Tell me what’s got you so scared.”
“He saw something one day unhinged him bad, made him lose his mind, Faust. I ain’t always been a fuckin’ lawbreaker. I ain’t always been like this.” The gun dipped and waved little patterns in the air. “What’s it worth, fighting over a place this small, huh? What’s it worth, pulling coal out the ground day-in and day-out, when we barely even live long enough to light our own furnaces? Shit. Kallum ain’t in this for no coal or riches. Best it suits him that everybody stay drank up and fucked up and don’t pay attention.” He swam for his words. He tried to pick them out of the air, piece them together. “Kallum wants it, the Magnate wants it. Hell, there’s…there’s other people want it, and they’ll tear this place to pieces just to get at it.”
“This all a bunch of talk about that Well of yours? You can sit here all you want and talk in circles, Curtis, but as it stands, you still ain’t told me shit. I’m taking this all on faith. Taking you on faith.”
“You think there’s something special about this place just naturally calls people?” the outlaw snapped. “You think Kallum picked this spot to drop a town on, what, ‘cause he threw a rock and that’s where it landed, like, ‘I proclaim thee Blackpeak’? There’s power in this sand and dirt—” and he scooped it up between his fingers, “—because the Well is somewhere beneath it all, and men’ll wade in each other’s blood and guts to be the first one to find it. I know, because—”
I saw the flash of glowing eyes over his shoulder before he ever would have.
A high-pitched wail. A growl. I slipped one of my Colts from the holster like it was a second part of me, reached across the fire, and pushed Gregdon out of the way.
A sack of bricks smashed into me, landed on me with four paws. Hot, sour breath blasted in my face. My Colt was in its mouth. Teeth clacked against it. I fired. A subdued flash of fire exploded out of the back of the beast’s head. Fluid splashed down onto me. The body went limp.
Maybe a wolf. Maybe a mountain-cat. Something. I wrenched the crumpling body off of me and scrambled to my feet.
“Curtis!”
He was already spinning around, his pistol clenched in both hands. From just outside the firelight’s reach I frantically counted at least five pairs of eyes watching us, reflecting our fear back at us. Beastly shadows stalked there, their claws dragging bad omens through the dirt.
One of the pairs of eyes vanished. Curtis got blasted back, expelling a gasp of breath. He splashed down into the fire, spraying sparks. A canine figure ripped at his slicker, ignoring the storm of embers. I raised my pistol and squeezed off a shot, but the beast leaped away the next instant. Curtis rolled out of the fire, his jacket glowing orange. He beat himself like a dying fish on the ground to put out the fires.
“Don’t fucking shoot at me,” he shouted.
“So get eaten faster next time,” I said.
I tore my other Colt out of its holster, unfocused my eyes to ignore the blinding firepit, aimed as well as I could at two of the figures – one at my left, one at my right – and fired.
A yelp. Another ran for me. Its paws hammered the dirt. I caught sight of a shock of bristly fur, a coned snout, pointed ears. It closed the distance almost too fast for me to react. I belted it across the face with both of my pistols. The iron sights tore its skin. It skittered to the side, unbalanced and distracted, blood spilling.
The one I’d smacked was still trying to clamber to its four paws. I squeezed off a shot at its snout and it dropped. On the end of my pistol, matted fur smoldered and smoked.
Curtis and I stood back-to-back. We peered into the darkness. The horses were pounding the ground, shuffling, neighing.
“Goddamnit,” Curtis whispered over and over. “Goddamnit. Goddamnit…”
“You see any of them?”
“They’re still out there.” He shot. The gun bucked wildly. I heard bullets whip into the dirt in the distance. “They’re still out there.”
“Wasting shots,” I said. “Don’t shoot any of the fucking horses, Gregdon, or—“ he fired again, as if he was trying to scare whatever was stalking us, “—we won’t have anything to ride. Steady hands, steady hands.”
“Goddamnit,” he said. A mantra.
I heard Curtis frantically fumbling to reload. Meanwhile, I caught sight of another pair of eyes in front of me, hovering like floating gems in the darkness. It bared wretched teeth. One of Curtis’s cartridges fell into the dirt.
When I took a bead between those two flashing orbs, I didn’t hesitate to shoot. Not knowing exactly what we were fighting, I didn’t want to take chances on being dinner. The revolver jerked in my hand. One of the creatures yelped and fell backwards, dead before it could ever approach. If I went off the five sets of eyes I saw after we first got attacked, that meant that three of the bastards still lived.
Three animals.
Three shots in my left-hand Colt.
Three shots in my right.
Wait. Scratch that. Two, right? Shit.
I ain’t had much experience fighting things that don’t cuss or splash piss on the pot-side, but I guessed animals weren’t going to be too different than men. A distraction for us meant advantages for them. I immediately spun around, aiming around Curtis. Can’t aim too good in the dark, but I saw what I expected to see – a shadow bounding at him, rearing up, leaping. Left Colt, two shots in quick succession – bang, hammer, bang again – and the furry blur slammed snout down into the ground. The body skidded to a stop right in front of Curtis and me, its mouth sagging open, its neck bent awkwardly to the side.
A coyote.
“Goddamnit,” sputtered Curtis, still fumbling to reload. With his shitty gun skills, I started to realize why Curtis Gregdon had run from his fears in the first place.
And that gave me an idea.
“Gregdon,” I said, barrels still pointed, waiting for the next attack. “Make a run for the horses.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Better than being dead,” I said, and I kicked him in his ass.
Sure enough, Gregdon’s wild flight drew the beasts out of the darkness. One of them came thundering out at him. It was followed by its partner, but that one only tailed Gregdon for so long before it pinwheeled its paws in the dirt, spun around, and began to rush for me.
I raised my right gun. The angry-ass coyote snarled. I squeezed the trigger. It kept coming. I fired again. The bullet-soaking beast just kept running.
The body careened into me, swept my feet out from under me, and smashed me back into the ground. I knocked my skull on the hard ground and felt my hat blow away. The coyote went straight for my throat, but I rammed my forearm between its jaws. It crunched down and my vision exploded into stars.
Few things ran through my head while getting love-bites from a coyote. Is that blood or saliva running down my arm? Is Curtis dead? Would a damn rug-mutt actually be the lucky one to do me in?
And how does a fucking coyote survive two bleeding gunshots in the middle of its chest?
I pounded on the coyote’s snout with the butt of my empty Colt. My pistols tumbled from my grasp as the coyote snarled, peeled back its lips, and struck again.
I balled a fist and cold-cocked it right across the snout. Just as it was about to go for me again, I went for its mouth. I grabbed the top and bottom of its jaw with both hands. Its teeth cut like razors. Those wild eyes wanted to kill me. I managed to throw the hackle-necked bastard off me and rolled with it, pinning it between me and the ground. I rammed my shredded forearm down into its mouth.
As I wrestled with the furious coyote, I noticed its gaze kept straying away from me. Flicking, flicking, toward something else.
My pocket.
Where the Eye sat in a whiskey-soaked rag.
Did it sense it?
I reached to the back of my belt for my knife, which I’d promised myself never to forget after the Joshua incident. I drew it out and hacked. The blade scraped between two of the coyote’s ribs. I turned my wrist to gut it, releasing the musty stink of blood and fresh shit into the air. The coyote’s breaths came out of the new hole in its side. It suffocated in its own blood.
“Faust,” I heard Curtis cry out.
I stumbled away from the coyote’s body, falling just enough to cake my ripped arm in loose dirt. Curtis and the coyote he’d drawn out of the darkness tumbled around in the weeds. I sprinted for the horses, who shifted uneasily away from me. I slid my shotgun out of the saddle-side holster.
I sauntered to Gregdon and his furry pal, reared back my boot, and then kicked the animal right in its throat.
Gregdon rolled away and quivered in the dirt.
I jabbed the barrel of my shotgun down against the coyote’s neck, its rigid paws trying to claw for purchase on the ground.
“Fuck me,” Curtis cried. “Oh, fuck, I’m all ripped up.”
I thumbed each hammer back, put my foot on the coyote’s head, then blew the mangy creature to bits.
That was the last of them. I reloaded.
I followed the trail of glowing coals to Gregdon’s writhing form. He was still rubbing at his face, leaving smears of red in the dirt. “They’re gonna kill us,” he said.
“The dogs?”
“We’re gonna be fuckin’ dead.”
“Aren’t yet,” I said, kicking one of the dead coyotes. No white foam around its mouth.
I crouched down next to Gregdon and pressed the brain-stained shotgun down against his forehead. He stared at me, the burnt half of his face freshly bloodied where a coyote’s claw had torn lines in his skin. “Faust,” he gasped.
I pulled back the right hammer. “I want answers.”
“I don’t have any—”
“Bullshit. Before I get fed up enough to blow your brains apart and pick out the info I want, I suggest you start talking.” It struck me then that most of our relationship had been shared overtop the barrel of a gun. Curtis and I thought too much alike. “You want to know what scares me, Curtis?”
He glanced at the shotgun, raising the burned skin where no eyebrow remained.
“Coyotes,” I told him, twisting the tip of my boot in a squishy piece of gore, “Especially ones acting out of sorts.”
“Wild coyotes. Wild.”
“I’d have thought so, but wild coyotes ain’t so stupid. I don’t imagine they’ll prey on humans by choice.”
“Maybe they had no choice.”
“They did,” I said. “The horses.”
“Maybe they didn’t want no horse.”
“Feeling I get is that if they needed to eat, that would’ve been their first option. They wanted us.” I pulled back the second hammer. “They wanted you.”
“You’re making shit up.”
I ignored him and continued on, narrowing my eyes, keeping him pinned beneath the weight of the double barrels. “Only thing I can assume is that maybe they’re trained. Maybe tamed, at least enough to kill when instructed in ways their nature won’t otherwise encourage.”
I saw a veil come over him, a thing of realization and discovery, as if I’d just put together things he’d never wanted to admit.
He wasn’t afraid of me. He was afraid of whateve
r it was he hadn’t revealed.
“They all want it,” he breathed. “The Well. Kallum, the Magnate, and hell, anyone else that knows about it. And my Pa says they find it – we find it – we get to ask of it anything we want. If we got gaps in our life, it fills it in with pleasures. If…if there’s somethin’ in life we want, it gives it to us. And if there’s somethin’ we done we want to take back, it lets us, quick as a flame or a gunshot.”
Some words, no matter how many strange things you’ve seen, still beggar understanding. His eyes leaked and he covered his face with a pair of trembling hands. What sat in front of me wasn’t an outlaw; it was a boy scared by stories, someone who’d had unreal promises dangled in front of him for far too long.
Then he sputtered, “I haven’t done a goddamned thing. I haven’t done anything…”
Scared child. Scared little boy. Had he ever seemed so small before?
“Ten minutes,” I said, storming past him to the horses. “Wash up, patch up, and saddle up. We’re due for the Western Elbow.”
I left him alone amid the coyote corpses, their blood, and the scattered curlicues of their brains drying in the sand. I used to think the dead coyote in the pass was saying turn back, turn back.
It was really saying We’re coming to get your ass.
We’re coming to kill you.
28
Trains don’t go in or out of Blackpeak. No train would want to. There ain’t a single thing Blackpeak has of value unless the rest of the world wanted the syph, bedbugs, and bad alcohol. The closest thing any resident of Blackpeak would ever get to a train is the Western Elbow.
It was right near nine in the morning when we arrived, looking down on the rickety train-tracks from a series of bare rocks above it. The Western Elbow was where southbound tracks coming from Crown Rock curved to avoid the mountains and shoot off west toward Rouseville. Enterprising trains would sometimes stop and sell extra cargo to people who waited at the Western Elbow. Usually cost a shitload more, but not-exactly-legal transactions weren’t known for fairness.