Branded

by Eric Red

  “Explain to me how their families had it coming, too, Emmett. Go ahead. I’m listening. That’s right, you can’t. Murdering the wives and sons and daughters of those badmen, killing women and children, that wasn’t justified. That father of yours took the lives of innocent people because he likes killing people and because he’s a madman. I know it and you know it.”

  Emmett looked down in remorse and nodded. “You’re right, he went too far.”

  “We both know what has to be done.”

  “You want me to put a bullet in his head, put him down like a horse?”

  “You got to put down a bad animal.”

  “I won’t murder my father.”

  “It’s a mercy killing, not murder. You’re his son and it’s right for you to be the one to pull the trigger and put him out of his misery.”

  “I’m taking him home.”

  “Even if he lets you take him home, then what?”

  “Do what any son does. Take care of him.”

  “If you really care about your father, end him. Know this: He’s never going to stop killing. He’s gotten a taste for blood. All this killing turned him into a bad animal. And like any bad animal you love, he will turn on you and when that day comes, Emmett, he’s gonna kill you.”

  “Stay out of my way, Joe.”

  Noose indicated the pistol Emmett leveled on him with a growl. “I’m freezing my ass off jawing out here. If you’re going to shoot me, get to it.”

  The marshal sighed, shook his head. “Figured all along at the end of this ride only one way this whole thing could end: me killing you and Bess. Wasn’t nothing personal but I couldn’t let you kill my father. I’m his son. It’s family. Was afraid it was going to end bad, right here, like this. Now here we are. And I can’t do it, Joe. I don’t want to kill you. You’re my friend, Marshal Bess, too. We rode a lot of miles together. You’re a good man, Joe, and my family done enough to you. So, no, ain’t gonna shoot you.” The bounty hunter just watched the marshal evenly. “But I’m taking my father home, Joe. And if you stand in my way, I won’t like it, but I will kill you.”

  Noose kept his sturdy, honest, pale gaze on Emmett. “If you don’t put that old man down, he’ll put you down, that’s a fact.”

  “It’s family.”

  They locked eyes, Noose nodding. “I know.”

  “Good-bye, Joe.”

  “Good-bye, Emmett.”

  With that, the man Joe Noose had known as Ford but whose real name was Quaid turned his back and hiked off, up the steep hill of the ridge, heading into his destiny, swirling snow wrapping him in layers of white until Emmett was no longer visible.

  Behind him below, Joe Noose stood for many long moments as still as a wooden cigar store Indian.

  Then he, too, started up the hill.

  * * *

  Higher and higher Emmett Quaid climbed.

  Leaning against the driving sleet, he marched knee-deep through the fresh snow blanketing the slope whipped up in the roaring winds. All was whiteness, an absence of everything that unnerved the marshal, creating in him a disturbing sense of dread and dislocation. It was oblivion. He kept his bearings only by following the bootprints heading upward in a crooked path. At the end of those footprints would be his father, who couldn’t be far now, because there was nowhere left to go.

  Ahead, the mountain face reared into the sky, a sheer wall of rock hundreds of feet high peaked by a gigantic shelf of snowpack hanging over his head. To one side was a yawning gorge plunging straight down hundreds of feet to the rocks. The other side was huge boulders too high to scale.

  Another thirty paces brought him to the top of the ridge, a plateau. Visibility was hazy in the swirling snow.

  There, the footsteps ended.

  And Emmett saw him.

  The Brander stood at the edge of the cliff fifty yards away, his back to the marshal. If he registered Emmett’s presence, he didn’t show it. The figure wasn’t moving, a ghost in the chill evanescence of all the white space.

  Emmett Quaid approached the solitary individual standing at the cliff, facing away from him, staring off into the oblivion of the gorge’s abyss. The wind blew the flowing, dirty white hair.

  “Pop . . .”

  The figure at the edge of the ridge slowly turned and now they were face-to-face. The hair and clothes belonging to Abraham Quaid were familiar, garments now worn, tattered, and ragged. The fingers of the glove hung limp where three of the fingers were gone. The old man’s shoulder-length hair was scraggly and gray, windblown across a pair of scalding bloodshot eyes gleaming with utter madness. But the face possessing that burning soulless stare was not an old man but a young one.

  Willard Quaid, Emmett’s younger brother!

  Wearing his dead father’s clothes.

  His youthful features were skeletal and ravaged from hunger and savagery, transfiguring the younger Quaid into something less human, more animal.

  At the startling sight of Willard, Emmett let out a shocked gasp and retreated a step.

  “Willard!”

  “Been a long time, big brother.”

  “I thought you were dead.”

  Noose peered around the edge of the boulder.

  A hundred yards away, two men stood at the edge of the high ridge, twin tall dark figures in stark relief against the ubiquitous snow.

  The bounty hunter’s breath caught in his throat as he saw The Brander was not Abraham Quaid but what he guessed was his other son. Noose saw from Emmett’s expression that he was just as surprised.

  The Quaid brothers reunited.

  “Willard, I-I’m so happy you’re alive. Pop said you were dead.”

  “Willard is dead. Pop told you the truth.”

  “You’re right here.”

  “I’m not Willard anymore.” The Brander grinned sickeningly, his exposed teeth and gums showing like a skinned skull through the half of his face hideously disfigured in bloody charred boils in the roasted flesh of the Q brand wound mark.

  Emmett struggled for words. “I know I left. But I’m back now. Come to take you home. And I’m never going away again.”

  A hundred yards down the icy slope, Joe Noose could barely hear the words spoken by the Quaids. The brothers were speaking softly. But the wintery silence up in the high elevations was so profound and complete, the bounty hunter caught most of what was said. Looking down at his empty holsters, Noose knew even if he had two loaded pistols he couldn’t use them. He had no concern about drawing down on them before they returned fire, that was not his problem . . . Looking up, Noose saw the titanic crags of the mountain towering into the low cloud cover around him, piled with countless tons of snow in a monumental shelf. The unsteady rumble of the unstable snowpack could occasionally be heard. It was an avalanche waiting to happen.

  One loud gunshot was all it would take.

  The mountain would come down on their heads. Shooting either of the brothers was not an option, and the bounty hunter damn sure hoped neither was thinking of shooting the other. It didn’t look like it. Gunplay not being an option for Noose subduing the Quaids—he would have to use his bare hands or his blade.

  Reaching into his belt with a gloved hand, he quietly unsheathed his heavy steel bowie knife from his scabbard and slid it into the back of his belt for easy access.

  Now he huddled against the boulder, peering around the edge at the two men a hundred yards away, listening, watching, biding his time, and waiting to make his move.

  Emmett stood a few feet from Willard, carefully closing the space between them with a conciliatory aspect to his stance.

  It was a final reckoning between the brothers. Willard looked grotesque wearing his father’s corpse’s clothes and the wig of long white hair. The deranged younger brother’s face was twisted in emotional anguish.

  “Why you wearing Pop’s clothes and hair, Willard?”

  “Don’t you see? I’m doing what Pop would have wanted to be done to the men who murdered him and burned our ranc
h and stole our cattle.”

  “That’s why you burned them with his brand.”

  “I knew you’d understand, Emmett.” His moods changing with shocking violence, Willard’s face broke into a psychotic sickle grin. Even from this distance, Noose could see the horror and remorse at the state of his troubled brother on Emmett’s face.

  “What happened to your hand?”

  “I took an ax to it, like Pop did to his. I always wanted to be like Pop, Emmett. Wanted to live up to his standards. Follow the example he set for us as men. For the longest time, I didn’t, but when he died, I knew I always did want to be just like him. He never thought I measured up because he always told me I didn’t, and he was right, so to do what needed to be done, I gave up being me and became Pop. Don’t you see? I feel him in me. His spirit carries on and gives me the strength to do my work. The work is done. They’re all dead, the badmen who wronged Pop and took everything from him. Including his life. But he’s not dead, you see . . . I’m still Pop.”

  “Let me take you home.”

  Emmett took a step closer and touched Willard’s arm. The younger brother violently recoiled and yanked his arm away, screaming at the top of his lungs in the older brother’s face.

  “You left me! You know what he did to me? Pop hurt me, Emmett! Every day he broke my body! Because you left, he took it out on me! The way he hurt us as boys, that was nothing! Nothing! Where were you? You made a promise to me, big brother! Promised you’d always protect me! Said you’d always look after me! But you left me! You abandoned me! To him!”

  Emmett’s face was screwed up in the pain of remembrance. “I-I couldn’t stay. Not on the ranch, not with him. I had to go.”

  “You said you’d never leave. You lied. We were brothers. You were all I had, we were all each of us had.”

  Emmett was so racked with guilty remorse he could barely get the words out. “I’m sorry. But I came back. I-I found you. We can start again. I’ll make it all up to you, I swear. We are brothers.”

  “Emmett . . .” His tortured younger brother broke down in sobs and hung his head. The sound of his weeping was like a mewling dog.

  “Let’s go home,” his older brother said.

  Emmett embraced Willard.

  Hugged him hard.

  Over his shoulder, his younger brother’s eyes were blank. “It’s too late. Pop was right. Everybody is guilty. You, me, everybody in the whole entire world is guilty. Only one thing to do. Kill ’em all.”

  Willard pushed Emmett off the edge of the cliff.

  * * *

  Far below them Marshal Bess Sugarland was climbing hand over fist up the sheer natural trail in the rock face when the body fell past.

  It was only a quick glimpse of the flailing, tumbling figure but the plummeting Emmett Quaid’s doomed gaze caught hers, his horrible screams filling her ears as he clutched at dead air then he was out of sight below. She covered her ears when she heard the wet smack of his body hitting the rocks.

  * * *

  Noose grimaced hearing the fading echo of the screams until the soft thud of impact an impossible distance below when the screams abruptly ceased.

  He stepped out from behind the boulder.

  Willard was standing at the edge of the cliff looking down, when he heard Noose’s boot on the snow and whirled fast, quick-drawing his revolver from his side holster with surprising speed.

  “Willard Quaid! Don’t fire that gun!” Joe Noose yelled.

  Surprised the stranger knew his name, the psychopath kept the gun lifted but his head was cocked in curiosity.

  Noose stood his ground, his hands open and empty, the bowie knife out of sight jammed into his belt behind his back. The men stood twenty feet apart on the edge of the precipice over the snowy abyss. Too far for Noose to rush Willard. The silence was oddly deafening, punctuated by the tics of falling snowflakes and a periodic ominous rumble of the ice and snowpack on top of the mountain poised to be loosed from the gunshot.

  “Don’t shoot, Willard. The sound of a shot from that Colt up here will start an avalanche and bring this whole mountain down on our heads. You shoot me, you kill us both.”

  The bounty hunter saw he might as well be talking to a wild animal from the unreasoning raw predatory look in The Brander’s eyes—murder was in his bloodthirsty nature. Noose kept him talking, taking a step closer, knowing this was the final face-off.

  His whole life had brought him to the top of this Godless mountain and it was probably all going to end right here.

  Willard Quaid kept the Colt Peacemaker pointed directly at Joe Noose in a lock-elbowed straight-armed grip, but the hammer wasn’t cocked.

  “Look. I’m not armed, Willard. I’m not going to shoot you.”

  The Brander stared hard at the bounty hunter, scrutinizing him.

  “You know me, boy,” Noose said. “Look at my face. It’ll come to you. It’s been a long time. Remember back twenty years. I was the boy your father branded at your ranch. I still have the mark on my chest. I’d show it to you but it’s too damn cold for me to open my shirt.”

  In the mad, anguished whorls of Willard Quaid’s eyes the spark of recognition flashed. Joe Noose saw it, his gaze locked with the psychopath’s.

  “That’s right. You and your brother, Emmett, held me down while your father Abraham put the brand to me. Yes. I’m that boy, Willard. Me and my friends tried to rustle your cattle, but you caught us. You father made you help him hang my friends. There were three. You put ’em on horses, put ropes around their necks. I know you and Emmett didn’t want to be part of that hanging, Willard. You was just kids. We was all just kids. Your daddy made you do murder and I saw how bad you felt about it, how bad both you boys felt about it. And I know you hated to watch him brand me, before you put me on a horse and sent me away. But I lived, and I grew up, and here I am now, you and me face-to-face, at the end of the world.”

  “You.” Noose saw Willard knew who he was now, watching the last living Quaid’s eyes widen with shocked recognition, remorse, rage, and confusion all together in his broken, twisted gaze. “You had it coming,” Willard snarled. “You all had it coming.”

  “We had punishment coming. Jail time for sure. But not hanging, not without a trial. And not branding. Not for any reason. That was torture.”

  Willard thumbed back the hammer of the gun, cocking it. “You’re guilty. You’re all guilty. You all have to pay. Everybody has to pay.”

  “This ends now, Willard. I don’t want to kill you. This ain’t all your fault. It’s your father’s fault for what he done to you boys. Give me the gun, Willard. You can’t shoot it. Not up here.”

  Seeing movement out of the corner of his eye, Noose glanced quickly left and saw Marshal Bess quietly sneaking up the ridge, hugging the rock out of Willard’s line of sight. Happy to see her safe, the bounty hunter’s stomach clenched knowing she was now in danger from an avalanche if Willard fired his gun.

  Noose kept his eyes fixed on The Brander, who was watching him down the gunsights of his big revolver. Willard held the pistol bare-handed, fingers blackened from frostbite and the bloody skin peeling off against the frozen metal of the gun. “I killed my brother.”

  “It wasn’t all your fault. Hand over the gun.”

  The realization that he ended Emmett’s life came over Willard in a flood of sadness and bereavement, as he comprehended what he had done. His posture slumped and finally the pistol lowered.

  Noose dared a few steps forward and put out his open hand.

  Willard started to hand over the still-cocked Remington cavalry pistol.

  Below, a sudden cry and thud of impact.

  Head whirling, Willard saw Bess slipping on the icy steep slope and taking a tumble on the snow.

  “Bess!” Noose called.

  Willard swung his awful gaze back to Noose, his mad vulture eyes dripping with malignance, letting out a high-pitched insane shriek of raw accusatory fury. “You tricked me!”

  The Brander drew dow
n on Noose, finger closing on the trigger.

  Reaching behind his back, the bounty hunter drew his hidden bowie knife with blinding speed and threw it with deadly accuracy in a flash of steel.

  Crunch.

  The heavy blade impaled Willard Quaid between the eyes, burying to the hilt, the tip bursting out the back of his skull.

  Dead on his feet Willard stood, shivering, body going into convulsions, his blank eyes staring into space.

  The gun lowered, his arm dropping.

  Noose and Bess exchanged a relieved glance.

  The cocked revolver discharged into the snow in a thunderous pistol crack and flash of flame and smoke— the deafening gunshot echoed through the mountains in booming reverberations, amplified by the granite walls, until a new terrifying sound drowned it out: the earthquake rumble of the snow-packed mountainside above collapsing in a towering avalanche.

  Noose looked up. “Oh hell.”

  CHAPTER 38

  Willard Quaid sank to the ground.

  Noose didn’t bother to collect his bowie knife from the sprawled corpse’s head. No time.

  “Avalanche!” Noose grabbed Bess’s arm and just ran, yelling at the top of his lungs. “Don’t look back! Run, Bess! Just go!” He didn’t look back, either—those were seconds they didn’t have to waste. “Go! Go! Go!” The man and the woman held hands to hold on to each other as they ran and jumped and leapt down the side of the mountain, boots hitting snow and ice and rocks.

  Behind and above them, where Noose and Bess dared not look, they heard the mountains fall. In the seconds beforehand, the air thrummed, trembling with sonic vibration, a roaring rolling thunder gathering force and timbre, until the peaks exploded in muffled cracking and booming impacts as monumental shelves of snow and ice broke loose of the peaks in giant slabs, crashing down onto the hill the tiny figures of the man and woman fled down, showering them with snow. The collapsing ice shelves shook the earth. The ground rocked below Noose and Bess’s feet, throwing them off-balance as they tripped and fell. Rolling over and over, the man and woman tumbled head over heels down the steep mountainside—neither let go of the other, holding hands the whole way. The fall was almost straight down but the snow was very deep, safely cushioning their bodies from bouncing off boulders. softening landings after sudden fifty-foot drops as the man and woman literally fell down the mountain.