The Chinaman said nothing.
“No? Because, you see mister, that’s exactly what I think you are.” His gun hand wiggled, his brows narrowed. “And I do not like fucking weirdos.”
It happened so fast Gabino could hardly keep the movements straight. Ted pulled the gun from his pocket. The Asian man flicked his wrist, the blade released from its cold metal sheath with a soft click, and he ran at Ted, covering the short distance between them in a split-second. Ted’s face contorted into a sneer as he raised and fired the gun. The Chinaman’s shoulder exploded, a chunk of meat flung away from it in a spray of blood.
Then the man was on him.
He swiped his wrist over and down and Ted’s face opened up like a split melon, left eye to left molar, his cheek dangling like a broken car door, hot blood spraying outward, dousing his duster and the floorboards.
Snarling and bloody, Ted grabbed the man’s neck and brought the fist of metal around to shoot him in the face, but the man swung his other arm upward in a blur, deflecting the gun as it fired. Ted’s wrist bent awkwardly and the gun shot wild, striking Widowmaker high in the throat. The horse screamed like a devil, jerked her massive head upward, nearly lifting Gabino, who still had a hand curled into her halter, from the floor. Gabino let go as the horse convulsed, her eyes wide and glossy as black chrome plates, rolling to the whites in shock.
Gabino loosed the scythe from the wall and leapt toward the bare-chested man, noticing in the fraction of a second as he moved that the man’s back was covered in the remainder of the red dragon figure which lay across his front.
Gabino swung the scythe downward at the back of the man’s head, but Fat Ted’s shocked, infuriated eyes must have warned him. He jerked sideways at the last second. The scythe caught the already-injured shoulder instead and sunk deeply into the meat, nearly separating the arm from the torso. The man screamed and simultaneously slid his razor across Fat Ted’s throat. Gabino had visions of a whale’s blowhole as a thick spray of blood erupted from Ted’s neck, dousing the Asian man and everything else within ten feet of him.
Gabino was too stunned to attack again, and as he stood there watching Fat Ted die, the tattooed man pried the gun from Ted’s meaty hand, spun around, and calmly shot Gabino in the belly. The roar of the shot was so tremendous that Gabino winced from the sound before he felt the punch in his guts.
Stunned, Gabino dropped to his knees. The man forgot Fat Ted and focused on Gabino, who knew a demon when he saw one.
The man was coated in fresh blood, the red dragon on his skin seeming to fly through the steaming fluid, blowing fire. One entire arm dangled by a thick jerky-strip of flesh, flopping and useless, and his own blood spurted outward from the wound. His face, however, was undaunted, almost calm. The grimacing, blood-drenched mask of Satan himself. Gabino could only whimper as the client lifted the razor high into the air and flung himself forward. Gabino tried vainly to raise the scythe, hoping to deflect the blow as it came down.
The madman was still raising his arm in a death-stroke when Widowmaker, frenzied and screaming in great throaty cries, kicked out wildly with her hind legs and struck the man in the ribs with the brutal force of a head-on highway collision. The Chinaman was flung from the platform as if tugged by a rope, hurtled through the air twenty feet before he smacked sickly into the grill of the F150. There was a jarring crunch as the man’s back snapped, and a whimpering thud as his broken corpse flopped lifelessly onto the hard-packed dirt, blood pooling.
Panting, his guts burning, Gabino looked around at the destruction. Fat Ted had stopped moving, one out-flung pudgy hand had been crushed beneath Widowmaker’s death-throe stomps. He looked down at his stomach, saw the hand holding the wound covered in gore. He winced, his heartbeat a pounding bass drum in his ears.
Part of him wondered if he could drive himself to a hospital, live with whatever legal consequences that might arise. He tried to stand, got as far as one knee, and collapsed back down onto his side, blood leaking from him in a bubbling flow. He looked up at Widowmaker, whose stomping had slowed. She blew air past her lips, shook her head. Her knees buckled. She tried to right herself but, like Gabino, lacked the life force to do so.
She tumbled onto the platform, snapping wood planks beneath the crushing weight as she fell, hooves pointed toward the dying thief. Her chin jutted upward, the lead of the harness still clinging to the iron rail. Gabino watched her great stomach rise and fall, but her limbs and head lay motionless.
Hot tears squeezing from his eyes, Gabino pushed himself up onto his elbows, screaming a curse at the pain. Gasping, with everything he had left, he crawled across the wooden planks to the horse. He slumped his body against her belly, placed a bloody hand on her fine black coat. Then, with the last effort of his sad, unfortunate life, he climbed, pulling himself onto and over her, pressing his bleeding wound to her side. He reached out with trembling fingers to stroke her head, her eyes still wild but fading, her lids heavy and pressing downward, a slowly closing veil. He lay still, his face wet with sweat and tears. He let his blood seep into her coat, took comfort from the rise and fall of her exhalations.
“I am sorry, lady,” he whispered soothingly, touching his fingertips to her mouth, her face, caressing her. “We go together, okay?” He closed his eyes, hot tears spilled down his cheeks, and he rasped, “Ya nos vamos a encontrar con los ángeles del Señor.”
Things grew quiet, and Gabino’s vision grew dark. He lifted his head one last time, looked around at the world he was leaving, saw his blood-spattered Stetson lying near the edge of the platform. He ran an absent hand over his own sweaty head, his hair plastered down, his moustache wet with sweat and saliva. He grimaced at a shock of pain in his guts, his white teeth shining.
He shifted his weight upward, his body pushing gracelessly to the mare’s great neck, wrapped his arm around it. His brow nudged up next to Widowmaker’s face, and he rested his forehead gently against her cheek, inhaled her smell. The smell of nobility, he thought, remembering how much pleasure it brought him as a boy, how much he always loved that smell. To him, it was the scent of greatness, of vast plains and speed, of strength, of vitality, of life itself. He wanted to cry for the pain and the beauty, but it was too late.
The thief breathed his last. His skin split at every pore and his muscles writhed, coiling and bulging through his torn external tissue, which had broken out in dense black bristles.
The bones of both corpses, man and horse, buckled and snapped like cracking stones, ropes of sinew twined like writhing snakes between them as their flesh conjoined. Gabino’s pupils melted and his eyes turned wide and brown. His hands and feet hardened, his mind expanded as wide as the great earth; the horizon a golden sea of flowing heather.
For a moment they lay dormant; dying passengers.
Then a surge of strength flooded through them and they stood, triumphantly, to their feet. They blew out a breath, whinnied, and with a twist of their great neck snapped the tether from the iron as if it were string.
Lunging, smashing all that lay beneath them, they turned and sprang from the platform, muscles singing, heart pounding with life, head bowed. Racing. Racing away, back into the darkness.
The world outside was an infinity, and they ran through it. Flying, sprinting faster than wind, their great pounding hooves shaking the crust of the new world, scorching across the plain like hellfire, their eyes forward toward the great horizon as they fled toward it, rejoicing.
In the great distance, a boy separated from a guarding shadow and ran toward them, waving his arms, leaping, laughing. They increased their pace, impatient to bask in that total love, be consumed by it, become reborn in its white light.
They were God’s creature, and His power surged through them. They were kings. They were racing mountains flexing with the power of exploding suns, flooding across the great plain beneath an eternal blanket of falling stars.
Running, forever running, to the light.
Coffin
Sylvia hated the
smell of flowers. The stink was pungent and thick; it burned her eyes and made her delicate skin itch, like it was crawling. They smelled like death. Or life, she supposed. If, like her, you thought of life as a slow decay. Like flowers, people bloomed and grew, shiny and bright, blossoming with promise, then crescendoed before the slow, inevitable death.
The Browning. The Bruising. The Withering.
Sylvia had just turned sixteen, and already she could feel her own growth slowing to a grinding, creaking halt. Her bones increasingly stagnant within layers of earthy flesh and muscle that would soon begin to degenerate, the microcosmic ballet of cells becoming clumsy as each fleeting day, each passing second, the feet of the dancers falter and stumble evermore; the once-vibrant performers drying up, flaking, falling and dying upon the great stage of her body, whisking it away toward its dusty end, toward the smell of flowers, toward the final curtain of death.
Then there was the funeral parlor—a disgusting place in itself, Sylvia thought—housing that perfect storm of death fragrances. You had the overwhelming stench of flowers, the perspiration, tears, belches, farts and stink of the mourners in crappy suits and ugly dresses, and, of course, the underlying, crisp stagnant scent of the star of this limited-run, one-person show: The Corpse.
In this case, the corpse was near and not-so-dear to the heart of young Sylvia—for it was her own, her precious, nana. Dead dead dead at the age of eighty-something, pruned and powdered as a man’s rat sack, wrapped up to the neck in what was likely a Victorian-era dress, white and lacy as the homespun tablecloth covering the endtable of Mrs. Abraham Lincoln, a massive doily replicated as evening wear or, in this case, coffin-wear. Sylvia thought it the most hideous thing she’d ever seen, especially when shoved into the puffy red silk of Nana’s coffin, like a splinter of bone in a blanket of blood. And Nana’s face. Horrifying. Smeared with more grease paint than a dustbowl circus clown, the eyebrows drawn on with black pencil, the interior of the mouth sewn shut too tightly so that the mortician-applied lipstick was smeared half on her sucked-in lips and half on her face, like a drunken hooker who couldn’t be bothered to find a mirror when dolling herself up for a night walking the streets and pounding Johns.
Sylvia was disgusted with the whole song-and-dance that her nana’s funeral, that all funerals, entailed, from the oversized book all the guests were forced to sign which, she was quite sure, would never be looked at again, to the crowd of irregulars—those cast-off relatives and thousand-year-old former dance partners. The whole scene was fake teeth, bad black and the most tenuously-clinging leaves on the shakiest limbs of their family tree.
Luckily, she’d seen her cousin Terry with a flask and followed him out to the dumpsters. She’d had to show him her tits but desperate times and all that. She needed a couple hits of bourbon to make it through the rest of this nightmare. The remainder of the afternoon she sat hunched near the back, huddled in a cheap folding chair and wishing she’d had her cell phone to keep her company, to let her at least text with Patti and Jill while she rotted in the small, brown-carpeted, puke-papered corpse-room while the mourners murmured and sneezed, told fabricated stories and half-baked memories to each other; like any of them really cared, like any of them really knew what Nana was all about, what the truth of her was.
But Sylvia knew. The old crone had made sure of that. Nana and her secrets, Nana and her tall tales, her mystic bullshit, Nana and her wanna-be witch hard-on. Oddly, even now, after everything, Sylvia didn’t hate the woman, but she was glad the wicked old bird was dead. There was bad blood, bad history between them. Things her parents never knew about, that this room full of phony acolytes could never even dream about. The real truth of who Nana was; not the doting grandmother who always brought her special honeyed ham to Christmas dinner, not the sweet old woman who enjoyed dancing with the ancient crustaceans from the church or having a night of cards with the fat old flappy-armed bats who all looked up to her, the queen bee, the grand mistress of Minnetonka’s frail and infirm. If they knew who she really was they would have never stepped foot into the same room, wouldn’t have had a single lick of her famous glazed holiday ham or clasped her bony old hand on the dance floor. Because they didn’t know the truth of it. Only Sylvia was privy to that, and boy oh boy, didn’t that just make her the luckiest cuckoo bird of them all. She had played Nana’s games, and paid dearly for her failures when she lost.
* * *
Minnetonka, where Sylvia lived, is named after the Dakota Indian mni tanka, meaning “great water.” Minnesota, the state surrounding the glorious city of Minnetonka (in case the root etymology wasn’t enough of a giveaway), uses the phrase “Land of 10,000 Lakes” as its slogan of choice. Sylvia wasn’t sure if there were really ten thousand lakes in her state, but if there were she figured about half of them were in Minnetonka. Lakes and trees, she liked to quip when her Facebook friends asked her what living in Minnesota was like, which wasn’t all that often, but when your social media net extended to places like China and Denmark, shit like that came up.
Sylvia’s home, specifically, was in a more rural area of Minnetonka, a stately old colonial that still utilized some of the original turn-of-the-century fixtures, which was hilarious for Sylvia because growing up she just assumed everyone’s toilet was the size of a thimble and that rust was just something you did. The “estate,” as her father called it, was perched on a hill, planted at the end of a twisting driveway that took you through a quarter acre of trees and wild rabbits before your safe arrival to sheltered, relative modernity. Behind the house, facing west toward great Lake Minnetonka itself, or Lake Minny as the locals called it, was more trees – acres and acres of green-topped forest.
Nana called it the Old Wood.
Of course both Sylvia and her younger brother, Jamie, were forbidden to go into the Old Wood at night, or by themselves, yada yada, but Sylvia still went for the occasional stroll just to kill time. Sometimes she’d take a camera and pretend she was a nature photographer. She enjoyed the animals that were out there, even the bugs were pretty cool. Spiders the size of thumbs, black-shelled beetles and pinky-sized caterpillars were prevalent. She’d once photographed a baby mountain lion, and had been so proud that she printed it out to show her parents, only to be grounded as an outcome. Sylvia hadn’t taken her own safety into consideration, apparently. Regardless, she’d hung the photo above her bed in defiant pride.
Her nana was raised in New Zealand, but had moved to the United States when she was a teenager. She’d been married three times and all of her husbands were dead. Nana came to live with Sylvia and her family when her most recent and last husband, Freddie, died a few days after a major stroke had turned his muscles to Play-Doh and his brain to oatmeal. He drooled for a while and when Sylvia finally got the guts to visit him he was only able to roll one broken eye in her direction, the white of it spider-webbed with red veins and the eyelid flickering like a window shade in a high wind. She touched his hand briefly, said, “goodbye,” and left feeling sick.
Freddie’s funeral hadn’t been too bad because Sylvia was only eight years old at the time and didn’t know enough to be distraught at having to hang out with a corpse all day long. She just ran around with the other kids she’d never met (and would never see again), getting scolded and asking for food and all the usual bull kids do at corpse-parties.
After Freddie’s funeral, Nana, old and alone, decided to move in with her son and his family. Ergo, only weeks after Freddy’s bones were buried, Nana was part of their everyday lives.
* * *
At first, Sylvia had viewed Nana as an invader. Not that she didn’t love and adore her nana, as any eight-year-old girl would, but she had to admit that Nana’s presence was... disruptive. She was one more person to schedule the television with, one more person in their upstairs bathroom that she already shared with Jamie—just a baby then—who had dumb stuff everywhere: rubber duck dead in an empty tub, a safety-lid on the toilet, bright sparkly tubes of tear-free soap and shampoo
and cartoon-themed toothpaste clogging up her nice girl things, contaminating everything. And now Nana. Compared to Nana’s takeover, Jamie’s stuff was next to nothing. Suddenly there were curling irons and perfumes, powders and pill bottles, a weird glass where she bathed her teeth at night, all filmy and coated with a dry rim of powder where the denture detergent had dissolved and crystalized. There were foreign towels and big robes on the cute hook her mother had installed on the back of the door, the one with two ceramic balls, pink flowers painted on their smooth white surfaces. She had loved flowers then. Thought them pretty. Thought them life-affirming.
She would soon learn, however, that nature was not about giving life. Nature was a hot greedy monster that had abilities humans couldn’t begin to fathom. Nature had secrets. Nature could kill you as easily as brushing an ant from the palm of your hand.
Nature, Sylvia was taught, beginning that first day in the Old Wood with Nana, was also power. If you knew the secrets that Nana did, then nature was as much your parent as your flesh-and-blood was, maybe even more so. Because while Sylvia’s mother and father loved her and tried to protect her, bathed her and fed her and clothed her, nature could do things to her that were unseen, make changes to her on the inside. Give her the power to protect herself, power to give back to nature what mankind had taken so rudely, so forcefully. And, like Nana, Sylvia loved the idea of all that power.
At first.
She loved it right up until the day of her twelfth birthday, when she had shared nature’s secrets with someone she loved.
Things were never the same again.
* * *
The summer after Nana was firmly settled in, Sylvia was introduced to the Old Wood for the first time. That was when Nana told her about nature’s mysteries, about what would happen if that mysterious, sacred knowledge were to ever get out, or get into the wrong hands. Sylvia, still just a child, had been thrilled, enraptured with the idea of keeping a secret with her nana, something only they shared.
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