The Graves at Seven Devils

by Peter Brandvold

  The revolver roared, the slug slamming into the stone wall above the bed.

  Louisa took two long, running strides and dove through one of the room’s two windows, hearing the bark of Squires’s six-shooter once more and feeling a bullet nip her boot heel as it cleared the window ledge.

  “Get that little bitch!” Cora squealed.

  Squires fired two more quick, hammering shots as Louisa hit the ground outside—a violent landing on the stony, prickly ground still wet from the rain—then rolled down a slight grade to the base of a gnarled cedar.

  Back inside the shack, Squires shouted, “I’m not shooting at rats, my heart!”

  There was the rake of soft leather heels as Squires scrambled to his feet inside the shack. Outside, heart hammering, Louisa gained her own feet.

  Clawing at the ground with her hands and digging her heels into the sand and gravel, she bolted out from under the cedar and headed up the grade toward cover in the form of rocks, shrubs, and boulders rising blackly against the starlit sky.

  “Get back here, little one!”

  Squires’s mocking, echoing shout was drowned by two more loud revolver barks. The slugs plunked into the gravel just inches off Louisa’s pounding, raking heels as she half crawled and half ran up the rocky slope toward the towering northern ridge a good two hundred yards away.

  When the echoes of Squires’s last two shots had dwindled, he shouted, “Got us a crazed polecat, fellas! Better come hither and pronto. I mean, vamoose!”

  The voice, muffled by the growing distance Louisa was putting between herself and the cabin, echoed ominously in the silent, clean, pine-scented night. She hadn’t run far amongst the ruined shacks cropping up out of the chaparral, looking as though they’d been here as long as the rocks, when she realized the flooded arroyo had taken more out of her than she’d thought.

  Her feet and legs grew heavy, her breath short. Her lungs felt little larger than prunes. Her chest ached.

  Behind her, the outlaws were calling back and forth. A couple whooped and yowled like wolves on the blood scent. Cora continued screaming so shrilly that Louisa couldn’t make out her words, though she was sure the crazed she-bitch was demanding Louisa’s head.

  Boots thumped, gravel crunched, and spurs rang. Louisa could hear labored breaths raking in and out of her pursuers’ lungs as they stormed up the grade behind her and fanned out across the slope, stalking her. She could sense their bloodlust, the thrill of the chase, the fevered anticipation of what they’d do once they caught her.

  If they caught her, she knew what they’d do. And without her weapons and ammunition for the derringer, there’d be nothing she could do about it.

  23

  WHEN LOUISA HAD run a good hundred yards up the slope from Cora’s cabin, she stopped near what appeared to be an old mine yawning blackly in the slope before her, surrounded with cracked rocks, weathered lumber, and a rusted, overturned wheelbarrow overgrown with buckbrush and junipers.

  She dropped to a knee, breathing hard.

  Down the slope behind her, the killers were flitting shadows amongst the rocks and cactus. Upslope, another two or three hundred yards away—it was hard to judge in the darkness—the sheer northern ridge loomed. One of the devil-shaped spires giving the range its name rose from the ridge’s mantel-like crest, climbing another three or four hundred feet skyward from the rest of the ridge.

  Looking around the broad, deep canyon in which the ancient village nestled, Louisa saw that the other surrounding ridges were capped with similarly shaped devil-like spires complete with tails and eroded horn-shaped stones protruding from their elongated tips. A couple even wielded what looked like pitchforks.

  The devil-like formations surrounding her didn’t so much heighten her fear as make her wish the big, Georgian saddle tramp who’d sold his soul to the Devil, Lou Prophet, were here. Armed with his mean and ugly horse and his sawed-off, double-barreled barn blaster, he’d find a way to save her in his clumsy, awkward way and blow out the lamps of the howling demons moving in on her now.

  But Prophet was no doubt somewhere on the other side of the devil-capped, star-shrouded northern ridge, miles away in the darkness, and wondering where she was but too far away to save her.

  Downslope, something flashed, and then the gun’s roar reached Louisa’s ears. There was a shrill, animal shriek and the muffled thrashing of trampled brush.

  “You git her?” one of the men yelled about fifty yards downslope and right.

  “Javelina,” called another, a wry pitch to his voice.

  Louisa quickly considered her options and decided that she couldn’t continue moving. Unable to outdistance the gang, and without the means to fight them, she’d be overtaken in minutes. She had to hide.

  Remaining crouched, she swiveled her head, looking around. On the other side of the gaping mine hole, three low stone walls rose from the scrub. Part of the old brush roof remained, partly attached to one of the vine-covered walls.

  Louisa scrambled over to what remained of the shack, circled, and stepped over the remaining wall, quietly shoving aside the slender, sun-bleached ironwood poles composing the roof.

  Stooping, she climbed beneath the low-slung poles and, hoping she’d run into no rattlesnakes or black widow spiders, scuttled in beneath the sagging roof and pressed her back to the cool, stone wall as far from view from the outside as possible.

  She hunkered down, drew her knees to her chest, and listened as her pursuers continued shouting back and forth across the slope on both sides and below her.

  “Goddamnit!” Cora screamed like a wounded she-grizzly, somewhere above Louisa now, stumbling around in the brush. “I want that little bitch. Find her!”

  “We are, Cora,” one of the men said placatingly, barely loudly enough for Louisa to hear. “It’s dark out here. . . .”

  Cora said something else but she must have turned her back to Louisa, for Louisa couldn’t make it out above the thumps of boots moving toward her from below and left.

  Louisa pressed her back harder against the stone wall as the footsteps and spur chings grew louder, with the occasional rattle of a kicked stone or the crunch of cactus spines. She could hear a man breathing hard. To her right, through a small gap between the fallen roof and the crumbling wall, a shadow moved. Louisa opened her mouth to breathe more quietly as the man stopped beside the hovel. He was probably only about six or seven feet away from her. Probably scrutinizing the fallen roof.

  Louisa’s heart beat with hard, measured strokes. The man stood frozen beside her. She could tell he was looking around, shifting his weight; gravel ground dully beneath his boots.

  “Hey, Little Bitch, you in there?”

  It was the voice of the black man, Heinz. In the night’s heavy silence, his voice was almost bizarrely clear, as though he’d spoken from only inches away.

  Silence.

  Heinz’s breath raked evenly in and out of his lungs. Suddenly, there was the low groan of boot leather. The man grunted softly. Louisa jumped as something struck the branches over her head with a loud, wooden thump. A stone slipped through a crack between the branches and plopped into the dust just inches in front of her boots.

  Louisa opened her mouth wider, drawing a deep, silent breath. Her heart thumped painfully against her ribs.

  The black man’s bulky shadow moved toward her, and Louisa steeled herself, prepared to fight. If he found her, she would jump him, claw his eyes out, and try to wrestle a gun away. . . .

  An owl screamed from up the slope—an eerie, rasping cry shattering the night’s dense quiet. There was a windy flapping of wings. Heinz stopped and turned to stare upslope.

  Louisa waited, listening to the owl’s distressed cry as it faded off toward the ridge.

  Heinz muttered something, turned away, and began striding up the slope, his shadow disappearing amongst the pinyons and boulders. When she could no longer hear his footsteps, Louisa let her head sag back against the wall and let out a long, slow, relieved
breath.

  She’d wait here until they gave up looking for her. They’d no doubt quit soon, go back to their fires and their liquor bottles. Besides, that wound her bullet had sliced across Cora’s cheek and ear needed tending. Louisa had to bide her time. She’d never been much for patience, bulling headlong into bailiwicks with her horns out, but if she tried to make a run for it too soon, before the entire gang had slinked back down into the canyon, she wouldn’t make it.

  Patience, Prophet had told her more times than she could count, was the key to a bounty hunter not pushing up sage from a wooden overcoat before his time.

  Snickering in spite of herself at the remembered advice, Louisa settled back against the wall and hugged her knees, shivering as the night’s chill penetrated her wet, muddy clothes. What she wouldn’t give for a warm blanket and a hot fire, maybe even a rare nip from Prophet’s bottle. . . .

  She waited for what must have been about two hours, watching the stars through the slats of the weathered ironwood logs and listening as the sounds of the searching gang ebbed and flowed around her. Several times the angry, inquiring voices and the thumping footsteps and crashing brush died, and Louisa thought they were retreating. But then more scuffling rose maybe thirty or forty yards away, upslope or down, and she settled back against the cold wall, shivering, waiting. . . .

  It went on like that all night.

  Louisa would find herself almost in a doze, sliding down against the wall. Then some bird or animal sound would rouse her, and she’d lift her head to listen. Just when she thought the slope was clear and she began moving her stiff limbs to crawl out from under the roof, she’d hear a voice or the unmistakable sound of a kicked stone or someone clearing his throat.

  The gang might have been named for the three bizarre look-alikes, but obviously Cora was the one in charge. She kept the men out there, kicking around for the girl who’d no doubt disfigured her permanently, all night long.

  Again, Louisa awoke from a doze, roused by her own rasping breath. She jerked her head up and peered through the roof slats. The sky was lightening, the stars fading. Birds chirped in the brush all around her.

  She listened intently for about five minutes.

  Only the bird sounds and the distant, frenzied yapping of ridge-sitting coyotes. Had the outlaws finally drifted back to their cabins?

  Louisa couldn’t hide here forever. She’d need water soon or she’d shrivel up and die like a mouse at the bottom of a dry well pit. It had gotten lighter than she would have liked, but she had to make a run for it, find a way through, around, or up and over that ridge, somehow make her way back to Prophet.

  She winced as she stretched out her legs, hearing her stiff muscles and bones snapping and popping. She turned onto her hands and knees and crawled slowly out from beneath the shack’s slanting roof, then lifted her head above the low, stone wall, looking around and listening.

  Except for the birds and the yammering of the coyotes, nothing. She picked up a brick-sized, jagged-edged stone—she felt too naked without any weapon at all—and, continuing to look around, began walking slowly up the slope. Meandering around the rocks and cactus, she also avoided the mine holes and tailings pocking the terrain.

  She stopped suddenly, drew a shallow breath through her nose, detecting the smell of tobacco. Frozen, she looked around, heart quickening once more. Smoke wafted in the predawn shadows, a couple of thin, weblike lines rising from her left.

  Louisa swung her head around, and her stomach leaped into her throat. The man called Sykes stood about seven feet away from her, in front of a boulder and a juniper shrub, bringing a quirley to his lips as he stared up the slope, slightly away from Louisa. The tip of the quirley glowed brightly in the purple shadows.

  Louisa’s mind reeled as her stomach continued churning, her ears screaming. Before she could make up her mind about what to do, Sykes turned toward her suddenly, as though he’d spied her in the periphery of his vision. His eyes beneath the brim of his blue cavalry hat snapped wide. His fingers opened, and the quirley dropped, spraying orange sparks along the ground.

  As he reached for the revolver jutting from his shoulder holster, he shouted, “Heyyy!”

  Louisa bolted toward him, cocking her arm, then slamming her rock against Sykes’s temple so hard that she could feel the impact all the way up her arm and into her shoulder.

  “Uhh!” The man stumbled back and sideways, tripping over his own boots and bringing a hand to his forehead.

  Louisa stepped toward him once more, swinging her arm back behind her. Bunching her lips, she swung it forward with even more power than before. The rock struck the side of Sykes’s head with another resolute, cracking thump. He groaned as his hat flew off his head and into the cedar behind him.

  “Here!” Sykes bellowed, falling to a knee against the cedar, his voice cracking with misery. “Bitch’s heeeere!”

  From downslope rose the unmistakable shriek of Cora. Cursing and bellowing like a bull trapped in a wildfire, Sykes again reached for his shoulder-holstered six-shooter. Louisa wheeled and, hearing footsteps and snapping brush all around her—she must have been moving right up through the killers stationed around her hiding place—she sprinted up the slope.

  Sykes triggered shots behind her, the slugs screeching off rocks around her scissoring heels.

  Leaping rocks and small shrubs, breath rasping in and out of her still-boggy lungs, Louisa ran hard, pumping her arms and lifting her knees. More shouts and shrieks rose behind her, and Sykes continued yammering and triggering errant rounds.

  “I can’t see!” the man bellowed. “Bitch blinded me!”

  “Shut up!” Cora’s cracking wail lifted the hair on the back of Louisa’s neck. “Where is she?”

  To Louisa’s left, a man’s voice boomed. “I got her!”

  “Bitch blinded—!” Sykes shouted again, his voice clipped by another scream from Cora and a pistol blast.

  There was a blue flash and a pop from maybe twenty yards away. The slug whistled inches in front of Louisa’s face and barked into a boulder ahead and right.

  Louisa offered a rare curse and continued running, tripping over obstacles in the uncertain light, hearing her own wheezing breaths and involuntary groans like some creature keeping pace beside her.

  Boots thudded behind her, a man’s labored breath growing louder.

  He triggered another thundering shot, and the slug sliced across Louisa’s left shoulder to smack the ground ahead with a whining thud. Louisa lurched to her right. Her boot clipped a stone, and she stumbled, flew forward, sliding and skidding along on her hands and knees.

  She whipped around to cast a look behind her. The handsome blond-haired outlaw materialized from the shadows, a revolver smoking in his right hand. White teeth shone as he stretched his mustache in a broad grin, then turned his head sideways.

  “Over here!”

  The others, including the big, grunting Mexican, running up the slope behind and around him, closed on him and Louisa.

  She looked around for a branch or a rock—anything she could use for a weapon. Her heart hammered, raging fury seething inside her. She’d wanted to get away from this bunch only so she could confront them again on her own terms and with the help of Prophet.

  The need to avenge her cousin and her cousin’s boy and husband, and the whole burned town of Seven Devils, was a roaring explosion inside her head. The sob that slipped from her lips was one of frustration only slightly tinged with the fear and terror at seeing her own end reflected in the faces of the gun wolves closing on her now from the shadow-obscured brush.

  Squires continued toward her, angling his smoking revolver toward Louisa’s head. The other men had run up to either side, breathing hard, the look-alike called Rafe stooped over and wheezing while he grinned down at Louisa. The big Mexican’s fetor reached Louisa like a palpable wave as he approached on her right, his shoulders sloped, eyes glistening with goatish lust and fury beneath the brim of his steeple-crowned sombrero. His
big Chihuahua spurs rang with each slow, purposeful step, dust puffing up around his steel-tipped boots.

  Coming up behind Rafe and his brother in the opera hat and rose-colored glasses, Cora pushed between them. She continued forward, shoved Squires’s gun hand aside, rammed a shoulder against the Mexican called Chulo, wrinkling her nose, and took one more step toward Louisa before she stopped and stared down, crazy eyes flashing gold sparks in the shadows.

  She’d wrapped a white cloth around her head at an angle, so that it covered her ear and bullet-nicked cheek. Knotted just under her opposite ear, it was heavily bloodstained. The white parts glowed in the gradually lightening darkness.

  “She’s mine.”

  Cora’s voice was eerily calm. Her chest rose and fell heavily, slowly. She holstered her revolver, then reached up and behind her head. When she lowered her right hand again, gray dawn light flashed off the bone-handled stiletto jutting toward Louisa. “When I’m done with her, the rest of you can have her . . . if there’s anything left.”

  She giggled her insane, high-pitched, little-girl giggle, and started forward.

  Propelled by hot, swirling fury, Louisa scrambled to her feet and ran stumbling forward over rocks and brush, bulling through low cedar branches. Her left boot dropped over the edge of a hole she hadn’t seen in the murky light, and she gasped, panic overtaking her.

  She flung her arms out to stay the fall, but she grabbed only mine tailings and a juniper branch that broke off in her hand.

  Before she knew it, both her legs were in the hole and she plunged down the steep trough angling into darkness, her stomach hurling into her throat.

  The pick-and-chisel-gouged side of the hole scraped her arms and legs, and her chin bounced painfully against it before her feet struck bottom. The air left her lungs in a rush. She fell backward and rolled several more feet before piling up against a wall buried in heavy darkness.

  Sand and gravel rattled down behind her.

  She lifted her head from the sandy floor and looked around. She heard voices above, but she couldn’t see the killers, for the hole angled back beneath the ledge, and she was as far under the ledge as she could have fallen. Lilac light hung before, but now she was shrouded in shadow.