by Alma Katsu
She tried to wrench away from him, but he got a hand around her dress and pulled, ripping the fabric. Without thinking, she brought her knee up hard between his legs. He doubled over backward, gasping. All at once, her children darted out from the shelter of the wagons and eddied around her torn skirts like a current, asking if she was okay. The littlest one, Eliza, was crying.
“Come,” was all she could say. There was a tight, airless feeling in her chest, as if he still had his weight against her.
They had turned away from Keseberg when he finally got his breath.
“You’re too old for me anyway. All used up,” he choked out. “But those stepdaughters of yours will do just fine. That Elitha’s been sniffing around.”
She froze. Her blood felt like a sluice of ice in her veins. “You stay away from her.”
He managed to smile, too. A horrible, ragged smile, like something cut by a knife. “I reckon she wants a man to make a woman of her.”
Fear crested to panic. Elitha, Elitha, Elitha. Where could she be? Tamsen turned with her children and ran, plunging back through the camp, ignoring the stares they received. Tamsen swept past the Reeds, hoping to find Elitha with her friend Virginia, but all she got was a sour look from Margaret. Through the trampled path that cut across the middle of the encampment (more grumbles, dark looks, mutters). Past the last cluster of wagons, the sun starting to set behind their weatherworn canopies. The children were starting to whimper, frightened to be so far from the rest of the family, and Tamsen was tempted to turn around but then Keseberg’s leer would rise up before her eyes and she knew she had to go just a little farther . . . Into the wild sage, the low branches snagging her skirt like a child’s hand. A distance from the camp, not far from the river—she could hear the lowing of oxen and cattle just ahead—when she thought she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. Dragging the little ones nearly off their feet, Tamsen swept into a small clearing to find Elitha kneeling in the dirt, with a lantern set beside her. She was using a stick to dig. Tamsen couldn’t tell why. The sun had set by now and everything was cast in bare and flickering light.
“Elitha!” she called out, half in anger, half in relief. Elitha started. “What are you doing here? Didn’t I tell you”—Tamsen had released her grip on Frances and Eliza and reached down to jerk her stepdaughter to her feet—“you were not to leave my sight, didn’t I tell you that?”
Elitha’s hands were coated in dirt. Her dress was filthy, too. “But I found lambs’ ears. I knew you’d want it. Didn’t you say so?”
Lambs’ ears. Tamsen used it for one of her remedies. But she was still gripped by a fear that rocked her chest like an inner earthquake. Without thinking, she slapped Elitha hard. Before she knew what had happened, her palm was red and stinging and Elitha was holding her cheek, looking up at her in shock.
But not in pain. In fury. She had never seen Elitha like this before, face knitted together, eyes flashing. She wanted to apologize to her and at the same time, shake her for giving her a fright. For the dizzy fear that still consumed her.
“You—you can’t treat me like a child,” Elitha said. “I’m nearly a grown woman.”
A grown woman—Keseberg’s words echoed in her head. Elitha had no idea what a risk it was for a woman to wander away from the wagon train unescorted.
“This is serious, Elitha, and I need you to listen to me and, most importantly, to obey me—”
She broke off. Even with the children shifting around her restlessly and the wind rattling the sage, Tamsen heard something moving. She went very still, as if some inner coil inside her had been wound tight. Was she imagining it?
Her first thought was of Keseberg. Perhaps he’d followed her, thought he would scare her good. Maybe it was only that sounds carried strangely over the hollow, making it seem like something far away was right beside her.
No. There was movement all around them, as though they were being surrounded.
“Get behind me,” Tamsen ordered. “All of you.” She lifted Elitha’s lantern and adjusted the wick to increase the flame. “Who’s there? Whoever it is, you might as well head back to the wagons. I’ll not put up with any nonsense tonight.”
But the man who hobbled out from the sagebrush and rocks was not anyone she knew. She lifted the lantern higher, and the figure squinted and moved back slightly into the shadows, crouched. She blinked in the darkness. She could see that he was lean and rangy and crusted brown all over like a skeleton caked in mud or as if he’d grown an outer coating of bark. Like he was part of the wilderness.
She blinked again, as the dizziness returned. Maybe it was the headache from earlier returning, or that she’d taken too much willow bark powder to make it go away. She couldn’t be sure of what she was seeing.
“Who are you?” she demanded. The thought of the children behind her amplified her fear; her protective duty rose within her like a fire in the wind. “What do you want?”
No answer. She couldn’t quite make out his face but he stared at her with the intensity of a mountain lion, eyes glittering in the lamplight. He was definitely not an Indian. A mountain man, maybe, attracted by the activity of the wagon train. A white man who’d been in the wilderness a long time, maybe lost and on his own. His eyes had an odd, feral quality to them with no glimmer of human intelligence.
“Be calm,” she said, in a low voice, when one of the children whimpered. “It’s all right.” Could they see what she was seeing?
Then there was a second man, and a third, she could swear. The lantern was too dim to show much: only shadows, impressions, movement. A chill lifted on her neck. The way they moved was all wrong. She thought of Luke Halloran, the broken way he’d crawled and lunged. They were like wolves: They circled the way wolves did, they spoke without saying anything out loud.
Wolves separated their prey, isolated them, and picked them off, one by one.
Tamsen turned and saw Elitha, trembling, too far from the others. Isolated.
Before she could shout, one of the shadows lunged in Elitha’s direction.
Tamsen’s heart sounded a rhythm of panic in her chest, in her head, in the back of her throat. She dove toward Elitha.
Another of the shadow figures scuttled to intercept Tamsen, clawing for her throat. He opened his mouth to reveal a nest of teeth, pointed and inhuman. She swung the lantern with all her might at the man, if that was what he was. The glass chimney shattered as it made contact with his jaw. The fount cracked, throwing oil all over his face.
The children began to bolt. “Stay together!” Tamsen screamed. But it was hopeless. They scattered, children darting through the sage like rabbits, eyes wide with fright.
Within a second, the man’s head was engulfed in flames. The sound that came from him was like nothing she’d ever heard, like a renting of the world itself that briefly revealed the pit screams of hell. He clawed at his face, but that only spread the flames to his hands, then his arms. The fire devoured him as though he were made of kindling. The other two men began to scream and retreat from the one that was burning, scattering like dumb animals.
Tamsen got hold of Elitha. “Go after the children, take them to the wagons—now!” Her heart seemed trapped in her throat, choking her.
“The dead . . .” Elitha muttered, looking stunned and confused.
Tamsen shoved Elitha hard in the back. “Don’t look back, just run.”
The stench from the burning man was overpowering. He flung himself against rocks and scrub as he tried to save himself but only succeeded in setting the whole plain ablaze: sagebrush, reeds, and striplings, all of it caught.
Within seconds the men were lost, as thick billows of smoke funneled toward the sky and made her eyes burn.
She backed away, holding her apron to her mouth, coughing. She wanted to run, but she had no strength left. And she had to try to douse the flames with water from the river, o
r it would be too late. They would lose everything.
But the fire had taken hold. It raced along the ground, it jumped from bush to bush. Before long, it was a wall of flame in front of her, defying her. Even after dozens of others came sprinting toward her from the camp, the fire spread faster than they could work.
More people came with buckets, and some with shovels, throwing sand onto the fire. Others tried a bucket brigade from the river, tossing bucket after bucket of muddy brown water on the conflagration.
Still, the flames gained.
Samuel Shoemaker wiped his forehead and surveyed the scene. “We’re losing ground. We need to hitch up the oxen and move those wagons.” The men around him began arguing: Could they round up the oxen in time? The animals had already moved away, frightened by the flames. Maybe they could try to push or drag the heavy wagons to safety—though that seemed like a fool’s errand. Some damned the families that had remained back at their campsites, thinking the fire was no threat.
“Let them burn,” Baylis Williams said, his face streaked with soot. “If they’re too shortsighted to see the danger . . .” Tamsen was shocked; he was normally a gentle soul.
Tamsen cleared her throat. She had to warn them of the danger that was stalking them—something far worse than these rabid flames. “I was attacked,” she shouted. “That’s how the fire started. Some men came out of nowhere and went after the children.”
The others stopped their arguing. “What men?” Graves narrowed his eyes. “White men, or Indians?”
“White men, I think.” But not men. Not quite. How could she explain, without playing into the hands of the people who wanted to discredit her?
Keseberg’s laugh was like the hollow echo of metal on bone. “There ain’t no white men besides us around here,” he said.
A murmur rippled through the crowd. Her throat was still raw from smoke, still raw from screaming. She put her hand to her head, trying to think clearly. She hated doubting herself, but suddenly she felt another swerve of dizziness. It wasn’t possible this had all been a kind of hallucination brought on by willow bark—was it? Most of the time, Tamsen kept a clear head, but there were times when she wondered if the strange, twisted, tortured part of her had taken over, occluding everything else.
Now, everyone was staring at her, but their looks were not ones of sympathy.
“Funny how you’re always in the middle of it whenever things go wrong,” Keseberg said loudly. “I think you like the attention, Mrs. Donner.”
The wind shifted, blowing the smoke away from them, and as the smoke lifted, the whole camp seemed to disappear before her eyes, dissolving into the darkness.
She broke out in a cold sweat.
But the impression was over just as quickly.
Now, she looked around at the rest of the gathered group and realized: Even if what she thought had happened had, there was no way she’d ever get them to listen to her.
And in fact, it didn’t matter. Because if what she’d seen had been real, then they were all as good as dead anyway. She saw that now, the memory of the feral men’s eyes still hovering in her mind, hardening into a certainty.
“We’re not going to stop this fire,” Eddy said, turning his back on the flames. “We gotta move the wagons. It’s our only hope.”
Tamsen watched as pandemonium broke out among the group, spouse arguing with spouse, some throwing down buckets and shovels to sprint for the wagons, others pulling on their neighbors’ sleeves, trying to make them stay. “It’s every man for hisself,” Franklin Graves muttered as he trotted past Tamsen, nearly knocking her off her feet.
With a fresh pulse of terror, Tamsen saw that he was right.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Edwin Bryant found the corpse in a cave.
It was the first body he’d come across, man or animal, in the weeks he’d been lost, other than the scattered bones at the prospectors’ camp, which had been around for years.
This one was, ironically, a sign of life, of normalcy. You expected to find half-decomposed animals if you walked in the woods long enough. It was the way things were in the wilderness: knots of flies, the sweet-sick smell of decay. But in the days since Fort Bridger, he’d seen nothing at all. Absolutely nothing.
He’d found the cave by accident, during a sudden sweeping rainstorm that had driven him to look for shelter. The cave was small, one of a handful pocking the side of a rocky rise. He was so weak he almost gave up the climb and bunkered where he was. But although myths of wolf-men and diseases that made vampires and corpses of all stripes he could handle, Bryant had never liked storms. So he’d hauled up through the crags, winded by even this limited exertion, and ducked into the first shelter he found.
He’d brought a bundle of sagebrush with him as fuel for a fire, and he was just looking for the best spot for it when he saw it: a male, probably in his midthirties, though it was hard to tell because of the decomposition. Probably an Indian, most likely a Washoe given where he was, or where he thought he was.
The cause of death was apparent enough. The Indian had a wicked gash in the skull, probably not accidental. The impact was too neat, and likely caused not by a fall but by the impact of some heavy weapon, but he couldn’t tell for sure—he was no expert in wounds or trauma. He had other injuries, too, deep cuts that could’ve been made by a wolf or bear, even a mountain cat. That was a funny thing. Bryant had seen no trace of predators in the area—no scores in the bark of the trees, no droppings, no dens.
The man had nothing with him, no bow and arrow, spear or rifle, not even a blanket. He had not been here long before he died. Bryant considered whether whoever—or whatever—had killed him had attacked the man inside the cave but quickly dismissed the idea. There was no evidence of blood except trace amounts on the stone. Bryant had to double over inside the cave to fit; it seemed unlikely that there had been a struggle inside the enclosure.
Which meant that the man had been injured elsewhere and climbed up, or been carried up, ten feet of rock just to die. Running away from something, most likely. Bryant pieced a story together in his head of a man attacked, mortally wounded but able to flee from his assailant. In a delirium, he had run until he saw the small cave; perhaps he mistook it for salvation.
Perhaps he only wanted to die in peace.
Bryant made a pillow of dried sagebrush as far as he could from the body in the narrow space. Every time he struck his flint, he imagined the man might sit up, blinking, irritated at having been awoken. He expected he was going a little mad. He had been alone long enough, without company for weeks now. And without food, except what he could scavenge: a tiny fish, a few eggs stolen from a bird’s nest. Mostly, he was getting by on insects and acorns. At one point he’d choked down a handful of roots but they’d given him heaves and he’d thrown up nothing but bile for hours, since there was nothing to throw up.
He drank water but though it filled his stomach, it did nothing for his hunger. After the first three or four days the gnawing had diminished—thank God, it had been like a jaw chewing out from inside him—and he felt clearer-headed, optimistic, certain that starvation had been like a sickness that had slowly passed off. It was another day before he realized he was traveling erratically, circling back over terrain he had passed before. He would wake suddenly in the mud, having lost consciousness without knowing it. He had to rest frequently; he gasped for breath. His heart raced after walking a hundred yards.
He was dying—slowly, at first. Quicker now.
All because he was hungry. All for lack of game, of meat, of food disguised as the flesh of other animals.
The corpse was dark: the color of smoked ham. It was hard to estimate how long he—it, the body—had been dead. Not too long. It smelled of rot but only faintly. The body was barely human anymore, though. His soul was long gone. He was nothing but a shell.
Shipwrecked men survived by eating the
bodies of sailors who perished before them, Bryant knew. It was the law of the sea. He’d even heard a story about it once. Something Lavinah Murphy had been saying around a fire back in the early days of their journey, a story about a German shipwreck and the unlucky survivors.
The sagebrush crackled as it burned. The smoke reminded him of Christmas, and Christmas reminded him of goose, and the crackle of sizzling fat, and going to sleep full and happy with the sound of his mother’s laughter in his ears. His eyes burned before he realized he was crying.
No one would know.
No one would blame him.
His hands went to the knife in his sheath.
Through the smoke, Bryant thought for a moment that perhaps the man was not a man at all, but an animal in decay. There was no sin in eating animals.
Why couldn’t he stop crying?
Not because he would do it, but because, at the last second, he couldn’t. He wept because it was no animal, it was a man, and he’d known deep down he would not be able to go through with it. He wept because that meant he would die—probably here, in the cave, to become another rotting corpse warming the air with putrescence.
It was then that he heard noises below the cave: the sound of horses’ hooves clipping stone and the murmuring of human voices, even though he couldn’t make out the words. He looked over the ledge to see four riders slipping through the sagebrush. They were Indians, probably Washoe, given the location, skinny as scarecrows under their old deerskins. Bryant tried to decide if they seemed dangerous. He could tell it was a hunting party, but what kind of luck had they had? Would they try to kill him for food? He pictured a village of emaciated women and children waiting for the hunters to return.