This Scorched Earth

by William Gear

  She eared the hammer back, snapped another shot as Nichols fled through her dining room. He hurled a chair to the side to clear his way. Then he was gone, boots hammering through her kitchen and on out the back.

  She stood in sudden silence, blue smoke rising, the smell of sulfur and blood in the room.

  The whimpering cry from the dining room came again. She glanced down at Parmelee, bleeding on her floor. The man’s eyes were open, as vacant as glass marbles. His beard now matted with blood. It frothed in his mouth and bubbled in his nostrils.

  The whimpering came again.

  She cocked her revolver, took a step, and almost toppled. Her left leg didn’t seem to work. She locked her knee, hobbled to the wide arch that separated the parlor and dining room.

  Leaning against it, she glanced down. Saw the man who huddled into a ball. He wore a fringed buckskin jacket. The wool pants were travel-stained and tucked into high cavalry boots. Dirty blond locks straggled out over his shoulders, his head hidden by a weathered felt hat.

  “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “Don’t hurt me, Sarah,” he whispered. “I don’t want to kill you no more. Don’t…” He sucked in a terrified breath. “Don’t fucking touch me!”

  She blinked, aware of the growing ache and weakness in her left leg. “Billy?”

  She let herself sag. Crouched beside him. “Billy?”

  “No!” he cried. “Tell Maw to leave me alone! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”

  She reached for him, only to feel a shock run through him as she grasped his arm.

  He looked up, terrified. In that instant, he screamed, “You demon bitch!”

  He knocked her backward, his hands going for her throat. She fought, clawed, as he bowled her onto her back. “Billy, for God’s sake, it’s me! Sarah!”

  He was leaning over her, hair hanging down, tears streaking from his eyes to patter on her face. A wild insanity twisted his expression, teeth bared. His eyes were possessed of a weird blue light.

  She felt her throat crushing under his grip.

  Driven by an animal terror, she pulled her hand back and drove the revolver hard into the side of his head. The force of the blow knocked the hat off his head.

  As he collapsed sideways, she managed to scramble out from under him. Scuttled away. Her left leg like numb meat.

  Across from him, she lifted herself up onto one of the chairs and, over the cocked pistol, watched him pant as he lay there.

  “Sarah?” he whispered hoarsely.

  “What in the name of hell are you doing, Billy?” she rasped. It hurt when she coughed, and she fingered her throat. Why did men always go for her throat?

  He looked up, half dazed, raised a hand to the side of his head. “You’re … alive?”

  “Not by much,” she told him wearily. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “You’re … not a demon?”

  “Do I look like a goddamned demon?” She shook her head, glancing back at Parmelee, now apparently dead on her floor. “What the hell are you doing with Parmelee and George Nichols? How did you get here? Just tell me what’s going on!”

  “You’re … the Goddess?” he rasped. “Thought you were dead. Haunting me. The nightmares … the endless goddamned nightmares…” He started to cry again. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  She swallowed painfully. “I’d never haunt you.” She paused. “Billy, I’m the one that’s sorry. Back at the trapper’s cabin, I was lost. More than a little crazy. A thousand times I’ve wished I could have gone back, told you it was all right.”

  “My fault,” he told her through streaming tears. “All my fault.”

  “Wasn’t anybody’s fault. Just the damn war. The madness. Men turned to animals. That’s all.”

  “I got ’em all,” he whispered. “Dewley’s bunch. Ran every last one of ’em down and killed him. But you still kept coming to haunt my dreams. All naked and raped. Reaching out for … for…”

  “Jesus!” She sucked a breath, suddenly starved for air. “Damn it, listen to me! I’m alive because you saved me. Now, get up. I’m shot! Parmelee’s dead on the floor. I think I shot Nichols, but he’s running. Philip and Butler are due here any minute. Philip’s a doctor. Here in Denver.”

  She pulled her skirt up, blood was leaking out of a hole about four inches below the point of her hip. It should have hurt worse than it did.

  Billy’s expression seemed to clear, and he wiped the tears from his face. “George? How did you know he’s broke?”

  She thinned her lips, balanced the revolver in her hand. If Billy went crazy and started to strangle her again? Could she shoot him?

  Hell yes!

  “I broke him. I’m tired of men raping me. Abusing me. Parmelee, George, it don’t matter, little brother.”

  “George … raped you,” Billy said absently, as if his mind were a thousand miles away.

  “Tried to.” She indicated the revolver. “Reckon when it comes to men, I’m getting right practiced at beating ’em off.”

  Odd how the mere presence of her brother made her language slip back to the Arkansas hills.

  “He can’t let this go,” Billy said, picking up the big Remington that lay on the floor beside him. He climbed wearily to his feet. “Is there some reason why I’m always proved to be the fool?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get George,” he told her.

  “Billy, wait. Philip and Butler are coming. We need to talk. There are so many questions.”

  He gave her an eerie, half-possessed stare as he paused at the kitchen door. “It’s my responsibility, Sis. Has been since Paw left. I gotta finish it.”

  Then he was gone.

  “Billy!” She rose to start after him, only to have her leg give out. Grabbing at the table, she barely kept from falling. For a moment the room spun. When it cleared she heard the back door slam.

  For the time being, all she could do was prop herself up, cling to her revolver, and pant.

  124

  June 29, 1868

  God—or the Devil—has played me for a fool!

  A bitterness like he’d never known leached his insides like lye on raw meat.

  Billy trotted Locomotive to the livery where George liked to stable his mount. The blood-bay mare was there; and tossing the hostler two bits, Billy ensured that Locomotive would be fed and watered and ready to go.

  Stepping out onto Wazee Street, he took stock as the sun began to fade behind the distant Rockies. God might have played him like a fool, but no one was a better hunter.

  There had been no blood on George’s saddle, which meant Sarah had either missed him, or barely nicked him.

  Sarah!

  Alive.

  Not a demon.

  “Well, God, or whoever you are, you son of a bitch, you ain’t playing me no more.”

  All those years he’d been trying to kill something that wasn’t dead. Bitterness churned as self-loathing took over.

  “Time to square the accounts,” he told himself.

  Where would George go? Not to one of Big Ed’s establishments. No, it would be one of the other taverns.

  Why a tavern?

  Billy licked his lips as he started for Blake Street. George would want to lick his wounds, salve his defeat with a couple of drinks. It wouldn’t be a cheap hole, but somewhere with style. He’d want to figure his next move. On top of being broke over the Piute Lode deal, he’d be smarting. Sarah had beaten him again after whatever setback she’d handed Nichols earlier. Was that why he’d been fingering that new scar? He’d tried to rape Sarah, and she’d beaten him off with a pistol?

  He grinned. A man had to love a sister with that kind of grit.

  But George? He’d be seething.

  Billy started with the Tremont House, then the Broadwell House, followed by the American. One by one he went through Denver’s finer establishments.

  “Did you hear?” one worthy asked at the International. “George Nichols and a
friend went after Sarah Anderson at her house. One man’s dead, and she’s shot!”

  Billy stopped at the edge of earshot, listening.

  “Word is that Marshal Cook’s looking for Nichols,” the worthy’s friend replied. “Bet he don’t try an’ force no woman with a pistol in her hand. Heard she’s got bruises on her throat.” The second man shook his head, spitting on the floor.

  On her throat? I did that.

  Billy ground his teeth, feeling sick to his stomach. Damnation and hell! One minute he was on the verge of rage—the next his eyes were burning with tears. He staggered out into the night, leaning against the saloon wall, one hand to his heart.

  When he remembered Sarah, it was as a girl. How she smiled, the way she teased. The time she’d set him up, tripped him so he fell headlong into the river.

  Damn and hell, they’d been great friends as kids: her chiding, his practical jokes. The time he’d put pine pitch in her comb. Sarah’s shrieks as Maw had washed her hair with turpentine. How Sarah had finally gotten him back, dropping a mouse in his pants pocket, the one with a hole in it. How he’d gone berserk with the little beast scampering around his cock and balls and then down his leg.

  When did we lose that?

  The pain built.

  In the end, the sense of desolation was too much to bear; he threw his head back and laughed, and laughed. Soul screaming at the trick fate had played on him.

  It took a couple of hours, but he found George. He was drinking upstairs at the Criterion—the infamous tavern and gaming hall started by dangerous Charlie Harrison and now run by Ed Jumps. The upstairs was separated from the riffraff, reserved for the more respectable clientele.

  “Hello, George,” Billy said, walking up behind his friend.

  George whirled, hand reaching for the pocket where he used to keep his single-shot Sharps. Then his slow smile spread. “Billy, where the hell you been? What happened to you? One minute you’re behind me, the next you’ve vanished! Goddamn it! You were supposed to back me up!”

  “How much is Sarah Anderson’s life worth to you? Assuming I kill her tonight?”

  “Five thousand.”

  “Oh, I forgot. You’re broke. Sarah took you on the Piute Mine deal. Maybe I better do it for free?” Billy smiled, gesturing for the bartender down the way. “Best you’ve got,” he called. “George is buying!”

  “Like hell,” George whispered, his eyes like black pits. “You crawled on me back there!”

  “Odd turn of events,” Billy told him as he took the amber liquor and drank it down. “That is good stuff. What’s it cost?” He gestured the bartender for another.

  “Four dollars a glass,” the bartender told him, filling it and retreating.

  “And it’s such a small glass,” Billy noted as he tossed off the second.

  George was red-faced, the corners of his lips trembling. “You and Parmelee. Start at the beginning where you killed my men.”

  Billy shrugged. “Not much to tell. I’d been running into Parmelee up and down Montana. Couldn’t remember where I’d heard of him. So, outside of Virginia City, a bunch of stranglers had him. Rope around his neck and all. Devil just gigged me, so I saved him.”

  Billy gestured for another whiskey.

  “See, George, this is all like one of them puppet shows. You know, the ones that dangle odd-looking little fellas on strings? I haven’t decided if it’s God or the Devil that’s been playing us.”

  “Do you know how goddamned crazy you sound?”

  “Reckon you ain’t up on the half of it.” Billy lifted the whiskey glass. “All them whores I been strangling and burning? It’s ’cause my sister’s ghost kept coming in my nightmares. What she’d do to me? If I told you, it would make your skin crawl. Let’s just say I’d wake screaming. And sometimes it was Maw rising out of the grave all full of hate.”

  “You are one insane son of a bitch!”

  Billy raised his voice. “Just your hired killer.” Felt the devil break loose in his chest. “The Meadowlark! At your service.”

  The bar had gone quiet. The bartender, a couple of paces down, stopped short, gaping, eyes wide.

  George had stiffened like an oaken rod. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Want me to deal with Sarah Anderson? Kill her for running you out of her house? You were going to rape her before cutting her throat, weren’t you, George?”

  Billy gestured grandly with his glass. “I mean, you can’t let her get the best of you. So now, after all them men you hired me to kill, you’ll pay me five thousand dollars to shoot Sarah Anderson in the face. Not because you want to get your fingers on a mine, like them other times, but because she drove you out of her house when you went to rape her.”

  “Shut your lying mouth!” George started to walk away.

  “You take another step, George, and I’ll shoot you down.”

  George stopped, his breath coming in fast gasps. “Billy, you’re drunk. Talking crazy. You been in the opium again?”

  “That odd turn of events I was talking about? Sarah Anderson is my sister, you pile of walking shit. She was Sarah Hancock before the war. Me, I let her down once. She and Maw both. I let her down again today. But it stops here. Turn around, you belly-crawling worm.”

  George turned, the only sound in the room coming from the raucous celebrants in the room below. George’s face was a conflicting mix of anger, disbelief, and soul-blanching fear.

  Billy said, “Time to give the Devil his due,” and shot George Nichols through the heart.

  George was gasping, his legs pumping weakly in the sawdust. Billy stopped long enough to pull a meadowlark feather from his pocket and stuck it in the bullet hole. Then he glared around the stunned room and started down the stairs.

  He was most of the way to the door before a man came pounding down after him, pointing, and crying, “He just kilt George Nichols! Grab him!”

  Billy pulled his pistol, waving it around, shouting, “Get your drunk carcasses away from me!”

  When one burly bullwhacker grabbed at him, Billy calmly shot the man in the face. Then he was out into the night, charging up Blake Street, feet pounding on the rutted thoroughfare.

  They came pouring out of the Criterion in his wake. Several pistols banged in the darkness. Billy flinched as a ball buried itself in his shoulder. Then came a staccato of gunfire like a string of Chinese firecrackers.

  The louder bark of a rifle accompanied a numbing impact in his hip. Something else slapped low into his back.

  Turning, he thumbed the hammer back on the Remington; his return fire scattered them into the darkness. A deep ache burned through his right hip, that leg going weak.

  Blinking, he stiff-legged into the sanctuary of an alley, found a board for a crutch, and hobbled forward. The pain was atrocious. Warm blood drained down the inside of his thigh. He stopped only long enough to throw up, then staggered on.

  He had just stepped out on Fifteenth Street. In one sense, he only had made it for a couple of blocks. On the other, he was as far from salvation as he’d ever been.

  That’s when a voice called, “There he is, men. I want him surrounded and unable to flee.”

  125

  June 30, 1868

  Doc poured coal oil into one of the lamps, then screwed the lid back onto the tin. After setting the tin back in its place, he threaded the hot lamp back together, lit the wick, and replaced the chimney. With three lamps burning, the surgery was as well illuminated as it could be for this time of night.

  He crossed to where Sarah lay on the cot. He’d just used his thermometer, finding her temperature a little high at 98.8. She usually ran about 98.5.

  “How’s the leg?” he asked.

  “A slight ache,” she told him, looking up at him with dreamy eyes. “Removing the bullet hurt worse than being shot.”

  “It wasn’t the bullet that worried me. It was the fabric it carried in with it. One of these days we’re going to understand why foreign obje
cts cause wounds to infect. But cleaning out a wound and irrigating it with boiled water seems to help.”

  “I like morphine,” she told him. “It’s like floating in warm water.”

  “Don’t like it too much. You’ll end up like so many of the girls down on the line. If it’s such an easy way out, why do they always end up dead?”

  She shook her head. “I’m past that trap, Doc. What am I? Twenty-three? I feel like an old lady.” She paused. “Butler’s a kind man, isn’t he?”

  “Him and all of his soldiers.” Doc reached for his coffee.

  “He’s so … odd. Talking to the air, but he seems to think like a normal person. Outside of losing the thread of the conversation on occasion.” She shook her head. “I keep thinking he’s fooling with me, playing games.”

  “It gets worse when he’s worried, like at your house tonight. Sometimes, when everything is going well, you can almost forget that he’s a lunatic.”

  She frowned. “Do you really think that letting him go back to the Indians is a good idea?”

  Doc sipped his coffee. “He seems happy, Sis. He lights up when he talks about this wife and family of his. But as to letting him go back? I think now that Billy’s here, maybe it ought to be a family decision.”

  “Perhaps.” A flicker of dreamy smile crossed her lips, and she asked, “Do you believe what he says about Paw?”

  “I’m not the one to ask. I always saw through Paw’s clapjaw and bluff. Maybe because I was the oldest.”

  She stared distantly at one of the lamps. “I fell for it. He was going to take me to Little Rock, find me a husband who would make me a lady. I’d be a happy brood mare, dressed in finery. The perfect accoutrement to augment a prominent gentleman’s social position. Envy of Arkansas high society.”

  “And?”

  Her lips twitched. “I suspect Paw would have pawned me off to whomever offered him the greatest gain. If I could go back I’d slap that little bitch silly, stand her on her own two feet, and start her practicing with a revolver at the age of eight.”

  “That sounds hard.”