Power in the Blood

by Greg Matthews

  Clay thought he would be unable to rise, and once having accomplished this, believed he could not possibly start walking, and when he had gone a quarter mile or so, was shocked to find himself still upright. He stayed close to the escarpment, glad of its shade, and only occasionally fell over the rocks that time and weather had spawned and tumbled from the sheer cliff beside him. The water, when he found it, was seeping into a shallow pool no more than two feet across. Clay dropped to his knees and began drinking.

  He literally drank the pool dry over the course of an hour or so, and had to wait for it to refill itself. He saw the tiny rippling of liquid as it entered the natural cup from below, and restrained himself until it had acquired a depth sufficient for him to scoop up water in his hands again. He drank now to free the stone and flush it through into his bladder. Clay was determined not to leave the tiny soak until the stone had completed its journey. He crawled into deeper shade as the sun came around to strike him, and ventured out only to sip some more from what he called the girlpool. She had saved him, and he decided she must be his guardian angel, despite her unusual, distinctly unheavenly appearance.

  The stone began to shift again, scraping its way down through passages that now ran with water like spring freshets, and by early evening it had entered Clay’s overflowing bladder. The pain died away within minutes. Sometime between dusk and dawn it would begin its second tight squeeze, along his penis. Clay still had his bottle of mineral oil and eyedropper; he would no more have parted from it than he would from his canteen or sawed-off.

  When dusk came he stood and took his filled canteen from the girlpool, and began walking. Lubricated again, his body worked as it always had, supplying a steady loping gait that caused his head to bob up and down slightly as he proceeded across the desert floor beneath a three-quarter moon. His stone was held in abeyance, and his head was no longer troubled by humming or pounding. Clay’s mood was almost jaunty. He was alive, in good health, considering, and his mood was one of determination again, not the wan acceptance of, if not actual beckoning for death that had overcome him the night before. He was alive, and he would live for as long as the water in his canteen lasted, and a little bit longer besides. And even then, if the water should give out, he would find more, because he had a guardian angel. Clay was beginning to doubt the underpinnings of his atheism. If guardian angels were real, might not the regular kind also be flitting about in abundance, presumably invisible to human eyes, especially those of a doubter like himself? And if there were angels, did that oblige God to climb onto a throne somewhere? Would there be judgment after death, a siphoning of good souls heavenward, a deluge of sinners sent cascading down to hell? The whole thing troubled him; he did not know if he was a good man after all, or just a man less bad than the worst of them. If his life was truly a test, he should definitely begin setting it in order. If he walked out of the desert alive (which he would, with the assistance of his blue-faced friend), he must begin anew. There must be an end to manhunting, a seeking-out of less bloody work. He had no idea what form this new work would take, since killing or apprehending bad men was all he knew, but he would find something. His life had been spared for a reason, a purpose of some kind, and he would not ignore so explicit an imperative.

  When he first saw it, the ranch appeared deserted in the moonlight, another home abandoned in fear of Slade. The place was small, one adobe house with a stable and corral. No dogs barked, no lamps burned. The deep window wells were black with emptiness. Clay could hear a windmill somewhere, slowly creaking, but could not see it. The ranch was tucked away into a shallow draw, the windmill presumably somewhere more open to the air; he would find it tomorrow, and hope it was still pumping water into a cattle pond. His first need was for food.

  The door yielded to his touch, the latch rising with a faint squeal. He smelled cold stove ashes as he searched for a lamp and for food. He found neither, but continued blundering through the darkness of the house, opening shutters to allow moonlight inside. They had taken everything edible, those frightened people, but left their few articles of hand-hewn furniture, too heavy for their wagon, maybe, thought Clay. Although the place was poor, it was a shame to leave such stuff as they had owned behind them as they had. Fear made men act in haste, he concluded, and lay down on an actual bed for the first time in over a month. Its straw-tick mattress caused him to moan with pleasure as he sank into its rustling embrace, and sleep came rushing over him despite his hunger and his blistered heels. The last sound Clay was aware of, as he fell into the welcome darkness of oblivion, was the windmill cranking out its one fractured, rusting note time and again, a metronome for the damned.

  Daylight woke him. Clay felt much refreshed but ravenously hungry, and so began searching the house in earnest, now that he could see his way from room to room. The former occupants had left a lot more than his first inspection had revealed, in fact it seemed that they had done no more than take their food and run, and not very long ago either. There was little dust on the floor and other horizontal surfaces; clothing of the many-times-patched kind hung on pegs; there were three chickens in the yard. Why hadn’t they taken their chickens along? What had scared them so badly that they fled in a panic, leaving behind most of what they owned? Even fear of Slade could not account for it.

  Clay found some tortilla flour and set about building a fire in the stove. The kitchen utensils were hanging on the wall. He baked himself several tasteless rounds and crammed them into his stomach. There was a coffeepot, but no coffee. Now he was beginning to feel a vague disquiet, a sense that something was not right with the house. It held an air of menace not fully explained by the presumed circumstances of its abandonment. The feeling gnawed at him, unsettling the glaze of physical contentment granted by a good night’s rest and a full belly. Some enigmatic displacement of the ordinary was impinging on him, brushing his awareness with a feather’s touch, unsettling him for reasons beyond his understanding.

  He began looking again, hoping that a more thorough search would reveal to his eyes what the deepest part of his brain was attempting to assimilate, so that he might be warned. Panic, the thing he had self-righteously assigned to the owners of the house, began to prick at Clay. He was fretting over the inexplicable, worrying himself about what had or might have happened there. That something bad had left its imprint upon the walls and air within the house he no longer doubted. He asked his guardian angel to appear and explain everything to him, but she remained where angels tread. He was whimpering now, like a frightened dog, anxious yet fearful to know why it was he felt as he did.

  The stable, he told himself, and went there in full expectation of answers, but there were none; in fact his confusion was deepened by the discovery there of a wagon. Why had the owners fled on foot? The hidden windmill continued its ceaseless creaking. No animals, but their dung was fresh, no more than a day old. Clay was becoming frantic, shaming himself with the noises that came unbidden from his throat. He could not control his thoughts, which formed no particular notion or picture, but were flooded with an unspecified dread. What was there in the house, or around it, to make him feel that way?

  The windmill. It had been calling him since his arrival. He would attend to it now, having exhausted every place else. Clay went outside and followed its dismal creakings, found a pathway to higher ground and came through a thicket of scrub to stand before the source of the endless grinding and clanking. The windmill was large, a more expensive model than Clay had expected for such a lowly spread; the owners must have scrimped and saved to pay for the tall metal tower and the twelve-foot span of vanes. One of the owners was spread-eagled across those vanes, wrists and ankles bound by wire, the body’s nakedness so smeared with blood it was impossible to guess its gender. Turning and turning upon its gutted axis, the featureless body had emptied its intestines onto the small utility platform beneath. At the base of the tower was another adult, and a boy, both naked, opened and emptied. The boy’s skull was smashed open, the adult’s head
removed completely. Flies formed a small and noisome cloud about their gaping wounds and the truncated neck. Coming closer, Clay saw that the adult on the ground was male, the one turning in circles above him female. He knelt and vomited the tortillas that had required so much effort to make, and the one word his mind was capable of formulating could not even pass his lips: Slade.

  When he was able, Clay pulled the man and boy aside, then climbed the windmill tower to release the woman. Starting up the rungs, he wondered why it was that no buzzards circled overhead. Could they have been scared off by the slowly spinning vanes, or was there in the region about the house and windmill some smell of evil too brutal, too unfamiliar to allow creatures near. It was an unrealistic notion, he supposed, but there were indeed no buzzards. Reaching the platform, he found both her breasts there, neatly arranged side by side. He pulled the brake and brought the spinning vanes to a stop, then unbound the wires holding her, keeping his mouth closed and his eyes squinted against the humming cloud of flies, but they crawled up his nostrils anyway. She was a small woman, less than five feet, and the natural crease between her legs had been opened all the way to her breastbone. Clay began to cry. He could barely untwist the lengths of wire. When the woman was free, her body fell from the vanes into his arms, almost taking him over the platform edge.

  He had to sling her over his shoulder to descend, and when he reached the ground, his clothing was covered in gore. He tore shirt and pants from himself and ran toward the house, to be away from the sight of the slaughtered family and the sound of the flies. Naked, he rolled in dust to smother the stench of death adhering to his skin, then ran three times around the corral, howling. Clay fell to the ground by the front porch, panting, asking himself if he could go on and do what must be done. The deep gashes on the bodies contained no maggots yet, despite the flies; Slade could not be much more than a day’s ride or walk away. He could be caught at last, and by the one man fit to catch him. Clay would not stop to bury the bodies; there was no time. When Slade was dead, there would be time to return and put his last victims under the earth.

  The shirt and overalls hanging in the house were a poor fit, but Clay could not bear to put on his own clothing again. He gathered up all the tortilla flour in a sack, took several canteens up to the windmill, where he kept his eyes averted from the bodies, and filled them from the tank. Then he was ready to follow the trail of the monster.

  But there was no trail, no wagon tracks or hoofprints, no trickling droplets of blood in the dust to indicate the route Slade had taken. While he pondered, Clay felt the stone begin to descend his urethra, and fetched his bottle of oil and eye-dropper to facilitate its passage. Striding restlessly back and forth along the shaded porch, pausing to inject oil into himself, Clay felt his rage and determination begin to ebb. Vengeance was all very fine, but it could not be had if Slade had vanished as he was rumored to do after every atrocity. Clay required some indication, however small, to set him in the right direction, but despite a second examination of the ground, there was none to be found.

  He was administering a final dose of oil (the stone was nearly through) when he saw the girl again. Clay froze, immobilized by embarrassment. She was staring at him without any expression on her mournful face, at least twenty yards distant, along the draw to the west of the house. Clay wished she had shown up earlier or later, anytime but that moment. He felt himself blushing, but would not remove the eyedropper from his penis at the crucial last stage of relief. She would just have to see, and he would just have to be seen. He looked down at his hands, ashamed and annoyed. A guardian angel should not be so thoughtless as to manifest itself at such a time. When he looked up, he saw her pointing along the draw, and was about to ask her if that was where Slade had gone, when she abruptly vanished, simply faded from sight, her arm still outstretched.

  “All right, then!” Clay called after her, and the stone came oozing into his hand on a sluggish wave of oil. He took it for a good sign.

  The draw opened out a short distance from the ranch house, entering a broad red valley that meandered east and west. Clay saw no hoofprints still, not even a boot mark in the dust. Might his guardian angel girl have misdirected him out of impish spite? He still could not quite accept the presence of so unnatural a figure in his life, even if he had been glimpsing her for years. He decided to seek her advice outright, as a test of her good faith.

  “Which way?” he asked the air before his nose. The angel did not appear to inform him, so Clay asked the question again, and again was left without the direction he required. It was confirmation of his doubt concerning the girl. Might she not be some fairy or spirit that had sprung directly from his own head into actuality, the product of a mind slowly becoming crazed? Clay was no expert judge of sanity, but it did seem inevitable that a madman would in all likelihood consider himself completely sane, and accept his own version of the world as the correct one. Had that happened to him? It was a disturbing thought, and it did nothing to assist him in making a choice—east or west.

  He headed west for no discernible reason, sure that the valley to the east would have proven equally unrewarding: no tracks, no sign at all that Slade had ever passed by. Was Slade also some unnatural being, truly a demon, as some of the newspapers would have it? That might explain the absence of a trail to follow, and the fiend’s ability to evade capture even when so many were after him for Leo Brannan’s reward and the gratitude of a nation. The killer had wings, maybe, that carried him from place to place, enabling him to descend like a hawk from the skies onto the very backs of his victims. Clay had seen pictures of winged demons from hell, and he had no wish to tangle with one, not even armed with his sawed-off. He wondered, as he admitted his fear, if he was becoming a coward as well as a madman, and was not encouraged by this new train of thought.

  The valley became redder as afternoon turned to evening. Clay drank sparingly from his canteens, and wished he had more than tortilla flour to eat. He placed dabs of it onto his tongue and mixed it with saliva to form a kind of paste he called spit dough, and it eased his hunger pangs without convincing him he had eaten. The angel did not appear, and Clay became fairly sure he had been imagining her all this time, which was reassuring in the sense that he could not be altogether mad if he acknowledged a symptom of his madness, but was distressing in that it indicated he had followed the direction along the draw that had been given to him by an entity that was not there, which in turn suggested he was following nothing to nowhere. None of the conflicting awarenesses within him gave Clay the strength he needed, not only to find and capture Slade, but to survive in the place where he now found himself. He had water enough for two days, if he rationed the quenching of his thirst. In that time he hoped to discover if he was indeed mad. He wished, before dying, to be cognizant of his own state of mind. To die while in a state of delusion would be a terrible thing, and a man’s entire life and accomplishments would be thrown into a new and unfavorable light in consequence of such a revelation. Clay desperately wanted his life to have been worthwhile. He had killed a sufficient number of awful individuals, and needed to be sure that his actions, although rewarded with human coin, had pleased some higher authority, whose definition came hard to an atheist. It had all been for something, the advancement of moral good in the world, had it not? He couldn’t say, and his footsteps slowed as the hopelessness of ever understanding the least thing about himself and his place in the vast scheme of things drove itself like a nail into his skull.

  Slade was nowhere near. The one thing Clay could finally be sure of was that. He had bungled his chance for immortality, walked away from fame because a blue-faced girl in his head had misdirected him, probably as a means of alerting him to his own seriously impaired brain. There was no guardian angel and there was no Slade; these things had nothing whatsoever to do with Clay Dugan, no matter how hard he might try to link himself with them. He was a fool in the wilderness, and sometime soon he would be a dead fool, buzzard food, the meanest end a man coul
d imagine for himself. It was too bad. Clay genuinely felt his existence should have counted for more than that. Of course, his wishes might be nothing more than the yearnings of a little man, a frightened man, one who finally had seen himself in the mirror of ultimate truth and was unable to accept the pitiful figure shivering there.

  Clay sat abruptly in the reddish dust of the valley floor. What was the point of going on, when he hadn’t the least indication that he was accomplishing anything worthwhile, not just wandering without purpose toward an untimely and insignificant end? He wanted to cry. He had cried already that day, when confronted with the wanton ugliness of Slade’s latest marauding. It was not right that he could not find the tears now for himself. Did he deserve less than the nameless family left slaughtered behind him? He would not budge from that spot until answers were given to him, or arrived at via the workings of his own mind. Clay wanted to know what it was that had brought him to this unique time and place, his ass inside a dead man’s pants, set down in the dust of a nameless valley filled with orange light from a setting sun. He had a right to some answers. The fact that he was there, defeated and in full knowledge of his defeat, gave him the right to answers.

  In the absence of these, he decided to sleep. The air was still warm, and would remain so for at least another half hour. He lay down and managed to close his eyes for several minutes, but could not rest. Sitting up, he saw a momentary flash several miles away. It lasted less than a second, possibly the result of the lowering sun reflecting off metal or glass. Clay knew it was Slade. It might also have been a chunk of quartz, or an abandoned bottle. But he knew it was not. It was Slade.

  Something like a terrible hunger began filling Clay. He felt it rising from the pit of his stomach, an unstoppable need, devouring him. The only thing that could ever cause the feeling to ease would be the sight of Slade lying dead at his feet, and Clay knew also that it would happen. He had been guided there and made to sit in exactly that place, and made to open his eyes at the precise moment the telltale flash was sent to him. All his doubts had been for nothing. Slade was being delivered into his hands in order that the earth might rest easy again. Clay felt himself the agent of those same higher forces he so recently had pondered over. Now he would do what it was they required of him. Charged with purpose, his blistered feet forgotten, Clay began to walk hard and fast toward the darkening land ahead.