by Robert Davis
He suspected that it was the rifleman, Penn. The greater accuracy of his rifle over long range made him the ideal choice to guard the town’s perimeter and to pick off anybody that tried to escape his brethren. Shane hoped that it was Penn anyway. Having only been a Cordite for about a day, Penn was probably still the weakest and therefore the easiest to kill. If it was somebody like Priestley then Shane was in big trouble.
He looked at all the places where he thought the Cordite might be hiding. He figured that Penn would favour a long shot and that he would probably be on a rooftop, balcony or upper storey window somewhere with a clean line-of-sight. Shane failed to spot him but, refusing to give up, he left the building that he was in and moved across the street to another one and continued his search from his new vantage point.
Madison was two-thirds of the way to the edge of town now and Shane focussed his search by drawing imaginary lines from her position out towards suitable shooting points. His rigorous approach paid off. A few streets away, he spotted a shadowy figure creeping across a rooftop at the edge of town. The shadow carried a rifle.
Got you! Shane thought to himself.
He stole quietly from the house and circled around to approach the Cordite’s position from behind. Gunfire crackled from other parts of town and he reasoned that there must still be a few invigilators left alive.
He moved hurriedly but with caution. He did not think that the Cordite would shoot Chastity; only Madison, and she was not so important to Shane that he was overly concerned by the prospect of her dying. He crept up to the house and entered through a downstairs window. It was dark inside but enough grey light penetrated the windows that he was able to find his way to a staircase and climb to the upper storey.
He found himself in a room with a sloping ceiling, whose rafters were bent and crooked and slowly succumbing to rot. The roof had come down on one corner and the floor was littered with debris: warped planks and broken beams, rotted furniture and some empty bottles. The floorboards were dry and they creaked loudly under Shane’s weight.
The noise carried and Shane immediately threw himself to one side, hearing movement above. A shot rang out and a hole was blasted through the roof. The bullet punched down, passing through the empty space where Shane had been standing and put a hole in the floorboards.
The roof flexed, shedding a cascade of dust as the Cordite stalked across it, ejecting a spent cartridge from its rifle and inserting a fresh one into the breach. Shane threw himself into a dive as a second shot punched down. It passed so close to him that he felt its heat in the air.
He landed with a roll and snatched up an old, discarded book that lay amongst the debris on the floor. He tossed it a few steps ahead of himself, in a direction that he might logically have travelled coming out of his roll. The book landed with a heavy thump and a third shot came down through the roof a split second later and ripped the book in half.
Shane stayed motionless where he was, not making a sound. He listened to the Cordite as it paced across the roof above him, the wooden rafters creaking and bending under its weight. It did not believe that he was dead. Its senses were not as finely attuned to the town as its brethren and it could not sense exactly where he was, only that his heart was still beating.
Crouching, Shane reached out for a broken chair leg that lay nearby. His movements caused the floorboards to creak softly and the Cordite stopped moving and turned to listen. Shane froze. He dared not even breathe in case he moved whilst doing so and allowed it to locate his whereabouts.
His muscles burned from the strain of staying in one position for so long. Above him, the rafters creaked, raining dust into the room. The demon was moving again. It had gotten tired of playing cat-and-mouse and was heading towards the place where the roof had fallen so it could climb down and confront him.
Shane moved like a mountain lion. Leaping forwards, he struck the chair leg into the rafters at a place where they looked to be particularly rotten. The wood split where he struck it and there was a crash as the ceiling caved-in. Shane rolled out of the way as it came down around him. The Cordite fell and landed heavily nearby, dropping its rifle. Shane was on it in an instant. His knife flashed in the dim light and plunged down into the demon’s chest.
Shane felt the blade turn as it struck bone and he wrenched it out and stabbed again. The Cordite tried to dislodge him but he batted its defences aside. He had no way of knowing if it would die like a normal man. Its wounds did not seem to bleed and so he kept on stabbing it, burying the blade up to the hilt in its chest, belly and neck. He attacked it with focussed aggression and did not stop hitting it until it stopped moving.
Shane guessed that he must have hit it more than forty times. His attack had left its torso badly mauled. He eyed it suspiciously but there was no sign that it would get back up again. As he had suspected, those who lived by the gun could apparently still die by the blade.
Chapter 25
Shane retrieved his knife and limped over to the window. He moved stiffly, wincing at the pain from his bruised ribs. The Cordite had landed a couple of good punches while he had fought with it and the adrenaline was wearing off, allowing the pain to come creeping in.
He looked out and saw that Madison and Chastity had reached the edge of town and were starting out into the desert. It was time he fetched the horses and joined them.
The sound of killing still rumbled across town as Shane made his way stealthily back along West Street towards the crossroads. Despite the fact that it was the middle of the night the air was unpleasantly warm. It seemed to clutch at Shane like an unfamiliar hand and left his skin damp with sweat.
The ground was thick with a knee-high layer of gunsmoke that glowed blood red where it surrounded the burning torches. The smoke parted as Shane waded through it, revealing the bodies of dead invigilators. Their guns lay beside them and Shane sensed them calling out to him, inviting him to take them into his hands. It was hard for him to resist them, and he squeezed his hands tight into fists and held them rigidly by his sides, determined not to give in to their siren-like calling.
There was no point in denying that his heart yearned for him to stay. The Cordites offered him more than the world outside of Covenant could ever give him. He would never find anybody else with whom he belonged so rightly. No mortal love could ever hope to eclipse what he felt for them and by denying them he knew that he was consigning himself to a life as a hollow man, deprived of joy and purpose.
But it was the price they demanded of him that settled his decision, as ever. To go the rest of his life alone, denying his heart’s desire, but to be free to make his own decisions and live a life of his own choosing was infinitely better than to become a slave.
It might only be a temporary salvation. He was devil kind. His soul belonged to the Cordites and they would claim it on the day he died, if he could resist them for that long. But for now, even a temporary reprieve was better than the alternative.
He found the stables and made his way in through the back door. The smell of blood from the dead stallion, coupled with the Cordites’ hellish rampage in the streets outside had gotten the horses even more anxious than they had been earlier, and several of them reared and screamed when they saw him. His own horse and Madison’s were calmer but would not stay that way for long with the panic the others were creating.
Shane opened up the main doors and carefully released the horses one by one, freeing them to bolt out into the streets. The stables felt eerily quiet after they had gone. Shane stroked his horse until she calmed down a little, then released her and did the same with Madison’s horse. He found Madison’s carpet bag and tied it onto his saddle.
Gunfire pounded from somewhere not very far away and Madison’s horse stamped its feet nervously, its eyes rolling. Shane tied its reins to the pommel of his saddle and led both horses into the night. He felt something dig into his thigh as he mounted up and checked in his pockets and discovered the two keys that Madison had given him earlier. They
were the ones that she had taken from Nathaniel. One was the key to the room in which Nathaniel’s money was stored.
Up until now, the money had not been important to him, but he was not far from the Grande and holding the key got him thinking. The last six years had taught him how difficult it was for a man to live without a gun. People didn’t look too favourably on pacifists in a land where any display of weakness invited trouble, and Shane could scarcely remember a town where his unwillingness to start a fight hadn’t landed him in trouble. With twenty-thousand dollars he could buy himself a place in society, set himself up with some property and a new identity. He could find Chastity a family who would raise and take care of her.
The more he thought about it, the more he became convinced that he needed the money just as badly as he needed the food and water in Madison’s bag. It would certainly make his future a hell of a lot easier to bear.
He tethered his horse to a hitching post and went back into the stables to grab a pair of saddlebags off a peg on the wall. He realised that he was probably making the very last mistake of his life, but he turned around and led the horses across the street towards the Grande.
The clock tower of the town hall reared against the skyline, its pale, round face gleaming like an enormous baleful eye. Beneath it, the crossroads were knee-deep in smoke that writhed and boiled with currents of its own formation. The familiar, dark buildings were ominously still and silent.
The fighting had all spilled out onto the edge of town and Shane crossed the street unmolested and went around the back of the Grande. He tethered the horses to a tree in the yard and entered the crooked building through the kitchen door, the two saddlebags slung across his shoulder.
The hotel had already acquired a dead feel to its musty halls, the memories of its occupation turned to ghosts now that the Cordites had reasserted their dominance. Shane followed the directions that Madison had given him and found the locked door. He tried the keys in the lock until he found the right one and the door swung open upon a small, dark room.
The two panniers lay on the centre of the floor. They were locked with stout padlocks but Shane broke one open by prising the blade of his knife under the hinges and applying leverage, tearing the screws from the wood. The box was filled with money, which he hurriedly began to transfer into his saddlebags.
He had emptied one box and was working on getting the other to open when he became aware that a lengthy silence had fallen across town. He paused in his work and cocked his head to listen.
The shooting had stopped.
Shane felt a cold chill of fear gush through him. The silence could only mean one thing: that the last of the invigilators had been killed and that Whisperer was either dead or had escaped. Shane was the only man left alive in Covenant and now the Cordites would be coming for him.
He abandoned the second box. His saddle bags were swollen with roughly ten-thousand dollars and that was enough. He slung them over his shoulder and started for the door only to find that his way was blocked.
A tall, dark figure stood in the doorway, wreathed in pale grey smoke. ‘Reduced to the level of a common thief,’ it said. ‘This is beneath you, Shane.’
Shane stood his ground against the demon that had once been Jacob Priestley. His hand fingered the hilt of his knife wonderingly but, the moment he tensed to step forward, Priestley drew his gun.
The weapon was aimed and ready to fire before Shane had a chance to move, but Priestley did not shoot. He grinned, exposing teeth that were long and sharp and stained like a dog’s. ‘We knew that you would come to us in time,’ he said.
‘I’m not here to join you.’ Shane replied.
The demon chuckled. It was a vile sound, like a man choking up blood. ‘You are one of us, Shane. Why seek to deny it?’
‘Because it’s not what I want!’
‘Your mouth says no, but your heart pleads yes.’
Priestley turned the gun around in his hand so that it was no longer pointed at Shane, but was instead presented to him as a gift.
Shane yearned to take it. He craved it with an emotion that was rooted deep inside his soul. He had to fight to resist it.
‘You will join us.’ Priestley said. ‘Even if you leave here today, you will one day come back to us. You cannot escape; this is where you belong.’
Shane clenched his fists to stop himself from taking the gun. It felt as if his mind had split in half and that his will was pouring out through the resulting chasm. He thought about the last six years of his life: the weakness, the constant burden of fear, the fights that he had been forced to run from because he had not possessed the power to defend himself. And against that he considered the years that had gone before it, the years in which he had been a legend, the years in which the name of Shane Ennis had been synonymous with Death.
There was no contest when he asked himself which of those times he would choose to live in if given the choice but, when he looked to his future, he saw that there was a third option. He had ten-thousand dollars and the rest of the world thought he was dead. He had an opportunity to start afresh.
He brought his eyes up level with Priestley’s and looked at him straight. The two of them stared into each other’s souls.
And Shane stabbed him.
Priestley bellowed with a sound like mortar fire as the blade sank into his arm. His hand spasmed and he dropped his gun and Shane barged into him, driving him up against the doorframe before punching him in the face.
Shane did not waste his time prolonging the fight but charged on by, pushing his way briskly into the hall. He turned towards the kitchen but another Cordite stood at the end of the hall. It reached for a gun and Shane pushed sideways through an unlocked door. Bullets chewed up the doorframe in his wake, flinging jagged splinters of wood across the room.
He heard footsteps in the hallway. The Cordites were closing in for the kill and he rushed to a boarded-up window and kicked through the boards. He cleared himself enough space to climb through and tossed the saddlebags out before scrambling after them. The Cordite entered the room behind him and fired a blaze of shots, but by then Shane was safely through the window.
He ducked his head and rapidly skirted the outside of the hotel. Figures rose up out of the gunsmoke on the crossroads and began to advance on him. He ducked around the side of the building as a shot was fired.
The horses were where he had left them. Shane thanked his good fortune that the Cordites had not killed them. He unwound his reins from the crooked tree and vaulted into the saddle.
At that moment, the kitchen door swung open and a Cordite stepped out into the yard. Shane was caught in its sights, helpless to do anything but stare at it.
It was not too late to change his mind, he thought. He could still join them.
He wavered in his indecision for a fraction of a second before the fear that he might actually submit galvanised him into action. He savagely yanked on the reins, sawed his horse’s head around, and laid his heels into her flanks.
The Cordite took aim as he galloped away but a gnarled hand closed upon his wrist. The Cordite turned and stared questioningly into the face of Jacob Priestley.
‘No.’ Priestley said, his eyes fixed on their fleeing brother. ‘He is not leaving us. He is only delaying the inevitable.’
The other Cordites gathered in the street to watch as Shane escaped. One by one, they faded away into the smoke until only Priestley remained. He shimmered, becoming insubstantial as a ghost.
‘We can be patient,’ he whispered. And Covenant breathed a sigh as if in anticipation.
The noise trembled through the ruinous buildings, a soft whisper of creaking wood and disturbed dust that spread outwards from the centre of town and chased at Shane’s heels as he galloped for safety.
He rode like a madman, kicking back his heels and hunching down in the saddle. His frightened horse was only too glad to be fleeing the town and galloped with all the speed she had, her hooves kicking up a thick cloud of
dust in their wake.
Shane did not expect to make it. He felt certain that they would shoot his horse out from under him, but the Cordites did nothing and he rode out into the desert without any sign of pursuit behind him. Even then he did not believe that he was safe. He rode hard and did not curb his horse until the town was far behind him, a dark and brooding thing on the horizon.
He caught up with Madison in the early hours of the dawn. ‘You made it,’ she said happily.
Shane tossed her carpet bag to her, then threw her one of the saddlebags. She caught it and her eyes widened when she looked inside and saw the money.
‘Your cut,’ he said. ‘Like we agreed.’
She ran over and threw her arms around him. Her lips were on his before he had chance to realise what she was doing. She kissed him and he drew her close, feeling her firm young body pressed against his. She was a poor substitute for what he had turned his back on in Covenant but she would suffice, he thought grimly.
He disengaged himself from her and lifted Chastity into his arms. The girl rested her head sleepily against his shoulder and sobbed quietly. There were tears on her cheeks.
‘I don’t think she wants to go.’ Madison said. ‘Will they come after her?’
Shane honestly did not know. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘One day.’
‘What about you?’
Shane did not answer. He could still hear Priestley’s words in his ear: ‘You are one of us.’ That was why they had let him escape; he knew it. They were sure that they would have him in the end.
But Shane had bought himself some more time, and maybe that was all he needed. Given another thirty or forty more years, maybe he could find a way to break the chains that bound him to them. He could not undo the crimes of his past, but perhaps half a lifetime spent well could even the score a little, and maybe in the end he would cheat the Cordites of their due. Maybe.
He climbed into the saddle and seated Chastity in front of him. ‘What’s your surname?’ he asked Madison.