The Ones That Got Away

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Towards the end of the week, even, the horses would come back, from downwind. They’d be skittish like the mare had been—skittish that he was dead like the others had been, just not lying down yet—but then he’d have oats in a sack, and, even if they had been smart enough to run away, they were still just horses.

  Or, he hoped—this time—a mule.

  Something with personality.

  They tended to taste better anyway.

  He came to again some time before dawn. He could tell by the quality of light sifting in through the bars of his window. There were no birds singing, though. And the smell. He was used to the smell by now.

  Miles east of town, he knew, a tree was coated with buzzards.

  Soon they would rise into an oily black mass, ride the heat into town, drift down onto the bodies that would be in the street by now.

  Like with the deputy Lonegan had found, the buzzards would know better than to eat. Even to them, this kind of dead tasted wrong.

  With luck, maybe one of the horses would have run its lungs bloody for them, collapsed in a heap of meat.

  With luck, it’d be that mare.

  They’d start on her haunch, of course, finish what Lonegan had started.

  He nodded, pulled a sharp hank of air up his nose, and realized what had woke him: the oak door. It was moving, creaking.

  In the next cell, Annie was already at the bars of her cell, holding her breath.

  “They can’t get in,” Lonegan told her, pulling at his bars to show.

  She didn’t look away from the door.

  “What were you dreaming about there?” she said, her voice flat and low.

  Lonegan narrowed his eyes at her.

  Dream?

  He looked at his hands as if they might have been involved, then touched his face.

  It was wet.

  He shook his head no, stood, and the oak door swung open.

  Standing in the space it had been was the Sheriff.

  He’d seen better days.

  Annie fell back to her cot, pulled the green blanket up to her mouth.

  Lonegan didn’t move, just inspected. It wasn’t often he got to see one of the shufflers when they were still shuffling. This one, he surmised, he’d fallen down in some open place. While he was turning, too, another had fed on him, it looked like. His face on the right side was down to the bone, one of his arms gone, just a ragged sleeve now.

  Not that he was in a state to care about any of that.

  This was probably the time he usually came into work on Monday.

  It was all he knew anymore.

  “Hey,” Lonegan called out to it, to be sure.

  The thing had to look around for the source of the sound.

  When he found it, Lonegan nodded.

  “No . . . ” Annie was saying through her blanket.

  “He can’t get through,” Lonegan said again. “They can’t—keys, tools, guns.”

  For a long time, then—it could sense the sun coming, Lonegan thought—the thing just stood there, rasping air in and out.

  Annie was hysterical, pushing on the floor with her legs.

  Lonegan watched like she was a new thing to him.

  Maybe if he was just seeing his first one too, he figured. But . . . no. Even then—it had been a goat—even then he’d known what was happening. It was the goat he’d been trying all his mixtures out on first, because it would eat anything. And because it couldn’t aim a pistol.

  When it had died, Lonegan had nodded, looked at the syrup in the wooden tube, already drying into a floury paste, and been about to sling it out into the creek with all the other bad mixes when the goat had kicked, its one good eye rolling in its skull, a sound clawing from its throat that had pushed Lonegan up onto his buckboard.

  Finally, when the horse he’d had then wouldn’t calm down, Lonegan had had to shoot the goat.

  The goat had looked up to the barrel like a child.

  It was the same look the thing in the doorway had now. Like it didn’t understand just how it had got to be where it was.

  The front of its pants were wet, from the first time it had relaxed into death.

  Lonegan watched it.

  In its other hand—and this he’d never seen before—was one of the bottles of what Annie had called poppy water.

  The thing was holding it by the neck like it knew what it was.

  When it lifted it to its mouth, Annie forgot how to breathe.

  Lonegan turned to her, then to the thing, and got it: she knew what that water tasted like, still thought it was the water, doing all this to her town.

  He smiled to himself, came back to the thing, the shuffler.

  It was making its way across the floor, one of its ankles at an angle not intended for distance, or speed.

  Now Annie was screaming, stuffing the blanket into her mouth. The thing noticed, came to her cell.

  “You don’t want to—” Lonegan started, but it was too late.

  Make them take an interest in you, he was going to say.

  Like anything with an appetite, jerky motions drew its attention.

  Annie was practically convulsing.

  Lonegan came to the wall of bars between them, reached for her hand, just to let her know she was alive, but, at the touch she cringed away, her eyes wild, breath shallow.

  “You should have gone to church,” Lonegan said, out loud he guessed, because she looked over, a question on her face, but by then the thing was trying to come through the bars. It wasn’t strong enough to, of course, but it didn’t understand things the way a man would either.

  Slowly, as if trying to, it wedged its head between two of the bars—leading with its mouth—and started to push and pull through.

  The first thing to go was its one good eye. It ran down its cheek.

  Next was its jaw, then its skull, and still it kept coming, got halfway through before it didn’t have anything left.

  Annie had never been in danger. Not from the thing, anyway.

  She wasn’t so much conscious anymore either, though.

  For a long time, Lonegan sat on the edge of his cot, his head leaned down into his hands, the thing in the bars still breathing somehow, even when the sunlight spilled through, started turning its skin to leather.

  It was time.

  Lonegan worked his pantsleg up, slid the two picks out, had the door to his cell open almost as fast as if he’d had the key.

  The first thing he did was take the shotgun off the wall, hold the barrel to the base of the thing’s skull. But then Annie started to stir. Lonegan focused in on her, nodded, and turned the gun around, slammed the butt into the thing until its head lolled forward, the skin at the back of the neck tearing into a mouth of sorts, that smiled with a ripping sound.

  When the thing fell, it gave Lonegan a clear line on Annie.

  She was dotted with black blood now.

  He might as well have just shot the thing, then. Same mess.

  “Well,” he said to her.

  She was crying, hiding inside herself.

  “You don’t catch it from the blood,” he told her, “don’t worry,” but she wasn’t listening anymore.

  Lonegan shrugged, pulled the keys up from the thing’s belt, and unlocked her cell, let the door swing wide.

  “But—but—” she said.

  Lonegan shrugged, disgusted with her.

  “What?” he said, finally. “I saved your life, Mary, Jezebel. Annie Jorgensson.”

  She shook her head no, more of a jerk than a gesture.

  Lonegan twirled the shotgun by the trigger guard, held it down along his leg.

  The easy thing to do now would be to point it at her, get this over with.

  Except she was the cake lady.

  For the first time in years, he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to stomach the cake, later, if he did this to her now.

  “What’s the name of this town?” he said to her.

  She looked up, the muscles in her face da
ncing.

  “Name?”

  “This place.”

  For a long time she didn’t understand the question, then she nodded, said it: “Gultree.”

  Lonegan nodded, said, “I don’t think I’ll be staying in Gultree much longer, Miss Jorgensson. Not to be rude.”

  She shook her head no, no, he wasn’t being rude.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” he said then. It even surprised him.

  Annie just stared at him, her mouth working around a word: “ . . . why?”

  “The world,” he said to her, “it’s a—it’s a hard place. I didn’t make it. It just is.”

  “Somebody told you that,” she said, shaking her head no. “You don’t . . . you don’t believe it.”

  “Would I do this if I didn’t?”

  “You’re trying to convince yourself, Mister Alone Again.”

  Lonegan stared hard at her, hated Gultree. Everything about it. He was glad he’d killed it, wiped it off the map.

  “Goodbye then,” he said to her, lifting the fingers of his free hand to the hat he’d left . . . where?

  He looked around for it, finally just took a sweated-through brown one off the peg by the door.

  It fit. Close enough.

  For a moment longer than he meant to, he stood in the doorway, waiting for Annie to come up behind him, but she didn’t. Even after the door of her cell made its rusty moan.

  Lonegan had to look back.

  Annie was on her knees behind the thing the Sheriff had become.

  She’d worked his revolver up from his holster, was holding it backwards, the barrel in her mouth, so deep she was gagging.

  Lonegan closed his eyes, heard her saying it again, from a few minutes ago: “But—but—”

  But she’d drunk the poppy water too. Thought she was already dead like the rest of them.

  She only had to shoot herself once.

  Lonegan narrowed his lips, made himself look at what was left of her, then turned, pulled the door shut.

  Usually, he took his time picking through town, filling saddlebags and feedsacks with jewelry and guns and whatever else would sell.

  This time was different, though.

  This time he just walked straight down main street to his buckboard, folded the side panel back into itself, and looked around for a horse.

  When there wasn’t one, he started walking the way he’d come in. Soon enough a horse whinnied.

  Lonegan slowed, filled his stolen hat with pebbles and sand, started shaking it, shaking it.

  Minutes later, the mare rose from the heat.

  “Not you,” he said.

  She was briny with salt, from running. Had already been coming back to town for the water trough.

  Lonegan narrowed his eyes at the distance behind her, for another horse. There was just her, though. He dumped the hat, slipped a rope over her head. She slumped into it, pulled for the water.

  “Go then,” he told her, pushing her away. Walking behind.

  All around them were the dead and nearly dead, littering the streets, coming half out of windows.

  Ahead of him, in the straight line from the last town to this one, there’d be another town, he knew. And another, and another. Right now, even, there was probably a runner out there from this town, trying to warn everybody of the snake oil man.

  Lonegan would find him like he’d found the last, though. Because anybody good enough to leave his own family to ride all night, warn people twenty miles away, anybody from that stock would have been at the service Sunday morning too, done a little partaking.

  Which meant he was dead in the saddle already, his tongue swelling in his mouth, a thirst rising from deeper than any thirst he’d ever had before.

  Lonegan fixed the yoke on the mare, smeared more poultice into her wound.

  If things got bad enough out there this time, he could do what he’d always thought would work: crush one of the wafers up, rub it into her nostrils, make her breathe it in.

  She’d die, yeah, but she’d come back too. If she was already in the harness when she did, then he could get a few more miles out of her, he figured.

  But it would spoil her meat.

  Lonegan looked ahead, trying to figure how far it was going to be this time. How many days. Whether there was some mixture or compound or extract he hadn’t found yet, one that could make him forget Gultree altogether. And Annie. Himself.

  They’d been asking for it, though, he told himself, again.

  If it hadn’t been him, it would have been somebody else, and that other person might not have known how to administer it, then it would have been one half of the town—the live half—against the other.

  And that just plain took too long.

  No, it was better this way.

  Lonegan nodded to himself, leaned over to spit, then climbed up onto the seat of the buckboard. The mare pulled ahead, picking around the bodies on her own. The one time one of them jerked, raising its arm to her, Lonegan put the thing down with the scattergun.

  In the silence afterwards, there wasn’t a sound in Gultree.

  Lonegan shook his head.

  At the far edge of town was what he’d been counting on: a house with a word gold-lettered onto the back of one of the windows: WM. JORGENSSON. It was where Annie lived, where she cooked, where she’d been cooking, until the Sheriff came for her.

  Lonegan tied the mare to a post, stepped into Annie’s living room, found himself with his hat in his hands for some reason, the scattergun in the buckboard.

  They were all dead, though.

  “Cake,” he said aloud, trying to make it real.

  It worked.

  In the kitchen, not even cut, was a white cake. It was smeared with lard, it looked like. Lard with sugar.

  Lonegan ran his finger along the edge, tasted it, breathed out for what felt like the first time in days.

  Yes.

  He took the cake and the dish it was on too, stepped back into the living room.

  The father was waiting for him, a felt bowler hat clamped down over his skull. He was dead, clutching a Bible the same way the Sheriff had been carrying the bottle.

  The old man was working his mouth and tongue like he was going to say something.

  Lonegan waited, waited, had no idea what one of these could say if it took a mind to.

  Finally he had to say it for the old man, though, answer the only question that mattered: Annie.

  “I got her out before,” he said. “You don’t need to worry about her none, sir.”

  The old man just creaked, deep in his throat.

  Walking across his left eyeball was a wasp.

  Lonegan took a step back, angled his head for another door then came back to the old man.

  If—if the buzzards knew better than to eat these things, shouldn’t a wasp too?

  Lonegan narrowed his eyes at the old man, walked around to see him from the side.

  He was dead, a shuffler, but—but not as dead.

  It hadn’t been a bad mixture, either. Lonegan had made it like every other time. No, it was something else, something . . .

  Lonegan shook his head no, then did it anyway: tipped the old man’s bowler hat off.

  What spilled out was a new head of hair. It was white, silky, dripping blue.

  The old man straightened his back, like trying to stand from the hair touching his neck now, for the first time ever.

  “No,” Lonegan whispered, still shaking his head, and then the old man held the Bible out to him.

  It pushed Lonegan backwards over a chair.

  He caught himself on his hand, rolled into a standing position in the kitchen doorway. Never even spilled the cake.

  “You’ve been using the oil,” he said to the old man, touching his own hair to show.

  The old man—William Jorgensson: a he, not an it—didn’t understand, just kept leading with the Bible.

  Lonegan smiled, shook his head no. Thanks, but no.

  The old ma
n breathed in sharp then, all at once, then out again, blood misting out now. Meaning it was almost over now, barbershop oil or no.

  Again, he started making the creaking sound with his throat. Like he was trying to talk.

  When he couldn’t get it out, and Lonegan wouldn’t take the Bible, the old man finally reached into his pocket, came out with a handful of broken wafers, stolen from the pan at church.

  It was what Annie had said: her father bringing the church back to her, since she wouldn’t go.

  Lonegan held his hands away, stepped back. Not that the crumbs could get through boot leather. But still.

  The Bible slapped the wooden floor.

  “You old thief,” Lonegan said.

  The old man just stood there.

  “What else you got in there, now?” Lonegan asked.

  The old man narrowed his half-dead eyes, focused on his hand in his pocket, and came up with the bottle Lonegan had given him for free. It was empty.

  Lonegan nodded about that, got the old man nodding too.

  “That I can do something about, now,” he said, and stepped long and wide around the old man, out the front door.

  The heat was stifling, wonderful.

  Lonegan balanced the cake just above his shoulder, unhooked the panel on the side of the buckboard. It slapped down, the mare spooking ahead a step or two, until the reins stopped her.

  Lonegan glared at her, looked back to the house, then did it anyway, what he knew he didn’t have to: palmed up the last two bottles of barbershop oil. They were pale blue in the sunlight, like a cat’s eyes.

  He stepped back into the living room, slapped the wall to let the old man know he was back.

  The old man turned around slow, the soles of his boots scraping the wood floor the whole way.

  “Here,” Lonegan said, setting the two bottles down on the table, holding up the cake to show what they were in trade for.

  The old man just stared, wasn’t going to make it. His index finger twitching by his thigh, the nailbed stained blue.

  “And I’m sorry,” Lonegan said. “Hear?”

  By the time he’d pulled away, the old man had shuffled to the door, was just standing there.

  “Give it six days,” Lonegan said, touching his own hair to show what he meant, then laughed a nervous laugh, slapped the leather down on the mare’s tender haunch.

  Fucking Gultree.