Horton himself didn’t present much of a problem—the lack of a head made him far more tractable than he’d been in life. But the six quarter horses were another matter entirely. They avoided Cody like he’d been set aflame, and though he was ordinarily a trig hand with horses, he found that none of his usual methods would calm them. Marguerite fared little better. At first Cody held a scant hope of her being able to cow them by virtue of her stunning beauty, but apparently the sight of Marguerite’s voluptuous body and soulful eyes did less for the animals than it did for Cody. Or maybe, he reasoned, he was the animal and the horses were the more logical of the two species.
In the end it was a matter of thirst and fatigue for the quarter horses. Though one of them—a large mare that bucked and whinnied like her ass was on fire no matter how composedly the other horses behaved—never was much help in towing the deathwagon back to the ranch, the other five were insistent enough on being watered that Cody and Marguerite were able to manage. Cody untied Horton from the bench and dragged him over to the small bonfire they’d built up, while Marguerite unhitched the horses and led them to the watering trough. Cody went into the house, dragged Price’s body out, and heaped it onto Horton’s corpse, which had begun to smolder. Soon both vampires’ bodies had shriveled to black husks. Cody and Marguerite looked on until the humanoid shapes collapsed into ash piles that were indistinguishable from the burned wood.
Then they burned the coach too.
It wouldn’t do, they realized, to give the appearance of incinerating evidence—not when they’d surely have several deaths for which to answer, including those of Jack and Gladys Wilson—but the thought of leaving that accursed black coach parked outside the house any longer than they had to was impossible to stomach. So they burned it, along with Horton’s head, which they’d found lying by the roadside.
They cremated Angela next. Both pieces of her. After much debate they cremated Martha Black and Willet simultaneously, deciding that by the time Cody had met the woman, Martha Black had become someone else. Willet had claimed she’d been a good mother, and that was sufficient testimony for Cody. They laid the bodies and their heads side by side—a good twenty feet away from the other vampires—covered them with kerosene-soaked shrouds, and said a few words. Cody didn’t make it far before he began to choke up, and though he hated blubbering in front of Marguerite, he managed to complete his eulogy, such as it was.
The acrid tang of smoke still fresh in his nostrils, he and Marguerite moved on to the barn. It was hell peeling Penders off the harrow, but in the end they were able to. After they grappled with his giant carcass for the better part of an hour and set its stinking hulk to blaze, they lounged in the yard for several minutes to catch their breath. Marguerite removed her shoes to let her feet breathe, and when Cody caught sight of her right foot, his breath clotted in his throat.
Marguerite noticed him staring. She lifted the foot and held it closer so he could see. The long toe next to her big toe was missing, in its place a pale mass of scar tissue that reminded him of a spider egg sac. “That’s the toe Slim took,” she said. “It bled a lot, but I’ve managed without it.”
Cody tried to imagine Slim Keeley chopping off Marguerite’s toe with an adze, but could not. “I’m sorry you had to be married to such a ruthless son of a bitch.”
“I didn’t have to be, but I was.” She regarded Cody timidly. “I’d say we both chose badly with our first spouses. Maybe we’ll do better the second time around.”
Cody stared out at the light blue horizon. It was early afternoon, and the heat was growing severe. But even though he’d begun to sweat, his hands were cold and unsteady. “You’ve seen me at my worst,” he said to her. “You know I’ve been weak before. You know how many times I’ve failed. So I figure since you know all those things, I might as well come out and ask you straight.”
Her eyes were large. “Ask me.”
“Is this the second time around?”
One corner of her mouth rose. “That’s up to you.”
“Then it is,” he said.
She leaned toward him, and they kissed. He let himself enjoy it for a long, glorious moment. Then he broke the kiss and pushed to his feet.
She visored her eyes and gazed up at him. “Don’t you like to kiss me?”
“It isn’t that,” he said and offered her a hand. Helping her up, he explained, “We still have two to burn.”
She sobered immediately.
They went for Gladys first. On the way up the ladder, Cody told himself there was no way his stepmother could’ve turned into a vampire. First of all, he’d seen Willet and Martha Black bleed Gladys dry, and to live, the vampires needed blood. Secondly, he thought as he reached the hayloft, it surely took longer than a few hours for a person to transform into a different species of creature, didn’t it?
But it was still a pleasant surprise to find Gladys in the same position in which they’d last seen her. Her eyes gazed sightlessly at the barn rafters, the hue of her skin a dingy gray. She certainly looked dead.
Cody waited for Marguerite to pull up alongside him before bending closer to Gladys’s prone form. He was about to draw her eyelids down when Marguerite grabbed his shoulder. “Wait,” she said.
He felt his scrotum tighten. “What is it?”
“What if she’s…”
“What if she is?”
He glanced up at Marguerite, who was shaking her head in superstitious terror. “She might attack you. Move back, Cody.”
“We’ve got to do something about her body,” he said, doing his best to keep the anxiety out of his voice. “Waiting’s only gonna make what we’re scared of more likely to happen.”
“Let’s get the scythe,” she said.
Cody winced. He tried to imagine beheading his stepmother’s corpse but couldn’t. “Let’s just get her to the yard so we can pay our respects and do it right.”
“Cremate her?”
Cody nodded.
Marguerite said, “What if she wakes up while we’re burning her?”
Cody’s breath caught in his throat. He caught a vision of Gladys, transformed into a vampire and very much alive, thrashing in agony as the flames consumed her.
He exhaled wearily. “Go get the scythe. I’ll stay here with her.”
After it was done, Marguerite carried the head out of the hayloft and waited for Cody at the base of the ladder. It wasn’t easy hauling Gladys’s body down the groaning rungs after all he’d been through, but he managed. Side by side with Marguerite, he bore Gladys’s headless form to the opposite side of the yard, where she’d once tended a small herb garden. They soaked her head and her body with kerosene, said some words, then stood with bowed heads while she burned. Cody tried to think about the woman and her life, but he was too preoccupied. Gladys’s body was unrecognizable within minutes, but still Cody stood with his head down, knowing he was avoiding the next job, the last thing that needed to be done.
Marguerite placed a hand on his shoulder and spoke in a voice that was gentle and loving. “We have to do it soon. We don’t know when the change happens.”
Cody kept his head down, his breathing harsh and ragged.
“Cody,” Marguerite persisted.
He clenched his jaw, took a steadying breath. “All right. Let’s go.”
The feeling in him on the way to the bedroom was nothing like it had been during their approach toward Gladys’s body. With Gladys he had been apprehensive, a part of him convinced she’d gone through the change. He’d felt reasonably confident about their odds against one vampire, especially one who’d just turned and hadn’t killed anything yet, but despite this confidence there had also been the fear.
But now, as Marguerite led him through the main room toward the back hall, what Cody felt was a different sort of dread that was infinitely worse than any terror could have been. An insane part of him wanted his dad’s body to be gone. Not that thinking of Jack Wilson as a vampire made the grief any less suffocating, but at
least it would save him from burying his father, and in one grotesque sense his father would go on existing.
They passed through the hallway and found Jack Wilson on the bedroom floor.
Wordlessly, Marguerite hunkered low and got her arms around Jack Wilson’s back. She hoisted him to a sitting position, but the way his head hung sideways made Cody’s heart ache.
“Let’s get him onto the bed,” he said in a voice that was little more than a whisper.
Soon they had his father in much the same position as Marguerite had been earlier. Only the bloom of life had been clearly indicated by the rise and fall of her chest and the healthy, if untidy, appearance of her skin.
Jack Wilson already looked embalmed.
To Cody’s anguished mind it was worse than seeing his dad displayed in some church, because this version of his father looked sad and defeated. The raw gore of his neck wound and the place where Price had bitten his forearm were further desecrations to what should have been an unblemished body that had earned its eternal slumber. Senseless, was what Cody’s mind kept repeating. Senseless. His mind uttered the word again and again like a doleful litany.
Something cold and hard was fitted into Cody’s hand. He stared dumbly down at the scythe Marguerite had handed him. He met her big brown eyes and understood what she intended him to do, but the idea of it seemed absurd, unthinkable. How could he be expected to decapitate his own dad? He dropped his gaze to the scythe blade and began shaking his head.
“Marguerite, I…”
“Would you like me to do it?”
Cody glanced up at her, knowing his eyes were red and full of tears. She stared back at him, waiting for him to speak. He hated her in that moment, hated her cold implacability. What if it were her dad on the bed here? What if the master carpenter was the one about to have his head chopped off?
Cody looked away first, unable to bear the hardness in those penetrating brown eyes.
The moment drew out.
“You must do it now,” Marguerite said.
Cody gestured feebly with the scythe. “We don’t even know he’d turn into one.”
“You told me he was,” Marguerite said. “Earlier, you told me your father had begun to change. He was worried he’d become like Willet.”
Cody had a vague recollection of telling Marguerite about what had happened when she’d been unconscious, but he couldn’t recall telling her about Jack Wilson’s growing interest in drinking blood. The day had been a blur of hauling bodies around, of eulogies for the lost, and of burning. Most of all the burning.
Cody glanced at his father’s corpse again. The pillow and bedclothes were soft enough to conform to Jack Wilson’s recumbent body. The neck wound wasn’t entirely concealed, but enough of it was hidden from view to make the sight of it less startling. As for the forearm, Marguerite had turned it inward so that had Cody not known the wound was there, he’d have never guessed of its existence.
Cody fetched a sigh, brought the scythe to rest on his shoulder. He supposed they should have positioned his dad’s body so that the head hung over the edge of the bed and thus made it a cleaner stroke. But that thought, of course, brought back memories of Willet’s beheading. He couldn’t imagine performing the same act on his father.
His fingers clenched, unclenched on the wooden scythe handle. He realized he was bouncing softly on his heels.
“Cody?”
“I know,” he said. “Just…give me a minute, okay?”
Marguerite said nothing.
Another minute went by, though it seemed much longer than that. Cody raised the scythe. After several gravid moments, he lowered it. “Can’t we at least do it in the yard?”
“I don’t think we should wait.”
Cody glanced at Marguerite in mute appeal, but though not uncaring, the woman’s dark face contained a grimness that advertised plainly that if Cody wouldn’t do what needed to be done, she would.
Cody hung his head. He stood there irresolute and wished it were done already. He glanced at his father’s still form and all of a sudden knew he had to kiss Jack Wilson one more time before decapitating him. Cody leaned over, heart throbbing in his chest, and brought his face close to his dad’s.
And now, as Cody bent over his father’s unmoving form, the notion that Jack Wilson had transformed into a vampire and would at any moment seize Cody and kill him descended with a grisly certitude. Cody clenched his jaw, felt the weight of Marguerite’s stare on his back, and willed himself to focus on his father.
Staring at the man’s closed lids is what did it. What steadied him. Cody put his lips to his dad’s grizzled cheek and kissed him. He whispered something in Jack Wilson’s ear. Then, without pause—he knew he could no longer hesitate, for if he did, this would never get done—he straightened, raised the scythe, and hammered at his father’s neck with all his might. The blade snicked through Jack Wilson’s throat with hardly a sound. What blood there was poured out of the wound and was instantly absorbed by the ivory bedclothes. A slow, burgundy stain spread from Jack Wilson’s cleaved neck, but soon the trickle of blood began to abate, and the broadening stain ceased to grow. Cody became aware that Marguerite was grasping his shoulder and that she was weeping.
And through it all, his father never moved.
Chapter Thirty
The eulogy and cremation didn’t take long. When they’d shoveled his father’s ashes into a hole Cody had dug, it wasn’t yet twilight, though he felt as though he hadn’t slept in months. Marguerite helped him through the burial, taking her turn shoveling the sandy soil into the hole so Cody could rest his hands, which had first blistered and proceeded to split open in angry pink blossoms.
They were sitting together on the front porch, sipping water Marguerite had pumped from the well, when a remote cloud formed where the lane met the horizon. The cloud, Cody soon realized, was a pair of riders, moving fast and purposefully toward the ranch.
“More of them?” Marguerite asked.
Squinting against the reddish early evening sun, Cody shook his head and took another sip of water.
“Friends of your father’s then?” she asked, her voice raw not only with exhaustion but trepidation as well.
“I’m guessing it’ll be the law,” Cody said.
The light brown cloud scudded nearer, the shapes of the riders crystalizing. The sound of thundering hooves drifted to them on the porch.
“What should we tell them?” Marguerite said.
“There’s only one thing.”
Peripherally, he could sense Marguerite’s frown, the disbelieving shake of her head. “They won’t believe us, Cody. They can’t. I wouldn’t believe such a story if I heard it.”
The riders were very close now. In seconds they would reach the remains of the wrecked Concord coach, the dead horses that hadn’t been touched since Penders had drained them.
Very deliberately, Cody took a last swig of cool water and placed the wooden cup on the porch. He picked up his father’s leather hat, which had once been dark brown but was now a faded noncolor from so many days spent in the sun, and placed it on his head. Surprisingly, it fit rather well. With Marguerite watching him fretfully, he started toward the ranch gate. There was a diamondback rattlesnake as big around as a stout man’s arm stationed a short distance from the overturned red coach. Cody tried not to take it as an omen.
When Marguerite caught up to him, she said, “What if they blame us? Burning the bodies looks suspicious. They won’t listen to—”
“They’ll have come from Mesquite,” Cody said. “You saw how many townspeople they left alive. The ones that got away, Price and the rest never even went after.”
Twenty feet from the gate now, the riders slackened their pace, both men drawing out their revolvers.
Cody said, “They won’t believe us at first, but we’ll be able to trace it all back to Tonuco, where they’ll find the woman’s bones that I mistook for Angela’s. Then they’ll go on and figure out whose bones they were.”
“How do you know that?”
The riders stopped short of the wrecked red coach, dismounted. One of them, a man wearing a black, flat-brimmed hat, trained his revolver on Cody while the other moved toward the Concord, the man taking care to give the diamondback a wide berth. Cody paused at the gate, watching the man examine the exsanguinated horses.
Cody turned to Marguerite. “I don’t know that. But I know we had to do what we did. Then we could’ve either ridden away like we were the ones who did something wrong, or wait here for these guys to ask us questions.”
Both lawmen were approaching them now, one of them short, thin and clean-shaven, the other tall and angular. A brown handlebar mustache perched on his upper lip.
“They might not believe us,” Marguerite said under her breath.
“My conscience is clean,” Cody muttered back.
Marguerite appeared about to respond to him, but by then the lawmen were too close. They both had their guns trained on Cody, a hard look in their eyes.
But for the first time in several days, Cody felt completely at ease. He favored the lawmen with a small grin. “How about you two come sit on the porch with us. Marguerite just pumped us a nice pitcher of water.”
It was nearly nine o’clock when the lawmen agreed to come inside. One of them, Tom Allison, the tall sheriff of Las Cruces, seemed dubious of their story. Allison had been one of the first to arrive at the Black ranch and had seen what was left of Willet’s home reduced to ashes. He’d had no reason to suspect anything other than an unfortunate and highly fatal house fire until one of his men, the one who’d been charged with combing through the ashes for human remains, informed him that at least three individuals—Willet, Martha Black and Willet’s grandfather—were unaccounted for. The same day, Jim Slauter, a small but formidable federal marshal, had arrived in Las Cruces with a whopper of a tale about a traveling quintet of actors who had a habit of stealing men’s wives and, even more disquietingly, leaving dead bodies in their wake.
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