by Andy Monk
It had seemed a good idea at the time.
Could she do it anyway? If there was a knife here, would she try to kill the bastard with it? She couldn’t imagine ever trying to hurt anyone, but she could imagine the kind of things he would be making her do soon well enough.
The sound of footsteps again. Coming closer. Then stopping again.
Why would Ash be creeping about like he didn’t know his own house? It had to be Blane.
There was nothing sharp in the room, but there was a vase that she put flowers in during the summer. It was big and heavy. But was it big and heavy enough to kill a man? Or just big and heavy enough to piss him off?
She rose in hesitant increments to her feet and took a step towards the vase, stopping when the footsteps resumed. She stood, speared by fear and indecision, until the footsteps fell silent again with a final soft squeak of boot leather. Someone was standing outside the room now; their shadow clearly 9visible through the gap beneath the door.
Her eyes returned to the vase. If she was going to kill him, was this the way to do it? With no plan and her daughter in the room? She took a step backwards, then stared transfixed as the doorknob slowly turned and the door swung open.
“Kate?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake Ash!” she didn’t know whether to be relieved or angry with her husband, so she settled on both.
“Are you alright?”
“Of course, I’m not alright,” she snapped. He blinked and looked surprised enough for someone to think she hadn’t been biting his head off a dozen times a day, “Why were you sneaking around? You scared me.”
“Sneaking around?”
He stared at Emily, who was lying motionless with her back to them both. A frown crumpled his forehead.
“It doesn’t matter,” she flicked hair away from her face. She wanted to curl up and cry again, but she was damned if she was going to do it in front of Ash.
“How’s Emily doing?”
“The same.”
“The same?”
“The same!” she barged past him, annoyed by everything Ash said or did. None of this was his fault she knew, but that didn’t change anything.
“Where are you going?”
“To fix dinner…”
“We should talk.”
“Sure,” she said from the doorway not looking back.
“Everything is going to be good Kate. Everything will be like it was…”
She stopped in her tracks, not because of the empty banality of Ash’s words, but the way he’d said them. Like he was reading them from a book, but was trying to mask the fact by overemphasising and coating them in a sugary brightness that was neither appropriate or believable.
In other words, bad acting.
She turned and stared at him. Noticing him. He smiled at her, not the pained, cold turns that had been all they’d been able to conjure for each other when she could muster the strength to at least try and put something in front of their fury and hurt, but a real smile.
Like he was fucking happy.
“Ash?” she demanded, “What’s going on?”
He came over and put his hands on her arms and squeezed, “Everything is going to be good again. You just have to trust me.”
“How can anything be good again?”
She wanted to brush him off, possibly after kicking his shins first, for thinking that anything could ever be right again, for not accepting that some broken things could never be put back together again, for neglecting her and taking her for granted, for everything that had happened in these last few terrible weeks that had seen her life disintegrate. But most of all for looking so fucking happy.
“I love you,” he said, as if that made everything better.
He took her hand and squeezed it.
She neither returned the squeeze or told him that she loved him, but she didn’t pull away. She was too tired.
“Come downstairs Kate… please…” his voice was so hollow she wondered if the stress of everything had finally caused something to snap inside him too.
“Why?”
“You need to see someone. He’s going to make it all better…”
*
She was strangely unsurprised to find the Mayor downstairs, all at home in Ash’s chair by the hearth.
She glanced at Ash, but he just smiled the same empty, beatific smile that had been plastering his face since he’d come home.
“What’s going on?” her eyes flicked between the two men. The Mayor nodded, but made no move to stand. He was turning something over in his hands. It looked like a small black bottle.
Ash placed a hand on her elbow and led her gently, but insistently, towards the Mayor. All the time grinning inanely at her.
“Don’t worry Kate, he’s a little… light-headed at present. But it will pass soon.”
“Have you been drinking?” she demanded, Ash’s grin didn’t waver, but his eyes were almost vacant.
“No booze has passed his lips,” the Mayor purred, “I can assure you.”
“Then what’s wrong with him?” she spun back to the Mayor. Her husband becoming an imbecile really would be the cherry on top of the shit cake her life had become.
“He’s happy Kate… has it been so long that you can’t remember what that feels like?”
“Happy?” Her gaze darted back and forth again. Perhaps Ash wasn’t the only imbecile in the room.
The Mayor held up his hand “Please, let us not have any more unpleasantness, I’m here to put everything right again.”
“How do you intend that magic trick?” The anger that bubbled up was almost a welcome distraction from hurt and fear.
The Mayor twirled the little bottle some more, “No magic Kate. This is the real deal. What do you say?”
“Say to what?”
“Having your life put back together. Emily back to her old self, no affair with Mr Smith, no Deputy Blane tormenting you?”
Her eyes snapped back to Ash, her heart bouncing to her stomach and back. Ash continued to smile, like he was an old-timer trying to follow a conversation he couldn’t quite understand.
“Don’t worry about him,” the Mayor grinned, “he’s still a bit addled. He doesn’t care about what you’ve been up to. Later he would be, but by then none of it would have happened, it’ll all be gone,” he blew on his fingers before flicking them towards her, “like dreams in the morning sunlight.”
“What have you done to him?”
“He’ll be right as rain, you’ll be right as rain, Emily will be right as rain – a little trickier with her, but I can fix it. Wouldn’t you want that?”
“Of course I would, but it can’t be done!”
“Oh, I assure you it can. A little sip from my bottle and a little bit of rummaging in your head and all those pesky memories will be gone. You’ll have your old life back. And you won’t stray again, Kate, oh no, no, no! You’ll love Ash very much and never ever look at another man, let alone let him fuck you in your marriage bed…”
“Ash?”
“Just take a little tipple Kate, then neither of us will remember you fucking John or letting Deputy Blane do what he liked to you. Let the Mayor take those memories away…” Ash’s smile stretched wider and his eye became glassier “…he’s a very nice man. He will help us. He will put things right…”
She pressed her hand against her mouth and edged away from her husband.
“What have you done to him?”
“Made him happy, of course…”
“He isn’t happy! He isn’t even Ash anymore!”
“Oh please! Don’t be so melodramatic Kate. When you fiddle around in the human brain sometimes things… don’t always work the same afterwards. For a little while at least, but he’ll be good as new soon. Everything will settle back into place, more or less. As will you. And Emily. All this nastiness forgotten.”
“You’re not touching Emily!” she hissed, whatever was going on in her daughter’s mind she couldn’t believe, on the
basis of Ash’s vacant eyes and simpleton’s smile, that the Mayor could do anything to make her better, “She’s suffered enough!”
Ash reached out towards her; like a giant child trying to stroke a dog. She jerked away and ran for the door. No man was touching Emily again. Not over her dead body.
The door slammed in her face.
She yanked at the handle, but it wouldn’t budge. Someone must have slammed the door shut and be holding it closed. She let out a cry and barged the door with her shoulder. It didn’t move.
But there hadn’t been anyone in the doorway…
“Ash please…” the Mayor waved a hand in her direction, “…do something before your wife injures herself. I’m really not in the mood for blood today.”
He grabbed her arms and pulled her away from the door. She tried to wriggle free but Ash, who had never ever laid a finger on her, gripped her arms tight enough to make her yelp, bodily lifted her from the floor and span around to face the Mayor before plonking her back down.
She tried to wriggle away, but both his big arms wrapped around her and pulled her tight against him.
The Mayor climbed to his feet.
“Really, Kate, please stop all this silliness right now. This is for your own good. For the good of your family. For the greater good”
“Keep away from me!”
Ash was nuzzling her ear in a lover’s embrace, she tried stamping on his foot but he just held her tighter. He was whispering that he loved her over and over in that same terrible, hollow voice that sounded like someone doing a fair, but not entirely convincing, imitation of her husband.
The Mayor was swinging his little black bottle back and forth as if he were holding a toy over a cot.
She stopped struggling, Ash’s arms around her were like bands of iron and she was never going to break free of his embrace.
“…I love you, I love you, I always loved you, from the first moment I saw you, I love you…”
So she tried screaming instead.
The Gunslinger
“Who’s there!?” A voice called out from the camp. The sound of hammers being thumbed accompanied the challenge.
“A friend!” he shouted back, tugging at the black sash he wore despite the darkness being lit by only starlight and a thin moon.
“Password, asshole!”
He’d always felt his gift was more of a curse, never something he could control, the minds of others spilling into his own at random, sometimes as clear as his own voice, sometimes as silent as the dead. This would be a bad time for it to be asleep. However, the Thin Rider was feeling benign, or maybe he was just eager for the souls of the Scourge raiders, for a single word echoed through the minds of the men he was about to kill.
“Righteous.”
“Why didn’t you say that in the first place, damn near shot you!”
“Been a long day…” he eased himself from the saddle and patted Silver’s neck. The horse was skittish, they’d been together long enough for him to sense when there was a grey stallion riding alongside them.
“Sure has,” the man who’d challenged him lowered his rifle as he led Silver into their makeshift camp. The Scourge raider was tall and wiry, shadowed eyes watching him from a hollow face, his soul a faint, nebulous glow around him. The password had come out of his head easily enough, but he wasn’t seeing the colours of the men’s souls as clearly as he sometimes did, but there was enough. The man was cautious and curious, but not too alarmed.
He hobbled Silver with the Scourge’s horses. Trusting his instincts enough to show the raiders his back. His easy manner reassured them further that he was one of them.
It was why he’d left Dorry out in the darkness with the spare horses despite her insistence that she should come with him.
“I can pass as a boy in the dark,” she’d protested. That was true enough, but she wasn’t a killer and he wasn’t going to trust their lives to a kid who’d nearly been gang-raped by friends of these men the day before.
Why are you doing this?
It was a good question. He’d let himself be distracted from getting back to Molly for a second time. Just doing a little good. Though he wouldn’t be doing either of them any damn good if one of these bastards put a bullet in him.
It hadn’t been anything Dorry had said that had changed his mind, he’d just felt her overwhelming desire to save the women they’d seen from suffering what had nearly happened to her. It had burnt hard enough to scald them both. The memories of her ordeal had played over and over in her mind as they’d ridden away. Memories that reminded him of Megan and how she’d suffered in the last terrible hour of her life as she’d been raped by men like these.
“How’d you find us in the dark?”
That was another good question. The man who asked it was warier than the others and stood at the shoulder of the first. He’d put his pistol back in its holster, but his right hand hadn’t wandered too far away from it.
He was the one in charge, though there was nothing to mark him out from the other three. He was in his early thirties and his blonde hair had already thinned to wisps.
“Didn’t. Just heard you and hoped you were from the Scourge. Didn’t seem likely anyone else would be out here in the middle of nowhere.”
The man nodded, but remained cautious.
“Who you been riding with, can’t say I can place you?”
He gave him the only name he had, “Henderson… I ain’t been with you boys long.”
He hoped, given the size of the Scourge, they wouldn’t know everyone else and new men would be joining regularly enough. No flashes of alarm ignited any of the men’s faintly lit souls, so he guessed he’d been right.
“How’s the fat fuck enjoying his day?”
“Not too well. He’s dead.”
“Shiiit…” the man groaned and spat into the grass, “…what happened?”
“We hit a ranch, thought there were only a couple of them in there, lost three boys outside, dynamited the door and got in… well, there were more than two of them. I was the only one who got away.”
“Guess they ain’t all so soft and weak out here after all…” the first man said.
“Always knew Henderson was a fool…” the balding man shook his head.
“How’s it been going?” Amos asked as he followed the two men into their camp. The other two had eased themselves back onto the grass and resumed spooning beans out of cans into their mouths.
“Good enough. We’ve cleansed dozens of homesteads and got some women and kids. Taking a few back to the Host.”
He followed the balding man’s nod. He’d already spotted the prisoners, their souls glowing with fear, pain and misery. Four lay in the grass together, each hog-tied. The fifth was on her own, curled up into a ball, muffled sobs audible above the windblown grass.
He stared at her and fought down the urge to pull his gun there and then. These men were all going to die, but he wanted to learn what he could about them first.
“We been breaking that one in,” the balding man explained, following his gaze.
“How’s she working out?” he heard himself say, his voice calm, his mind molten.
“We’ll give her another chance, but she ain’t stopped with the damn crying. Not sure she’s gonna make it as a Bride. Shame, as she’s pretty enough.”
“Can’t see why we can’t have one each,” one of the sitting men grumbled through a mouthful of beans he was shovelling into his beard.
“Cos someone’s gotta damn well stay on watch, this ain’t a fucking party Shelton!”
Shelton muttered something through his beard and beans, irritation momentarily discolouring his soul.
“Cave,” the balding man said, holding out his hand.
“Carter,” he took his hand and tried not to grimace at the images that squirmed and slithered out.
“You want some chow or do you want a go on her first?” he nodded towards the sobbing girl again, “guess you might need to let off some
steam the pisser of a day you’ve had.”
“Unless seeing your team get gunned down ain’t put you off pussy,” Shelton sniggered.
“Nope,” he shot back.
It took men like you and a serrated hunting knife to do that…
“Good man,” Cave patted his back and grinned, “Fire makes us stronger, eh?”
More images flashed behind his eyes. Death, pain, screaming, men, women, children. Just like Dorry. Just like Megan.
His gun was in one hand while his left arm wrapped around Cave’s neck.
He guessed he knew all he needed to about the Scourge for now.
He took the man with the rifle first, a bloody flower bursting open his chest. The other two died as their spoons hit the ground, but before they could grab their weapons, their souls dissipating into clouds of grey nothingness as their blood sprayed the trampled grass. Cave had managed to draw his gun by the time Amos clubbed him with his pistol. When Cave didn’t go limp the first time, he kept hitting him till he did.
It had taken seconds and now there was nothing but the night’s silence again. Even the girl’s sobbing had ceased.
He stood panting, watching the three men he’d gunned down. No life flickered within them, there was nothing to see beneath the starlight but cooling flesh. Their souls had gone dark.
Raising his gun towards the sky he fired two shots, counted to ten and fired a third. The signal to Dorry. If she’d heard nothing after the shooting stopped she was to turn towards Hawker’s Drift and not stop riding till she got there. But two shots followed by a third ten seconds later meant it was safe to approach. The dark work was done.
He looked down at the unconscious figure of Cave sprawled in the flattened grass at his feet.
Almost.
*
He’d just finished trussing Cave up when the sound of approaching hooves made him reach for his gun, but his fingers slid away as he recognised the spiky flashes of Dorry’s soul emerging out of the night.
He hadn’t approached the prisoners yet, wanting to make sure Cave was secure before turning his back on him. Their fear was a palpable throb pushing against his temples. Hog-tied and lying in the long grass they hadn’t seen much of what had happened. The girl Cave and his men had raped however was sitting up, hugging her knees to her chest and watching him with glistening eyes.