The roar of the torrent was huge now, a crescendo overwhelming all else. The rumbling thunder of the stampede was gone, washed away by the white-water rapids. Miguel thought he might have heard human screams once or twice, but so cut off was he from his fellow riders, so perfectly isolated within the fury of this instant hurricane, that he could not tell whether he alone survived at that moment.
Flossie struggled and wrestled against the flood, gaining purchase with her hooves, then losing it, then finding a foothold again. Just as it seemed she might tire and succumb, Miguel felt her connect with solid earth again, somewhere down below the rushing water, and with a titanic heave she launched herself up out of the death grip of the flood and onto the slight rise.
"Go, girl, go, go," the cowboy cried, urging her on.
The great beast, the finest of his mounts, repaid his faith in her, pushing onward and upward, finding a small, gentle ridgeline submerged beneath just a foot of water.
He reined her in then lest they plunge into greater depths again.
A longhorn appeared out of the white squall, bawling with fear, charging for them. Before Miguel could turn Flossie around, she saw the danger and veered, increasing her speed. He could see that a collision was inevitable, though. The steer was going to broadside them in just a few seconds.
Miguel acted without thought, whipping out his saddle gun and blasting the animal in the head. It roared with agony and outrage, half its face torn away by the Lupara, but just as it seemed as though momentum might carry it into them anyway, the beast's front legs buckled and it tumbled end over end, a thousand pounds of muscle, meat, and bone crunching into the ground, throwing up a massive fantail of floodwater.
Miguel felt his bowels tighten and shudder with the shock of near death. The horse whinnied her alarm but had sense enough to thread herself quickly around the airborne steer. She found good purchase on the small rise and galloped on. Miguel thought to rein her in, then decided to trust the animal's instincts. She was probably better suited than he to surviving this.
On they raced for a few minutes more, Flossie following the natural rise of the land and only once or twice plunging into unexpected depths, drenching them both again. Miguel kept his head down and his attention focused on the remains of the herd to his right. He strained with all his might to make out some sign of his daughter through the violence and chaos, but there was nothing. As the wind and rain finally began to abate, it became clear that few of the cattle remained. The hellish squall faded back to a hard downpour, and finally he was able to see more than a few feet in any direction. A river now ran off to his right, a violent, roiling dark brown flow in which floated the carcasses of dozens of dead animals, most of them cattle but also a few horses, some still saddled, and one sheep, bloated with gas, its four legs pointed skyward.
Pulling on his reins, at last he brought Flossie to a halt on a small mound of waterlogged earth that seemed high enough to have avoided inundation. Three longhorns already stood there, but they moved aside silently for the newcomers. Miguel turned in the saddle and peered back up the valley, into the rain. Even with visibility still reduced, it was possible to see that a hugely destructive force had scoured the wide shallow gorge of animals and plants in a short time. He spied an uprooted tree heading toward him from the south, along with what looked like an old car body. The Lord only knew where that had come from. He had seen no sign of human habitation, new or old, for miles.
"Hello!" he cried out. "Can anyone hear me?"
Of D'Age, who had been so close at one point that he'd been able to reach out and steady his ride, there was no sign. He heard a plaintive barking somewhere behind him and craned around to see Red Dog a few hundred yards away, standing atop a truck-sized boulder, wagging her tail and spinning in circles. She was safe from the flood there, but he saw nothing of the other dog, Blue.
"Hey. Over here!"
A female voice, coming from the north and a little to the east, on the far side of the still-roaring river that had sprang into life.
Miguel found her waving from a tree.
Miss Jessup, and with her Sofia.
His heart felt as though it might burst from his chest.
One of the camp whores appeared from behind them, too, but he could not tell which, so thoroughly bedraggled and mud-covered was she.
"Stay there," he cried back. "Do not move until the water falls or someone comes to help."
Sofia yelled something in reply, but he could not make it out.
Miguel waved in what he could only hope was a reassuring fashion as he spurred on, looking for other survivors. He saw hundreds of dead cattle, some of them jammed up in massive natural dams formed when one or two had caught on a tree trunk, providing a temporary obstacle against which even more had piled up. A few minutes on he found D'Age's body, smashed against a rocky outcrop, the head staved in and resting at a horribly unnatural angle. The young man's eyes were open, staring up into the storm that had killed him. Miguel did not dismount. There was nothing to be done for the dead at this time, whereas the living might be in need of his help.
Another body just a short way farther on turned out to be Jenny, Willem D'Age's fiancee. Miguel recognized her fine red leather riding boots sticking out from the crushing weight of a dead longhorn.
He crossed himself and offered a quick prayer for the souls of the departed. It was a mechanical gesture, something programmed into him by the nuns of his childhood. In his heart he no longer felt as if he was talking to God. There was only a void and a world full of pain and wickedness.
"Miguel… over here…"
He almost didn't hear the faint voice crying out over the raging waters and the still hammering rain, but the crack of a rifle shot drew his attention back across the flood stream to where Adam stood atop another large boulder with a woman. His spirits lifted as he recognized Maive Aronson, but then his mood palled again. He just knew that her husband must be dead. Cooper Aronson, the leader of this small band who had taken him and Sofia in, who had adopted them, really, after Crockett, had been riding on the far side of the herd with his wife. Miguel knew the man well enough to understand that he would not have let himself be separated from her even in the worst of the storm. That he was nowhere to be seen was an ill omen indeed.
Miguel waved and gestured for them to stay put, nodding when Adam signaled that he understood. Shivering in his sodden clothes, the vaquero rode on to survey the extent of the damage.
"All gone," Aronson's wife whimpered. "All of them?"
"I am afraid so," Miguel said, the words like ashes in his throat. It was he who had suggested-insisted-that they head to the northeast to avoid entanglements with the road agents, but in doing so he had doomed the small party to utter destruction.
Four more hours he had ridden that day, up and down the length of the flood, until it receded, leaving a hellish landscape. Dead and broken cattle. Shattered trees. The bodies of the missing, save for Adam's sweetheart, young Miss Gray, who remained unaccounted for. Wrack and ruin.
The herd was scattered to hell and beyond.
His own horses and Blue the cattle dog had perished.
The few surviving souls clustered around a sputtering, rusted iron stove in an old corrugated iron shed on high ground, a good five miles from where they had lost everything. Himself. Sofia. Maive Aronson. Adam and Trudi Jessup. And the camp whore named Marsha, rescued, cleaned up, and dressed in a very damp pair of Adam's jeans and a grossly oversized flannelette shirt and lamb's wool jacket from Miguel's pack.
Just another hour would have seen them clear of the worst effects of the flash flood. Had the storm held off just that brief while longer, they could have laagered up here on this hill, easily high enough to have sheltered all the cattle and the humans who watched over them.
A steady downpour fell outside, and occasional gusts of wind blew miserable drifts of cold rain and even sleet into the shelter, which looked to Miguel to be an outstation for a large ranch. A workbench ran a
long the back wall, and rusted bridles, and one stiff cracked ancient saddle hung neatly from the rafters. He stoked the oven fire from a supply of hardwood stored neatly under a tarpaulin, well back from the entrance to the shed. As the others warmed themselves and absorbed their shock, he did his best to hang the tarp over the gaping entrance, providing them with a barrier against the weather.
Somebody had once cared well for this small outpost, he could tell, probably camping there overnight after a long trek from the main homestead of this ranch, wherever that might be. He had even discovered a few logs of pitch wood under the canvas sheet, sticky with resin and easy to light even in the damp conditions. Miguel had no idea where they had come from. Such fuel was not common in Texas.
Upon finishing the makeshift canvas wall, he returned to the stove, where the others now sat silently and Red Dog lay curled up in his daughter's lap, as close as possible to the heat. Sofia stroked her with shaking hands and appeared to be staring at something a long, long way off in the distance.
A small burst of orange sparks floated out of the open grille as he tossed in two more logs, old gray hardwood this time. They would burn slowly for hours. Night had fallen outside, and with it came a killing chill. Adam and the women huddled around the warmth, wrapped in old horsehair blankets they had found hanging in the shed. Their own sodden blankets and sleeping rolls were draped from the same drying racks.
Miguel busied himself with food, a few hunks of good meat he had cut from the rump of a longhorn he had found suffering from two broken legs. After putting the animal out of its misery, he'd dressed the kill and returned to the shed in the last failing moments of daylight.
Miss Jessup had been a great help, taking the bloody steaks from him without a qualm and tending to them on the stove. Poor Maive Aronson was beyond talking to anybody and merely sat, shivering and staring into the coals. Sometimes her chest would hitch with sobs, and she would whimper a few words. But mostly she just sat and gazed.
Miguel had tried to apologize, to tell her how dreadfully sorry he was, how this was all his fault, but she had waved him off.
Adam had spoken for her.
"This is nobody's fault, Miguel. Not yours. Not Brother Aronson, who chose this particular path. Not God's. It is not even the fault of those agents we came through here to avoid. These things are… God's design… but not his fault," the young man said, although he did not seem at all convinced.
"You must eat. We all have to eat," Miss Jessup said quietly as she pulled the seared rump steaks off the griddle built into the top of the stove.
They smelled fine, but Miguel felt awful when his stomach growled and spit flooded into his mouth. It seemed unworthy and wrong.
But she was right, of course. They were still on the trail and could not indulge themselves in the luxury of not eating because they did not feel like it. Tomorrow might well bring even more severe tests than they had faced today, and only the lucky and the strong would survive.
He nodded to Trudi, who passed over a piece of rump steak on a long, thin metal skewer. Miguel had no idea where she had found it, but all their camp utensils had been lost, so he took the crude implement gratefully. Adam followed him, taking an extra piece, which he handed to Marsha. Miguel had determined that it would probably be best if he stopped thinking of her as a whore. In her pathetic, bedraggled state she could not have been less alluring. Miss Jessup passed a chunk of meat to Sofia, who took it without comment. Another piece went to the dog, who scarfed it up without ceremony, her tail beating a fast tattoo on Sofia's thigh. Miguel was relieved to see that even Maive shared in the meal, although she did so mechanically, consuming the food as fuel and nothing else. Certainly not as a comfort.
The remnants of the storm still lashed at them, but the shed had been well placed in the lee of the hill, probably for that reason. Weather tended to come from a particular direction in Miguel's experience, and the ranch owners had obviously prepared well for it with this humble shack. With the tarp hung over the entrance, trapping more of the warm air inside and blocking the occasional gusts of wind and rain that curled around to seek them out, they might even have been cozy. But Miguel could not help seeing the remains of the dead, now hastily buried a mile away. It felt as though he had abandoned them out there, and he imagined that Adam and Maive felt the same way, only much more intensely. Adam, indeed, nearly had to be restrained at the end of the day, when he'd insisted on continuing the search for Miss Gray.
It was only the discovery of one of her boots still containing a foot, and a bloodstained shred of her dress that had convinced him she was gone and there would be no finding her.
Even so, Miguel resolved to venture out later while the others slept and see if he might locate her body or some sign of her.
Without torches or lamps it would be hazardous going, but there was nothing for it. He would not be able to sleep while she remained lost, even though he knew in his heart that she, too, was gone.
"Have to round up the cattle in the morning."
The flat, emotionless voice surprised him. He had not thought Maive would speak at all tonight, certainly not that she would discuss such banalities. But then, he thought, people often did that in moments of great shock and sadness.
Miss Jessup laid a worried look on Aronson's wife and went immediately to her side, sitting down and putting an arm around her shoulder. The simple human contact seemed to collapse some final, fragile defense, and Maive let loose a terrible howl, a searing, animalistic wail of impacted grief and loss and rage. It turned to long racking sobs and then weeping as the two women embraced, bathed in the flickering golden light of the camp stove. Sofia's face crumpled, too, and she pushed the dog from her lap to hurry over and comfort the woman who had been of such comfort and support to her these past weeks.
"All gone. All gone," Maive whimpered. "All gone."
"I know, honey. I know," Trudi Jessup said as she rocked and stroked the woman like a child. "I know."
Sofia placed her arms around the Mormon lady and hugged her fiercely, repeating over and over again, "I'm sorry."
Miguel thought for a second that he might lose his humble dinner, but the wave of nausea and self-loathing that washed over him passed with surprising speed.
He could not bring this woman's husband and friends back.
But he could do what he had promised to do in the first place.
Get them safely to their destination and his. To Kansas City.
"In the morning," he said softly, "we shall start again." Acknowledgments Halfway through writing After America I broke my arm. My writin' arm. That's why you're holding this weighty tome about twelve months after I expected to get it to you. The busted wing threw a lot of schedules and deadlines out of alignment. Mega thanks are due to all my editing and publishing friends who helped out as I slowly got back to work. Cate Paterson and Joel Naoum in Sydney; Betsy Mitchell in New York; and a whole heap of magazine and newspaper eds along with them. And in the realm of a thousand thank-yous, I dips me propeller beanie to my faithful researcher and occasional co-conspirator S. F. Murphy, of the great state of Missouri.
As I was punching through the deadlines on After America, I received invaluable help from an unexpected source. The Cloud. Specifically from my followers on Twitter who were an amazing fount of obscure factoids and information such as the color of the carpet in the Plaza Hotel in 2003. Hundreds of them contributed in one way or another to this book; thousands of them if you count the people who stood on the electronic sidelines each day cheering me on. Extra special mention must go to my regulars and lurkers over at cheeseburgergothic.com, my personal blog. They know who they are and what they contribute. Nuff said.
And as always, my poor, poor family. Goddamn they put up with some shit.
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