by Nick Cutter
Micah said, “You do the things men like us do, you are bound to have enemies you have never set eyes on.”
Micah could get a better sense of their location from here. They were in a makeshift ward. The woman was behind another set of curtains to the left; he could hear her deep, sleep-thick breathing. A small window gave a view of Mogollon’s main drag. He saw the brim of a man’s behatted head at the lowest edge of the window frame. The hat of a New Mexico police officer, who he assumed was standing watch. When he and the Englishman and the woman had sufficiently healed, he imagined they would be transported to a more secure location.
The Englishman wriggled his head into the pillow. “What did that doctor shoot into me? Lovely stuff.”
“The doc has cooked you on it.”
He nodded dopily. “Oh yes, I am well pickled.”
“You seem okay.”
“A few gobbets of flesh missing here and there, but I feel jim . . . dandy.” The Englishman hummed the refrain to “Polly Wolly Doodle,” then stopped. “You were very cool in the heat of it. Your hand did not tremble.”
“I have been there before” was all Micah could say.
“Korea?” Off Micah’s nod, the Englishman said, “Me as well. Royal Marines. The 1181st. First boots on the ground. Silent as death.”
“You must have been young.”
“Oh yes. A wee stripling. But I found I had an aptitude for it. Killing, I mean. It didn’t trouble me. I woke up screaming in the trenches sometimes, yes, but not half so much as the other lads. It is horrible to have a talent for something so dreadful, but there you have it.”
Micah nodded. They were both good at the same damned thing.
“They gave me a dishonorable discharge for knobbing my CO and breaking his nose,” the Englishman continued. “He deserved it, I assure you. After that, I came here. There was nothing for me back home. The marines turned me into an agent of chaos, yes? A piranha set loose in a goldfish tank. I was not fit for polite society. But here I found a heightened need for a man with my particular skills. The land of the free and the home of the brave. Your country is still so . . . unformed. Even now. And that lack of form creates pockets for me to ply my trade.”
“You were cool in the cut, too,” said Micah. He did not exactly mean it as a compliment.
“Hm.”
The men kept their peace. In time, the Englishman spoke. “The doctor took your eye?”
“He took it.”
“Well then, I am sorry.”
Micah said, “They will put us in prison. Give us the electric chair.”
“Hmmmm.”
“They took our pistols.”
“Hmmmm.”
Faintly, the woman’s breathing carried over the curtain.
“We are still in Mogollon,” Micah said. “On the main strip.”
“Near the stable?”
“Near enough.”
“We could take those horses,” said the Englishman. “Light out.”
Micah frowned. “Horses?”
The Englishman grinned. “It’s a few minutes’ hard gallop to the woods. They run deep and thick in this part of the state. We could melt right into them.”
“Can you ride?”
“Capably, yes.”
Micah had some experience with horses. He was no expert, but he could ride.
He said, “You and I?”
“Why not?”
“I do not know if I can ride with the man who stole my eye,” said Micah.
“I’m humbly sorry again about your eye. We had reason to kill each other before. Money was our sole motivator, yes? Without it, there’s no reason to kill anyone or do much of anything, truth be told.”
Micah didn’t see the line being so clear-cut. There were reasons outside of money why some men needed to get themselves dead. “What about Appleton?”
“Oh, I imagine he’s well pleased by this turn of events. The prisons will eat us all up, and he won’t owe anyone a cent.”
“I still aim to kill him.”
The Englishman grinned. “What chutzpah.”
“The woman?” Micah said.
“Piss on her head. She tried to kill us.”
Micah could see the Englishman’s point of view . . . still, part of him rebelled at leaving her. He was curious. Clearly her attack had been planned, which meant she knew who they were—and how dangerous, too. Knowing so, why did she act so recklessly?
“I will think on it,” he said, and shuffled back toward his bed.
“Micah.”
Micah started. It had been years since anyone had addressed him by his Christian name.
“It will have to be tomorrow,” the Englishman said.
“Can you manage?”
The Englishman coughed weakly. “With some more of that doctor’s magical cocktail.”
“You know my name. I do not know yours.”
The Englishman seemed reluctant, but ultimately he spoke. “Ebenezer.”
Micah had not known that a black man could visibly blush, but Ebenezer appeared to be doing so now.
“Ebenezer Elkins. My parents were sadists,” he said with a slight shrug. “It is the only explanation. You may call me Eb, if it suits.”
“Eb. That is good.”
“Hm. So be it.”
7
THE DOCTOR RETURNED the next day. He saturated a ball of cotton in rubbing alcohol and poked it into Micah’s socket. This caused him considerable pain, as the doctor averred it would. He offered Micah another shot of morphine.
“I do not need it.”
The doctor nodded. “The US Marshals are coming to get you, is what I hear.”
“When?” Micah asked.
“Tomorrow or the day after.”
“Just me?”
“And the other fella. The woman goes someplace else.”
The doctor passed back through the curtain. Micah heard him offer Ebenezer a shot, which the Englishman happily accepted. After the doctor had left, and once Micah could hear Eb’s morphine-thickened snores, he got up and went to look in on the woman.
She lay in bed with a sheet draped over her legs up to her hips and another folded across her breasts. Her stomach was bare. An ulcerated hole lay to the right of her belly button, oozing at its edges.
Her eyelids fluttered. She saw him. Her pupils constricted.
“Come to kill me?” she croaked.
Micah was not angry at her for trying to assassinate him. He had no leg to stand on, morally speaking, having done the same thing himself. He poured water from the bedside jug and held the glass to her lips. Gratefully, she drank.
“What is your name?” he asked.
“Minerva Atwater.”
“You one of the Atwater clan out of Tuscaloosa?”
“I have no family in that part of the world.” She drank some more. “So they took your eye?”
“It is gone.”
She uttered a note of sympathy. “Was it my round that—?”
Micah shook his head. “The other man. With a little derringer, concealed.”
The sun shone through a window overlooking the main street. Micah could see the back of the deputy’s head where he stood guard.
“He hired me to get you,” Minerva said. “Appleton.”
“That was my figuring.” Micah gestured to where the Englishman lay behind the curtain. “Appleton hired him, too. But it seemed you were more intent on him than me.”
She shifted her body and winced. “Goddamn Christly hell, don’t that hurt. But the doctor says no vitals were hit.”
“Will you ever dance again?”
“What makes you think I’m a dancer?”
“You should try. You are not cut out for this.”
Minerva sneered. “You figure I should be tending home fires?”
Micah offered her another drink. She snatched the glass from him. “I’m not a spit-bubbling infant.” She drank and coughed, water dribbling down her chin. “I just only started collecting
bounties. I’ll get better.”
“You will not.”
“The hell I won’t.”
“You will not, because you are finished. The Feds get here tomorrow.”
She dwelled on this. “I guess that’s fair enough.”
“It is for me and the English fellow. I do not know what you have done.”
Micah was certain that she hadn’t done much. This could very well be her first transgression. They would put her away for a long time all the same.
“Maybe they’ll hang me,” she said.
“It is doubtful,” said Micah.
“They hanged a woman named Ellen Watson up in Natrona County for cattle rustling. And Lizzie Potts in California, on account of stoving her husband’s head in with a shovel. That all went down a century ago, but still.”
“You appear to have studied these matters.”
“So what, then?” she said. “We just gonna let them take us, I guess?”
“That,” said Micah, “or we slip our necks from the noose.”
Minerva stared at him a long time.
“Take me,” she said.
“Well, I do not know.”
“I won’t be a burden. I can move as fast as greased goose shit when I have to. How would we do it?”
“Can you ride a horse?”
“I helped out at a local stable when I was a girl. To earn some pin money. Used to canter the horses around the paddock—y’know, exercise them. Most of them were nags or glue-footers, but I can ride any horse you put in front of me.”
Micah said, “Okay.”
“And him?” Minerva said, meaning the Englishman.
“Oh yes.” The Englishman’s druggy voice floated over the curtain. “I shall be along. I was hoping to leave you for the crows, but Mr. Shughrue’s veins run thick with the milk of human kindness. But be aware, milady—if you so much as look at me funny, I will snap your neck like a hen’s.”
8
THEY MADE THEIR ATTEMPT the following evening. The sunlight was paling over the ridges. Chain lightning flared soundlessly to the east. The day had been spent in nervous anticipation—they expected to catch the rumble of the marshals’ trucks down the main road. But the rumble had not come.
Their clothes had been confiscated. Their boots, too. But otherwise their wardship was surprisingly lax. They had not been handcuffed or restrained in any way. A deputy checked on them every few hours. In all, they had been treated more like convalescing patients—which they were—than ruthless and calculating mercenaries. This gave them ample opportunity to plan their escape.
The three of them grunted in pain as they wound bedsheets around their bodies. When they were done, they resembled Socratic disciples on their way to the agora. The deputy guarding them was an easy matter. Micah ethered him with the contents of a brown bottle the doctor had carelessly left in a supply cupboard—it was almost as if these gormless deputy dawgs wanted them to escape.
Micah arranged the deputy’s body in the chair, tipping his head back so he would not choke on his tongue. He took the deputy’s sidearm and walkie-talkie.
They crossed the street barefoot in the deepening night, bedsheets fluttering. A few solitary squares of light burned in the odd house window, but the street was empty. Nobody saw them make their way to the stable, looking like a trio of half-fleshed Halloween ghosts.
The stable was deserted, the horses penned. They found saddles in the tack room. It was a chore strapping them to the horses: the light was thin and they were badly hurt, and only Minerva was a true horsewoman. The horses whinnied softly, but to Micah’s ears they might as well have been shrieking. The seconds snipped off a clock inside his head, counting down to the moment when their escape would be discovered.
Micah assayed his companions. The woman was clearly nauseated with pain. The doctor had stitched her wounds with catgut, but a goodly number must have popped already, because her bedsheets were bloody—only a pinpricking so far, but the more she moved, the faster the blood would flow. The Englishman was not much better. Micah resolved to abandon them if they couldn’t keep up—perhaps they could kill each other before the authorities slapped handcuffs on them, if that was their wish.
The walkie-talkie crackled. “Wylie, come in. Edie’s off to the Sip N’ Dip for bear claws and coffee. I get you some?”
Micah pictured the town sheriff—fat and beery the way only southern lawmen could be, a barrel-shaped gut straining against the buttons of his mule-colored shirt.
“Wylie, come on back now.” Silence. Then, with a wary edge: “Wy?”
“Mount up, goddamn it,” Micah said.
Minerva and Eb struggled into their saddles. Micah knotted the deputy’s pistol to his saddle with a length of rawhide. The horses shied beneath them—Minerva’s steed was an especially twitchy specimen. Micah shouldered the stable doors open. They galloped onto the main road, cracking the stirrups into the horses’ ribs.
A few townsfolk occurred in lit windows and on the porches of the houses along the main street. They watched the criminals ride into the deep black of the mountainsides—half naked, bloody, ungainly atop animals that dearly wished to buck them off, without food or flint or medicine. What an odd sight they must have made: three pasty phantoms on horseback stampeding into the wild, like a fever dream of the Old West.
“God will see them dead,” one man said to his wife once the trio had ridden from sight. “His holy eye will seek them out and cut them down.”
9
MICAH’S EYELID FLUTTERED over his empty socket as he flogged his horse into the foothills. The slack flesh, no longer bulwarked by an eyeball, flapped in the wind that blew into his face. The eyelid made a tender sucking sound, the wet edges of each lid gumming shut before blowing open again, as he imagined wet curtains might do. The sensation was not entirely disagreeable—the wind washed into the empty socket, cooling the inflamed tissues. It felt as if it had been swabbed out with lidocaine, or essence of spearmint.
They halted after half an hour of hard riding. White froth foamed at the edges of the horses’ mouths. They had reached a split in the path.
Micah examined his companions. The woman was slumped over the saddle, her head lolling against the horse’s neck. The Englishman sat favoring his wounded hip; his sheet was red with blood, the excess running down his leg to drip steadily off his toes. His arm swayed limply from his ruined shoulder, and yet he was grinning like an idiot.
Micah considered which way to go while his companions waited patiently and bled.
“We could ride up and off the path until the ridge plateaus,” he said.
“Ride, then,” said Eb. “I will follow.”
“And if I fall,” Minerva said, her voice muffled by the horse’s mane, “leave me where I lie.”
Micah said, “I will.”
The whop-whop of helicopter blades carried over the hillsides. They sallied their horses under an oak tree; the horses’ hooves crackled on a carpet of rotted acorns. Once the whirlybird had passed on, Micah gussied his horse along the steep incline. The beast stirred up clouds of dust, which drifted into his empty socket. He probed inside it with his finger and touched an exposed nerve—a jolt of pain drove straight back into his skull.
The hillside carried up over bear grass and fescue and through a copse of gnarled desert willows. Micah’s breath exited his mouth in plosive pops as he leaned hard into the horse. Every so often, he hazarded a glance back. The other two appeared to be held atop their horses less by gravity than by some unholy magic. Their heads sagging, their bodies rocking so it seemed they would pitch into the hawthorn on the horses’ very next step. Yet they kept following Micah, a pair of ghostly effigies.
He topped the plateau. A bone-searching wind rattled the scorpion weeds. The other two caught up. Their sheets were now more blood than white. Micah gussied his horse alongside Minerva and checked to see that she was still alive. Her breath came thin and raspy.
“We must sleep together,” said Micah. �
��Any other way, we freeze to death.”
They led their horses to a dip in the earth bulwarked by a flat-topped chunk of shale. The limbs of a cottonwood tree fanned overhead to provide cover. Micah dismounted and corralled Minerva’s horse. He popped her feet from the stirrups and braced her across his shoulders.
“. . . goddamn hands to yourself,” she mumbled. She was in a dream state, trapped someplace between waking and sleeping, alive and dead.
Micah lashed the horses to a nearby tree. They nickered unhappily, hungry after the long ride. The three escapees bedded down on the hard ground. Micah wrapped his arms around Minerva. Her spine touched his chest. He twined his thick legs with hers. There was nothing sexual in this—they were too exhausted for carnalities. Micah did not find her comely in any case; he preferred a woman with breasts and hips, some brisket on her bones. The Englishman curled up behind Micah; an oily, carbolic smell leached out of his skin from the powerful narcotics he had been given.
The wind shivered empty seedpods. It churned up dust devils that spun through the gloom like mad tops. If the woman made it through the coming hours, it would count as some manner of miracle. The Englishman was a mess, too; Micah felt the blood trickling from Ebenezer’s wounds and soaking his own sheet.
If they died, he would not bury them. He had no shovel, and no time for the observance. If one of their horses was superior to his own, he would take it. He would hide out a few weeks, recuperate, then resume his pursuit of Seaborn Appleton.
He closed his eye and fell into a dreamless sleep.
10
MICAH AWOKE to spy the woman on her knees, hefting a rock the size of a stag’s head, readying to bring it down on the Englishman’s skull.
It was dawn. New sunlight ribboned through the trees. Minerva was a vision straight out of hell: her face a mask of dried blood. Her eyes bulged, wide and full of hate. Her arms quivered with the weight of the huge stone she bore above her head.
Micah rolled away, believing the blow was destined for him. He reached inside his sheet and came up with the deputy’s pistol. He pointed it at Minerva, then looked at the Englishman. The sand under his head was soaked with blood, leading Micah to the false conclusion that she’d brained him already; a closer inspection made it clear that he was merely unconscious.