Strange Dominion

by Lyons, Amanda M.

  “You best get on your way, son.”

  The voice was not Corey’s, not Momma’s, and not in my head. I spun around to see a man not half a dozen paces from me. My hand slapped leather, or would have if they hadn’t relieved me of my gunbelt and holsters.

  The man smiled. It was a thin smile but not unkindly. He was tall, tall and lean, and he wore what I was surprised to recognize as a uniform from the war, the war, the War Between the States as they called it. That had been back years ago; Momma’s eldest brother fought and died in it … but Momma’s eldest brother had worn the Union Blue, and this tall stranger here was dressed head to foot in Confederate Gray. He was old, too, with a full silver beard, and long silver hair spilling from under his hat.

  “Best get on your way,” he repeated. “They’ll be after you soon. Coming for you. Hot on your trail.”

  He was surely right about that, I knew. Once they discovered the empty cell, there’d be a posse of men riding out from Joshua Flats to hunt down the murderer who had himself a date with the ropemaker’s daughter.

  But I didn’t move. “Who are you?” I asked. My mouth was powerful dry, and the words came out in a croak.

  The old soldier’s eyes were brown behind round spectacles. Like his smile, his eyes were not unkindly, but there was a coolness in them. “Time’s a-wasting, son. Get you going, now.”

  “Where?” I asked, not knowing why I did.

  He pointed off across the desert. “Make for Bony Ford. They can’t chase you past that. And if you’re there before nightfall, you might catch the next stagecoach.”

  “Stagecoach?” I felt for my pockets, but I had about as much money as I had guns … which was to say, none at all.

  From the other side of the hilltop there arose a sound, an eerie sound not quite a hiss, not quite a rattle, not quite a clicking.

  “Hurry along.” The soldier dug into his own pocket and flipped a coin at me.

  I caught it and saw it was a silver dollar. “Mister --”

  The eerie sound arose again, nearer now, and something about it brought all the fine hairs on my arms and the nape of my neck to quivering straight up. I tried to see what was making such a noise, and when I looked back, the old soldier in Confederate Gray was gone like he’d never been there at all.

  But he had been, because I held his silver dollar clenched in my fist. I could see plain as day the scuff marks where he’d been standing. What I could not see was any tracks leading from there, or anyplace a man that tall could have got to and hid …

  The sound again, and it seemed to be from several places at once. I thought of snakes … sidewinders … rattlers, big diamondbacks … I thought of scurrying lizards and strutting scorpions.

  Then I thought I best do what the soldier had said and get out of there, get on my way. The direction he’d pointed was as good as any. Better than most, because when the posse went looking for me, it was about the last way they’d expect a fugitive from justice to high-tail it.

  So, high-tail it in that direction is what I did. I was some glad to have Joshua Flats fall away behind me. Never mind that I had no horse, no provisions, no canteen, nothing but the clothes I stood up in and this one silver dollar.

  The sky kept on with its hazy rust-green, like copper that’s begun to go bad. There was no wind to speak of. Despite that, the joshua trees as I passed gave these stealthy rustles, almost as if they moved to watch me go by. The air had a flat quality, a funny taste, that too like copper. I started in to wonder if a lightning storm was brewing … or if there’d be a downpour, flash floods, and I’d drown in some arroyo instead of swinging at the end of a rope.

  I kept an ear perked for pursuit, but all I could hear was the rustling joshua trees and, occasionally, sometimes near and sometimes far, more of the hiss-rattle-clicking that set my hairs on end.

  Until, that was, I heard the screaming.

  Screaming, and crying, and carrying on something terrible.

  I broke into a run, struggled up a rise, fought through a stand of scrub at the top, and saw two children up on a boulder in a drywash gully below.

  The one screaming and carrying on was a little girl, in a check-gingham dress and bonnet, only she screamed more with anger than anything else. The boy, even littler, sobbed as he clung onto her apron. This hindered her some in what she was doing, which involved swatting with a stick at the …

  My eyes saw the things, and my gut believed them, but the rest of me was dumbstruck all the way down to my toes.

  I had never, in all my born days, seen or imagined the like. Drunk or sober, waking or dreaming.

  They were like snakes, but they weren’t. They had the long, sinuous bodies of snakes … but they ran on lizard-legs and scrabbled with wicked claws at the side of the boulder … their tails, which sported rattles, also sported the venom-dripping stingers of scorpions … hard scaled plates covered their heads and ran the lengths of their backs … and sprouting out to either side of their necks were jointed limbs ending in serrated pinchers.

  They moved fast. They made that sound I’d been hearing.

  They were also, each, about the size of a man’s leg.

  I stared.

  And here was this child, trying to fend them off with a stick. This girl who couldn’t have been no more than eight or nine years old, trapped with her kid brother on this boulder in the middle of a drywash …

  I thought of myself and Corey when we were small, how I had looked up to him in every sense of the word. Corey would have protected me until his last breath.

  Before I knew I was going to, I’d snatched up a rock off the ground and hucked it at the nearest snake-beast. It whipped around and suddenly half of them were streaking at me, rattles shaking for all they were worth, that clicking chittering hiss louder than ever and hatefully evil.

  Yelling, hollering fit to split, I grabbed for a stick of my own and set to laying about in a full-on fury. I felt a couple pinchers snag at my pants, I felt a stinger jab at my boot but not go through the good leather. A nasty brownish liquid spurted out whenever I struck one of the things, bitter-smelling and looking like tobacco juice.

  I beat three of them into the dirt and then the rest skedaddled. I saw another two by the boulder, one back-broke so that its front end tried to drag the crippled hind end along, the other walloped so bad there was barely anything left but limp scraps.

  “You both all right?” I asked, in a coughing wheeze because my dry throat was sore and felt swollen from all the hollering as well as having nothing to drink all day.

  The children looked at me as if they had never seen another person in their lives. I went up to the boulder, brought my boot-heel down on the crippled snake-beast’s skull – it crunched like a boiled egg, very satisfying – and tried again.

  “You all right?”

  The girl nodded. The boy, his face red and blotched and snot-streaked, only snuffled.

  “What’re you doing way out here? Where’s your folks?”

  “They went on ahead,” the girl said. She had braids the color of molasses and freckles sprinkled across her snub nose. “Momma, she got a job schoolteachin’ down San Diego way. Daddy, he’s takin’ us to meet her there.”

  “And where’s your daddy at?”

  She shrugged, and I saw despair flit through her big brown eyes. “Daddy, he said stay right there, wait by the wagon. But Amos --” Here, she jerked her chin to indicate the boy. “Amos wandered off and I went to fetch him and then we couldn’t find our way again.”

  “I want Daddy!” Amos wailed.

  “Can you help us, mister?” asked the girl.

  “I want Daddy!”

  “Hush him up before those … whatever they were … before they come back,” I said, and cast a nervous look around. “Let’s get a move on, get out of here. What’s your name?”

  “Cora,” she said.

  I felt like someone had just walked over my grave. Which, given how I’d begun this day, wasn’t anything I wanted to thi
nk about.

  “What’s yours, mister?” she went on.

  I almost told her, but reckoned how it might not be so smart what with me being a hunted man and all. “Corey,” I said.

  She beamed brighter than a little ray of sunshine. “That’s like my name!”

  I heard that hiss-click-rattling again and knew the pleasantries had to wait. “Come on. There’s supposed to be a stagecoach stop ahead here somewhere, maybe a town. That’s as good a place as any to start looking for your daddy.”

  They’d been walking quite a while by then, and with Amos all tuckered out it fell to me to hoist him up and carry him along. He was a hefty sack of potatoes. A real misery to my cricked spine and stiff neck. I found it none the easier because I was also reluctant to leave behind the stick I’d used against the snake-beasts. Hadn’t been the best weapon, but it was still a sight better than nothing at all.

  Cora kept her stick, too. And, soon enough in that way children had, she’d gone over right cheerful. Skipping, chattering, fair to peppering me with questions – why was the sky that strange color, did he think it was going to storm on them, was there a wildfire someplace, what were those funny trees, and those snakes, what in the world had those been, was all California like this with funny trees and strange sky and snake-things?

  I answered as best I could, only resorting to lies when her questions took a turn for the personal. Amos had dropped off to sleep with his head on my shoulder.

  We walked and walked for what seemed like a hundred years. Sunset approached, not in a blaze of red and gold like there often was when the air rode heavy with smoke, just a dull, leaden, burnt-looking sort of sunset. It’d be on toward dark soon, and I had yet to see anything resembling a town, a stagecoach stop, a ford, a river, or the like.

  Had that old soldier pointed me wrong? Sent me to wander aimless until I simply dropped from thirst, heat-stroke and starvation?

  Amos woke, lifted his head from my shoulder, looked behind me, and shrieked in my ear so loud I thought my head would crack open.

  I spun. So did Cora.

  After all that previous clicking, hissing and rattling … they’d come after us in total silence. Gathering their numbers. Gaining ground. Closing in. Now a great swarm of them were there. Some had crawled their way up the joshua trees or perched atop rocks. That dull, sullen, leaden-orange sunset painted over them, making their stingers gleam with the wet drips of venom.

  “Run!” I shouted to Cora.

  At that, the swarm let loose with a terrible ruckus. They rushed at us. I could smell them, the stink of them, a nose-wrinkling mix of tobacco juice and rancid bacon, curdled milk and sour beer. It washed over us like a bad wind.

  I let the stick fall and ran for blue blazes. For a moment I thought how if I wasn’t weighed down by Amos … but I couldn’t bring myself to cast the kid aside. Shoot a man while drunk, that I had done, and that did make me a killer, even a murderer. Leaving little Amos to be torn apart by those monsters while I saved my own skin? That would make me the lowest of the low.

  So, I ran. I would have shoved Cora along, would have picked her up too if I’d’ve had to. The girl, though, was fast on her feet with her braids flying straight out from her head. She paused once to glance back and I shouted again for her to run, run, keep going, not to wait on me but run goldurn it!

  The goldurn it, that part slipped out, I hadn’t meant to swear at a child.

  “I see somethin’!” Cora cried.

  I didn’t see a thing … and then I did. A wide, glassy ribbon curved through the desert … a river, slow and sluggish … catching the burnt color of the sky like a mirror … smooth, except for one stretch where it shallowed out over a lumpy bed of stones … the ford! And, on the river bank, the stark outline of what appeared to be a wooden shed or shelter of some kind … the stagecoach stop!

  Amos had half to throttled me by then, his chubby arms cinched tighter around my neck than a dance hall girl’s corset. “There, make for it, make for it!” I choked.

  We ran. Cora’s bonnet whisked off and I trampled it into the dust. Shadows lengthened around us, joshua tree shadows reaching with their bristly arms.

  “Horses! Look, Corey, look, horses! Horses and a stagecoach!”

  I wanted to call for them to hold up, wait up, wait for us, but Amos had me in that death-grip. My boots pounded from loose sandy soil onto pale, pebbly rocks that gritted and grated underfoot.

  Horses, yes indeed, horses, a team of six, tossing their heads and stamping their forehooves amid the cast-up driftwood on the riverbank, snorting, eager to be on their way. The stagecoach was a far sight bigger and finer than it had a right to be in these desolate parts. All I could make out of the driver was a man-shape in a duster and a hat, sitting up high, holding the reins.

  The shotgun rider swung down from his seat with a lantern, which he raised as he opened the door to let the waiting folks start getting in. The light that lantern shed was a whitish-green that made me think of marshfire. It shone pale and strange on the faces, which themselves had a pale and strange look about them. I saw the glint of money as they handed over their fares and climbed aboard.

  None of them paid us any mind at first, as we raced toward them with that skittering, slithering swarm of death on our heels. Then, as Cora screamed again, begging them to wait, someone at the back of the line looked around.

  “Cora?” he asked, in a voice that sounded like a man just waking up.

  “Daddy!” The little girl spurred on so quick that pebbles and chunks of crushed stone spattered at me.

  In my arms, Amos commenced shrieking again, eager this time, and he let go my neck to wave his arms at the man.

  I near collapsed onto the boards at his feet. The swarm of snake-beasts veered off, raising one final, furious, cheated hiss.

  I lay there gasping, gulping, feeling like someone had stuffed my throat with barbed wire. There was a commotion above me as Cora, Amos, and their daddy embraced, all talking at once. When I heard my name – or my brother’s, that was – I lifted my head on my sore, aching neck.

  “This is Corey, he saved us!” Cora said.

  I looked up.

  The man looked at me.

  “Daddy …” the little girl went on, frowning, “why’s there so much blood on you, Daddy?”

  Because it had poured from him like someone sprung the bung on a barrel, that was why. It had poured like that after I shot him in front of the general store in Joshua Flats.

  “Stage is leaving, folks,” the shotgun rider said. “We got a schedule to keep to. Don’t be holding up the show, now.”

  Without a word, Cora and Amos’ daddy scooped up his children, one in the crook of each arm. He ducked as he entered into the stagecoach with them. They all three vanished from my sight as if a black curtain had fallen into place behind them.

  I pushed myself to my hands and knees. Had to steady my own head as I did it, since it seemed my neck wasn’t fit for the task any more.

  The riverbank along the ford was, I saw, littered with skeletons, not driftwood … bleached skeletons picked clean. The pale pebbles grating beneath my boots hadn’t been pebbles at all. They were bone-shards, the ivory slivers of ribs, the knob-ends of joints.

  The stones poking up from the ford itself weren’t stones. They were skulls. Cattle skulls, those long-horn skulls unmistakable … coyote skulls, their naked teeth sharp and feral … human skulls, rounded with empty eye sockets staring. The dark water slipped around them slick and oily-like … poison, it must be … some powerful poison …

  The far side of the river was lost in gloom. I couldn’t make out hide nor hair of what might be over there.

  “You coming or not?” asked the shotgun rider. He held out a leather-gloved hand. “Last chance.”

  The driver shifted in his seat to grin at me from beneath the brim of his hat. In fact, grinning was all he could do, what with his bare jawbones leering fleshless white.

  I understood then. I touched
my throat, feeling at the swollen welt where the rope had dug into my flesh.

  I grasped the rider’s hand and let him help me to my feet. His hand then turned over, cupped and waiting. I fished the silver dollar from my pocket and dropped it into his palm. His fingers closed over it.

  What was it Corey liked to say? A body could get used to anything …

  I climbed into the stagecoach, knowing that whatever else might happen, it would be nice to see him and Momma again … on the other side of the river … past the crossing here at Bony Ford.

  Devil’s Ridge

  Dona Fox

  I admit it, I was a fool to go up on Devil’s Ridge that night. Yeah, I’ve killed a dozen men, slept with every whore from San Francisco to New York, even ran my own gold camp for a bit, but I was somewhat hesitant to go up on Devil’s Ridge at night. Hell, I’ll admit it now, I was half-afraid to go there in the daytime. But I guess there ain’t nothing left to be afraid of now; they got all they wanted from me. I hope. Still, I ain’t going back up there, not for all the tea in China. Not if you told me there was the richest vein of gold…

  Well, that’s what drew me up there that winter; that’s what I heard–gold.

  I was gonna take a crew with me but nobody was willin’ to go in the deep snow–not even for gold, so, I packed up Diamond with a mule behind her and all the supplies we could carry. I wasn’t gonna wait for Spring and all the lazy, comfort lovin’ bastards I’d have to compete with. This gold was gonna be mine.

  It turned out Diamond was a bit of a dandy; she couldn’t handle the snow and the climb. So I sent her back while I thought she could still make it; the mule and I continued on alone.

  We got up to the top of Devil’s Ridge as what little sun there was fell behind the cold blue mountains when something spooked that damned old mule. I don’t know what scared it and I don’t know to this day where that critter went. Fortunately, I was carryin’ a small possibles bag of provisions myself. I decided to wait it out on the ridge until morning, then I’d consider my options, but I’d probably have to head back down and start over. Then the night wind picked up. It was a strong northwester.