by Adam Nevill
The old man was impressed and afraid; his dark mouth hung open like he was some kind of imbecile. ‘Shee-it.’ He snapped out of his gaping. ‘You gonna do ’em all, soldier?’
‘Ever’ last one.’
The old man swallowed and his eyes went wide again. ‘What about your sister?’
The soldier stared right into the black heavens. ‘She ain’t my sister no more. She ain’t like you and me. No, she ain’t. When the time comes, the time comes.’ He pinched his fingers into his eyes sockets and the old man looked away to let him have his moment.
‘Aw heck,’ the dragoon said, shaking his head. ‘That’s how it spread. Folk wanted to hold onto their own, even though they was bit by Lehi. Then they got bit too by their own folks. Pretty soon, the whole town was on its way out here. All bit. Converted. All of them Fair-skinned Nephites.’
And when the soldier rode away from the old man, whom he left with a gift of three hundred Yankee dollars, and his campaign medal, and his story, he remembered too the time that he rode away from his sister. All white in the face with her bottom lip trembling she was, as the last person she knew enough to love rode away. He remembered every moment of their parting. Not only because it was the last time that he saw her, but he remembered every moment of their parting because it was wrong of him to have left her alone in the world at his uncle’s dirt farm. Consumption took their daddy and smallpox killed their ma. And they was all each other ever had after. Two orphans with a dour aunt who knew more scripture than she did kindness, and an uncle who thought the young should get whipped like mules. And he left little Mercy Lisle with them because she wasn’t old enough to light out and run herself, like he did by joining the army to get into the scrape down in Texas. He left her cryin’ on that porch. And only after he was gone from sight did he let himself feel the cold unbearable anguish that he had left behind in that child’s little heart. And it burst inside him like canister round and the hurting never faded like the scars of old wounds are supposed to do.
But he kept himself alive through every charge at the Mexican lines, and kept his head down and under every one of General Mariano Arista’s cannonballs, which pounded out of those big brass guns and came down at the dragoons like the fists of giants thumping the earth all about their mounts. He kept his head and his blood all in one place through that war, because his memory of the abandoned child on that porch kept him eaten by guilt so strong that not even his remorse for what his sabre did to the hatless heads of routed Mexican infantry could ever equal it.
There was nothing left of her when he returned from the war to his uncle’s patch in Illinois; none of her trinkets, or any of the three little grey dresses that she wore, or the dolly his pa had made her. Nothing of her was left in a bare room in that ramshackle house that sat at a slouch on a few acres of miserable dust. Every farmhouse was the same for ten miles; left dismal and swept empty of life on account of the little settlement’s vigour to be part of Prophet Lehi’s lost Hebrew tribe of Fair-skinned Nephites.
Some Gentiles across the wash told him of the town’s exodus following their suffering a plague that past winter, from which many of them miraculously arose from their sickbeds, but changed. Ravaged bone-thin by disease, but somehow brighter of eye and quicker on foot than any survivor of the black pox had a right to be.
And the Nephites had organised themselves but four months before his return from war, to travel in a long wagon train to the Promised Land as the Day of Judgement was all but nigh. Because Lehi’s congregation needed to be in place at the Great Dead Sea to escape the persecution of the apostates, the Gentiles and the already damned, who comprised a multitude so vast that it included anyone who was not a devoted and servile follower of the Prophet Lehi.
And the soldier learned from the first few Fair-skinned Nephites that he came across, as they snapped up at him with their dry mouths, around the sole of his boot that pressed their necks into the dust, that his sister had been wed to his uncle soon as he left for the war. Then taken from his uncle, along with his aunt, and married to Lehi after the Prophet’s final engagement with the angel Moroni on the Hill Cumorah.
Lehi had branded his uncle an apostate, the fate of many simple men in that town; men who atoned for their lack of faith by parting company with their wives and children and goods and chattels, and finally with the very blood in their veins if the prophet so wished. It was the only favour the Prophet Lehi had ever done him: saving him the trouble of shooting down the dog that was his uncle.
But as for this act of mass witlessness and self-trickery perpetrated by an entire community, the soldier began to see it as an act of the most grievous wrongdoing against his sister, the little girl he had left behind, defenceless and alone, for safekeeping. An act of dereliction that demanded retribution. A swift and violent end to any and all who had stood by and watched as his sister was married to those two sons of bitches, so full of low animal cunning that they might as well have been prairie dogs and run to the Great Dead Sea on all fours.
After he left the old prospector, his first opportunity to settle matters, or to find the very end of his own dealings on this earth, came in a long, thin ravine made of red rock and floored with shadows and dust, south of the Great Dead Sea.
The soldier rode slowly through it, his carbine resting across the saddle. His eyes moved beneath the peak of his cap, from his horse’s ears to the steep sides of the ravine. He’d ridden all morning on the prospector’s directions, and guessed this was the last of the canyons before he came across the settlement that the Nephites had hidden here. And he could see that this place was a strategic location. It was far enough away from Brigham’s Mormon Saints not to compete, but close enough to lay the blame on them for its nefarious actions in attracting a share of the sun-beaten, thirsty, California gold-rush traffic, that could be waylaid in these ravines and gathered like rich pickings.
Toward the end of the ravine, the dragoon’s horse began to pull her head away from whatever scent she’d caught on a cool morning breeze. The soldier calmed her by whispering into her ear like he always did and stroking her fine chestnut neck with one hand. She cantered to one side of the ravine and they waited until her master could also hear the squeak of the axles and the rolling creak of the carriage’s wheels across the rocky floor.
The dragoon dismounted and crouched, not more than two feet from the stirrup of his saddle, aiming the carbine straight ahead. When the carriage came rattling and shaking around the bend in the ravine, he was disappointed to see that Prophet Lehi was not out front on his black horse, leading this gathering party. With the soldier despatching every one of his assassins that the Prophet sent back east to stop him culling the stragglers and feed-gatherers and convert-hunters of the Fair-skinned Nephite tribe, it seemed that it had become too dangerous for their leader to range far from Zion. The soldier had cut, shot or smashed down some thirty-three Nephites to date. Another thirty he’d found dead, killed by other hands, including their leader’s. Over forty more he’d found withered to husks from starvation along the trail upon which he’d tracked them to Utah. He doubted there could be more than forty left in the congregation that had reached the Great Dead Sea.
The man who sat up front in the wagon was not Lehi, whom he had seen only three times and at a distance. The Prophet was taller and more horribly thin than any man he had ever seen. He always wore a black suit, gold watch chain, short preacher’s cape and a hat of good quality wool felt, with a tall crown, curved brim and matching hatband ribbon around the base of the crown.
Behind the figure driving the carriage through the ravine, the soldier saw a collection of whitish hair and dowdy bonnets. He waited for the preacher to appear, because he had always been near the wagon on previous sightings. Cursing under his breath, he waited until the black carriage with those big narrow wheels was fifty yards away from him and the driver had seen him plainly. As the driver pulled up on the reins of his train, the soldier shot him back into the bucket seat. Caught hi
m up high in the chest and punched him sideways in his seat, where he sat with his papery maw just snatching at the air.
The sound of the carbine bullet echoing through that ravine set off the passengers into a terrible shrieking, accompanied by the throwing of their long arms up and into the early red sunlight.
As the dragoon reloaded the carbine, he heard Lehi, further back and out of sight, issue an order. And the passengers, three women and one man naked from the waist down, stood up and tottered in the carriage like they were in a rowing boat that was sinking fast. They disembarked over the sides quickly and scuttled away to either side of the ravine.
When he’d reloaded the carbine, besides the shot driver, who was still swallowing at the air and holding his throat, all that was left to see of the Nephites was suggestions of sprightly dark shapes, crawling upwards. There was no clear shot to be had. The trooper swore and holstered the carbine. Then swung up and into his saddle. He drew his sabre and kicked his horse forward, to a canter that she knew preceded a charge.
And down that valley he thundered, his sabre forward, angled down so he could see the slotted throat, level with his charger’s bit. He passed that carriage in a slipstream of dust. His sabre flashed but once, before returning to position. And as the trooper was passing by, the head and forearms of the driver came asunder from his brittle body.
Above him the soldier received the sense that four dark figures had gone scratching like ocean crabs in flight from a sea bird’s sharp beak. They were unarmed save for one Mississippi musket that he saw the male drag off behind its wasted legs. But as this was the closest he’d ever come to Lehi, the soldier kept on the charge like it was those Mexican gunners that he was riding down at Palo Alto. The Prophet dropped from his thin horse and ran to the right side of the ravine as the cavalry dragoon rode upon him.
The Prophet’s black horse reared and shook a terrible yellow mouth from which no spittle would ever froth again. The dragoon aimed his mount right at it. Then cleaved its bone muzzle and skull in two great parts with Old Wristbreaker as he passed its shuddering, angry shape.
The dragoon inclined his charger to chase the scrabbling Prophet into the rocks, but his horse buckled, and then slid sideways, before he even heard the shot from somewhere behind his right ear.
In the rushing cold of the dawn, the crimson world of dust and stone was all a blur about him, and he jumped from his horse before she bumped and skidded across the valley floor.
He rolled and came to his feet with his sabre up high like the French Hussar taught them back east. He hobbled back to his horse, who was shot bad through the neck by two balls from one barrel. Took from the saddle his carbine, and he ran to the closest side of the ravine opposite from where he’d been shot at.
He went up the ravine twenty feet and no more, in case the shooter had reloaded and could sight him in the open. The soldier dropped down behind a big red boulder that showed him the way in and out of the valley from each side. Three Nephites were somewhere up above him. Another two, one of them Lehi, were on the other side. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he said.
‘That you, Trooper Ephraim Lisle?’ It was Lehi calling out from where he hid like some black spider amongst the rocks.
‘You know it.’ The trooper peered across the ravine to see if the Prophet had poked up his white face.
‘Little Mercy Lisle I keep close, Ephraim. I think you know that. Real close out here on those cold, cold nights. Your uncle may have made her a woman, but I been ploughin’ her like a dry field, soldier. You hear me?’
The soldier gritted his teeth and two of them broke their tips clean off at the back of his mouth.
‘But I’m a generous man, Ephraim. I might be willin’ to let you stud little Mercy yourself. Now, how about that, soldier blue?’
‘You tryin’ to get a move out of me, preacher? Well, it nearly workin’,’ the soldier said, and had to bite down hard on his sleeve and fill his mouth with wool to stifle his sobs of such rage that all he could see was hot red blood pumping through his eyes. And it was all he could do to keep himself nailed to the earth and not rise up with his pistol and sword and run at the Nephites across the wash.
‘God in heaven,’ he prayed. ‘Lord who has walked beside me through the valley of the shadow of death, I ask you now, just one more favour. That you keep me strong and breathin’ long enough to send these devils back to the mouth of the hell that they come crawlin’ right out of . . . After that, my Lord, I am happy to come home and to take good care of my sister like I never did that last time.’
And on the last word of his prayer, he saw the long shadow of the first Nephite come crawlin’ through the dawn for him. Like the long shanks of a scarecrow put up in a Missouri cornfield, and about as well put together as some bird-frighter too, it was coming down the wall of the ravine. Head first, body after. Hopping and jerking quick, like a bat he’d once seen moving across some dirt.
The soldier used the instincts that only a man accustomed to having been under plenty of gunfire can call upon, and he stayed put. Never twitched a muscle, even when the raggedy thing’s shadow covered him up completely. They rarely made a sound, the Nephites, when stalking. Unless a man saw them coming, or got some sign from a shadow, it was all over for that man, and he had no choice but to convert right there and then as their dirty teeth baptised his flesh. But the soldier had learned from the Indian scouts in the army, as he had learned from the Indians who made those drawings in that cave on the Hill Cumorah; he had learned how to follow signs in the dirt and to move without leaving any himself; he’d learned too how to be still and to wait, as all the killers on the plains and in the desert wait. Before he struck.
He saw it as he turned and lengthened the arm holding Old Wristbreaker; saw it readying to leap like a starving man upon the carcase of a horse in a famine. And before the black eyes in the paper-dry face had a chance to blink and adjust to the sudden whirl of dust and sunlight on steel before it, the Nephite was looking up at the indigo sky. And three feet away from the workings of its jaw in the dirt, and the attempts to twist that terrible head on a scrawny neck severed, lay its long body, so thin and hard among the loose folds of clothes that it no longer filled so well.
The soldier looked up the wall of the ravine, and saw two more, hanging like black shadows upon the red rocks. They paused, then reached down their yellowy faces, snake-like, with threadbare heads pushed forward like geese with no feathers, as if to sniff at the sudden commotion they had just witnessed below and not yet fully understood.
Their hesitation gave the soldier time to raise his pistol and shoot the closest one clean off the rock. It came out of the air shrieking, but thumped so hard against a boulder next to him that he heard its back break like a tomato cane. He saw that it had once been a woman. The ball from his pistol had shot most of its black bonnet away, and half of the skull along with it. The washed-out eyes were rolled up. A small sigh, like a hiss escaping from a kitten, came out of the pale, lipless muzzle. It never moved again.
Up on one knee, carbine butt packed into the familiar embrace of his shoulder, just like a cavalry trooper down off his horse and ready to fire in battle, he sighted the other one. It turned and skittered like a long rat, back up the red rock wall. Strands of white hair had come loose from the bun on the back of its head, and streamed down the dusty cloth of its dress. He’d seen this one before, a long time ago, eating a snake in a valley in Wyoming. Maybe she’d been the wife of a miller back home, but he couldn’t be certain.
It was hard work crawling upwards on that sandy rock this second time, and the Nephite struggled. It made a pitiful keening sound in its throat too, like a goat, because it must have known that the tables had been turned on its sneaking approach down that dawn-lightened rock. The trooper shot out its back in a great puff of dust.
She hung on for a few seconds before dropping straight down, close to the face of the cliff, hitting a promontory and bouncing away, over his head, and further down towards the valle
y floor.
There was a terrible strangled cry of rage and anguish from across the ravine, and he heard the pounding of thin, hard feet over the rocks and through the dust. Another voice cried out, and it was Lehi’s. ‘Brother, be still!’ the Prophet commanded, but the last of his congregation still standing was so driven by fury and grief, there was no delaying its desire for immediate retribution.
Calmly, the soldier reloaded the carbine, working quietly with steady hands. Then peeked over the ridge of his position and saw the female Nephite that he’d just shot from the cliff-face, crawling slowly back towards either the black carriage or the other side of the ravine where Lehi had been taunting him. One of its stick arms was twisted backwards and flopped across the ruin of its exposed spine. The legs were useless. Even if it made it back to the Prophet, Lehi would not let it live. The soldier had often found the bodies of those Lehi had saved him the trouble of despatching; whatever the insult caused to bring about apostasy the soldier could but guess, but mad Lehi often killed his own by bludgeoning their skulls with something blunt, probably his boot heel.
The soldier guessed the husband of the broken-backed female was the thing now racing across to him. He smiled when he saw that it carried the musket the Nephites had in the wagon. The soldier remembered the sudden sideways fall of his horse, shot out from under him, and he stopped smiling.
Leaning up and onto his toes, with one blue knee pressed into the rock, he sighted the carbine at the hopping fright that came at him through the rocks. Its long arms were thrown into the air and it carried the musket like a club. The sleeves of its black jacket and the hair shirt beneath it appeared too short for the length of its pale forearms. Its trousers were long gone too, as was its underwear. A pelvis papered with mottled skin topped two shanks thin as oars, and they strode those clawed, yellowish feet through the dust towards him.