by David Haynes
Every few steps, Mercer would bring the sights of his Ruger up to his eye and scan the forest. In all the years he had known Mercer, he'd never seen him hit anything other than the air above an animal’s head. Mercer preferred it that way.
“Nothing here, is there?” Draper said. It was unlikely they were going to find whatever body part it was that the wolf had chewed up under Puckett’s camper.
Mercer said nothing and dropped to his knees. He leveled the Ruger and stayed motionless.
“Bear,” he whispered. “Big, brown bear.”
Draper dropped too. He couldn’t see anything out there, couldn’t hear a sound. The earth was bone dry beneath his knees. The canopy had kept the rain out like a giant umbrella.
“He’s moving off,” Mercer whispered again, his eye stuck to the sight.
With the earth being so dry and dusty, they should have been able to find some prints, an indication of direction. But there were none.
Mercer lowered the gun. “He was a beauty.”
“I’m sure he’d be pleased to know you approve.” Draper winked.
Mercer gave him a strange look. “Where did you go? You just dropped off the planet.”
It had been coming for a while – this talk.
“After spending a few days with the cops, you mean? I took off. I didn’t want to see another human being. I didn’t want to hear one, smell one, or breathe the same air as our species. I just wanted to keep moving, keep my mind away from what happened over there. If I stopped for one minute and thought about it, I knew I was a dead man.”
Both men stood up.
“Distance,” Draper added. “That was the only way I could deal with it. Wasn’t right, I know. Not for Meg or her mom but it was the only way I knew how.”
“It wasn’t your fault. I’ll keep saying it, as long as you keep questioning it.”
Draper looked at his friend. “How would you feel if you shot that bear?”
Mercer looked at the ground. “Well, I’d be sad. It’d probably eat me up for a day or two.” He looked up. “But if that bear was chewing the head off one of my buddies, or was on top of me trying to rip my guts out, then I’d know it was the only option left and I’d pull the trigger without a doubt.”
The image of the carnage at Delta Junction smashed into Draper’s mind. Paul Rogers lying dead on the floor with his head hanging by a thin sinew, his blood running across the rocks and into the creek. Tom Briggs standing over the body holding a hunting knife. Blood dripping from his hands in thick globules and a look of furious evil on his face. Briggs wrenching back the neck of the unconscious Ben Jones and bringing the knife across his throat. Two shots. One in the cheek, sending teeth and bone flying through the air. The second one smashing into his skull, knocking him down, knocking him into the creek.
“Let’s just go back.” Draper could feel sweat not only gathering under his shirt but also on his brow and hands. “We’ve got a pay-streak to mine.”
*
For the next week they worked hard. Twelve, fourteen and sometimes sixteen hours a day digging the paydirt, hauling it to the plant and processing it. They ate together and then slumped into their beds, sore, aching but content. To Draper, when things were running like this, it was one of the sweetest feelings he knew.
The wolf had been scared away, at least for the time being. Puckett’s shots into the dark had obviously done the trick. There hadn’t been any further instances of bones being left in the camp or of things being eaten beneath campers. In that week there were no thoughts of wolves, bears or any other threats. It was just gold. Mining the gold.
One night as they gathered in the kitchen to eat, Meg bumped into Draper, her hip colliding with his thigh.
“Oh, sorry,” she said before realizing it was him. It was the only time she’d spoken directly to him since the explosion at Chicken. It was also the first time he’d touched her, albeit accidentally, in over two years. She scampered off before any more words were spoken. It was heartbreaking.
The only point of concern during the week were comments passed by Puckett as they ate.
“Where’s the Preacher?” Flynn asked. “His chili’s getting cold.”
“Track on the dozer’s slipping. He’s taking a look,” Mercer answered.
“Man needs to look at his bladder whilst he’s at it,” Puckett said between mouthfuls.
Draper laughed. “What?”
“The man is up and down twenty, thirty times a night. Door open, door closed, open, closed. Sometimes I can hear him pacing around out there in the middle of the night.”
“Maybe he needs a prostate test,” Flynn said. “Comes to us all.”
“Speak for yourself, old man. It’ll never happen to me.” Puckett turned to Flynn. “Surprised you don’t hear him. He’s in-between us.”
Flynn shook his head. “Haven’t heard a thing. I sleep like a log because I work hard. Hey, maybe you’re not working hard enough, Puckett?”
“You’d have to be dead not to hear him stomping around. Oh wait Flynn, you’re so old you are almost dead.”
“Fixed!” Vinson walked in through the back door, wiping his hands on a piece of oily rag he carried around.
“Good man,” Mercer shouted to him.
Draper’s dad had been diagnosed with prostate cancer at an early stage. He’d been getting up to use the toilet six or seven times a night, often not being able to go properly. Puckett exaggerated whenever he could but even half of what he was suggesting didn’t sound good.
At the end of the first week of processing dirt from the Resurrection Cut, Draper poured the last few flakes of gold into the dish on the scales. He already knew it wasn’t great. He’d seen the sluice boxes on the plant and they weren’t exactly crammed full of gold. The others had seen it too. The look on Mercer’s face told him everything.
He poured the dried gold into the jar and walked through onto the porch where everyone was sitting. It had rained every day for the last week. Some days more than others but it always came sooner or later. It was turning the camp into a swamp and Black Pine Creek into a raging torrent.
They all had a beer in hand and hope rather than expectation in their eyes.
“Nine ounces of gold. Ten thousand dollars.” It wouldn’t cover the fuel bill for the week.
“Are you kidding me?” Puckett got to his feet and took the jar out of Draper’s hand. “This ain’t gonna get Gramma a new leg.”
Puckett’s remark had at least lightened the blow. And it was a blow.
Vinson rubbed at his fledgling beard. “The test holes? The pan you took? They all said we should get at least a hundred ounces.”
“Sometimes, it just ain’t there. Test holes have been wrong before. Won’t be the last time,” Mercer answered. “We’ll get it next week, won’t we, boss?” He winked at Draper.
“Of course.” He sat down and took a beer out of Mercer’s hand. “I’ll pan the rest of Resurrection tomorrow morning and see what it shows. If it’s no good we move on. It’s not like we haven’t got the ground, is it?”
They all nodded in agreement. Gold miners were nothing if not resilient and optimistic. It was the reason why they were in the middle of nowhere scratching around in the dirt.
Vinson snapped a dry twig and threw it toward the treeline. “I’ve got bills to pay,” he said to himself. “A lot of bills.”
Draper looked at him, waiting for another comment, but none came. They all had bills to pay, not just Vinson. Some of them stood to lose everything if this didn’t come off. And he wasn’t just talking about dollars. There was dignity and sanity at stake. The others tried to hide their disappointment, including Meg, but Vinson let it shine through. He turned his head and looked at Draper. Their eyes locked for a moment before Vinson looked away. It was clear he wanted to say something else but he had the good sense to know the timing was wrong.
A deafening crack sounded across the camp. It was like gunfire. The noise echoed across the valley.
> “What was that?” Puckett was the first off his chair, jumping down the steps and around the side of the saloon.
Draper and the others followed up behind. When they found Puckett he was staring across the camp, past the creek road to the trees on the far side of the bend in the river. He was pointing.
“Look at that!”
The trees were swaying from side to side in a rapid procession. It was like a storm was passing through that strip of land, bending the trees in its wake, coming toward the camp. Toward them.
They all watched the spectacle, transfixed by the power. Some of those trees were a hundred feet tall with trunks wider than Mercer’s arm span, yet they were being pushed around like saplings.
“Tornado?” Puckett asked.
“Like none I’ve ever seen,” Mercer answered.
Apart from the ear-splitting noise of limbs being twisted, the air was still. There was no breeze and no rain. Nothing except for the splintering of wood. And yet something was carried in the air and into their nostrils. Something sour. Something bad, rotten.
And why did Draper feel like it wasn’t just wood that was being splintered? Why was he thinking about bones? About the cracking of bones.
“Should we move away?” Meg took a step back. “It’s coming this way and if it’s doing that to those trees then I don’t want to get in its path.”
Draper looked at her and then at Vinson who was already jogging toward his camper.
“Good idea.” He turned back to Puckett. “Come on.” Quite how much protection their wooden saloon would provide was debatable but it was better than Vinson’s camper.
Flynn rubbed his mustache and raised his eyebrows. “That’s a new one on me.”
Before Puckett could turn, a piercing scream rode on the still air toward them. It was followed by a terrible grinding wail. Draper covered his ears but it was useless in stopping the wall of sound. The noise was industrial somehow, like something you might expect to hear in a foundry. Like the huge and heavy door of a furnace being eased open. Its scorched hinges grating, fighting against the heat. Bone crushing. That’s what it came back to. Bones being burned. A terrible vision swam across his mind. Bodies, thousands and thousands of them being burned. Every one of them screaming and crying out. Over and over again. Nausea swept over him. The stench was repellent.
He saw Mercer’s eyes widen and his mouth open, but above the hellish cacophony he could hear nothing.
And then it stopped. The trees stopped moving, the branches stopped splitting and there was silence. Complete and utter silence. The birds had fled.
Puckett was still at the front and he turned to face them. “What was...? Did you see...?”
Flynn jumped in. “It was a tree coming down. Roots and all. That’s all it was. That’s all.”
“But... did you see...” Puckett left his sentence unfinished. He turned toward the trees again. “Down near the wash-plant...”
“What’s got into you?” Flynn grabbed Puckett’s shoulder. “Come on, you didn’t finish that beer. You stink, by the way. When did you last take a shower?”
Puckett turned without resistance. He opened and closed his mouth several times without uttering a sound as Flynn led him away. They were like father and son.
Meg looked at Draper. For a moment he thought he saw the need for reassurance in her expression. But then it was gone the next instant and she followed Puckett and Flynn back to the porch.
“Freaky.” Mercer was still staring down toward the wash-plant and the trees beyond.
“Haven’t you ever heard a tree falling down before?”
“I have.” He looked at Draper. “But can you see any felled trees over there?” He patted Draper on the shoulder and walked away. “Come on, let’s finish that beer.”
Draper scanned the treeline on both sides of the creek. It was the same as it had always been, a solid mass of black pine. Not one felled tree.
13
In the run up to Tom Briggs cutting Paul Rogers’s head off with a hunting knife, there had been no warning. No blossoming black clouds on the horizon to indicate Briggs’s state of mind. The dispute between the two men had been, as far as Draper knew, resolved. They would never be best buddies but they would be able to work together without trying to kill one another. Or so he thought.
What he didn’t know, what Paul Rogers and later Ben Jones didn’t know, was that Tom Briggs held onto resentment like it was a nugget of gold. He polished it, he examined it and he felt the power of it flow through his veins.
He waited nearly six weeks after the game of poker to release the emotion. By then he’d convinced his comrade Neil Evans that Rogers and Jones were ripping them off. That Draper himself was siphoning off the gold and keeping it for himself. None of it was true but that’s what Briggs told Evans and he swallowed the lot. Evans was young, naive and gullible. Easy pickings for a man like Tom Briggs.
Killing Rogers and Evans was an act that Briggs had given a lot of thought to. He could have shot them both with his own Beretta. That was the easy option but it wasn’t the right one for Briggs. He wanted to feel their blood dripping off his flesh. He wanted to taste the last of their spurting life-force and drink it down. The resentment needed feeding and blood was the only way to sate it.
Killing them was premeditated. It had been meditated upon for the last six weeks. He was ready for it. He was hungry for the blood.
When Draper shot Briggs twice in the head, it wasn’t an act he had never considered before. Not that morning, not the day before, not in the whole of his life had he ever thought what it would feel like to kill someone… to kill Tom Briggs and then later Neil Evans. He was unprepared for what it would do to him.
He must have stood there for a minute, pointing the Beretta at where Tom Briggs’s head was just a minute earlier. The space he vacated seemed enormous, far larger than Briggs had actually been. It seemed like the air around his body had exploded sideways, stretching and bending when the bullets struck home.
Briggs lay on the rocks beside Paul Rogers and Ben Jones. Their blood mingled and ran into the creek. All differences aside. Three dead men.
When he finally lowered the gun, and when the sound of Briggs’s teeth skidding across the rocks had gone, he heard men shouting. He heard Ray Mercer telling someone to “Put the damn gun down!”
The world came together again at that moment. The void where Briggs had stood with his bloody knife was filled again with life. With oxygen. Draper was able to move. He was able to sprint back toward the camp and forget momentarily that the three dead men were there. Momentarily.
When he reached the camp, he saw Mercer crouching in the dirt with a streak of blood running from his forehead down his cheek and into his beard.
“Put the gun down, Neil. There’s no need for any of this.”
Evans leveled the gun at Draper. “That bastard is ripping us off, man. Can’t you see that? He’s ripping us off. All of us.”
He moved the gun in a circle pointing at the others. Jenkins, Fletcher, Priest, Killian and Capewell, all staring at Evans.
“What the fuck is this all about, Neil? What are you doing?” Draper shouted.
Evans ignored him and looked over Draper’s shoulder. “Where is he? Where’s Briggs?”
“Down there,” Draper replied without thinking. Without lying. “He’s down there by the creek.”
“He knows,” started Evans. “He knows that this bastard is taking our gold. He’s got proof. I’ve seen it myself.”
Draper felt the eyes of the men fall on him. “Neil, that’s crazy. You know me. We’ve worked together for years. I’ve never...”
“You’re lying!” Evans was waving the gun around like it was a toy. Sweat flew from his hair and glittered like diamonds in the air. “He’s lying.”
Mercer stood up. Draper knew the only way Evans would have been able to knock Mercer down was with a cheap shot.
It was then Draper felt his arm rising. The Beretta coming with
it. “Put it down, Neil.”
“You’ve killed him, haven’t you? You’ve killed Briggs.”
Draper didn’t react. He didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t thought about what he’d just done. He couldn’t. Not yet.
His arm leveled off until it was pointing directly at Evans. He felt like an automaton. He’d missed the signs, whatever they were, and Briggs had killed two men. He wasn’t going to let Evans kill anyone.
“Neil, you can look in my camper, you can search me and you can search the office. You can look wherever you want. I’m not hiding anything. Just put the gun down and you can look for yourself.”
Evans scrutinized him for a second. “You’ve already cashed it in. That’s what Briggs told me. There isn’t any evidence. You, Rogers and Jones have got rich off of all our hard work.”
“Man, this is ridiculous,” Mercer took a step forward. “You’ve got it all wrong, Neil. Whatever Briggs said to you was bullshit.”
Evans turned quickly and cocked the hammer. “Stop right there, Ray. You’re probably in on it too. You all are.” He waved the gun in a circle again. Any time now, thought Draper. Any time now, Neil Evans is going to start murdering people.
That was when Draper pulled the trigger. The decision was made and he acted on it immediately. The first round hit the shed just to the right of Evans’s body. As he pulled the trigger again, he was aware that Evans was lowering his arm. Lowering the gun. Pointing it at the floor. Dropping it?
The second shot hit Evans in his chest. A crimson patch bloomed across his shirt. The bullet had made a mess of his heart. He was dead even as his eyes widened with the shock. Even as the gun fell from his hand and thudded into the dirt, he was dead.
In the few seconds that followed, nobody moved. Nobody except Neil Evans, at least. He slithered down the shed leaving a bloody skid-mark in the wood. Then one by one the men turned to look at Draper, at the man who had fired the gun and killed Neil Evans. None of them knew about Tom Briggs at that point, that knowledge would come later. At the same time as the questions started. The hushed questions and the sly comments.