To Hell and Beyond

by Mark Henry

  “Not Greek, oh, wise student of learned whores. Latin. Sanguis frigitis literally means cold blood—more figuratively, it means steady under pressure—calm in the face of danger. Suits the captain right to the core.”

  Trap stood in the stirrups to stretch his back. “Can’t argue there.”

  “Hell,” Clay snorted. “After what I’ve seen in the last three days, I guess it suits you two as much as him. Gougin’ folks’ eyes out and loppin’ their heads off at the gallop . . . I reckon I’m the only one that gets shook up over anything anymore.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Trap said. “You seemed mighty calm making a three-hundred-yard shot to save the captain and his men from that scalp-hunter rifleman.”

  “Four hundred and thirty,” Clay corrected with a wink. “I stepped it off.”

  “Well, there you go then.” Webber raised his fist high in the air, as if in a toast. “I hereby declare the motto of the Scout Trackers to be Sanguis Frigitis.”

  “Sanguis Frigitis,” Trap and Clay repeated, nodding their heads.

  “Has a nice ring to it,” Roman said without turning around. The other men jumped when they realized he’d been listening. “Cold Blood. I’m afraid we’ll need it.”

  CHAPTER 34

  When she moved, she threw up, and throwing up made her move. Beads of sweat covered her forehead, pasting ringlets of black hair against pallid skin. Her body burned with fever, shivers sending bolts of pain down her shoulder and through her right arm. A normally petite hand throbbed purple and yellow at twice its normal size.

  The filthy, merciless men had dragged her from her bed in the dead of night and thrown her to the ground in her nightgown. Horses squealed and stomped amid acrid smoke and the clap of gunfire. Riders cursed and shouted at each other in the darkness. She’d tried to crawl away in the confusion, but a horse had stepped on her hand.

  The pain had been unbearable. She heard the bones crunch between hoof and rock. Nausea overwhelmed her before unconsciousness silenced her choking screams.

  Three days in this sandstone hell had pressed every tear out of her bloodshot eyes. Grit and grime covered every inch of her body, grating and inflaming her pink skin until even a light breeze brought on dizzying waves of agony.

  Red sand caked her face where it had pressed against the ground without benefit of a blanket or pillow. Her lavender gown, once a sight to behold, made in Mexico City from the finest cotton, was now reduced to filthy rags. It did little to protect her from the bone-numbing chill at night, and even less to cover her bruised nakedness.

  Vile men who cared nothing for her survival squatted and knelt in tiny groups around a crackling cedar fire under the deep rock overhang. The sight of them racked her slight body with sickening panic that made her teeth ache. The things they’d said, the things they’d done to poor Charlie before they finally cut off his head—his pitiful wails still tore at her ears and haunted her fitful dreams. Their gruff voices echoed inside the rock tomb, bouncing around in her head until she thought it might explode.

  The flames cast huge shadows along the back of the shallow cave, dancing and crackling with the night wind. Orange sparks rose and swirled like ghostly spirits on the air, stark against the blackness beyond the rocks.

  Locked in a game of dice, the men drank and cursed and sometimes hit each other, but they seldom wasted a glance on the pitiful Mexican girl in the corner.

  A half-cooked joint of antelope meat lay covered with flies on a greasy rock beside her. She’d eaten a few bites out of desperation earlier that day, but vomited them back up again a few moments later.

  She knew she should eat something to keep her strength up, but her stomach churned and boiled every time she looked at the foul thing. Her lips were dry and split from lack of water and purple from slaps and rough taunts.

  “Damn every last one of you, you lousy sons of bitches,” the man called Jack Straw shouted as he rose from the main game of dice across the flickering chamber. He shook a bottle of liquor at the others. “I ain’t gonna hunker here and get cheated by your sorry hides.” His stooped shoulders heaved with anger. His craggy face appeared to twitch in the orange firelight. The big Indian slid a huge knife half out of the beaded sheath stuck in his belt. He glared through cruel eyes that shut Straw up as surely as a cold slap in the face.

  The girl held her breath. They fought like this all the time, especially in the evening. She’d never seen people argue and scream at each other so violently. Someone would certainly die before long. In the beginning, she was afraid it would be her. Very soon, she knew, she would welcome the thought of it.

  Straw skulked to the rear of the cave with a bottle in his hand. Back to the wall, he slid to the sandy floor, shoulders slouched in defeat. His dirty blond head hung between his knees.

  When he sat up to take a drink, he caught her looking at him. She held her breath and turned away, but it was too late.

  “What the hell are you gawkin’ at, Miss Purebred?” Whiskey ran around the mouth of the bottle as he took a pull and dribbled down on his torn shirt. “You ain’t never seen a man drunk before?”

  She clenched her eyes shut. It did no good to talk to these men. She pressed her face against the sand, hoping against hope that Straw would keep drinking and leave her alone.

  She smelled the fetid stench of his body and the sour odor of cheap whiskey before she opened her eyes. The coarse weave of his homespun shirt brushed against her bare shoulder. She flinched, wishing herself deeper into the sand.

  “Here you go, Little Highness,” Straw slurred, shaking the bottle in her face. His knee bumped her broken hand, and she bit her lip to keep from crying out. Her stomach roiled from the pain and the man’s awful smell.

  “Have a little drink, Honey Pot. It’ll loosen you up.”

  Clenching her eyes shut, she shook her head and turned away. Her shoulders trembled with fright.

  Straw clawed at her shoulder and gave it a brutal yank. “I said have a drink, damn you.” He hauled her up by her arm. She moved with him to keep from causing any more pain to her broken hand. His face was only inches from hers. Yellow teeth gleamed dully in the shadows. She winced at his rancid breath, dumb and frozen with fear.

  He grabbed her by the face and squeezed until tears poured from her eyes. He slurred through clenched teeth, “Just because them bastards cheat me don’t give you the right to give me no sass.” He rubbed his greasy forehead against hers as he spoke. “I don’t give a damn about the money anymore. I can’t spend another minute in this cave with your sweetness a-waftin’ up to my old nose just a few feet away. I reckon I’ll take my cut of you now.”

  The other men laughed at their new game of dice. Someone was losing badly, and now that Straw was gone, the group had homed in on him.

  Straw was oblivious. He shoved her head tight against the rock wall, pressing her jaw with his thumb and forefinger until he forced her mouth open. She tried to scream, but could only manage a moaning gurgle.

  “Come on, take a little swig.” Straw leered. “You’re gonna need it.”

  He forced the heavy whiskey bottle through dry, cracked lips. She tasted the saltiness of her own blood an instant before glass hit her teeth with a sickening thud. She gagged as the searing liquid poured against her throat and spewed down her chest.

  The pain was excruciating, but she summoned enough strength to struggle, flailing against her attacker with both hands. She felt one of her front teeth snap, and retched as he jammed the bottle deeper against the back of her throat.

  Suddenly, Straw stopped. The whiskey bottle fell away and splashed harmlessly to the sand. The panting girl shielded her face with her good hand and braced herself for another attack. When none came, she opened her eyes.

  Straw knelt above her, his back arched in agony, his mouth open in a noiseless cry. The big Indian stood behind him, one hand on the hilt of the huge knife that was buried in Straw’s spine, the other gripping a fistful of greasy hair.

 
Straw dropped the bottle and reached over his shoulder with both hands, clawing in vain at his back. His shoulders twitched when the Indian jerked out the knife and stabbed him again and again.

  The girl collapsed against the ground and watched in detached silence as Straw’s glowing red eyes rolled back in his head. Blood poured out of him, drenching the sand. He lay at her feet, twitching and taking a long time to die.

  CHAPTER 35

  “Something’s been eatin’ at me, Webber,” Clay confided as the group rode along three abreast. Roman was well in the lead. It was early afternoon on the second day out of Camp Apache. The first night had been chilly, but the sun now hung in a cloudless sky and the weather had warmed considerably.

  Trap and Webber rode on without speaking. Both knew they didn’t need to say anything to prod Clay into explaining what he meant.

  “It’s something the colonel said back there.” The Texan looked at Johannes. “Webber, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re one of the smartest men I ever met when it comes to book learnin’. If you don’t mind my asking, how come you never did apply to be an officer?”

  The three rode on in silence for quite some time with no sound but the heavy thud of hooves on rock and the lumbering groan of the horses.

  “Plato,” Webber said, looking ahead. “Among others.”

  Clay gave a swaggering laugh. “I figured you’d say something about the Greeks. Plato told you not to be an officer?”

  Johannes shrugged, not upset from the question, but deadly serious. “Plato believed philosophers should be kings and all kings should be philosophers. He also said a man should do what he was born to do—stay in his own class.”

  “Well,” Clay said. “I ain’t sayin’ you should be a king, but your philosophizin’ ought to at least qualify you for lieutenant.”

  “Kings,” Johannes pointed out, “and other powerful men tend to use their power to further their own selfish goals. They have a way of becoming corrupted.”

  Clay chewed on that for a while. Trap watched the captain riding out ahead of them. Now there was a man with philosophy and power—and he seemed virtually incorruptible.

  “I think you’d make a good enough officer, even with the power it brings.” Clay gave a sincere nod as if he was passing judgment.

  “My friend,” Johannes said, “that just proves how little you know about me.”

  The wind shifted and sent Clay’s mind drifting another direction before he could think of a comeback. He stood in the saddle and sniffed the air. “Reminds me of a pig roast.” He turned to Trap, who rode beside him, eyes on the ground looking for sign. “A pig roast and burnt rope. Do you smell what I’m smellin’?”

  Trap looked up, took a moment to inhale the dry desert air, and nodded. The smell of cooked meat did hang on the faint wind. He chided himself for not noticing it before Madsen. His mother had often warned him about depending too much on one sense and forgetting the others. Humans had a way of relying only on their eyes while their ears and nose went virtually unused. The little tracker reined in his horse and drew another lungful of air. Something else mixed with the familiar smell—just a whiff. It wasn’t rope—it was hair.

  Roman and his men saw the buzzards ten minutes later. Some circled lazily overhead, dark specks against a blinding blue; others perched on the gnarled branches of a dead mesquite in the wavy, heated light of midday. The raucous coughing of crows grated the air shortly after. A sprawling stand of prickly pear cactus hid whatever produced the smell from view, but it was causing quite a fight among the scavenger community.

  A heavy sense of doom permeated the air as the men neared the cactus. The smell grew stronger and pinched at Trap’s nose. He knew what it was. They all did.

  Five turkey buzzards tried to lift off from the nearest of two bodies as the riders approached on snorting horses. Two of the birds found they couldn’t fly with their bellies full of rancid meat, and regurgitated it up in a splattering slurry as they winged away. Trap shot a glance at Clay, who was highly likely to throw up at the sight of such a thing. For all his braggadocio, the Texan had a tendency toward a weak stomach. Luckily, he was busy scanning the horizon for trouble and missed the buzzards’ display.

  “My Lord,” Clay said when he finally let his eyes come to rest on the bloated bodies. His voice was shallow. “My poor eyes keep seein’ things they don’t want to see.”

  Roman dismounted and looped the bay’s reins around the dead mesquite. The buzzards, crows, and a handful of magpies winged off to wait their respective turns after the interloping men moved on. There was a hierarchy among the birds, and they ate in ascending order of their looks.

  “O’Shannon,” the captain whispered. Trap would come to know that Roman generally spoke quietly around the dead. “Take a look around the bodies and see if you can get an idea of what happened here.” He turned to Webber and Madsen, who both stood wide-eyed, entranced at the two naked bodies staked to the ground in front of them. “Men! Snap out of it and secure your horses. Get your rifles and keep a weather eye on those hills. I wouldn’t put it past an Apache to use a massacre like this as bait to catch us unawares.”

  That bit of information was enough to jog Clay out of his stupor. He had Clarice out glinting in the sun in a matter of moments. Webber stood with his Winchester, facing the hills in the opposite direction.

  Trap surveyed the grisly scene. Two men, it was impossible to tell how old they were, lay spread-eagle, feet pointing in opposite directions on the rocky ground. Stout leather cord and wooden pegs kept them there. The remains of a fire blacked the earth between what was left of their swollen heads.

  Death had not come quickly for the poor souls. Trap could make out the square-toed tracks of Apache moccasins where they had fed the fire a bit at a time, keeping it just large enough to cause excruciating pain without bringing an end to the doomed men’s suffering. Trap wondered how long they’d screamed while the flames singed their hair, blistered the tender skin, and finally boiled their brains.

  He had to look at them like tracks to keep from getting sick. If he considered them as human beings, his stomach began to rebel. He thought of them as nothing more than sign with a story to tell, and quelled his unruly gut.

  The buzzards had started with the cooked parts, and the men stared up at nothing with swollen, eyeless skulls. The sun had taken its toll on the lower half of the bodies, and though the fire had not cooked them, they were bloated and dark.

  After he studied the area around the bodies, Trap worked out in ever-growing circles, checking behind every rock and shrub within a fifty-yard circle.

  “They been here a while,” he said when he was satisfied he had the complete story and came back to the group. “A day or two at least.” He stuck his hand in the coals. There was no heat left, even a few inches down. They were as dead as the men they had killed.

  “Apache?” Webber shouted from his position a few yards away.

  “Looks that way.” Roman nodded, slapping his leather gloves against an open hand.

  “Victorio’s band?” Webber scanned the hills to the east. There was no fear in his voice. He was merely thinking out loud.

  Trap stood and walked toward his horse to put some distance between himself and the mutilated bodies. “There are too many hoofprints to count, Captain. Most are unshod. The whole place is covered with moccasin tracks. One set is smaller like those of a woman. It could be Victorio and his sister, Lozan. She relieved herself behind that square stone there.” He pointed with an open hand.

  Webber took a break from his vigil and cast a sidelong glance over his shoulder. “You can tell it was a woman by looking at where she . . .”

  Trap shrugged. His mother had been blunt and open about such things as part of his tracking education. Talk of sex bothered him, but this was different; bodily functions were sign and deserved study. Trap was finding himself a teacher more and more each day.

  “A female is generally wary of being discovered in such a deli
cate position,” he pointed out calmly, as if he was instructing a class. “They will look over their shoulder, this way, then that way, back and forth several times during the process.” O’Shannon mimicked the motion himself, letting his entire body sway with the movement. “Whatever they leave behind, liquid or solid, is usually in a little crescent shape instead of a circle.”

  Webber smirked. “Well, sir, that’s about as much as I need to know about that.” He resumed his guard duties, shaking his head.

  Clay giggled, then nodded slowly to himself, obviously picturing the whole thing in his mind. “Victorio and Lozan it is.”

  “Could be,” Roman mused. “But we have other business.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that.” Clay gave an exasperated sigh. “I got no real desire to go up against an army of Apache who would roast what little brain I got just to get their daily entertainment.”

  “Let’s get some dirt pushed up over the bodies,” Roman said, walking to his horse for a hand shovel. They’d brought with them two of the Rice-Chillingsworth trowel-style bayonets the Army had experimented with. Roman wouldn’t allow them on the end of a rifle, said it was too much temptation to stick the muzzle in the dirt, but he did find them useful as digging tools and easy to pack on such a mission where space was at a premium.

  “Poor souls deserve a decent burial, whoever they are.” Never one to leave the distasteful work solely to his men, Roman started for the bodies with his trowel. Trap joined him while the other two stood watch. Sweat dripped off both men by the time they had a sizable pile of dirt and rock piled over the bodies.

  Trap knew it might keep the birds away for a while, but would never discourage scavengers like wolves or coyotes. He reckoned that out in the desert like this, decent folks like Captain Roman buried the dead so they could look at something neat and tidy as they rode away. If vermin and turkey buzzards dragged the bones out later, at least a man could know things were in order when he left. Burial was a luxury on the wide-open plain: peace of mind more for the living than for the uncaring dead.