Led to the Slaughter

by Duncan McGeary

  I will watch them from a distance. I will try to protect them.

  But I am no longer one of them.

  CHAPTER 28

  Diary of Charles Stanton, undated entry

  I have survived, though the night I left the others, I was certain I would perish. I dug a hole in a snowbank and nestled into the little cave I had made. It seemed a strange thing to do, but almost immediately, I felt relief from the frigid winds. The snow was like a blanket draped around me. A blizzard was building, so I stayed where I was. The next morning, I was surprised to find myself warmer than I have been since this desolate winter began.

  The hunger has once again faded away. It is as if my body understands that it shall never again be granted food. This, my body, is all the fuel I have, or will ever have.

  I’m just out of sight of the others, and I can hear them clearly. The soft sounds carry far under the glowering sky––nightmare voices devoid of humanity, discussing the unthinkable. I imagine that the doomed souls of hell talk in such a way.

  They spoke calmly of what parts of the bodies to cut away next. They organized the flesh in such a way that they could distinguish its origins, so that no one need consume his own relatives, as if it were acceptable to eat friends but not family. I could scarcely believe what I was hearing.

  I overheard William Eddy refuse to eat the flesh, and ascertained that Luis and Salvador had likewise turned away in disgust. Later that day, as the blizzard grew, I heard a whispered discussion among the survivors about whether they should kill the Indians. In the evening, I stole to the edge of the camp and caught the attention of my former companions. I felt responsible for them. They followed me to this desolate end. Luis and Salvador turned to look at me with stoic faces. I warned them of the others’ intentions. Later that night, they slipped away into the darkness.

  I thought about following them or asking them to join me, but I thought better of it, deeming it best for them to get away completely, to use whatever skills they possessed to survive and rejoin their own kind. I let them go. No one was supposed to know I was there. I wanted to remain unseen, unnoticed, a guardian from a distance. I crept away from the camp, back to my snow cave. I could hear the sounds of the Things that hunt us in the woods all around us.

  The group managed to get a fire going, and as they began to cook the human flesh, I gagged at the smell––not because it was foul, but because it was so enticing. I breathed through my mouth, trying not to take it in, but well into the night, when the fires had long since burned low, the smell of the flesh still coated my nostrils and throat.

  In the morning, I changed my mind and decided to follow after Luis and Salvador. I don’t know if I planned to join them in trying to escape or to plead with them to help me save the others.

  I’m not certain that I wanted to save the others.

  At first their tracks led directly west, but soon they started meandering, and I realized they had become lost. Luis and Salvador had left in a hurry, without the tools they needed to start a fire, without sufficient clothing. This was true of myself as well, of course, but I was possessed of an unusual energy, as if knowing that my end was near had given me permission to expend all my life’s spirit in a few days.

  I saw depressions where one or the other of them had fallen, and their footprints grew ever closer together, as if they were merely shuffling forward. I feared what I would find.

  I was not the first to find them. They were in a clearing, leaning against a fallen log, their heads nearly touching. They were conscious––their eyes were moving––but they were covered with a crust of frozen snow and clearly hadn’t moved in hours.

  I didn’t see fear in their eyes, only acceptance of their fate. They were at peace, for they knew they had tried to do right.

  Standing over them was Bill Foster, his rifle cradled in his arms. He was still, his chin on his chest as if he was deep in thought, contemplating the condition of the Indians.

  I raised my rifle, ready to fire if he should start to turn into a beast. Virginia had warned me that Foster had been bitten, so I had been expecting this.

  “I’m sorry,” I heard him say. He pointed his rifle at Luis’s face and fired. The Indian’s head all but disappeared, chunks flying through the air and splattering against tree trunks.

  Salvador gave a low groan. I should have fired at Foster then, but I was so stunned by this unexpected turn of events that he had plenty of time to pull his pistol and shoot Salvador in the chest.

  I ran into the clearing. Foster was leaning down, staring into Salvador’s eyes as he died, but straightened up when he saw me coming. I didn’t see guilt in his face, merely a faint surprise that I was there, and he even began to offer a welcoming smile before he noticed my expression.

  “What have you done, you bastard?” I cried. I’d been horrified by my companions’ willingness to eat their dead fellows, but until then, none of us had murdered another.

  “They’re just savages,” Foster said calmly. “They were dying anyway. I did them a favor.”

  I almost shot him then. Perhaps I should have.

  He ignored me, got down on his knees, and pulled out his knife. He turned Salvador over and cut away his leggings, took a section of thigh and began to hack it off.

  Again he shocked me, because instead of taking the meat back to the others or starting a fire, he took a handful of the raw flesh and began to eat it. He gagged a few times but kept swallowing. As I watched, he began to Turn.

  I backed away in horror. I heard the sounds of bones shifting and cracking, the slithering of flesh as it moved to different parts of the man’s body and assumed different proportions, the ripping of clothing as muscles expanded. Foster pulled off his clothes as quickly as he could, revealing long black fur.

  Backing away, I stumbled over a log and fell over backward. My rifle discharged uselessly into the sky. I heard growling above me, then something landed roughly on my legs. I looked up into the face of a werewolf.

  Its fangs were coated in blood, and unlike the other werewolves I’d seen, there appeared to be no human intelligence in those red eyes. This was an animal, nothing more. I felt its claws in my shoulders and thighs, digging into me with the violence of its snarling. It lowered its muzzle and I pushed desperately at its neck, but it continued to press down on me as if it couldn’t even feel my resistance. It licked my neck, and then I felt its teeth start to sink into my flesh.

  Suddenly, it stiffened. Confusion filled its eyes, and it cocked its head as if perplexed. As I watched, the creature began to turn back into the man I knew as William Foster.

  As soon as Foster realized he was crouching over me, he sprang up, startled. He looked down at his torn, discarded clothing and shivered, then began to put the clothes back on. As he did so, he noticed that his hands were covered with blood. He touched his face, his mouth, and pulled away a strip of flesh caught in his teeth and held it out in front of him in bafflement. He tossed it away in disgust. Then he saw the bodies of Luis and Salvador, and he froze in place as the import of what he was seeing sank in.

  “What happened here?” he asked.

  “You started to turn into a wo––”

  “No!” he shouted, drowning out my words.

  I tried again. “You were becoming a crea––”

  “I don’t want to hear it!” he cried. He stared at the two dead Indians, then turned away. I saw him trying to compose himself. “I found them this way,” he said.

  He looked at me defiantly, as if daring me to contradict him.

  I saw no point in doing so. I shrugged, casually picked up my rifle, and began to load it. I wasn’t yet sure what I was going to do, but reckoned it was best to be prepared.

  Foster didn’t look concerned by my reloading. It was as if, as far as he was concerned, nothing that had happened had really happened. He turned stiffly and walked away, back toward the others. By the time I had finished reloading, he was out of sight. I decided not to pursue him.

&n
bsp; I stood over the bodies of Luis and Salvador and wept. For the first time since our troubles began, I wept. Yes, I wept bitterly for a couple of savages: savages who had volunteered to help strangers––white men––and had been murdered for their kindness.

  I felt something trickling down my neck and touched the place where I’d been bitten. He’d barely sunk his teeth into me before he changed back, but they’d gone deep enough to make me bleed.

  I shuddered. So far, everyone I have witnessed get bitten by one of these creatures has turned into a Monster. I looked at the blood on my hand and felt my heart sink, but I shook off my dismay. I never expected to survive this trip anyway; now I’ve decided to make certain that I won’t.

  I wished I could bury my friends, or at least cover them, but I could barely move and didn’t dare expend the energy. With a last muttered apology, I headed back to my shelter. I hadn’t gone more than a dozen yards when I sensed something behind me.

  I turned to see five of the creatures approaching the dead Indians with their noses to the ground, sniffing. A couple of them glanced my way, unconcerned, then dismissed me from their attention.

  I raised the rifle, then lowered it. At best, I could kill one of them before the rest fell upon me. They began to tear into Luis and Salvador, growling and snapping. The huge male who led them went first, and when he’d torn off enough flesh to drag away, the others started worrying the bodies, tearing off limbs and ripping open stomachs to get at the still-warm entrails.

  I backed away, foot by foot, and finally, when I was out of sight of the carnage, I turned and ran.

  CHAPTER 29

  Diary of James Reed, San Jose, California, December 26, 1846

  I shunned all celebrations at Christmas. Indeed, I fasted in sympathy with the poor souls stuck in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada.

  The people of San Jose have tried to help me, petitioning the military to mount an expedition. This appeal received little response, so I sent out a call to civilians. Only three men responded, and though some supplies have been donated, I know it will not be enough. I will have to wait until this conflict is decided. The roads have been made impassable by the tide of refugees fleeing local uprisings.

  I have bowed to the inevitable and accepted my commission as an officer. As commander of the volunteers, I have been given the cast-off uniform of one of Fremont’s lieutenants. I feel ridiculous, as if I am an imposter: even in the Black Hawk War, in the midst of real danger, on real battlefields, my uniform always felt like a costume. But I salute my superiors and follow orders. What’s more, I give orders and they are followed.

  It is all real enough.

  The native Mexicans clearly don’t want to fight us. They don’t seem to care who claims sovereignty over this beautiful land, far-off Mexico City or far-off Washington; they certainly don’t want to die over it.

  Fremont, on the other hand, is itching for a fight, so we play soldier while my family starves in the snows. I gave my word that if Fremont helped me in my rescue attempt, I would stay in his service until the conflict is resolved. I didn’t foresee that the conflict might never manifest to be resolved.

  Even if I wished to break my word, all available resources have been requisitioned and all able-bodied men have been drafted. I have made some contacts among the soldiers that I hope will prove useful when this is all over.

  Fremont endlessly drills his regulars as well as the volunteers, but the more he drills, the more frustrated he becomes as he realizes that the civilians are never going to take to military life.

  I am not sleeping, which only gives my mind more time to obsess over what might be happening to my family. If the situation here is not resolved soon, I will desert, and even if it means joining my family only to share their doom, I will find them. I cannot let them believe I have abandoned them.

  January 5, 1847

  The battle––such as it was––is over. For us, that means the Mexican-American War is over. The Battle of Santa Clara, as it is being called in the dispatches, was little more than a skirmish.

  The forces facing us were more than sufficient to defeat us on their own, and they had even more resources they could have called upon, but they chose not to fight. Fremont’s belligerence is winning battles before they begin, battles whose outcome would have been in doubt if they were actually fought.

  All had surrendered to us but one Mexican official, who unexpectedly decided to kidnap six sailors from the sloop USS Warren while they were on shore requisitioning supplies. I suspect the sailors may have been trying to take the supplies without paying. The Californios already don’t trust us because of our constant invasion of their ranchos, and what may have been a minor incident turned into a crisis. The Army wanted a fight and was looking for any excuse to start one, and this was their excuse.

  I was in the San Jose area when the skirmish started and immediately reported for duty to the local commander, a captain of artillery named Marston. Once again, I’d been trying to organize a relief party. Every available white man was caught up in the coming conflict, so I’d decided to search out Californios who might be willing to help me, for money or for charity. The Mexicans refused to even talk to me, however.

  I was certain there would be no battle. No one had the stomach for it. I was therefore astonished to be called into the captain’s tent and told that the volunteer troops would be given the honor of leading the charge. I was surprised by that, because I was certain the regular Army would want to take credit for our victory, but then I realized that they would take credit in any case, and no doubt thought that if they could win the battle without any regulars being killed, so much the better.

  “Have you sent a delegation to negotiate?” I asked.

  “I will not negotiate with hostage takers,” Marston declared. “You are to march to the walls of the town and lead the charge. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, giving him my best salute.

  We had scarcely left the camp before I ordered the column to halt. I took aside the lieutenant who had been assigned to me as liaison to the regulars.

  “Woodworth, we aren’t going to be charging a fixed position,” I told him. “That’s suicide. We will approach under cover, and when given the signal, we will fire upon the walls. Then we will ask for negotiations.”

  “Those aren’t our orders, sir.” The young fellow needed to be convinced, but I could see he was already wavering.

  I grabbed him by his sleeve and stared earnestly into his face. “I’ve seen what happens when men charge across an open field at an entrenched enemy. Please do as I ask.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, without further hesitation.

  We crept through a mustard field, the high stalks of the plants concealing our approach. When we neared the open area between the field and the walls, a sentry saw us and fired upon us. Woodworth and I were leading the way, and I immediately pulled him to the ground. As I did so, a bullet hit him in the shoulder.

  He looked down, stunned, and grasped my arm. “That would have hit me in the heart!” he exclaimed.

  My men returned fire, and for a short time, we exchanged volleys with the enemy. Nobody appeared to be hitting anyone, however.

  Even with the bullets flying, even with Woodworth bleeding beside me, it still felt like playing soldier to me. I could see the women of the town watching from atop the flat roofs of the haciendas. We crawled toward the walls, firing as we went.

  We were ready to charge the last few feet when our foes raised a white flag. The battle was over.

  Two of my men had been wounded. Four of the enemy had been killed.

  Later, underneath an old oak tree, a temporary armistice was signed. We agreed that we would not take the Californios’ property, and in return, our men were released––and just like that, the war was done.

  #

  I walked away, taking off my too-hot coat, though it was against regulations to do so. I swore I would never again fight my fellow man or wear anyo
ne’s uniform.

  Outside the town walls, an elderly Californio approached me. “Sir, may I have a word with you?”

  “What is it?”

  “I asked your captain, but he was rather rude,” he said in heavily accented English. He looked at my ill-fitting officer’s uniform dubiously. “I have a small inquiry. Are you a gentleman of means? Would you be interested in buying some land?”

  “I would be very interested in seeing it,” I replied.

  It may seem strange, but I am still trying to think of what our future will be in this land. With God’s grace, my family will join me soon, and it would be a fine thing to have a home already established.

  The man, whose name was Sanchez, took me to his home that night and fed me a feast, and even agreed to supply mules and food for my rescue expedition. In return, I gave him most of the money I still had in credit with Sutter.

  “Why do you sell your land so cheaply?” I asked him.

  “I do not believe in the assurances of the Americanos that they will allow us to keep our land,” he replied. “Conquerors always say that. But they are conquerors, and sooner or later, they will remember it. I would rather sell now for less than lose it all later.”

  A wise man, I thought. I drank to this sentiment, which I thought was no doubt true.

  Now all that is needed is for the Mexican garrison south of us to sign a more permanent truce, and I will finally be able mount an expedition to retrieve my family.

  February 15, 1847

  At last! I have assembled a party composed of men familiar with the wilderness, secured enough supplies to feed all whom we will find, and––most importantly––have the determination to see the rescue through, no matter the difficulties. The military has pitched in, grateful for my service. I made an effort to get to know my men and to convince them of my desperation. Woodworth has been promoted to captain and has asked to lead the party. I’m more than happy to let him take the lead if it will bring more help. The people of this beautiful land have finally responded with all their hearts.