Taking up the rear as before was Taft, the pots and pans clanging in the chuckwain as we rolled forward.
Our wheels turned, ours wains rocked, our boots stepped across the ancient gravel, and we all moved cautiously, fearing what lay around each bend. The foothills of the western mountains rose around us, and cradled in those hills was the town of Methow.
THIRTEEN
THE SMELL HIT US FIRST. Riding on the wind with the noise, it swirled around us. Another menacing companion, another ill omen, another traveler on the Broken Road. Crows circled in the air ahead, their harsh cries mixing with the noise. A numberless mass of them, writhing in the air and forming an ominous cloud.
The scent was deeper, more rank and more subtle than the decay of vegetation that surrounded us. Something darker than the rot of the fallen autumn leaves blanketing the forest floor we picked our way through.
The noise was with us almost constantly now. It roared to life as we put miles behind us and faded as we rounded blind corners in the woods. The noise came and went like the wind on the high desert, carrying sound and smell instead of bone-dry dust.
Everything in me told me to turn around. Turn tail. Flee. Retreat like General Bowles at Crowsnest. There’s intelligence in recognizing when you’re beaten, in admitting it’s time to throw in the towel.
That seemed to skip me. Something else drove me on, something deep and rank inside me. I wanted this over. I wanted to look in the faces of the people who took Tin and Shaler, and I wanted to end them.
I remembered the faces of the people I had killed, the cultists in the tunnels below the city. I could still see the look in their maddened eyes as they were cut down. They lingered on the edge of my thoughts, haunting me alongside friends I’d lost. The Judge hung at my hip, a heavy pendulum rocking with the roll of the wain. Would I be able to go through with it again? Would I be able to pull my gun when I faced off against this unknown? Could I kill again?
“Mankind often chooses war. It is in his nature.” My old man’s words rang in my ears. He was right, returning to Syringa meant this would haunt me forever. The ghosts of Shaler and Tin would hang with me, joining the others.
I couldn’t have that.
My father was right. I chose war.
We ignored the smell of decay, the odor of death that slithered through the pines and aspen. The rolling hills fell behind us and forest began to thicken around us. Tall rangy pines and white aspen stands broken up by willows and cottonwoods replaced the open spaces of the rolling hills. Parts of the Broken Road were overgrown by bushes and brambles and we hacked our way through, clearing the road for the wains.
At laager the caravan barely spoke. We ate our meals in silence, our stomachs grateful but our minds tired from the desperate effort of ignoring the scent that threatened to wrench our meals from within us. What words were spoken were only what was necessary: check ins, the morning roll call, orders for the caravan.
Sleep wasn’t easy. The nightmares were unceasing. I’d wake each morning in a persistent cloud from a night of restless sleep, my head muddled, my vision blurred. Exhaustion became a constant companion, almost comfortable. As constant as the sound that roared above us.
I began to hallucinate. I saw old friends, dead friends among the rocks and trees of the Broken Road. I saw the shadows of hooded gargoyles on the hills and ridges, hanging about like statues on an ancient temple. They watched our dwindling caravan like crows circling ahead of us, so many carrion birds staking claim over a dying animal too stupid to realize it was already a corpse.
Occasionally someone would spot a figure moving in the trees. A shadow that flickered and disappeared. Wensem and I tried to go after them a few times but found nothing, not even footprints. I started to wonder if the rumors of a haunted road were true.
Ernest Rousseau deserted us the day before we made Methow.
When he came to me, face drawn, I knew what was on his mind. I saw it in his eyes. I understood before he even began to speak.
“You know why I am here?” he asked, his voice the raspy whisper of a dimanian who smoked too many cigarettes.
I frowned. A part of me didn’t want to acknowledge his question. Rousseau staying behind with the company lent validity to my decision to carry on. Made me feel like my decision—despite my suspicions—was justified. He was one of Shaler’s own crew, the only one remaining not related by blood. Recognizing he was about to leave cracked the weak wall erected around my decision. Doubt threatened to flood inwards once again.
“I can’t handle it anymore. The sounds. The dreams. Now this—this awful smell.” He inhaled, as if to lend credence to his choice, his face twisting.
My head snapped up.
“Dreams?” I asked, blinking. Trying to bring his face into focus.
He grunted and gave a curt nod. “Nightmares, more like. Strange ones. Wicked faces staring down at me from shadowy ruins. Hooded figures. Someone in red, with animals following him, licking at his fingers.” He chuckled a dry laugh that sounded like the rattle of bones. “Sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud in the light of day. But at night...” he tapped his forehead. “That's a different story. Never had dreams like that before. They are ill omens, Mister Bell.”
A chill slowly ran down my spine. Ill omens. My own dreams sprang into memory. Rousseau had dreams just like mine, just like Hannah’s.
Mass hysteria was something I had read about, years ago. Usually sparked from a single event and especially common among close-knit groups, it could spread quickly. More so during times of stress or fright. I tried to think back to what we had all experienced. The sound could be our common event. The hooded gargoyles were suspect as well. But we seemed to be sharing dreams. Was that even possible? Something like that wasn’t hysteria. Mass hysteria was one thing, this was mass hallucinations.
I tried to rationalize away the idea, but came up short. The thought made my stomach turn.
Rousseau didn’t wait for a response. “I can’t stay. I won’t. As it stands, I will get nothing out of this. If I leave now—leave before we find something even worse—at the very least I will escape with my hide intact, probably my sanity.” He paused and watched me for a few moments before he finished. “That’s more than some can say.”
His words were muffled compared to the commotion inside me. Hannah and I experienced the same dreams, and now Rousseau had too. The exact same dreams. The faces. The hooded figures. Ruins. The man in red, even the dogs.
“I understand,” I said. My words sounded distant in my ears. It was true, I did understand. I could relate, and somewhere inside, I was jealous.
We always choose war.
“Under other circumstances…” Rousseau’s voice trailed off.
I waved a hand dismissively. “Save it. We can blame folks for days, but I’m still the caravan master.” My legs wavered below me, my right knee popping. I extended my hand. “I hope your future roads are led by better men than me.”
Rousseau didn’t meet my eyes as he grasped my hand in a weak shake before brushing past me towards the last Shaler cargowain.
I watched him pull himself up and coax his team of oxen forward. He broke the column, whipped around and began to move east.
Samantha appeared beside me, saying nothing. I could feel her hand on my shoulder. Light but purposeful. As if to say, it was okay. That everything would be okay.
FOURTEEN
HANNAH WAS THE FIRST TO SCREAM. Then one of the Shalers, and finally Taft. The rest of us remained silent. Shocked. Horrified. Too stunned for sound.
The forest just ended. A quarter-mile scar was torn into the ground between the tree line and the source of the horror.
My body trembled at the sight. It was exactly what the priest had described. Bodies, hundreds of bodies impaled or crucified, left to rot under the sun. It stretched on before us; a waking nightmare. Crows and carrion birds fluttered between the corpses, while the sound of millions of flies and other insects added a dull hum to the s
cene.
None had been spared. There were naked men, women, even children among the dead. Bodies in stages of rot and decomposition were hammered to crosses of various shapes and sizes. Some of the corpses had been mummified and emaciated in the heat while others were bloated mockeries of their former selves.
“Oh Lord,” Samantha said, standing next to me. She moved backwards, recoiling from the scene, hand over her mouth, eyes wide as she struggled to comprehend what we were witnessing.
Hannah dropped to her knees and vomited. Wensem looked like he might do the same. We couldn’t take our eyes off of it. Here it was, a manifestation of evil. How could it exist?
This can’t be happening. This isn’t real! I thought, blinking against the midday sun. The noise that had dogged us relentlessly had dropped away, fading like the last note of a demonic symphony as we emerged upon the forest of the dead.
Father Norry’s tale had sounded too far-fetched to be true, like a trail myth that gets passed around. Boogieman stories that always begin with, “I heard this story about a friend of a friend…”
Is this the war you wanted to fight? I thought. Could you win a battle against whatever could do something like this?
The forest of the dead spread across a narrow valley that cut north. Steep hillsides lined the valley, and an old mining tower—the headframe—loomed down at us from atop a small mountain opposite where we stood, like one of Hannah’s gargoyles.
The Broken Road ran north through the horror and between the burnt foundations of buildings. It disappeared under a gate built into a hastily constructed barricade. Wood, scrap, and corrugated metal wrapped around what remained of the town, a huddle of buildings cowering at the center of the forest.
Is it keeping people out or folk in? I wondered, sure I didn’t want to find out. I couldn’t see anyone moving behind the wall. A few gray tendrils of smoke rose from behind the gate. The remains of a fire? Maybe there wasn’t anyone inside those walls, maybe the town was now just a husk, smoldering in memoriam.
Summoning my courage, I took a step forward, moving into the first stand of stakes. I looked at the bodies. Fresher ones were placed around the edges. As I looked towards the buildings at the center, I could see the corpses there were more decayed.
Someone gasped. “Wal, their arms, their legs, look at them!”
My eyes flicked to the nearest corpse, and then the next, and the next. I blinked at what I saw. Parts of the corpses, a hand here, a leg there, were severed, cut cleanly. Not taken by rot or torn free by wild animals, but removed surgically.
Intentionally.
A sense of déjà vu struck me and I dropped to my knees with a painful jolt. Peter Black, the mad cultist and supposed demigod followed a similar path in his effort to resurrect Cybill.
He had killed friends and acquaintances, took body parts for a perverse ritual. A ritual that we quashed in the tunnels below Lovat. He meant to make Wensem and his son his last victims before ripping out my heart as the final piece of the sacrifice.
Was this his doing? Some other wing of his cult operating outside the city?
My stomach heaved. Where had I taken us?
What was this place?
How could this exist… anywhere?
Heaving a third time, I emptied the last of my stomach’s contents. The stench of death was overwhelming. The sight of disfigured and naked corpses too grisly to comprehend. My stomach continued dry heaving despite having nothing to eject.
I steeled myself and rose to check on my company. Samantha had collapsed. Chance and Range shook their heads in disbelief. Taft was nowhere to be seen. The moment we realized what we were witnessing, she retreated to the back of her wain, and refused to come around. Wensem was sitting back, his face buried in his hands, shoulders shaking.
I don’t know how long we sat there. The sun marched across a now silent sky.
It was mid-afternoon when the first of us recovered. Hannah shakily stood, then poured whiskey from her flask onto her green keff and wrapped it around her face.
With her green eyes peering out, she looked like a wild bandit stalking forward. Rifle at the ready, she approached the scene.
“The priest was right!” said Range. He stood and turned his back on the forest of the dead, facing the party. “This is hell!”
“Who would do this?” asked Wensem, his soft voice wavering.
I shook my head, unable to answer. Fearing that if I spoke, I would be wracked with another bout of heaving I needed to wrap my head around the scene. I tried to count the bodies, looking over the forms as to not linger on any one for too long.
I lost count after two hundred.
Breathe. Look at this objectively. Tactically.
I stood, my knee popping with pain. Following Hannah’s lead, I soaked my own keff in whiskey and wrapped it around my neck, over my nose and mouth. The liquor’s smell was strong, and it went a long way towards masking the scent.
Drawing the Judge with my left hand, I stalked behind Hannah. The feeling of the gun in my hand was a comfort, something I could control. I studied the bodies with a coldness that made me feel hollow.
Stay calm. Remain disengaged, I told myself over and over as I witnessed the terrible means by which these people had died.
The means of crucifixion were varied, but they all served the same brutal purpose. Somehow the impalements were harder to understand. I attributed it to the Reunified. Years of seeing their crosses had prepared me for the concept of crucifixion, if not the actual reality.
The most common cross was two pieces of wood hammered into an X shape, so arms and legs were spread wide. Some were just a single pole, while others were T-shaped. Others were the traditional cross, like the crucifix that hung around Samantha’s neck.
What had the priest called this place? Perdition? It meant hell. I didn’t believe in hell, at least not until this moment.
“Wal! Wal! Come quick!” Samantha shouted from somewhere to my right.
I ran towards her voice and found her along the eastern edge of the Forest, near the freshest corpses. She had also donned a liquor-soaked keff. The rest of the caravan arrived behind me, trepidation in their eyes.
Ivari Tin was hanging upside down on a single stake. Flies swarmed his body, and I tried to bat them away. His feet and hands were nailed, and his chest and stomach had been horrifically gashed open. He was naked, save for the tin mask that clung to his head, dented and bloody. Lifeless eyes stared from behind the slits in the metal.
“No, no, no, no, no,” I said, as I dropped to a squatting position, my head pressed between my fists. My jaw was clenched so tight it was hard to breathe. Tears welled up in my eyes.
I beat my fists against my head. Strange guttural noises erupted from somewhere inside of me.
Something in me had hoped he was still alive. Hoped he was in hiding or held hostage waiting for rescue, but here he was: crucified. My arms were shaking, and when Samantha reached down for me, I pushed her away.
“No,” I said coldly.
By the Firsts, I thought, by the Firsts, kid, I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry.
Something in me hardened. Something in me grew cold, and it scared me. I remembered the feeling from before, when I was in the tunnel facing Black’s horde of cultists. When I raised the shotgun and fired into the back of the nearest one.
A red rage filled my chest. It flowed down my arms, into my stomach and legs, it numbed me.
Standing, I stared at Tin’s body.
Samantha stood to one side with a look I hadn’t seen on her face before. Worry? Fear? I couldn’t tell. Somewhere in the back of my mind I wanted to reach out and hold her. Console one another. But that part of me wasn’t in control. I wanted to find the bastards responsible and tear them limb from limb.
“Let’s get him down,” I said, my voice cold. “I won’t have any member of my company treated this way.”
“I’ll fetch some tools,” said Hannah, retreating from my cold rage.
&nb
sp; “What about my cousin?” Chance asked. “What if she’s out here hanging just like him?”
It was a valid question.
“You and your brother spread out and look for her. Fire your gun if there's trouble.” I said.
The thought that Shaler was also out here sickened me further. There was little affection between the two of us, but no one deserved this. I couldn’t imagine how I would inform her father if we found her here.
“I’ll help as well,” said Samantha.
The three of them set off, moving quickly, keeping liquor-soaked bandannas and keffs held tightly over their faces. They glanced at bodies but didn’t dwell as they moved among them.
When Hannah returned, it only took a few moments to remove the spikes that held Tin inverted on the simple cross.
We lifted him down, and wrapped his body in an oiled tarpaulin. We made sure we were careful but he was stiff as a board and it was difficult to get him into a peaceful position.
“Careful with his mask,” I said as we bent his arms in place. “Respect his customs even in his death. We'll do right by our dead.”
This was the first time I had to deal with a dead member of the company. Samantha and the boys reappeared as we were finishing up.
“Anything?” I asked.
Samantha shook her head.
“She’s not out there,” said Range. “That’s good, right?”
“I hope so,” I said, my tone flat. I meant it, but summoning emotions for Margaret Shaler was difficult.
“We’ll bury him in the woods, back the way we came, away from this place.” I looked at Samantha, and she looked back with her large dark eyes. “He was Reunified. Sam, can you oversee his burial?”
She nodded, and bent over him and began to mumble some prayers. I left her to it and turned my gaze back to the Forest of the Dead, regarding it with a loathing I now found frightening. How many of these had come here like Tin? How many of these bodies were friends, husbands and wives, sons and daughters of someone out there, someone wondering if they were still alive?
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