Bad Medicine (17 page)

Will mumbled to himself—and moaned, now and again—but for the most part, he sat the horse, not knowing where the hell he was, and not really caring.

The fatigue, the pain, the pounding ache in his body and in his heart, fell on Will like a heavy, impenetrable blanket. His eyes closed and he slumped forward at the waist, his face only a few inches above the horse's ears.

The animal was, of course, not saddled. Only Will's many years of riding, both bareback and in a saddle, kept him aboard the horse. Will's body shifted with that of the animal rather than against it, and although he wasn't consciously aware of it, his legs exerted just enough pressure to keep him centered.

The horse, confused, danced a bit and huffed
through his nostrils. When there was no reaction, no command, from his rider, the animal did as his instincts demanded. He headed toward the place where he'd last known safety, hay, and water: the camp where One Dog and his troops had settled prior to their siege of the mercantile.

Will wasn't asleep, but he wasn't exactly awake, either. Instead, he was in a sort of twilight, unaware of his surroundings but realizing that the horse under him was walking steadily, moving well. To where he didn't know, and it didn't really matter.

The sun had risen by the time the horse stopped. When his rider failed to dismount he became nervous. This wasn't the way things were supposed to be, the way they always were in the past. Further, there were no men and more importantly, no other horses—simply signs of cook fires, piles of manure, and remnants of bales of hay. He danced again, this time circling, raising a cloud of grit, frightened by what should have been familiar, but wasn't. He arched his back and bucked, all four hooves off the ground, and came down hard. Will toppled off his back and hit the dirt and manure like a full sack of grain tossed from a wagon. The horse trotted to the murky little puddle that provided water to the camp. After he drank, he began snuffling through the scraps of hay left behind by the renegades, salvaging what he could.

The sun flexed its morning muscles, adding its own fire to the agony of Will's face and arms. He groaned and fought his way to consciousness. He was neither hungry nor thirsty, but he realized he needed to eat and drink to stay alive. He pushed himself to a sitting
position and rubbed the crust from his eyes. He recognized that there'd been a camp here, but little further registered—at least until he focused on the horse he'd ridden in on. He was what horsemen call “right pretty,” a tall, well-muscled pinto with large expanses of white and equally large splotches of a deep chestnut. His nut sack looked like a tanned deerskin bag with a pair of doorknobs in it: he was obviously a stallion, and a young one, at that. But Will's eyes swung past the horse to a scrawny jackrabbit picking through the dirt for bits of spilled grain.

Will's hand found the grips of his .45 easily, smoothly, regardless of his pain. He took a breath, aimed by instinct, and squeezed his trigger. The sharp metallic snap of the hammer striking an empty cartridge was loud in the heat and the vastness of the prairie. The horse swung his head toward Will, and the jack ran ten yards or so before stopping and looking back over his shoulder, still ready to run.

“Goddammit,” Will muttered through cracked and bleeding lips. He swung open the cylinder of his .45, dumped the empties, and fumbled along his belt until he found three fresh cartridges. He eased the cylinder shut. That faint click startled the jack. The pinto paid no attention.

The few bits of grain were a mighty lure for the starving rabbit. The midsummer sun had burned his usual forage to stunted brown blades with no more life to them than the arid dirt around them. Her mate had died, as had all seven of her latest litter. She'd eaten two of them but there hadn't been enough to them to maintain her life.

The jack moved cautiously back toward the spilled
grain. Will fired, taking the rabbit between its long ears and flipping it into the air in an awkward sommersault.

Will struggled to his feet, unsteady, dizzy, and within a few moments he fell on his ass. He cursed again. He needed the jack and it was a sure bet he wasn't going to be able to stroll over and pick it up.

It took him a while and a lot of hurt, but eventually, on his hands and knees, the sun flogging him, he made it to the jack. He drew his knife from his boot, cut the rabbit's throat, and drank the still hot, copper-tasting blood. He then split the jack up the middle, dumped its intestines, and gnawed at the raw, bloody, stringy flesh.

There was some shade—precious little of it—begrudgingly yielded by a few desert pines on one side of the water. Will took his jack and crawled to the shade and the water. He drank, ate some more rabbit, and then he slept.

He slept through the day until dusk, plagued by dreams of lakes of fire and flaming demons chasing him, catching him, embracing him. He fought his way to consciousness and when he was fully awake he gently touched his face, for the first time feeling the tissue-thin ripped sacks of ruptured blisters. He stayed under the scraggly trees until he felt he may be able to move.

The remains of the jackrabbit were next to him, barely visible in the fading light. The carcass was warm now, not with the warmth of life but rather with the grotesque warmth of a dead creature long exposed to the sun. He gnawed off a piece of flesh—which had already begun to stink—gagged, swallowed, gagged again, and finally kept the meat down.
Two more mouthfuls were all he could bear; he tossed the jack into the prairie.

Will's mind wasn't working properly, normally. It took him several minutes to figure out that the snuffling and crunching he heard was the pinto moving about, twenty or so feet from him. The image of the horse in his mind led to the picture of the horse drinking, and at that very moment the intensity of his own thirst almost strangled him. His tongue, fat, sandy, desert dry, filled his mouth and was a lump of foul and useless desiccated meat in his mouth.

Will realized he had to get to that puddle or he'd die. And he couldn't die; he hadn't yet taken the revenge that was rightfully his, which now included the killings of Austin and Gentle Jane. He unbuckled his gun belt and let it fall to the ground. He braced himself with a hand to either side, and with all the strength he could find in himself, he pushed to his knees. Panting as if he'd just run a mile, he scuffled his way to his feet. The earth moved under him, undulating, shifting, and jagged spots of red drifted about in front of his eyes. He fell face-first, slamming against the ground with enough force to bring an involuntary yelp from him—a feminine sound, and one he couldn't recall ever making before. He tried to curse but he couldn't force words past his swollen tongue, and the attempt started his lips seeping blood once again.

One piece of luck came Will's way: the pinto had wandered to the sinkhole and was sucking water. Will had a direction; he wouldn't have to crawl about on his hands and knees seeking the water. The horse moved away as Will dragged himself to the water.
His hands found it first and he pushed himself forward, falling chest-first into the muddy, brackish liquid, straining to keep his nose in the air, his mouth sucking water frantically.

The foul water seemed to clear not only his voracious thirst but his befuddled mind. His hands had sunk into the soil beneath the water beyond his wrists—but what he felt was neither sand nor dirt. It was clay.

Will recalled the time when, as a boy, he'd stood gawking at a barn fire and a swarm of hornets found his face and arms. Someone—a neighbor?—had plastered the stings with clay. Its coolness not only eased the fiery pain, but as it dried, it drew out the stingers the hornets had planted in him. Could it help with his burns?
Hell,
he thought,
I got nothin' to lose.

Will glopped handfuls of the clay, which had the consistency somewhere between a thick liquid and a spongy solid, and spread it over his face and arms. The clay smelled dank, but it wasn't an unpleasant scent—it was much like that of freshly turned soil in the spring. It was wonderfully cool, and it seemed to draw the pain in the same fashion the clay had drawn the hornet stingers many years ago. He drank more water and then crawled back to the desert pines, which were now merely vague shapes in the dark. He slept deeply and dreamlessly.

The pinto eased his way to Will and, after several moments, nudged him with his nose. This man was acting like no man he'd seen before in his four years of life. The horse had been saddle broke at an early age, and sprint-raced against short horses—what some folks called quarter horses—at age three. He'd
never been beaten. He'd known nothing but kindness and feed until the outlaws stole him and burned his owner's home and barn, and that was only a week or ten days ago. His dim mind told him that this man would eventually rise up and give him fresh, sweet hay and scoops of grain. There was no reason to run off into the prairie. Regardless of his strange actions, this man would take care of him.

He nudged Will again, with no result. After a few minutes, the pinto went back to scrounging the ground for dropped hay.

Dawn was near when a strange, abrasive sound cut through Will's sleep. Dried clay cracked from his hand and arm as he drew his Colt and thumbed back the hammer.

The sound came again, halted, and then restarted, as whatever it was came closer to Will.

The pinto huffed at the sound, stared in its direction for several moments, and then went back to grazing, obviously not feeling threatened.

The sun was almost clear of the horizon before Will could see what he'd been listening to, weapon ready. A dog—underfed, its mousy coat bare in places from mange—was dragging a stout wooden post attached to its neck by a six-foot strand of heavy wire. The dog, belly to the ground, pulled himself ahead with his forepaws and pushed with his rears. He managed to move the heavy post a few inches with each attempt. Every so often he'd stop, raise his nose to sniff the air—making sure he was headed to the water, Will thought—before starting out again.

Will was on his feet before he realized he was
standing. He was weak and still in pain, but the dizziness and the red spots were gone. He approached the dog, pistol at his side.

The dog looked up at Will, its chestnut eyes neither pleading nor begging, but simply acknowledging the man's presence. Will looked more closely. Frothy blood dripped from the creature's open mouth, obviously from trying to chew through the wire to free himself. The wire, wrapped twice around his neck, had cut through his coat and into the flesh.

Will forgot his own pain. “You was either a meal or a watchdog,” he said aloud, “an' them killers just left you when they deserted this camp.” He eyed the post. “Musta took you some time to haul that thing outta the ground, dog, an' the scent of water musta been drivin' you nuts. But you kept right on tuggin'. You got a set of balls on you, dog—either that or you're too stupid to know when to give up.”

The dog's eyes and ears pointed at Will as the man spoke, as if taking in and understanding each word. Will holstered his pistol. “Let's get that goddamn wire from 'round your neck,” he said, crouching stiffly next to the dog. He needed both hands to unwrap the wire, and he fully realized that the animal might go for either of his arms or his throat as soon as he was loose.

Will decided it was worth the chance to set the poor creature free.

The wire hadn't been knotted; its end was twisted around the cruel collar and was easy enough to loosen. The dog's body trembled as Will touched the wire and his neck, but he didn't offer to growl or snarl. With a pair of quick, circular sweeps, Will got
the wire free. The dog was motionless for a long moment, and then he was on his feet and in a shambling run to the water. He flung his body into it, mouth wide open, and drank, his tongue moving listlessly as the muddy water ran down his throat. When his thirst was sated for the moment he stood up to his hocks in the water and grunted as loud as a sow in warm mud.

“Good, huh?” Will grinned.

The dog turned his head at the sound of Will's voice and their eyes met. Perhaps, at least in a sense, they spoke to one another, because both understood the message conveyed by the animal's eyes:
You saved me. I'll stay with you.

The dog left the sinkhole, stood next to Will, and shook himself vigorously, shedding water, dirt, and speckles of blood in a wide area—which included Will. The animal looked more like a drowned rat than a drowned rat would. It would have been easy enough to count his ribs, they were so prominent, and his gut curved upward almost to his spine. His tail, rodentlike, flicked from side to side a few inches each way as he looked up at Will.

His head, Will saw, wasn't half bad for a range mongrel. His snout was straight, his eyes set nicely, neither too close together nor too far apart, and his pricked ears—like those of a collie—stood alert, at attention.

“Well hell,” Will said, and scratched the spot between the dripping-wet dog's ears. The dog grunted and then licked Will's hand.

“Well, hell,” Will said again.

He counted the number of cartridges left in his gun belt. There were four, and he had the two he'd
loaded before shooting the jackrabbit. Will needed food and so did the dog. He opened the cylinder of his .45, loaded his last rounds, and snapped the cylinder shut.

The only game available was rattlesnake, prairie dogs, and rabbit. A prairie dog wasn't large enough to waste a shot on, and snake, unless it was long and fat, didn't yield enough meat. That left rabbit.

The water drew creatures to it; it made no sense to trek about in the killing sun. Instead, Will went back to where he'd slept, clay cracking and dropping from his face and arms as he walked. If nothing else, the layer of clay had eased and cooled Will's pain, and for whatever reason, it seemed to ease the weeping of the blisters.

He situated himself in the shade, leaned back against the thin trunk of a desert pine, and rested his pistol in his right hand in his lap. The dog sat next to him on his left, and almost unconsciously, Will's hand began to stroke the animal's neck.