Authors: Tim Curran
Cabe and Dirker just stared at the thing swimming in that brine. It was pale and bloated, obscenely fleshly. It seemed to move with a gentle, unknown motion.
“I guess there’s no doubt that he’s the Sin City Strangler,” Dirker managed, his throat tight.
Cabe just nodded, knowing there was little else to say.
The bastard had slipped away yet again. The only good thing was that Cabe had seen him, would recognize him if the chance came again. But he still didn’t know who he was or where he came from. And things like that, he’d found in his line of work, made hunting someone down far more troublesome.
As it stood, “Freeman” could show up just about anywhere.
And probably would.
18
In Redemption, the bullets were flying.
The vigilantes had rode in again in force, but this time the Mormons were ready for them. Or so they thought. The Danites instructed the townsfolk to stay in their homes and cabins, to lock themselves down tight. To wait it out. The Danites wanted them to adhere to the teachings of Brigham Young which meant to avoid violence at any costs. If there was killing to be done, the Danites would do it.
So the Mormons waited it out.
And outside, it was a shooting gallery.
Within the first ten minutes three vigilantes were dead and a fourth seriously wounded. Likewise, two Danites had been shot from their hiding places by expertly placed bullets.
And it became something of a standoff.
Caleb Callister did everything he could to reign in his forces and mount the attack in a precise military fashion, but his boys would have none of it. They wanted to shoot. To burn. To kill and pillage. They saw in the Mormons everything that had ever gone wrong in their lives. And this is why Caslow, McCrutchen, and Retting were now dead and Cheevers was moaning in the street, his guts shot out.
He wouldn’t last and Callister knew it.
It was just him and Windows now.
The bad thing was they were outgunned about twenty to one, if not worse. The good thing was they were still in possession of the dynamite that McCrutchen had gotten from the mine. Callister’s idea had been to ride into Redemption and start throwing the stuff immediately, but the others wanted to do some shooting and things had simply gone to hell.
Windows and he were hiding behind a barricade of cordwood with their backs against the outside wall of a livery barn. Escape was not in the cards, at least not yet…but on the other hand, the Danites were in no position to overrun their position.
Stalemate.
But it was night and it was dark and just about anything could happen. A few fires were burning, most of them set by the vigilantes, and the illumination they threw was enough to see and shoot by.
A couple townspeople rushed out with buckets of sand and water to extinguish a blaze that had started in bales of hay and was quickly working its way up the walls of a stable.
Windows brought up his Winchester 1866 carbine. Scarcely aiming, he sighted and fired, levered quickly, and fired again. The bucket brigade—both of them—lay dead in the streets.
“Two more dead nits,” Windows said.
A flurry of rifle fire grazed the log embankment they hid behind as the Danites tried to flush them out. Callister and Windows returned the fire which came from no less than four different locations.
Callister had no doubt that the Destroying Angels were trying to flank them. Probably crawling over rooftops in order to draw a bead on them. But it wouldn’t be easy in the murk.
More bullets ripped into their rampart, chips of wood flying like shrapnel. At that moment, two Danites charged in on horseback. Windows shot one of them through the throat as bullets whizzed all around him. Callister didn’t bother with his gun: He lit a stick of dynamite, let the fuse burn down some and tossed it at the other rider as Windows felled his comrade. It was a perfect throw, for the dynamite landed right in the Danite’s lap. He saw what it was, made to toss it aside, but somehow managed to get the burning stick caught between himself and his horse.
Then there was a booming explosion and both he and his horse were sprayed over the streets like bloody mucilage. Blood and smoldering bits of anatomy were everywhere.
The Danites had not expected this.
Callister lit another stick and tossed it onto the steps of a log house across the way from which they’d been receiving gunfire. The entire front of the place went up like kindling and what was left behind, collapsed into itself, burying alive anyone who’d survived the initial explosion. Flaming bits of wood rained over the town. The razed log house began to blaze.
“We got ‘em,” Windows was saying. “Sure as shit, we got ‘em.”
“Now they’re gonna have to make their move,” Callister said.
And they did.
A half-dozen men on horseback charged their position. They were spread out with an almost military efficiency. Callister watched them come on and had to admit, even to himself, that those Danites were a courageous, devil-may-care bunch. Tough as any men he’d ever fought with. In the their flapping black coats and wide-brimmed preacher’s hats, they were truly something to see, riding hard with smoking pistols.
But their strategy was all-too apparent.
The riders were trying to force the vigilantes out of their holes. Using themselves as bait, the Danites were riding right into the mouth of hell itself so the others could get a clean shot.
But it didn’t work that way.
More sticks of dynamite were tossed over the rampart. Not just two or three, but five or six that landed one after the other and resulted in a chain of resounding explosions that not only atomized horses and riders, but blew out the windows of houses and threw riders from their mounts. The shock waves actually knocked men from rooftops.
Whatever the Danites were planning, they gave it up.
They had lost no less than ten men now and had easily that number injured. There were only four or five left in any sort of fighting shape. For the next hour, there was silence broken only by an occasional gunshot so that both sides would know the other had not slipped away.
But slipping away was exactly what Callister was thinking.
And particularly when a dozen riders came pouring down the street, the lead man waving a white flag tied to the barrel of a rifle. Nobody shot at them. The Mormons called out to them to identify themselves, but the strangers would not. They just kept waving and smiling on those black mounts.
“I don’t like this,” Windows said.
And Callister didn’t either. There was something very wrong about all it all. And what was that high, hot gassy smell in the air like rancid meat? Seven or eight of the riders trotted over to the Mormon positions. The others, led by the man with the white flag galloped over to the vigilantes’ fortification.
The man with the white flag dismounted, said, “I am unarmed.”
Windows told him to keep his fucking distance, but the man waltzed right over and…funny thing, half way there something started to happen to him and he started to walk funny, a real weird odor coming off him. Callister sucked in a sharp gasp of cool air.
For he could see wan moonlight reflected off bone as if the man had no face on the left side. And what he saw confirmed that: a grotesque, inhuman skull knitted with raw quilts of muscle.
“Evening,” the man said and that voice was more animal than human. “Name’s Cobb. And I figure I got business with ye…”
19
An hour after the revelation of Freeman and the heart in the jar, Cabe found himself again at the Cider House Saloon in need of a drink. He put back two whiskeys and a like number of beers, thinking it all over. About Dirker, who might just have been his friend now (of all crazy things) and Freeman and, of course, Janice Dirker. That was one thing that kept circulating through his brain.
But in all the furor he’d forgotten a few things.
He’d actually forgotten that it was here that he’d put down Virgil Clay only a few nights before. His brain was simply too full with everything else. So when the door opened and a blast of wet wind blew through the bar, the last thing he was thinking of was Elijah Clay.
He didn’t even bother turning.
Maybe if he had, he would’ve seen men falling out of their way to get out of the path of the behemoth in the buffalo coat and gray beard.
As it was, he leaned up against the wall, lost in himself, and that’s when the blade of a knife imbedded itself in said wall scant inches from the tip of his nose.
Cabe dropped his drink and whirled around, his hand going for the Starr double-action at his hip. It almost made it, too, but the man he saw moving through the bar room stopped him dead.
Cabe stood there and stared.
He knew who he was; there could not be two men that matched this description in Utah Territory.
All Cabe could do was think:
Oh Jesus and Mary, lookit the size of him…
The guy had to be seven feet tall if he was an inch. He was bearded and fierce and built like something that wrestled bears for a living. He carried a double-barrel scattergun in his hand and his chest was crisscrossed with cartridge belts. Lots of them. And that was a necessary thing when you factored in all the pistols hanging from the homemade belts at his waist. He carried more firepower than most cavalry platoons. And that didn’t even take into account the hatchets, skinning blades, and bowie knives that hung off him.
As folks in Whisper Lake wisely said, when Elijah Clay comes, even the Devil his ownself wisely crosses the street.
Cabe grabbed the hilt of the knife in the wall—a Buffalo skinner with an eight-inch blade—and tried to pull it from the wall. He had to use both hands.
“Ya’ll excuse me please,” the giant said, tossing men aside like they were stuffed with feathers. “My apologies, gents, my apologies.”
He had an odd sort of gallantry and charm about him. Those that didn’t get out of his path, he swatted aside like pesky gnats. And some of them were real big men. Big men who found themselves suddenly airborne.
The giant’s right cheek bulged with chew. He spat a stream of it at the faro table, soiling the cards. “Name’s Elijah Clay,” he announced. “And I’m pleased to know ye, one and all.” He came right up to a table about four feet from Cabe, just stood there. “Evenin’, gents. I’m a-here lookin’ fer some worm-brained, sheep-humpin’ slice of Arkansas dogfuck name of Tyler Cabe. Any of ye know this mother-raper?” He looked around, those eyes like boring bits. “Speak up now, hear? Way I’m a-thinkin’, gents, yer either fer me or agin me. And if it be the latter, than God help yer poor grievin’ mothers after I have m’ way with ye.”
And it occurred to Cabe that Clay did not know who he was. Not yet. Now, any sane man would have bolted and run at the very least. Tyler Cabe out of Arkansas? No sir, no sir, you must be mistaken. I’m Joe J. Crow out of Gary, Indiana, so if you’ll excuse me, I got a sick wife to attend to and I think I just pissed myself and all.
Sure, that’s what a sane man would have done.
But Cabe?
Nope. Not Tyler Cabe who rode hard through more shit in a year than most men rode through in a lifetime. Not Tyler Cabe who was just as fast and sure with his pistols as any man in the Territory and was no stranger to knife and fists. And not Tyler Cabe who knew an inbred hellbilly when he saw one because he was one himself and was not about to back down no how, no way from trash like that.
But, of course, Cabe had never waded in against something like Elijah Clay. The sort of lifetaker that could and would use his bones to pick his long yellow teeth with.
Regardless, Cabe said, “I’m Tyler Cabe. I’m the one you’re looking for, mister.”
Clay just nodded, but seemed pleasantly surprised. Maybe he wasn’t used to men admitting who they were when he hunted them. And being from a hill-clan, he put a lot of stock in bravery and courage. Even when it was foolishly placed.
“Well, Mr. Cabe, yer the snake what shot down m’ boy, so lets we two get straight down to it, what say? You fancy shootin’ irons?” Clay considered it, shook his head. “Naw, not yer thing, is it? Too wily. Yer the sort that fancies knives and the like. If’n that’s yer game, I surely can oblige.” He set his shotgun and assorted gunbelts on the table, pulling two hatchets from his belt and stabbing them into the tabletop where they quivered menacingly. “Well, boy, let’s get to it. Got me plans fer yer hide, yessum, figure on making yer life last till well past cockcrow.”
Men were murmuring amongst themselves, maybe mentally recording the entire thing for future yarning. Possibly making note of that impressive set of balls old Tyler Cabe had, but more likely wondering if he had enough money in his poke to bury him with proper.
Cabe grabbed the handle of one of the hatchets, yanked the blade from wood. “All right,” he said. “If it’s gotta be done this way, you big smelly piece of shit, then let’s get to it.”
Clay laughed, pulled up his own hatchet.
Cabe did not waste any time, he lunged in quick, swinging his ax and nearly taking out Clay’s throat, but the big man stepped back, grinning with all those piss-yellow teeth. Here Cabe was, figuring this was a matter of survival, a fight to the death…but to Clay it was just an amusement. Something that beat the shit out of watching the corn grow or violating your own sister.