The Shotgun Arcana (3 page)

“Meat,” the broken, starving faithful hissed, “meat, meat, meat…”

At the back of the tent was a large black iron cook pot. The rancid stench was much stronger in the shelter here. Tucker gagged.

“Meat, meat, meat,” the starving chanted.

“Sweet Lord, save our souls,” he muttered, realizing he was praying like a child, terrified and seeking any protection he could find. He and Bick peered over the lip of the cauldron.

Inside were the scabbed-on remains of old meals baked to the iron walls. There was a viscous liquid with islands of white grease and blue-green mold near the bottom of the pot. Jutting out of the rancid broth were human long bones—arms, legs—boiled clean and brittle from being cooked over and over again. Smaller finger and knuckle bones, dozens of them, clustered like colonies of pale grubs in the remains of the liquid. More bones crisscrossed near the base of the pot, and resting in the nest of bones was a human skull.

“Meat, meat, meat,” the chanting grew louder, more insistent.

The skull was yellow from age, obviously not the same as the other bleached and brittle bones in the pot. A thin spider web of hairline cracks radiated outward from the left brow, just above the dark, hollow orbits where eyes had once been. From the crown, and slightly back, was a several-inch-long fissure in the bone. It looked like a jack-o’-lantern’s smile. The mandible and the maxima were intact, but the sockets for the teeth were all cracked and empty.

“No,” Bick said. “No, damn it! This is all wrong.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Tucker said. “These folks are eating each other, and it looks like they are worshiping a skull, a dammed skull!”

“Damned,” Bick said. “Truer words were never spoken.”

“Meat, meat, meat!” the weak and the dying snarled, thrashing on the dirt floor like snakes.

“Stop!” Bick said softly, but his voice held thunder like a cannon. Everyone in the shelter heard it. A blast of frigid wind howled through the tent. The candles were snuffed out, and the lanterns guttered. The chanting stopped.

Bick knelt by the girl. “Leanna, is this the way it was when you found it in the cave?” The little girl looked down again; she shuffled a little under the dark man’s gaze. “I promise you are in no trouble, Leanna, but I must know.”

“Bick, leave her be,” Tucker said.

“Mr. Tucker,” Bick said, “I like you, I see you have a kind soul. Please don’t interrupt me again.” Bick gently lifted Leanna’s chin until she was looking at him again. “Leanna?”

“The teeth,” Leanna muttered. “It told me to pull all the teeth out.”

“What did you do with them, Leanna?” Bick asked.

“I … It … told me to scatter them outside, at dawn. The birds came and took them.”

“Birds?” Tucker said. Leanna nodded.

“Crows,” she said. “I’ve never seen so many crows. They made the sky dark again. They swooped on down and took them all, like bread crumbs. Then they flew off in every direction.”

“When, Leanna?” Bick asked, standing.

“Yesterday morning,” she said. “It told me you were coming.”

Tucker looked at the dark rider. Bick ignored the captain’s gaze. He cupped the little girl’s face as she looked up at him. She was crying.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I did bad. I’m sorry.”

“No, Leanna,” Bick said, his voice softened. “You just did what you were told. It’s all right. I want you to help Captain Tucker in any way you can. He is going to take you and your family home. You understand?”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

Bick removed his duster and carefully wrapped it around the skull in the pot. He took the bundle and placed it under his arm. Tucker noticed for the first time since he met Malachi Bick that the man’s breath didn’t stream out of his mouth and nose in a cloud of condensation like everyone else’s in the soul-numbing cold.

“Leanna, you are going to forget about this,” Bick said. “All of this, in time. You all will. Life is a dream you wake from. Don’t let this nightmare ruin the rest of your dream. Good-bye, Leanna. You were very brave. Thank you, bless you.”

Bick touched the girl gently on the head, nodded to Tucker, and made his way out of the shelter with the skull under his arm.

Tucker followed him out into the gray light of morning. “One dammed minute, Bick! What is all this, some of the Devil’s work? Are you in league with ol’ Scratch?”

Bick had placed the skull in one of his saddlebags and was climbing onto his horse, a beautiful Arabian the color of coal. His name was Pecado.

“I only wish this was the Devil’s work,” Bick said. “It would make this much easier. This is far worse. And, no, like I told you, I’m here to help you. This isn’t my responsibility. I’m cleaning up someone else’s mess.”

“Can you tell me what the hell is going on here?” Tucker said.

Bick sighed, and then looked down at Reason Tucker. “You really want to know, don’t you? Very well. These people passed through my home on their way west. The little girl took the skull into her possession, unknown to me, or anyone else. The skull exuded certain … influence over these people, and this is the result—all this madness, murder, death, all this terrible hunger and rage.”

“These were decent, normal, God-fearing people,” Tucker said. “What the hell did that skull do to them?”

“Nothing that wasn’t already there,” Bick said. “I’m taking it back home and securing it. Unfortunately, now pieces of it have literally been scattered to the four winds. It wants to be loose in the world, it always has, and it seems to have found a way for fragments of it to be so.”

“How did you know all this?” Tucker asked. “Why are you taking it? Are you some kind of expert in all this witchery? You wander around collecting cursed things?”

“Actually, I’m more of a homebody,” Bick said. “Like I said, I’m cleaning up some other jackass’s mess. But I do seem to collect interesting … trinkets. Good luck, Captain Tucker. Safe journey to you and yours. I doubt we will meet again. I’d prefer you speak as little about all this as possible.”

Tucker scratched his head. “I wouldn’t even know what to say. Careful heading down, and headed home, Mr. Bick. I can’t imagine a place with things like that skull, a body could ever truly call home.”

“It’s as close to home as folks like me ever get,” Bick said as Pecado began to trot toward the frozen creek. The dark rider and his obscene prize rode away into the blinding, bitter white of the Sierra dawn. Overhead, the dark shapes of crows mocked him as he began his long decent.

Judgment

Twenty-three years later …

November 18, 1870

Nevada

The moon was a bullet hole in the sable night, bleeding ghost light across the wasteland of the 40-Mile Desert. The 40-Mile was part of the price you paid for the West. That price was often paid in blood and tears, and yet still they came—headed west, headed just a little ways farther out, away from safety and rules and meaningless lives and anonymous deaths.

Some were lured by promises of gold and silver, others came for the vision of a new world, a new life in a land big enough for everyone to have dreams. Some came hacked and hewn, inside or out, from the war, from the madness and the carnage, because they had nowhere else to go.

They all headed west, where luck and fortune still flowed like milk and honey and where your fate wasn’t set in stone. You could be a hero, a villain, a self-made man, or you could vanish without a trace, erasing the person you once were.

But first there was the crossing: there was the 40-Mile and other places just like it. Many met the crucible of the desert and failed. The floor of the wastes was littered with the bleached bones and artifacts of lives lost in the attempt.

A soul would need to be crazier than a snake in the sun to leave behind civilization and kin, home and hearth, to travel for months in a wagon or on horseback to a land still more myth than reality, full of gunslingers and savages, outlaws and madmen, sickness, wild animals and spirit-crushing loneliness.

And still they came. Hope is a powerful drug. The moonlight washed onto the shore of the desolate, murderous land and found at the very edge of the 40-Mile, a town. Huddled in the cradle between two small mountains, the town waited. She waited for those strong enough to endure the initiation of the 40-Mile, she waited for those seeking solace or redemption or anonymity: the blessed and damned.

Golgotha waited with open arms, embracing the night. On the rooftops of Golgotha, two shadows pursued a third across the roof of the Dove’s Roost, a house of ill repute tucked away from the sanctity of Main Street behind Golgotha’s largest saloon, the Paradise Falls. One of the pursuers began to close the gap and the other shouted out in frustration and redoubled his efforts.

“Mutt! Hey, Mutt!” Jim Negrey shouted, panting as he sprinted as fast as he could across the uneven and partly unstable roof of the cathouse. “Dang it, Mutt, I ain’t got no four-legged kin in my blood! Wait for me!”

Jim was sixteen. His sand-colored hair whipped in the desert night’s cold wind. His eyes were bright but also old. He had his father’s six-gun holstered on his belt and a silver deputy’s star pinned to his vest. A small leather pouch, tied by a leather cord around his neck, bumped and jumped against his chest. The pouch held his dead father’s jade eye. Jim’s boots thudded like hammers as he gave all he could to catch up with his partner. Jim’s partner was a blur. Thin as a whip and twice as fast, his hair was longer than Jim’s, falling to his shoulders, oily and black. His battered leather Stetson had fallen off his head and jumped against his back, held on by a stampede cord. The man was an Indian, with a thin, pointy nose that showed signs of having been broken a time or two. The thick, black eyebrows above his crooked nose grew together and his narrow face was marred with scars and pockmarks. His teeth were yellow and crooked but his incisors were straight and prominent. He carried a pistol strapped to one thigh and a huge knife strapped to the other and, like Jim, he wore the silver star of a deputy. His people denied him a name. He called himself Mutt.

“C’mon, lazy britches,” Mutt shouted back over his shoulder, grinning. “I’m only using two legs, and besides I’m tired of chasing this damn thing all over town. I’m of a mind to catch it tonight!”

The shadowy figure they pursued was small, perhaps four feet tall, and was moving at remarkable speeds with an odd gait, more reminiscent of a penguin’s waddle than a man running. The pursued approached the edge of the Dove’s Roost’s roof, turned back to regard Mutt and Jim with glowing red eyes possessed of pupils of green fire. The thing hissed at the deputies and then leapt, almost flew, across the gap between the Dove’s Roost and the roof of the boardinghouse next door, run by Mr. and Mrs. Scutty. The thing spread its arms as it jumped and wing-like membranes under each arm extended to allow it to catch the night wind and glide to the next roof. Its taloned feet hit the roof and it scampered to disappear into the darkness again.

“It’s got wings,” Jim muttered to himself. “Of course it has wings.”

“Like hell I’m letting some flying … whatever the hell that is … git the better of me!” Mutt yelled.

“Mutt, don’t!” Jim shouted, but it was too late. Mutt increased his speed and launched himself across the gap between roofs with a yip and yell that would have put gray-coated rebels to shame. He hit the other roof, rolled, and came up running and laughing.

“Aw, dammit,” Jim muttered, as he picked up speed. He reached the edge of the roof, jumping for all he was worth. He landed on the roof of the boardinghouse, barely, his feet scraping and slipping on the weathered and cracked wooden shingles, almost falling backward and down three stories to the floor of the narrow alley below. Jim steadied himself.

He saw some movement in the darkness of the alleyway, two figures, cloaked by night, shifting, grappling roughly. He thought he heard a woman cry out for just an instant. Jim paused, peering down into the now-silent alley, struggling to pierce the shadows, straining to hear. He looked up to call out to Mutt, but the deputy and the creature were nearing the edge of the boardinghouse roof, both fully engaged in the pursuit.

The creature had veered toward the southern side of the roof and sprung out again, its weird arm-wings spread. It landed easily on the roof of the Elysium Hotel and scuttled-waddled off at breakneck speed, hissing and growling. Mutt was already preparing to spring after it, his thin legs churning and his arms pistoning as he prepared to leap.

“C’mon, boy! You’re gonna miss all the fun!” Mutt shouted, and then howled as he flew through the air. Mutt landed in a crouch, popped up and kept running.

Jim gave one last glimpse into the narrow, seemingly empty alley. All he could hear now was the raucous banter of the Dove’s Roost’s clients and ladies. The Roost was always noisy at night; most likely nothing to fret over. Still, something tugged at him. He heard Mutt whoop again as he pursued the monster. The alley would have to wait.

Jim sprinted after Mutt and the creature. He tried not to think about the fall and the impact if he slipped or fell short. He wondered how his late pa would have handled this, but that thought was of little use to him now. Pa would have never gotten himself into this kind of fool mess in the first place. Jim laughed at the thought and flung himself into space, chasing after his friend and the thing they both hunted.

*   *   *

The trouble had started quiet enough. Trouble in Golgotha usually took its time to make a ruckus. About a month ago, Clancy Gower had come by the jail to report something very disturbing. Clancy’s goats were dying, being slaughtered. At first he had suspected his neighbor and cattle rancher, Doug Stack. Doug and Clancy had a long feud over Clancy’s goats wandering onto Doug’s property and eating up his grazing land and his few meager crops. But this was different, and Clancy said he was pretty sure Doug had nothing to do with the animals dying. The goats had all been drained of blood, but there were no wounds he could find to explain the shriveled carcasses.

Talking to Doug uncovered that he had lost some cows in the exact same way and that his troubles had started about the same time as Clancy’s.