Hell Snake

by Bernard Schaffer

  A tall, long-legged figure carrying a shotgun strode toward her from among the trees. Behind him were the stoic-looking men in robes she’d seen the night before. Rena’s mouth came open to cry out but no words emerged from her throat. She stumbled backward, her legs shaking and boots knocking together, and she would have fallen if someone hadn’t grabbed her from behind.

  She smelled her captor’s foul breath and felt his mustache scrape against her cheek. “Where you going, pretty lady?”

  His forearm clamped down on her throat and she felt him press himself tight against her. He ran his tongue along the inside of her ear and Rena screamed at its wet intrusion.

  The group in front of her parted to allow a man draped in red robes and wearing a mask of golden flames to pass through. She squirmed as he crossed in front of the others and came toward her. He hiked up the hem of his robe to keep it from touching the ground.

  “Get away from me!” Rena snapped.

  The man in the mask came before her and paused. He leaned closer to get a better view of her face and said, “What is thy name, child?”

  Rena tried to respond but her words only came out in rasps. He waved for the man to release her and put the tips of his fingers beneath her chin to raise her head to face him. “Tell me thy name.”

  “Rena,” she whispered.

  “Rena,” he repeated. “How lovely. I am seeking a woman called Jesse Sinclair and her son. Where are they?”

  “Gone.”

  “Gone? Gone where?”

  Rena pointed south. “She went to see the sheriff and raise a posse.”

  He put his hand against his chest and said, “Oh my. A posse? How terrifying.”

  “It’s true,” Rena said. “You’d all better run before they get here.”

  He smiled at her, then turned back toward the group and raised his hand over his shoulder. “Make her scream. We shall see who comes running.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The snare hadn’t caught anything. Jesse decided they were going to have to find something else to eat, some berries or mushrooms maybe. There were neighbors she could go to who would be glad to take her in, but she needed to be sure she and Rena weren’t followed. Whatever danger she and Rena were in, she had no desire to bring it on anyone else. But if they’d lend her a horse, she thought, that would be enough. She’d leave Rena in safekeeping and ride to the sheriff’s office to tell him what happened. All she needed was a little more time.

  Instead, as she got up from the branch and eased her way back toward the trunk of the tree to let herself down, she heard a sickening scream that nearly made her lose her grip and fall. It was Rena. Of that much she was sure.

  “Hang on, Miss Rena,” Jesse called. “I’m coming!”

  She grabbed the sides of the tree trunk and slid the rest of the way down. She landed with a thud on the ground, then turned around and ran as fast as she could back toward their camp.

  Rena screamed again.

  Jesse cringed at the sound of it and drew both snake guns. Whoever, or whatever, was hurting her friend was about to die a horrible death. “Leave her the hell alone!” Jesse shouted as she burst through the brush.

  Rena was being held from behind by a man with a leering grin on his face as he pressed against her. “See that, darlin’?” he said. “I told you if you screamed loud enough your friend would come.”

  Jesse cocked the snake gun in her right hand and aimed it at him. He shifted Rena to block her shot and said, “You think you can hit me and not her, lady? You must be one hell of a trick shot.”

  Blackjack McGinty raised his shotgun to his shoulder to aim it at Jesse and clicked the hammer back. Jesse cocked the second snake gun and aimed it at him. “Don’t be foolish, girl,” McGinty said. “You’ll never hit nothing holding two guns in two different directions, but I’ll sure as hell knock your guts out with this here scattergun.”

  Jesse didn’t move. “Run,” Rena pleaded. “Just go. Run as fast as you can.”

  Cody Canada grabbed Rena’s arm and pulled it behind her back. He cranked it upward until there was a loud pop! of bone and Rena screamed out in pain. Canada yanked Rena back into place by her hair and said, “Now, how about you shut up while we’re trying to talk to your friend?”

  Deacon cocked his head and several of his acolytes moved immediately to stand in front of Rena, blocking Jesse’s line of fire with their bodies.

  “What the hell do you people want?” Jesse demanded.

  “Only to talk with thee,” Deacon said.

  “Well, here I am,” Jesse said, moving the guns to try to see past the crowd of acolytes to find the man holding Rena. “Talk away.”

  Deacon smiled. “We have mutual acquaintances, you and I. Ash Sinclair and Lorenzo Escalante. I knew them both when I was young.”

  “Sorry to tell you this, but they’re both dead,” Jesse said. “Anyway, those two ain’t got nothing to do with Miss Rena. Let her go and we can talk all you want.”

  “As you wish,” Deacon said. “Mr. McGinty, lower your gun, please.”

  Blackjack McGinty glanced at Deacon, unsure of what he’d heard.

  “Do it,” Deacon commanded.

  McGinty decocked the shotgun and lowered it toward the ground.

  “There, see?” Deacon said. He pointed toward Jesse and said, “Now please do the same.”

  “Like hell,” Jesse said.

  Deacon sighed and waited.

  Rena cried out. Jesse could not see what was being done to her, but she could hear the pain in Rena’s sobs.

  “I said leave her alone!” Jesse shouted.

  “And I said lower your guns!” Deacon shouted back.

  Jesse glared at him. She could shoot him right now. He certainly deserved it. She bet she could kill the tall son of a bitch before he could raise that shotgun too. She didn’t recognize him from last night at her house, but that didn’t matter. He was riding with them now and he deserved whatever he got.

  It was the rest of them that was the problem. She’d have to mow down as many as she could before they swarmed her. Even then, there was no guarantee that she wouldn’t shoot Rena in the process. Or that the bastard holding her wouldn’t kill her just so he could get away.

  “Put them down, so that we might talk,” Deacon said. “They are useless to thee in this situation.”

  Jesse decocked the pistols and lowered them to her sides.

  “Very good,” Deacon said. “Now put them in their holsters.”

  Jesse looked at the shotgun in McGinty’s hands. It was pointed at the ground but there was no doubt it could come up firing in less than a second. He’d spoken true. She’d have a hell of a time trying to shoot him left-handed while pointing a different gun in the other direction. Meanwhile, the shotgun he was holding would likely cut her in half.

  She holstered the guns but kept her hands close to the holsters. “There,” she said. “Now tell your man to let Rena go.”

  “I am nothing if not fair, Mrs. Sinclair,” Deacon said. “I will offer you a trade.”

  “What kind of trade?”

  “A prisoner for a prisoner,” Deacon said. “You agree to come with me so that we can talk, and I will let your friend go.”

  “No,” Rena moaned. “Don’t you do it, Mrs. Jesse. Don’t you do it!”

  “I promise you, Mr. Canada has no limit to ways he can hurt her,” Deacon said. “For now, it’s just a few broken bones. Next he will begin cutting.”

  Jesse unbuckled the gun belt and looked around for a place to throw it. She saw some cobwebby leaves gathered in a pile near an overturned tree where a mass of thorns and vines had grown around it. She bunched up the gun belt and the holsters and tossed them into the brush. “There,” she said. “Now let Rena go.”

  “Of course,” Deacon said.

 
Cody Canada released Rena, who came as quickly as she could to Jesse’s side. Jesse hugged her gently, afraid of hurting her further, while Rena wept and said she wasn’t going to leave her. “You have to,” Jesse whispered. “Go and get help.”

  “No, I can’t leave you,” Rena moaned.

  “It’s going to be all right.” Jesse attempted a reassuring smile.

  The acolytes were closing in around them, followed by Deacon and the two outlaws. “Seize Mrs. Sinclair and bring her back to our camp,” Deacon said.

  “Get your hands off of her!” Rena shouted. She tried batting the acolytes back but it was useless. They shoved her aside and grabbed Jesse by both arms.

  As the acolytes pulled Jesse Sinclair toward the trees, Blackjack McGinty inclined his head toward Rena. “What about this one?”

  Deacon tapped his lower jaw with the tip of his index finger. “It is a pity there are no more Children of the Forest to feed on her.” He shrugged and said, “Dispose of her as you wish.”

  “What?” Jesse shouted. She struggled to turn around and free herself from the acolytes’ grasp. “No! Rena, run!” she screamed.

  Rena turned and tried to flee, but Blackjack McGinty had already raised the shotgun and aimed it at her. He clicked the hammers back on either side of the shotgun’s double barrels and closed his left eye to aim.

  The barrels erupted in a burst of flame that lit up the woods only long enough to see the burst of smoke, followed by Rena’s hands flying up into the air before she collapsed.

  Jesse Sinclair’s legs went limp and she would have fallen if not for the acolytes latched on to her arms. Her entire body trembled with rage as she screamed at the sight of Rena’s body splayed across the grass, her blue nightdress now shredded, her skin exposed and blown open.

  Blackjack McGinty cracked the barrel on his shotgun and flicked the two spent shells into the grass. As he reached into his pocket for two new ones, Cody Canada patted him on the shoulder. “Nice shot,” he said.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Connor was standing alone in a desert when he heard it rumbling far below. It swam upward through lakes of molten iron and then smashed headfirst through miles of silicate rock that rose as they heated and cooled as they fell.

  The ground trembled beneath him, then split open beneath his feet so that he was standing suspended over the divided earth, able to do nothing more than flap his arms like a wounded bird that could not fly. The gap grew wider and he cried out. Enormous gusts of wind rose up from the canyon, threatening to upend him and send him hurtling down into its endless abyss.

  He heard it coming faster, with the force and speed of a train, except it was rising from below and tearing the earth apart with it. It smashed up through the layers of hard stone plates encircling the planet’s mantel. Molten rock erupted from inside the canyon in great spurts of bright yellow flame and he cried out and tried to cover himself with his hands to keep from being burned.

  Everything began to shake. Gently at first, a quiet rattling that he could hear more than feel. Then the dirt under his boots was shaking and he saw the rocks and pebbles on the desert floor begin to bounce. They bounced so hard they tumbled over the edge of the abyss and fell silently, for there was no bottom to it.

  It set his entire body vibrating, and then, with one deafening roar, it shot upward from the darkness below, its head aimed toward the sky. It stretched out its long, muscular, serpentine body, then bent to stare down at him.

  Connor Sinclair looked in horror at the hooded eyes of the enormous eldritch snake that loomed over him, massive and ancient and terrible. His mind cracked at its incalculable size. A snake that lived in the planet’s core, like Nidhogg coiled around the roots of the world tree, Yggdrasil. A living thing, sprung forth from the pages of a story Miss Rena had read to him so long ago.

  The ground split wider, spreading Connor’s legs until he could no longer endure the pain. His feet slipped and he tumbled backward into the abyss. Wind rushed past him, rippling through his hair and clothes and fluttering the fingers of his outstretched hands.

  It was peaceful to fall. It was the last thing he ever had to do. In the end, after all of the struggle, it was easy to simply let go.

  As he fell he was engulfed in a blast of heat coming from the molten rivers below. He could feel himself disintegrating. Soon all that he was would be ash spread out over the white-hot core at the center of everything. And after that? There would be nothing more.

  The snake dove after him. It was going to catch him before he fell too far and he wanted to tell it not to try. He wanted it to let him fall.

  The snake swung between his legs and slithered upward to catch him on its massive back. Light from the erupting lava around them glittered against the snake’s massive scales.

  Connor lay on his stomach and the snake flew up toward the edge of the canyon’s rim and the land of the living. They crested the edge of the desert floor and the snake took off across the barren landscape, moving so fast that it was all Connor could do to grab the edges of the massive scales and hang on.

  There were snowcapped mountains in the distance, backed by a purple sky. The mountains flew past them in a blur and Connor pressed his face against the snake’s back to shield himself from the wind. He felt the snake’s sides expand as it breathed. He listened to the slow, steady pulse of its heart and realized it was synchronized with his own.

  The snake slowed as they approached what looked like a group of strange, erect stones in the distance. As they drew closer, Connor saw that they were not stones at all, but the buildings of what had once been a town. There was a general store and a bank and several more buildings, but all of them were abandoned and on the verge of collapse. There were wagons in the street without horses and no people anywhere. Everything was abandoned and broken.

  It was Boldfield, Connor realized. Exactly as he remembered, but now it was in ruins.

  The snake slithered down the main street toward the only building that seemed to be somewhat intact, the saloon. It came to a stop at the entrance, but Connor did not let go. He was too high up in the air. The snake turned its head to look back at him, waiting for him to remove himself, but Connor would not.

  The snake gently rolled to the right, farther and farther until Connor could no longer hold on and he fell. He landed hard in the dirt, and by the time he managed to get to his feet, the snake was already gone.

  Connor had been wrong, he realized. The town was not abandoned. At least not completely. There were lights on inside the saloon. A piano was playing. Someone was laughing so hard he sounded like he was crying, and another man was yelling at him to be quiet. He could hear glass mugs clinking into other glass mugs and the sound of men guzzling from them afterward.

  The saloon was marked by a sign on the door. It was similar to the sign Connor had seen before, but this time, the snake was coiled and it was clenching pieces of a broken spear in its mouth.

  Inside, the main room was packed. Every seat at the bar was filled, all the way down to the end, and men crowded around every table.

  To his amazement, Connor saw that the ones seated nearest the door were not entirely human. They were shaped like men but had deformed, apelike faces, and their upper torsos were covered in hair. Other tables were filled by short, squat men with masses of woolly hair and they were wearing little more than rags.

  Connor headed toward the bar. A man who was missing an eye and whose face was covered by what looked like the claw marks of some wild beast glared back at him. Another man, tall and thin, wore a silk blouse and pants that ended at his knees and below that were what looked like white women’s stockings. His shoes were made from shining black leather and had a brass buckle on them. To Connor’s surprise, the man had a long thin rapier hanging from his belt. He sneered as Connor walked past, then returned to his drink.

  Behind them, Connor saw William Sinclair. William
was standing behind the bar, holding two empty mugs. He turned around to refill them from a large barrel behind him.

  “Pa!” Connor shouted.

  William set the mugs down, then headed toward the end of the bar to wait on someone else. “Pa!” Connor shouted again. He thrust himself between two of the patrons to see where William had gone, but they shoved him back. Connor pushed his way through the crowd, trying to keep William in sight. William snatched an empty bottle of whiskey off the bar and spun around to grab another, but there was not another one to replace it with. He pulled up a trapdoor in the floor and went quickly down the steps into the cellar, vanishing from Connor’s view.

  Connor slammed his fist on the bar top in frustration. The only thing to do was wait. He found an empty stool at the end of the bar and slumped down on it to wait for his father to come back.

  The man sitting next to him slammed down an empty whiskey glass, then moved to pick up another full one and raised that to his lips. Next to that glass was a mug of beer.

  Connor turned to get a better look at who was sitting next to him and his eyes went wide. Ashford Sinclair slammed the second empty whiskey glass down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Without turning to look at Connor, he said, “I’ve punched fools for staring at me a lot less time than you are now, boy.”

  Connor closed his eyes and told himself he was dreaming. He gave his head a shake, then hesitantly opened his eyes, thinking everything would be gone, but all of it was still there. The saloon, the strange men, and his grandfather Ash Sinclair on the stool beside him.

  Sinclair pointed his glass toward the trapdoor behind the bar and said, “You’ll have to wait till your pa comes back up if you’re thirsty. Going to be a while, though. Everybody has to take their shift serving the others and I didn’t restock for him when I finished mine. I guess it’s true what they say. Once a snake, always a snake.”

  The man sitting to Sinclair’s right reached for the full beer mug, but Sinclair smacked his hand away. “That’s mine, you damn idiot.”