Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

  Jesus. Charlie wanted exactly nothing to do with the firebombs from then on.

  He crouched at the corner of the house, unlimbering the shotgun, that Browning Auto-5 with the duck-bill spreader, and clacked the bolt to hoist a 12-gauge blue whistler into the chamber.

  Meanwhile, the fire, as it will, waged a swift campaign of destruction, as various hungry elements of it consolidated with other hungry elements, seeking fuel and oxygen, both plentiful in the pinewood building. The conflagration was close to instantaneous, though in fact it probably took fifteen to twenty seconds before the blaze was universal.

  Nothing panics like flame.

  Upstairs, the swifter deputies felt the heat scalding through the floorboards, smelled the swift accumulation of smoke as it rose through the stairwell and the heating shafts, and knew in an instant that they had to flee or die.

  They fled.

  They spilled out into the yard, coughing, screaming, utterly demoralized by the fire that was consuming their world so quickly, propelled onward by the screams of those above not so fortunate as to have arisen on the first report. Outside they fell to their knees, gasping for air, or they hugged each other in ardent premature celebration of their survival, or they squawked gibberish, conjecturing in mangled syntax and stunned stupefaction on what the hell was going on.

  Charlie waited ’til no one else came out, and went to work with the Browning Auto-5. He worked left to right, fast, instinctive shooting, Blue Whistlers a-whistling. The gun bucked and spewed, lashing out in each shell a blast of eight .32-caliber pellets, which the spreader arranged in a horizontal dispersal pattern while Charlie regained control and moved on to the next.

  He just gunned them down in a burst of semiautomatic fire, fast and stunning; it sounded like a sort of tommy gun. The shot patterns at that range were so powerful they didn’t penetrate so much as eviscerate. Deputies were blown backward, illuminated by the light of the blazing building, amid sprays of severed limbs and ripped entrails and detached jaws and faces lost forever.

  It was over in four seconds, and Charlie stood there, still locked into his combat crouch, in the rising heat of the flames, his face illuminated madly by their intense glow, the seething smell of gunpowder all around him, a litter of shot shells on the ground, the fallen men before him dead or dying, some twisting in torment, others gone still.

  Nineteen.

  Twenty.

  Twenty-one.

  Twenty-two.

  Twenty-three.

  Twenty-four.

  Then he got shot in the left rib. The bullet cracked it, spewed left and not right, cut a track of a few inches, and exited his body, spinning, frontally.

  He turned and threw his shotgun at his opponent on the porch, who was busy trying to cock a lever rifle. The flung shotgun conked him hard enough to knock him off stride, and Charlie drew his Colt and popped all six into him. Two would have been enough, three extravagant, but six did get the job done.

  “You goddamn bastard, you shot me,” he said.

  He examined the wound. Man, did it hurt like hell. He’d never been hit before. Where the hell had that boy come from?

  But Charlie wasn’t the sort to panic at the sight of his own blood. Instead of fear he felt anger, hot and rough like steam. Who were these jazzbos to think they could shoot Charlie Hatchison?

  He pulled a knife, cut off a swatch of bandanna, and plugged the exit wound. Wasn’t pretty, but it should hold. The entry wound was so small it wasn’t bleeding much. It just looked like a big pimple.

  Charlie turned quickly, regaining his sense of mission. He retrieved the empty shotgun, kneeled to swiftly reload his Colt, and edged around the perimeter of the house.

  A man leaped from the second floor, landed hard. He was not a problem because he was aflame and ran around a bit, screaming, before he fell. A second man landed, not in flames. He hit too hard and possibly broke his ankle. He pulled himself up and began to hobble off, and Charlie shot him twice.

  Twenty-six.

  He waited another few minutes.

  No other men came out.

  The fire spread, and the whole structure blazed. It was like some mad pagan ritual celebrating the presence of the war god on earth, with the bodies of the sacrificed now browning like bacon in the heat of the fire.

  Charlie was driven back.

  Finally he knew it was done, but for a last thing.

  He reholstered the revolver, drew six shotgun shells out of his duster pocket, readjusted his hat, threaded the shells into the gun, jacked the bolt, and walked to the kennels.

  The dogs, driven insane by the fire, screamed and howled and threw themselves bloodily against their fence for freedom.

  Swiftly, Charlie killed them all.

  Then he headed for the stable. There, too, the horses bucked and whinnied. He opened the stalls on most and let them rush out into the night. He calmed the remaining animal, saddled it eventually, though the job was somewhat more difficult for the broken rib, and rode out to join the boys in the prison.

  Behind him, the flames blazed brightly in the night.

  62

  EARL kicked in the door of the Whipping House. He had leaned his Winchester .348 against the building, for this would be close-in work, revolver work. He had a gun in each hand.

  He wanted Bigboy. Lord, how he wanted him.

  Instead he found a guard with a Winchester .351 self-loader, who popped off three shots, high; Earl dropped him with a square shot to the middle of the body from the Heavy Duty. The supervelocity .38 thumped a puff of dust off the man’s chest, and he was dead before Earl could get to him.

  He kicked in a door, found no one. He kicked in another, and saw two guards looking for targets outside. They spun, but only fast enough to die with the .38 high-velocities ripping through their chests instead of their backs.

  He climbed the steps. He thumped up them, then stepped back. A man with a shotgun ducked out, thinking he had Earl pickled. But Earl fired with each gun and placed his shots an inch apart in the chest. The man rolled, bouncing, spraying teeth, down the stairs to land at Earl’s feet, but Earl didn’t notice, for he had taken just a bit of a break to slide twelve new shells into his two hot and smoky weapons.

  “Bigboy,” he shouted, “goddammit, I am here for you! You come fight me.”

  But there was no answer.

  Earl climbed the steps, but he knew that if there were guns on the upper floor of the old brick building, they’d be ready. So instead, he reached into his pouch and unscrewed the lid of a firebomb. He pulled the cord. Nothing happened. As he was short on them, he didn’t feel right dumping it. He tried to force the matches back down the tube, and of course they ignited.

  “Oh, Christ,” he said, and if he didn’t have such fast hands he would have barbecued himself to a char right there. But somehow in the two seconds that remained, he got the thing airborne down the hallway.

  He heard the muffled pop as it detonated, and watched as the sudden glare reflected off the old brick walls. Presently a man in flames came running by him, but Earl paid him no mind. He could tell by the compact frame that the fellow could not have been Bigboy.

  He stepped into the hallway, the end of which was bright aflame. The heat pulsated like the punches of a savvy fighter, but Earl turned sideways and cleared each room.

  In the third one, he found old Fish.

  It was the whipping room.

  It was burning.

  Fish hung, lips dried, head down, wrists broken from the twisted angle, his body in utter repose. The flesh was riven beyond any capacity to understand. The old man hung in a pool of his own blood, dark and jellified, mixed with waste. A cloud of flies buzzed about, taking small pieces of him for nourishment. Such squalor cannot be imagined, though Earl had seen as much in the Pacific when a Jap was cooked to death by the flamethrowers or turned inside out by mortar shells.

  Earl had no key to the padlocks that locked Fish in his chains, and the heat was rising.

&n
bsp; “Old man, I did come,” he said. “I came as soon as I could, and I am sorry I was not sooner.”

  The old man did not answer, of course. He had no last words of atonement or forgiveness, gave no pep talk or instructions. He was simply dead on chains, head pure weight slung forward and down, and the body could not be released for the simple dignity of burning supine; he would burn to ashes as he had died, hanging. Earl recognized it as Bigboy’s work. No other man could have done such a thing.

  “Bigboy!” he screamed, “where are you, goddammit!”

  There was no answer.

  The flames blossomed powerfully, sending a burst of energy down the hallway. The floorboards shuddered. Sparks filled the air and so did smoke, and in seconds there’d be no getting out.

  Earl turned, to leave the old man hanging, knowing in seconds he’d be ashes. He never made it back to the Chinee girl and the high yeller of N’Awleens. He’d died, whipped slow, over time, by Bigboy.

  Then he turned back, stupidly. Something strange yet powerful had occurred to him: no man should be consumed in fire while hanging in chains. Wasn’t right, any way you look at it. It was dying a slave. Earl seized up a chain, put the muzzle of the .38 close to it, and fired. He was peppered with pieces of metal as the bullet chewed through the chain link, and the old man fell forward. Earl caught him, set him down gently, then moved to the other chain and sheared it with the same .38 high-velocity. He lifted the old man and made it to the door, where a guard stood with a shotgun.

  “You! You supposed to be dead.”

  “Don’t know where you got that idea,” Earl said. The heat billowed powerfully, but the man opposing him was mad with rage, and Earl knew he was cooked. But then a shot came and hit the fellow square in the face and down he went.

  Earl turned. There was no other man visible. Who had fired, God? But he made out the puncture hole in a window and knew from his memory of the orientation of the building that he lined up, three hundred or so yards off, with the compound tower. Jack O’Brian was on the job.

  Still carrying the old man, Earl made it to the stairwell, as the part of the house behind him collapsed when the floor burned through, and the walls down there, without their internal support, gave way and caved in, so that the acrid dust of old brick mixed with the smoke and the sparks, making breathing a labor.

  Earl set the old man’s body down in a cool glade of trees some hundred yards or so from the blazing Whipping House. He knelt beside him. Of course he had no words, for words were not his specialty. He arranged the body in as neat a position as he could.

  “I will make good on my promise to you,” he told the body. “Except the part about the whores. But now I will burn this place to the ground, old man, and come the morning there won’t be nothing left except ghosts and ashes. Semper Fi, old goat.”

  Some spark or piece of airborne grit must have gotten into his eyes. He knitted them in pain, and rose to continue the fight.

  He ran across the yard, out of the light. But on the way he found one of the men he had shot coughing as he bled out, having crawled out of the building. Earl knelt.

  “You!” the wounded man gasped, his words competing with the accordion groan of a sucking chest wound. “You’s daid.”

  It was one of the boys from the boat who’d watched as Earl followed the block into the black water.

  “I ain’t, not a bit. Now tell me: Where the hell is that Bigboy?”

  “Sir, I ain’t seen him. He’s alone with the old man, whipping on him. Whipped him every night, five nights running. Whipped him bad. Don’t want to face my maker with sin on my mind.”

  “That ain’t my department. Where’s Bigboy?”

  “He must have got out. Damn you, you have killed me.”

  “That is why I come. You die now, for you ain’t no more use to me.”

  Earl turned.

  Around him, flames rose. He looked. Elmer had already lit up the Store. In the distance, heavy shooting suggested Elmer and Bill had moved on to the guards’ barracks.

  Farther out, the steady crack of Jack’s .270 suggested that the old man was doing his damage, steady as a rock.

  Earl turned. The Big House itself hadn’t been touched.

  Time now to go visit Mr. Warden.

  WHO were they?

  Bigboy had made it to the piney woods, and he watched the destruction of Thebes from afar. Shots rang out, men fell. Always, with the inevitability of sacks of corn dropped off a truck. These fellows could shoot, that was clear.

  But it was more than just shooting. It was determination. There was no hesitation or reluctance; instead, as Bigboy was an expert in such matters and would quickly recognize, it was maximum force applied without conscience but with considerable skill.

  Already the place was ablaze. The Store was gone; that meant all records, all debts, all supplies, all the things that sustained Thebes were ashes in the wind, as the flames ate through the wood structure and devoured it, and all that was inside.

  The Big House still stood, but Bigboy had heard shots from within it. Somebody whacked the warden, you could count on that.

  The world was ending.

  Thebes was destroyed.

  There would be no coming back from this night.

  He had read the shots well and, leaving the old man hanging, had quickly come across two men shot through the head from afar, which convinced him that standing and fighting was a tragic mistake. So he bailed out a rear window, slithered across the yard toward the tree line, as shots rang out from everywhere. He meant to head to the guards’ barracks, where he could rally his boys, distribute weapons from the strong room, and begin a defense. But he saw that that was too far gone; the point had been reached where all was lost, and the prudent thing was to survive for another day, conceding that these outriders would carry the night. On top of that, he had no weapons, no shirt, not a thing to fight with: except, of course, his whip.

  He made it to the trees, and gathered himself. He had no compass and knew an ordeal lay ahead. But he calculated swiftly, saw that in two days hence, the prison launch would arrive up from Pascagoula, and he could forage for that amount of time at least, and emerge then, with a report and a future.

  All that changed in a second.

  That second came as the Whipping House itself ignited from within. The fire ate it with a vengeance. He could see it glow, smoke, throw spark and gas, and then almost explode, as flames reached the old wood roof and began to eat with a pig’s gusto. In seconds the building was engaged totally, and seconds after that, one half of it collapsed in upon itself, throwing up a blast of dust and spark.

  Then his eyes traveled to the other end of the house, and he saw a fellow coming out, carrying a man.

  This was the first of them he had seen. He saw and read cowboy, for the man was sheathed in a duster and had a ten-gallon hat on, and had a cowboy’s leanness and sinewy grit.

  Bigboy tried to figure it out: Cowboy. Posse. Outriders. It had not occurred to him till that moment to contemplate his antagonists. That would come later; now was merely to survive. It amazed him nonetheless that this fellow was not law enforcement by uniform and not some kind of rogue Negro; he was just a goddamned cowboy from the last century or from the pictures, in on a night of helling and town-busting.

  Then Bigboy realized who it was this cowboy carried. It was dead old Fish. He’d gone in and carried out Fish. That’s when he knew who it had to be.

  It was Bogart.

  Bigboy had a moment of stupefaction. His lungs dried up even as his heart began to pound. He settled back, feeling extreme displeasure rocket through his body, as well as fear. His knees began to tremble, and his hands followed. He more or less fell apart, gagging on this reality, chewing it over for a few seconds.

  How?

  How the hell?

  How on God’s earth?

  He searched his memory and again saw the man swallowed by the black river, sliding downward beneath its moon-riddled surface, trailing a wake
of bubbles. No one ever comes back from that one.

  Was he a ghost? Was he a conjurer’s trick? Was he an illusion? Was Bigboy losing his mind? But Bigboy didn’t have the kind of mind one can lose; it was too obdurate, too anchored in the realistic to be delicate enough to break free and float toward madness.

  Then Bigboy realized he’d made a tremendous discovery. For if he had come across Bogart of a sudden face-to-face, he would have staggered into shock and the man could have dealt him a fatal blow while he stood there knock-kneed, sucking wind. But now he knew: Bogart was back again, somehow, and worrying about how or why had no point on this fiery evening.

  It occurred to Bigboy that he would kill him again tonight. This time he would kill him right and proper and completely. He tried to think where such a thing could happen, where he would catch the man unexpected, and kill him with his whip. He would whip him to death as he had so many others, for that is what he was the best at. He did not want to fight him again with fists; the man was a hellion. The whip would be excellent: take his skin, take his will, take his eyes, take his hands, make him perish in pain so penetrating and absolute you beg for death, even when it’s a long way off.

  Then he understood what must happen and where he must go.

  He turned and slid off into the piney woods, almost happy.

  63

  THE shots awakened Warden.

  He jacked up in bed, hearing them crash all about. The flare of burning fires dappled his far wall, as a flame-orange glow suffused the room through the windows.

  His first reaction was the phone, the only one to the outside. He could call Jackson, they could radio the nearest state police barracks in Hattiesburg and in…

  But the phone was dead.

  Then he felt the presence in the room.

  He was not alone.

  The other sat facing him in the dark.

  “Hello, Cleon,” came a voice from across the years.

  “Davis! Davis, damn your soul!”

  “I have come home.”