Wake of Vultures

by Lila Bowen

  The buzzard landed, oily black wings held wide.

  The horse blew air out her nose and lowered her head.

  The buzzard crept closer, hopping sideways and in no way trying to hide.

  She wasn’t actually a buzzard. She was a vulture.

  But she was more than that, too.

  Nettie dreamed of biscuits and red-eye gravy, giant pits of creamy grease that smelled delicious but sucked at her boots and then at her bare feet as she tried to escape. Slurped down into the bacon-speckled ooze, she hollered and hollered and hollered, but no one answered.

  The horse stepped gently over her prone form, hooves spread wide and planted firm. She snorted a warning and bared her long, yellow teeth.

  The vulture laughed.

  “You’re a bitch, too,” the bird growled.

  CHAPTER

  8

  The mare screamed, and Nettie startled awake and sat up, smacking her head on Ragdoll’s knee. Her heart just about ate itself when she realized just how close her soft parts were to a thousand pounds of angry horse. Luckily, the horse wasn’t angry at her.

  Unluckily, the critter that the horse was facing off with was also angry and probably even more dangerous.

  It was a buzzard. Well, most folks called ’em buzzards for convenience, but Nettie knew well enough it was a vulture. Monty had explained once that buzzards were actually swift brown things, more like hawks, while vultures were the big, bald-headed scavengers that wheeled high up, searching for dead things to eat. There were black vultures and turkey vultures, and this one, with its bald, pink head, was a turkey vulture.

  But then again, it wasn’t.

  The critter swallowing up the sun with its six-foot wingspan was mostly a vulture as Nettie knew one, but the eyes were human and the flight feathers were shiny and sharp as razors, and Nettie reckoned that no bird had any use for the floppy breasts that dangled their long, red nipples as the bird hopped closer and stabbed at Nettie’s fingers with a blood-speckled beak.

  “Holy crow!” Nettie snatched the gun away before the all-kinds-of-wrong buzzard pecked a hole in her hand.

  “Not a crow,” the bird hissed with an old woman’s voice. “Bitch.”

  Ragdoll’s teeth snapped where the bird’s neck had been seconds before, and Nettie scrambled back from under the horse and crouched, pointing her gun under the mare’s speckled belly. The vulture squawked and hopped back, dugs swinging, and Nettie was forced away as Ragdoll spun and shoved her aside with the full power of her rump. Still sleep-addled and not sure if she was fighting horse meat or a tar pit of gravy, Nettie did what her instincts told her to do: She shoved the horse aside and shot the dadblamed buzzard in the tits.

  Feathers exploded, but the bird just knotted in on itself, threw back its bald, ugly head, and laughed with the sound of hot piss splashing over sharp rocks.

  “Bullets, girl?” With a powerful retch, the bird vomited up a flattened chunk of metal. “Damn things tickle.”

  Mind spinning and heart yammering, Nettie kept her shaking pistol pointed at the buzzard while she took inventory of the other weapons on her person. Two more guns in her saddle bag, apparently useless against the bird. Her lariat, which the critter would probably just bite in half. Three Bowie knives, none too sharp, but she reckoned those were useless unless she could get within stabbing distance of a creature that didn’t much care to be stabbed and came equipped with plenty of razor-sharp parts of its own.

  “Any ideas, Ragdoll?” she muttered, and the horse just backed up a few steps and squealed.

  From far away, she was sure she heard someone whisper, “Run, idjit,” and she figured that was pretty good advice. Peeking around the mare’s left side, Nettie shot the buzzard again, and as the bird laughed and yarked, she whipped out her knife, sliced Ragdoll’s hobble, swung into the loose saddle, yanked the horse’s head left, and kicked with all her might. Seemed like a lot of steps for two seconds’ worth of work and a cloud of dust, but the mare was ready and more than glad to oblige.

  The buzzard spit out the bullet and screeched in rage, her wings beating the air as Nettie lay low and begged the mare to hurry. Considering neither of them were paying much attention to steering and it was all Nettie could do to keep the loosened saddle upright, they barreled blindly through the mesquite bushes. Nettie got a hand up over her eyes as the finger-length thorns reached for her and caught in her shirt. Her cheeks and arms burned with fresh scratches as they burst out the other side of the thicket and streaked across the bare brown prairie. Whatever water and grass Ragdoll had found gave her enough power to get them a good ways away from the bird’s dark shadow, but Nettie could feel the nasty critter hovering overhead and chuckling to herself as she rode the wind. Their only hope was to find another green patch and some sort of cover, if not a town or other gathering of normal, heavily armed people who didn’t take kindly to being cussed at by turkey vultures.

  The day burned on in a haze of eternal bleakness. At some point, the saddle fell sideways, and Nettie rolled off the mare’s neck on unsteady legs to tighten it. Trying to climb back up was a lot like being drunk, and she had to find a rock to use as a mounting block. Ragdoll took it in stride, more patient and gentle than a new-broke horse had any right to be. For a while, Nettie barely held the reins in one loose hand, and the mare obliged by zigzagging from thicket to creek to the occasional patch of shade thrown from a butte or boulder. Every now and then, a black shadow would flicker over them, a harsh laugh drifting down from the blue-white sky. All the vulture had to do was wait.

  It wasn’t until the horse had slowed to a sloppy walk and the sun was sizzling as it set that Nettie realized she’d taken a mesquite thorn in the arm. The damn thing had settled in good and deep through the dead stranger’s shirt. In between the red heat of the scratches on her face and hands, the acid in her empty belly, the dryness in her throat, and the ache in her rump from two days of hard riding, Nettie somehow hadn’t noticed a mesquite spine the size of tall man’s finger sticking straight up out of her bicep. Apparently dying alone in the desert made folks right stupid.

  Nettie dropped the reins over her saddle horn and felt around the thorn with fingers thick with blisters and calluses. As she yanked the mesquite chunk out and tossed it to the dirt, the buzzard laughed high overhead and let her wide shadow fall over the girl and the horse.

  “Soon enough, girl. Soon enough,” she called.

  “Gettin’ damn sick of listening to that bird talk,” Nettie grumbled.

  “Ain’t we all,” the desert muttered back.

  Swallowing was hard, and staying awake was harder. The water skin was empty. Nettie’s tongue felt like a Gila monster’s tail fallen off after a scare and flopping around, useless. A hard pain in her belly and a hot, wet burn told her her flux had arrived, but for once, she didn’t care, didn’t even stop to tie on her rags. All the pain melted together in a pool of damp warmth that only made her mouth more dry. It felt like her life was bleeding out of her, staining her saddle with shame and leaving her empty as the cloudless sky. And she didn’t care at all.

  The sway of the mare’s walk was a long ripple, a swallow, the rhythm of a boat at sea that lured Nettie into an uneasy sleep as the sun flattened into a flaming crown and began to sink beneath the black horizon like a penny in a bucket of water. The next time she blinked, stars exploded against the indigo, the moon a fat, white fang. Her belly was a stone, her thighs aching and chafed with dried blood and piss. Then it was noon again, the sun punishing and cruel. Rain fell, and her mouth was open to the heavens, her blood washed away to soak into the sand. A shadow covered her like a blanket, thick with stars. Ragdoll drank from a stream, but by the time Nettie looked at the ground, it was sand again, and the sun was laughing at her. Dark and light, hot and cold, wet and dry, pain and emptiness. Time meant nothing, direction even less. Her feet lost the stirrups and danced like broken puppets in the air below the short mare’s mud-stained belly.

  A bird’s sharp sc
ream woke Nettie in a panic, and she opened her eyes on a sunset unlike anything she’d ever seen before. Two buttes almost kissed dead ahead, a narrow path between them. The sky was black above, melting to blue and lavender and red, so bright and beautiful in the rocky frame that it made Nettie Lonesome want to cry. A shape filled the space between the buttes, a pitch-black vulture with wings outspread, larger than life and blotting out the dying light. But Nettie wasn’t scared—not this time. She closed her eyes and opened her arms wide and felt the kiss of feathers on her face as she offered herself to the monster, ready to end this hellish forever of dying in the desert. Just as sharp claws and a putrid beak should’ve ripped into her chest, she felt a white-hot heat suffuse her, as if she’d swallowed the sun. But death didn’t come. When she opened her eyes again, she saw stars and a steady, patient half moon. The vulture was gone.

  Nothing changed for what felt like forever, and then the mare let out a little gasp and stumbled along faster. Nettie jerked awake and clutched at air, tumbling sideways off her horse and landing in a boneless heap on the last thing she would have expected: mud. Dang, but it felt good, seeping into her clothes and skin. Her grasping hands found marsh grass, sharp cat-tails topped with velvet. Somewhere nearby, the mare gulped and gulped and gulped and blew out with a splash, so Nettie dragged herself forward with the sharp spines of the water plants until her cracked and swollen lips touched real water.

  If this was a dream, it beat hell out of biscuits and gravy.

  Nettie drank a little water, threw it up full of dirt, and drank down some more. She began to think she just might live long enough to see to the thorn wound’s damage by light of day when Ragdoll whinnied a challenge and splashed around her to stand, legs splayed, between Nettie and a dark shape falling from the sky.

  “You carrion yet, girl?” the buzzard taunted.

  “You wish, buzzard.”

  “Vulture. Harpy. Hungry.”

  “Don’t matter. To me, you’re just something that needs to die.”

  But behind the bold words, Nettie had gone ice-cold to her toes. She was half soaked in the creek, which meant her gun was wet, which meant she couldn’t even distract the bird by wasting bullets. With a full-body shiver, she wrapped numb fingers around her Bowie knife and pulled it out of its sheath, struggling to her feet with the horse blocking her view of the vulture waiting on the moonlit bank. She didn’t know much about vultures, save that they were generally agreeable birds that fed on carrion killed by braver creatures. Up until today, she’d never seen one closer than a stone’s throw, and she’d certainly never heard one holler in human language and stare at her with bright blue eyes. Downright unsettling, even before it started calling her ugly names.

  Nettie had never considered a foe that couldn’t be taken down by a pistol, especially not at point-blank range. The vulture-thing was fast and had better weapons, but Nettie had one thing the bird surely didn’t: a reckless fury backed by the desire to not be eaten. Make that two things: Nettie also had a bull-headed horse determined to serve as a barrier between her rider and the things that had set their mind to killing her.

  As if on cue, the buzzard hopped forward and aimed a peck at Ragdoll’s hoof, barely missing the tender coronet above the hard horn. In response, the mare reared and attempted to stomp the ugly thing’s bald head, but the bird just giggled and jogged back, enjoying the game.

  The creek was barely a dribble, not even enough for Nettie to get her head underwater, had she wanted to do so. But she did see plenty of stones on the bank, so she scooted back away from the horse and the bird until her wet rump fetched up on the opposite side. The first rock she found was the size of a hen’s egg, and she flung it at the bird with all her might.

  Instead, she hit her horse.

  The poor mare squealed as the stone thwacked off her rear leg, and in the way of horses, her fear took over her good sense and sent her galloping away into the night.

  Now, instead of a wall of horse and a saddlebag containing two dry guns, two dry knives, and a whip, Nettie had a wet gun, one knife, and a deep sense of regret. And the vulture had a clear shot at a mostly helpless girl just starting to feel sorry for herself and to wonder what it felt like when all the organs got yanked out through a person’s belly button.

  As the buzzard-woman clambered forward on tufted talons, Nettie grabbed another rock and flung it into the bird’s wing. The creature cackled and flapped into the air, her feathers unruffled. The next rock went wide, and the third one clocked the bird in the tit, which didn’t do a damn bit of good. Even though she knew it was foolish, Nettie pulled out her pistol and tried a shot, but the powder was too wet to do a damn thing. As the vulture landed in the middle of the creek with a splash, Nettie held her Bowie knife out in front of her, the foot-long blade still not long enough and not nearly as sharp as it should’ve been.

  “Keep laughing, bird.” She waggled the knife with false bravado.

  “Last laugh’s the best laugh,” the vulture answered, somehow managing to smile when all it had was a rotten beak. “I’ma peck out your eyeballs first.”

  Nettie managed to stand, her boots full of water and her pants stuck to her legs. “Come over here and say that again, Ugly.”

  With a hellacious squawk, the vulture flapped her wings and slowly rose into the air.

  “Don’t! Call! Me! Ugly!” she screamed with each wingbeat, and Nettie took a deep breath and prepared to stab for the fluffy-soft feathers of the buzzard’s belly.

  “Shouldn’t have called her that.”

  The man’s voice, bemused and deep and coming from somewhere behind her, startled the hell out of poor Nettie, and she glanced back instead of leaping forward with her knife. Behind her on the bank stood a tall, wiry native man wearing only a few strips of leather in pertinent places, a peculiar sight that stole her attention away from the buzzard. As if they’d planned it that way all along, the bird attacked, barreling into Nettie claw-first and knocking the bedraggled girl to the mushy ground, the razor-sharp, gut-splattered beak aiming straight for one wide brown eye.

  CHAPTER

  9

  The vulture’s beak snapped shut close enough for Nettie to see the moonlight shining on tiny hairs caught in dried blood crusted to the black. Hard claws dug through her shirt’s fabric to prick Nettie’s skin as the bird sat on her in grim triumph, her long tits pressing up against Nettie’s chest in a right uncomfortable fashion.

  “I’ll teach you ugly, girl.”

  The claws tightened, and the bright blue, all-too-human eyeballs peered into Nettie’s as carrion breath washed over her.

  “What are you?” Nettie managed to whisper.

  The buzzard-thing opened her mouth to answer, and an arrow thunked straight down her gullet, the white feathers quivering by Nettie’s cheek. Black oil sputtered out of the critter’s mouth along with an enraged scream and a river of vomited filth. Bones, buttons, and a tiny human finger spilled into Nettie’s lap. She sat up right quick and knocked the dying buzzard-woman off her body. The clumpy black blood burned, just like the stranger’s had.

  “She’s a harpy.” The man knelt beside Nettie, barely brushing her shoulder as he yanked the arrow out of the bird’s head with a sick suck and kicked the writhing carcass away.

  Nettie sat up, fingers shaking as she wiped the black gunk off her neck with the ruined sleeve of her shirt.

  “Harpies ain’t real.”

  “They ain’t? Huh.” He stood, towering over Nettie as he slung his bow over his shoulder and stuck the arrow back in his quiver. “Could’ve fooled me.”

  The way he was standing, Nettie got a right eyeful of the feller’s rump, which was just as muscled and warm brown as every other bit of him. His hair brushed his shoulders, ink black and straight where Nettie’s had once been wavy. His face was fine-featured, with sharp planes and high cheekbones and an intelligent, thoughtful look to it. He was probably twenty to her sixteen but carried himself like he was forty and the president of
a goddamn bank. The way he’d said ain’t implied he thought it was the punch line to a bad joke instead of a real word. And his accent was strangely low and musical, like he was half-swallowing the sounds before they could escape and was too polite to burp. He made her feel right unsettled. But then again, so did the dead bird lying on its back with blue eyes open and tits flopped into the dirt. Nettie pulled down her hat and looked away.

  “It’s probably the mesquite thorns, is all. Ran through a patch last night. You shot a buzzard, I reckon, and I’m mesquite-poisoned and sick with putrefaction and whatever the hell else a sun’ll do to a feller.”

  The man barked a laugh. “You’re not a feller. And that is no buzzard. But you will start seeing even more particularities, if we do not see to your injury.”

  She hunched her shoulders. “What injury?”

  He looked her up and down, his nose quivering. “Shoulder. The thorn was stuck deep. The wound is hot and hard and red, so there’s probably still a chunk in there. You didn’t notice?”

  It was downright uncomfortable, having a strange man claim to know what was under her clothes. Nettie twitched her shoulder and ran a hand down the neck of her shirt. Goddamned if he wasn’t right. The place where she’d pulled the thorn out earlier was rock-hard and hotter than the sun. And there was no way he should’ve known that.

  “I didn’t know Injuns could see through shirts.”

  “Injuns can’t. I can’t. But I have my ways. You need doctoring before something else decides you’re carrion. We’ve got to get you to the Rangers before you get yourself killed.”

  Nettie shook her head. “Ain’t none of that made a lick of sense.”

  The man nodded. “It will soon, whether you like it or not. But for now, we have work to do.” He knelt and swiftly, gently pulled her Bowie knife from her hand. She was too tired, hurt, and confused to argue, although she had a good hissy fit in her head; it didn’t do to touch another feller’s knife if he was there to take it back and stab you.