Wake of Vultures

by Lila Bowen

  Hennessy wandered up, rubbing the raw places on his shoulders where Nettie’s rope had held him and looking peaky when he spotted the pile of carcasses. “Somebody tied me to a post, Captain. Now I got the strangest song stuck in my head,” he muttered, sticking a finger in his ear. “Won’t go away. And what happened to Chicken? What’s going on?”

  “We’re gonna find out, by God.” The Captain spit on the ground to seal the deal.

  Back inside the saloon, the men had laid out the bodies on the tables. It was common knowledge that almost all the flat wood in any popular business would be whittled down by the knives of cowpokes losing at poker, or at the very least stained and gouged from bar fights and spilled liquor and tobacco juice and blood. But these tables looked like they’d just been rolled off the wagon. Lying atop the smooth wood were four relatively fresh strangers with strange, round bites taken out of ’em at peculiar intervals, and then there was Chicken. Most of his face and lips were gone, an acid-edged circle showing his gums and teeth. Nettie wanted to throw up, but she figured she’d just swallow it down before letting the Captain think she was weaker than any of his other fellers. It was damned inconvenient, wanting to yark all the damn time.

  “Poor Chicken always was the first one through the whore’s door,” Milo said.

  Virgil shook his head. “Women is always trouble.”

  Nettie’s temper flared.

  “That thing wasn’t no woman,” she said, making her voice husky and low.

  The Captain looked up as if seeing her for the first time, his eyes narrowing. He looked her up and down, and she managed to stick out her chin without letting her chest push out.

  “You done good, Rhett. Reckon we’d still be listening to that octopus woman, if you hadn’t killed her.” Gentler than Nettie would’ve expected from him, the Captain reached down and undid the Durango Rangers badge pinned to Chicken’s shirt. When he’d affixed it to Nettie’s collar, he said, “Welcome to the Rangers, Rhett. The spoils belong to you.”

  With that, he turned and walked out of the saloon.

  “Well, go on.” Milo jerked his chin at the door behind the bar. “You’d better start with a vest and a decent saddle. Looks like you’re the next Bloomfield.”

  “Don’t the Captain take his spoils first?” Nettie asked.

  Virgil snorted a laugh, and Milo answered for him. “Captain only takes horses. He’ll keep whatever’s sound, add ’em to the herd.”

  “Why?”

  “Everything else just weighs a man down, he says.”

  In the back room, Nettie looked at the riches laid out, unsure of where to start and how much to take. The other men milled around, waiting and watching. With more goods than she’d ever seen in her life laid out before her, Nettie itched to run fingers through the gold and hang the watches around her neck like pearls and pinch silver dollars between her teeth just to feel the soft metal dent.

  But she knew a test when she saw one, and Milo had said “Bloomfield” like it was a slur. She wanted the Rangers to think her a good man, so she passed by the barrels of gold and silver and went to where the clothes were neatly stacked. Testing for quality between callused fingers, she picked out a leather vest and a wool serape, selected a few bright bandannas, hunted for a good pair of socks, and claimed a dented silver pocket watch that wasn’t too fancy. She took a well-padded saddle, too, but not the nicest one that really caught her eye.

  “That all you taking?” Hennessy asked, and Nettie nodded.

  “A man don’t need to be weighed down,” she said. “Y’all can have the rest.”

  Before they left, and after each of the men had taken a share of Nettie’s spoils, they set fire to the town. Nettie’d never seen so much fancy wood go up in smoke, and she wondered what story would reach the fine folk of Durango about another massacre by the Rangers.

  Seemed like there would always be a certain dishonesty to Nettie Lonesome’s life, but it was better than being eaten by a damn octopus or serving as a drunk man’s slave. She kicked her horse and followed Hennessy out of town with a smile on her face.

  As she was settling into her cushy new saddle and enjoying the spoils of war, she was pretty sure she heard a woman scream.

  CHAPTER

  16

  She was the last in line, and when she turned in the saddle, she saw nothing but fire.

  “Captain, you hear that?” she shouted, but none of the men turned around.

  “I don’t hear nothin’,” Hennessy said by her side, but… she did.

  With a final rub of her brand-new Rangers badge, she cussed under her breath, turned her horse, and galloped back toward the blaze.

  “Rhett? That’s against orders, man! Come back!” Hennessy hollered, but Nettie refused.

  She was sure she heard it now, a woman shredding her throat with screaming above the crackling of the fire. It was coming from the building she’d taken for a jail, considering the door had a shiny new lock on it and there were bars on the window. Small hands were wrapped around the iron.

  “Help! Please! I’m locked in. Help!”

  Even knowing the Captain might draw and quarter her, even knowing it was probably another one of them siren things, still she couldn’t just turn her back on a person crying for help. Yanking Ragdoll to a halt, she jumped off the mare and didn’t bother tying her to a post.

  The door was locked, but the latch wasn’t hot, and the flames were just spreading from the building next door. Nettie tried kicking the door open, but unlike the ramshackle wood of Pap’s farm, this new construction wouldn’t budge with just a boot.

  “Aw, hellfire,” she muttered as she pulled out her pistol and fired a round into the lock.

  Damn thing didn’t budge.

  “Stand back, Rhett.”

  She’d never been so glad to see Samuel Hennessy, which was saying a lot. He moved her gently by the shoulder and stuck a shiny spade into the door’s edge, prying it open. The room inside was smoky but not ablaze, thank goodness, and the screaming turned to relief as soon as they stepped inside.

  “Help! Please. He locked me in here. I can’t…” The woman broke down coughing, and Nettie hurried to the cell, where a woman lay on the floor, ragged and oddly shaped.

  “You a monster?” Nettie asked.

  The woman shook her head. “I’m in a family way. The smoke… please…”

  Sam was already there with his shovel, moving Nettie aside again to work on the lock. After banging on it like a damn blacksmith, he finally got the hasp snapped in half. Nettie pulled it off and wrenched the door open. The woman on the floor inside was unmoving, and Nettie and Sam each took an arm to drag her out. They coughed and ducked low as they dragged her from the building, its walls already catching flame.

  Lord, she was more than in a family way—the woman was enormous. Nettie’d never seen a woman in this stage, carrying a belly that had to be bigger than the rest of her combined. Once they’d tugged her out into the street, Nettie leaned down and put her ear to the woman’s mouth to see if she was still breathing, which she was.

  “Lady, you got to get up. Can you walk?”

  The woman shook her head like she was dreaming. “My husband. Tell me. Is he—?” She fell into a violent coughing fit, gasped, and went limp. Fire was licking through the cracks between the boards, the smoke thickening. Sam pulled his bandanna up over his nose, but Nettie had left her new ones in her saddlebag. Best she could do was pull up her shirt and squeeze her eyes shut as they drug the still form out toward their waiting horses.

  The Captain and his Rangers were mounted at the edge of town, watching. Nettie ignored them, turning the woman onto her back and checking for worse injuries once they were far out of range of the fire. Sam put an arm behind the woman’s shoulders and pulled her to sitting.

  “Go get your water, Rhett.” When Nettie paused too long, he pulled down his bandanna and added, “Ain’t you ever seen a woman with child? Get her some water!”

  Nettie fetched her
skin from Ragdoll’s saddle, glad the mare hadn’t taken it into her fool head to run away. Hurrying back, she kneeled at Sam’s side and squeezed water onto the woman’s lips. Her eyes popped open, and she drank gratefully, one hand rubbing the taut fabric stretched over her belly. As Nettie watched, dumbfounded, the woman’s belly heaved and rumpled.

  “Is it a monster?” she whispered.

  Sam laughed. “Naw, it’s always like that, near the end. I was the second of eight, so I seen it plenty of times.”

  Nettie closed her eyes and felt around inside but sensed no flip in her belly. Well, until Sam put a hand on her arm, at least. “Go get your second pony, will you? My black’s too anxious.”

  “Can she ride astride like that?”

  Sam shook his head and chuckled. “If her other choice is to stay here, I reckon she’ll find a way.”

  “My husband,” the woman murmured, eyes closed and face ashen. “Trent. Went in the saloon. You seen him?”

  Nettie’s eyes met Sam’s, and she felt a pang of loss for the woman.

  “I ain’t seen him, no,” Sam said, and Nettie hurried toward the Rangers for Puddin’.

  She and Sam both knew what had happened to Trent, but the woman was half dead and didn’t need to know about the pile of bodies yet.

  “This ain’t no charity,” Milo said as Nettie took Puddin’s rope from one of the Rangers.

  The Captain, she noticed, was silent and watchful.

  “Well it ain’t a hangman’s noose for two, neither,” she muttered, jogging back with the horse.

  The woman was sitting up now, coughing, and Nettie took a moment to switch her new saddle from Ragdoll to the stocky paint pony, cussing to herself all the while. She’d been enjoying that cushy seat, dammit, and now she’d be bareback on the rangy appy, leading along a woman that the Captain, or at least his chief men, didn’t care to save.

  Well, and what right did she have to call herself a Ranger if she was going to let humans die?

  “Can you ride?” she asked.

  The woman looked up, eyes red and cheeks gaunt.

  “I need to find my husband.”

  “We’ll try to help you,” Sam said. “But we can’t do that unless you get on this horse.”

  When the woman held a trembling hand out, Nettie had no choice but to help Sam pull her to her feet, which seemed far too small compared to her huge stomach. Her flowered dress was faded and bare, almost bursting over her shape, and she clearly hadn’t been eating well. But when Sam bent over and held out both hands as a step, the woman took the saddle horn in one hand like any good prairie wife and obligingly let the two wranglers heave her mass up onto the fat pony, who grunted but didn’t falter, to his credit.

  “Trent taught me to ride,” she said, all dreamy. “We’re going to San Anton. I’ll be a rancher’s wife, and we’ll raise Trent Jr. to be the pride of Durango.”

  Sam took the rope and swung up onto his palomino, and Nettie grabbed a handful of mane and launched herself onto Ragdoll’s bare back. As they turned away from the encroaching fire, it occurred to her to ask, “There ain’t any other folks locked up in this shitshow town, are there?”

  “I don’t think so,” the woman said, swaying with the pony’s stride. “I didn’t see nobody but the man with the mustache and his wife. She said they were keeping me safe for when the Cannibal Owl came to visit. I do wonder what that is, don’t you?”

  Nettie’s eyes met Sam’s.

  “I do wonder,” she said.

  That night, they made camp on a butte, starting up two fires and setting guard rotations. None of the men wanted anything to do with the rescued woman.

  All the Captain said was “You all want a pet, you all take care of your damn pet.”

  “But, Captain. She was gonna die,” Sam said, the picture of pup-dog innocence.

  The Captain looked at him, all sharp. “Hennessy, a man-eating monster took the time to lock that woman up. What makes you think there wasn’t a good reason?”

  But Nettie knew there was nothing monstrous in the woman’s belly—at least, she couldn’t sense anything inhuman. The wobbly feeling inside her was solely from hunger and breathing in smoke, and as soon as she’d eaten two bowls of Delgado’s swamp beans and some goat, it settled down just fine. The woman ate two bowls, too, and Delgado seemed to favor her with extra meat, an unusual kindness.

  Nettie had just settled down to sleep when Jiddy walked by and grunted at her from across the fire. She shook her head. He’d done that, from time to time, since the saloon. The mule-stubborn man was too proud to ask her out loud if she sensed anything dangerous, so grunting and nodding like animals had to be enough. They both knew she was the better, more sensitive scout. For now, there were no new monsters in the area.

  The woman was mostly silent, although Sam tried to draw her out into conversation. She allowed that her name was Regina, she was from Fort Leavenworth, and she was fairly certain that Trent would show up in their covered wagon to collect her at any moment. Nettie repeatedly asked her about the Cannibal Owl, but all Regina knew was that it was coming soon and would want to meet her baby.

  She beamed with grease all around her lips. “The lady from the saloon called me a fitting tribute. I reckon that means something nice, don’t it?”

  Then she murmured a few things about hoe-cake recipes and fell asleep with her bird’s-nest brown hair flopped over Nettie’s new saddle. All Nettie had to pillow her head was a rock.

  She settled down and wrapped herself up in her new serape, which smelled comfortingly of horse. Hennessy had laid down his bedroll next to hers, which made her pulse quicken for just a moment before she recalled that he didn’t know she was a girl. Of course the newest and youngest fellers among the Rangers would be close, and Sam was the only other feller willing to sleep near Regina and her great, heaving belly. It was peaceful, bedding down as the fire crackled and the growing herd of horses nickered softly, surrounded by fighting men and overhung by stars. Hennessy got up and came back with a third plate of beans and sat down, shucking off his boots. Nettie was already lying on her back, opting to sleep fully dressed with boots on. She couldn’t imagine much worse than facing a calamity on the prairie at night while barefoot.

  Some of the fellers were already asleep and snoring through their whiskers when Hennessy finished his plate, belched, and cozied down just a few feet away.

  “A siren. Who’d have guessed? The longer I’m with the Rangers, the more I reckon I don’t know about the world.” His voice was soft as he turned on his side to face her, his blue eyes keen with firelight. Nettie had never felt a moment so intimate with another person, and she instinctively turned on her side to face him.

  Damn, he was close.

  She swallowed hard. “Yeah.”

  Hennessy’s voice dropped. “Were you scared today, Rhett?”

  “Hadn’t really thought much about it. A little, I guess. Wasn’t much time to feel anything.”

  “But why’d it take us all so queer and not you? I just remember there being something so purty I couldn’t stand it, opry-type music. Voice like an angel. And then I woke up, lassoed to a pole.”

  “Monsters don’t affect me as much, I reckon.”

  “But why?”

  Nettie snorted and rolled onto her other side, but she saw a glimmering black shadow on the edge of the butte, pointing west. As if she could just get on her horse and keep riding on the Injun woman’s timetable. Like she was a damn train with a schedule to follow. In more of a huff, she rolled onto her back, but the stars held no answers.

  “I don’t know, Sam. I don’t know anything. All I know is I got to do this or I’ll never be free.”

  “Were you—” Hennessy shifted like there was a spider in his britches “—a slave? Before?”

  Rage burned through her, but she measured her answer. She liked Hennessy and wanted him to like her. Normally, she’d say something sharp to a man who asked her such a personal and painful question, but this was S
amuel Hennessy, the noon sun to her personal midnight, so she rolled back to face him even though tears threatened. “I was raised by folks who used me like a slave but called me their child. At least with a ghost on my tail, I get to choose how most of my hours are spent. Sitting horseback’s better than what I was doing, I reckon.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “G—” She caught herself. Hennessy knew Gloomy Bluebird. “Galvez.”

  He sighed. “I always wanted to see Galvez. But I keep ending up further west. Figure one day I’ll fetch up in Calafia, at this rate. Ever feel like you’re not in charge of your destiny, Rhett?”

  Considering he’d just assumed she was a slave, Nettie reckoned the question was more about him than it was about her. So she tried to comfort him, a piece of work that was new to her. “I reckon every person on this earth was meant to do something. The hard part’s figuring out what exactly it is. And making sure you’re up to it.”

  Hennessy’s smile could’ve lit the moon. “That’s right wise, Rhett. Thank you kindly.”

  A little chunk of something in Nettie’s chest melted.

  “Welcome,” she said. And after a long pause, “And thanks for following me today. I figured the Captain would just keep riding.”

  “Well, he did,” Sam said. “But I turned around, anyway. Once you said you heard screaming, I heard it, too. Poor woman. Should we tell her what happened to her man?”

  Nettie shook her head. “I don’t see the point. Give her some hope. A body needs hope, sometimes, more than it needs the truth.”

  Hennessy’s hand landed on her shoulder, wide and soft, and her entire body burned up like a cedar on fire. Then he squeezed her, let go, rolled on his back, and started snoring, easy as pie.

  Nettie laid awake for most of the night, remembering that touch.

  Was it possible Sam could see exactly who she was? And was his destiny all twined up with hers like she hoped it might be?

  She let her fingers almost graze his where they lay on the ground. It wasn’t enough. Nothing ever was.