He nodded a lie as he slung the shotgun across his back. Sara clutched Gwen to her bosom as he looped a satchel over his other shoulder.
“How long will you be gone?” she asked. Her tone was as uncertain as the wildness in his eyes.
When he made no reply she sat Gwen in her chair and walked into the kitchen to the sink. Staring blankly out the windowpane, she could see the approach of his reflection from behind and felt his heavy arms fall around her.
He held her with emotion. This is what I fight for, he reminded himself.
She sighed, and relaxed in his embrace. When he released her, she bowed her head toward the sink.
“I’ll put Gwen down before I go,” he said.
Matthew hoisted the drowsy tot from her seat, and drew her close to his chest. By the time he’d carried her upstairs to her cradle, she had already closed her eyes. He tucked a blanket around her.
With the farm like a picture-postcard behind him, Matthew slipped his revolver from the satchel and secured it under his belt, then slid two shells into the shotgun’s breech. He quit the route to town and struck for the forest instead, every thought to the task at hand.
The pitter-patter tracks of wren and raccoon were delicate furrows in the trenches, and a blurry sun smeared behind the stark branches of the frontlines. His every step was ordered by the implacable will of his youth, but the hatred that nourished it made him forget he was at war for the sake of his family.
There was a whisk of air that smelled of sulfur, and a ticklish whisper like cat’s breath. The twin bores of his shotgun waited while his heart slammed in his chest and he surveyed the pines.
It crouched on a deadfall upwind of him, and chattered like fingernails on a school slate. Its back was arched and the tawny hairs bristled like quills; its tail as stiff as a bottle-brush. The gleam of needle-fangs and the sparkle of ice-black eyes dared him; its tiny, red-wreathed maw mocked him. Only a trigger-drag lay between them.
The wood roared with muzzle-blast as a hail of icy spears and brown needles shook from the firs. The acrid stench of gun-powder filled his nostrils, and the heavy gray smoke blinded him, yet he ventured forward with his heart now a dead-thing behind his ribs. The timber against which it had stood was scored with buckshot, but there was neither body nor blood.
Matthew shrieked to the woods like a damned soul as he pursued the phantom creature. Frozen shanks of muscle drove him over gullies and into ravines as he burst through the ice of frozen brooks, and heaved steaming upward toward the crest of a knoll. His breath huffed and the air was like broken glass in his lungs as he clutched the stitch in his side, driving on, over stumps, brambles and hidden outcroppings of stone. A flash of brown, a glint of red, and the weasel sang into a thicket at the peak of the ridge.
Nothing natural moved so fast, he knew it. He waded through nests of briars as if they were soft summer grasses, oblivious to the scraps of wool and flesh he left behind. In a final surge of burning muscle and singular will he crested the hill into his own sleeping pastures; sleek and lustrous in their shrouds of unbroken white. As the brown silhouette like ragged static raced for the distant farmhouse, it was panic rather than judgment that unleashed the second barrel of his weapon. The barrage of buckshot peppered the ice, but his target had been little more than a dusky shadow, and had now vanished in the smoke and glare. Matthew’s body was a smarting and exhausted thing, but his will was killing fire.
There is a part of the human spirit, they say, that can refuse to die. It will defy matchless odds, and shares neither the pain of flesh nor the reason of intellect. This primal spark is a passionate survivor that kills in the heat of desperation, and is insolent to the concept of surrender. Far from merely a romantic notion, it is a venomous thing. Matthew had never actually reasoned such a philosophy, yet he had become its personification.
“Sara!” The frantic cry echoed through the house.
The furnishings and walls were oddly foreign to him as he stalked through the back porch and its barren pantry. A strange kitchen volunteered a shoe, on the floor and behind the cabinets. The shoe became a woman’s leg, became a mannequin in a homespun cotton dress. His weapon clattered to the floor as he stooped beside her. Sticky locks of hair plastered her cheek; he felt the tack of red gelatin on his fingers as he plucked them away. The ridge of her brow was a small curtain of flesh in a blue-black nimbus. A russet asterisk stained the edge of the sink.
“Missed!” Came a hiss; familiar as it was ethereal.
A spit of ruby winked and vanished from behind the banister of the stairs just beyond the kitchen.
Like a drunkard, Matthew staggered over the empty shotgun and traversed the staircase with a strength that was alien to him.
From a whitewashed cradle, the face of an eternally sleeping infant stared up at him, as peaceful and unreal as a china-doll. He touched the cool gray face, reeling headlong into purgatory as a surreal chatter taunted him from the doorway. Heavy hands fumbled for the pistol in his belt while the dance of a retreating shadow lured him still upwards.
“I’m still here!” He railed at the apparition.
A ladder spanned into the gloom of an attic, and the soldier took it rung by rung to the high ground—just like San Juan Hill.
The stale air was choked with dust, and the fine gray powder clung to crates and boxes stacked neatly into rows of cardboard towers. Matthew’s legs now failed him at last, but he cut a swath in the dust as he crawled to a corner that he fancied a Cuban foxhole.
“I’m still here,” He repeated, brandishing his revolver.
A hot wire thrashed in his skull, keeping time with the pace of his pistol bore as he took aim after aim at the shadows. Pale, yellow light streamed through the glass of a single murky rectangle and cast the attic into a delirium of black reflections. Through them Matthew saw the murderer’s silhouette more clearly than he ought. Tiny button-black eyes glowered like beacons of heaven or hell—Matthew still couldn’t tell which.
His face twisted in the throes of anguish, and froze to a distorted, damp mask as the demon, or death angel slinked forward.
“I’m still here,” said the weasel.
The barrel of Matthew’s pistol strayed from its target and turned beneath his own chin. The steel dimpled the fabric of his throat, numbing its every fiber as a dark epiphany drained into his muddled soul. The muffled crack resounded through the farmhouse, from attic to kitchen, before drifting into funereal silence. Tears of melting icicles, the only things left to mourn.
E. Dagforth is a writer from the Midwest where he lives with his family.
Blood Devil
Erik Scott de Bie
Cortijo waited at the entrance to the cave, watching the grains of sand slide through his fingers and fall to the ground. As it dropped, the steady stream of particles wafted back and forth, back and forth, in a steady pattern. It almost seemed like the cave was drawing in the wind and blowing it out. Breathing.
The Cheyenne had told him this land was alive, and warned that he must take care not to offend the spirits. Most of the white men dismissed such beliefs as superstition, but Jesús Cortijo had seen enough in his time to know otherwise. He whispered the prayer his guide had taught him, promising that if the Great Spirit protected him, he would stop the beast.
Whether the spirit approved or not, the wind slowed, and the last of the sand fell from his fingers to pool along the lip of the cave. A few grains skittered down the tunnel floor. He listened for the singing of the rattlers that usually infested caves, but after the trail of death he’d followed for a year, he didn’t think he’d find anything else alive in this place.
Just her.
“Here we go.” Cortijo drew his pistol and stepped into the humid darkness. His eyes adjusted slowly, letting him pick out faint firelight that filtered up from somewhere inside. Loose stones skittered under his boots, so he stepped carefully. He’d spent months tracking the witch woman from burned towns to blood-smeared campsites to this lonely cave hig
h in the Colorado Mountains. To alert her would make a waste of all that effort.
The cave grew tighter, and he had to crouch and creep through, gun held low at his side. The stench of blood filled the stale air, soaking his pores like smoke. He touched the wall to steady himself, and his fingers came away wet with liquid that looked red-black in the reflected firelight. He tasted it, then spat. Blood.
A hulking form loomed behind him. He raised his pistol, but the beast was not moving. It was a bear, he realized—dead at least a few days, its body torn open and oozing. All around it, five-pointed stars were drawn on the stone, scrawled in the bear’s blood over cave paintings that had endured here for centuries. He knew that symbol—the witch left those to mark her wake. A bloody trail led from the bear corpse deeper into the earth.
Murmurs echoed off the walls now. Cortijo was close.
Ten paces deeper, the tunnel opened into a cave the size of a shed, just big enough for a bear to fit snugly. The light came from red wax candles that burned all around the cave, their smoke staining the stone overhead. In the center of this chamber, trapped in a five-pointed star drawn in blood, knelt the woman he was hunting. She wore rags and multiple layers of dirt and grime, which she was bathing away with diluted blood from a chamberpot at her side. As she washed, she murmured words Cortijo didn’t recognize. He hadn’t seen her this close in months, and just like that first day a year ago, he could hardly believe she was a monster. Beneath the layers of babbling madness, she was just a frail, petite girl of 18, maybe.
She was only a little older than Clara, the daughter he’d lost—the one she’d taken.
He steeled himself. The witch had caused more devastation in her bloody trail across the west than he’d seen in all his years as a lawman. She’d reduced town after town to charred rubble filled with butchered corpses. What few blood-smeared survivors she left could only stare vacantly at nothing or weep for parents or siblings ripped in half with a strength no human could match. The worst had been in Utah: an entire church torn apart and bodies hung naked from the rafters. Each scene painted with the same bloody pentagram.
The witch was a demon unleashed on the world, and he meant to end her. It was necessary, and it was personal.
He stepped out into the cave, gun down at his side. “Bruja,” he said. “Mira aquí.”
She went right on bathing as though she had not heard. She stripped off the remains of her blouse and rubbed herself, smearing the blood in swirls across her skin. She moaned as if doing so gave her pleasure.
Cortijo shivered with desire and revulsion. “Witch! Look at me!”
She looked up. There was no sanity in her eyes, only the desire to feast and mate and destroy. She grinned with a mouth full of stained teeth. “Jesús,” she said.
That was his name, but did she know him or was she praying?
He drew up his gun and shot her in the chest. Blood burst out her back and spattered the wall. She staggered, turned halfway, and fell across the bloody edge of her pentagram. It smeared as she scrambled to rise.
The stone wailed around him, and he could hear screams of the souls she’d sacrificed to hell. He could hear his daughter Clara among them, ripped open at the hands of the witch.
Cortijo pulled back the hammer and shot her again, this time low in the back. She screeched in pain and curled into a wheezing, blood-soaked ball.
He remembered holding Clara in his arms as she choked on the blood filling her lungs. Again, he felt her cough blood onto his face.
Cortijo kicked over a candle and crossed the bounds of the pentagram so that he stood over the witch. He slowly drew back the hammer of his pistol. “Look at me,” he said.
Laughter bubbled up from her, then became a bone-grinding moan. Her fingers traced a five-pointed star in the stone floor, pushed so hard that her skin broke open and painted the symbol in her own blood. Her tear-streaked face looked like Clara’s, beseeching him.
“Jesús.” The smoke and the candle flames stirred in a wind he could not feel. “Jesús—”
He shot the witch in the face.
Two weeks later, as the sun dipped, Jesús Cortijo crossed the creaky old Stevenson bridge that marked the border of his own ranch. After a year on the trail, after months without talking to another living person, he was nervous about seeing his family.
Gracias a dios that Rosa was the first to greet him. The muscular sheepdog offered a simple greeting with boundless enthusiasm for his return. Rosa practically knocked him off his horse. He had to reprimand her for it, but he couldn’t feel angry. The dog’s ardor had broken his anxiety, and he rode on with a half-smile on his face.
He came across Norris, who was bringing the cattle in for the night. The men greeted each other with the slight nods they’d grown accustomed to.
“Got your telegram,” Norris said. “It’s dead, then?”
Cortijo nodded. It comforted him to think of the witch as an “it,” and to forget how human she had become in the cave.
Norris had been his friend for years, ever since Cortijo had dragged him off the field at Antietam. Cortijo had entrusted his family to Norris in the year he’d been away. The way Norris figured it, he owed Cortijo his life and would gladly protect the homestead. Some of the locals—particularly his nearest neighbors, the Parsons—had never taken to a black man working under a Mexican, but neither Cortijo nor Norris much cared.
“God have mercy on it.” Norris spat in the dust. “We expected you a day back. Missus Cortijo even baked you a cake, I reckon. You’re always late.”
“Always late,” Cortijo said. Norris hadn’t intended it that way, but the words reminded Cortijo how he’d been too late to save so many people: settlers, natives, Clara.
“She’ll be right steamed, no doubt,” Norris said. “Better pay the devil what’s due her.”
Cortijo winced at the unfortunate reminder of his battle with the witch.
“What’s the matter?” Norris looked concerned.
Cortijo waved it away. “Just tired,” he said. “See you for supper. And the family?”
Norris smiled broadly. “My wife had our third baby two months back. Lucas.”
“Congratulations,” Cortijo said. “Does he look like you?”
Norris laughed and went back to work with the herd.
Cortijo reined his horse toward the main house, his expression neutral but his mind roiling. So far, he’d been able to forget that awful moment in the cave during the day, but at night the memories filled his dreams. He woke every morning wiping non-existent blood from his face. Even though it was daytime now, as the sun dipped toward the horizon, he sensed the coming nightmares. The horror seemed so much more vivid now that he had returned to where it had all begun a year before.
“It’s over,” he whispered to himself.
After a stop at the stables—introducing the horse he’d bought in Colorado to the others in the brief, quiet way of horses—Cortijo made his way to the farmhouse.
He found his youngest daughter, Ana, in a rocker on the porch. He almost thought she was his wife at first—she’d changed from a girl into a young woman during his absence. She’d grown taller and she wore her hair loose in curly waves. She had to be sixteen now.
“Ana?” He touched her hand.
Her thick black hair stirred in the breeze as she stared out over the prairie, rocking slowly. She remained as silent as she had the day he’d left a year ago. After the witch had eviscerated Clara and broken Ana’s mind.
Cortijo patted Ana’s hand and made his way to the door. He paused on the threshold, overcome by an odd feeling. The house hardly seemed his anymore, as though he had no right to be here after so long away. Some gun fighter he was, hesitating in front of his own door like a frightened child. He was glad none of his fellow soldiers were here to see him, or the Cheyenne.
He went inside. “Marta?”
The familiar scent of wildflowers filtered through the house, though they smelled old and withered, their natural fragr
ance diluted by a kind of persistent sadness. The house felt dead, just as it had the morning after the witch killed Clara. The day he left.
His wife sat at the family table by the remains of a partially-eaten cake. Its caramel cream drooped in the heat, and it reminded Cortijo of something dead by the roadside. Marta wasn’t eating, but rather cutting the cake apart with a long cooking knife. She looked tired.
“You’re late,” she said without looking up.
“Yes ma’am.”
She cut a sliver off the cake. “You want a piece?”
“Yes ma’am.”
He sat down across from her and picked up a fork. Her knuckles were white on the handle of the knife as she cut him a piece. They ate in silence, eyes averted. It tasted wonderful, despite how it looked.
Marta seemed to have aged several years in the space of one. Threads of gray ran through her vibrant black hair, and the wrinkles around her eyes had deepened. She’d become a bundle of bones and sinews, and she looked like she could have used some of that cake.
“Did you stop her?” Marta asked.
He nodded. “Yes.”
“¿Está muerta?” she asked in her native Spanish.
“Sí,” he said. “Yes, I killed her.”
Her voice was cold. “Bien.”
That night, they made fearsome love, gasping and screaming fit to wake the horses. The pain and loss of the last year began to burn away in their bed. Still, Marta refused to look at him.
Afterward, when Cortijo reached out to stroke Marta’s lustrous hair, she shivered.
Cortijo awoke alone to the sound of the rooster crowing. He felt beat-down and exhausted, as though he hadn’t rested at all. A hot morning wind stirred against the walls and roof, and he heard the front door open and shut.
Marta had risen long before, leaving her side of the bed a cold fallow. He inhaled the fragments of her scent he could still capture—the faint whiff of her natural earthy smell coupled with spring blossoms. She’d always worn flowers, from the first time they had met in far away Guadalajara until the day Clara had died. Then all the flowers Marta kept around their home withered, as if unable to grow in a place tainted by the witch’s evil.
Use Enough Gun (Legends of the Monster Hunter Book 3) Page 6
