Last One Standing

by Derek Rutherford

  The snoring stopped.

  I froze.

  I looked back at Jia. The moonlight on her face made it look like she had cat’s eyes.

  Moose Schmidt started snoring again.

  I waited a minute, maybe more, then I took another step inside. I motioned for Jia to stay outside, but she shook her head. She wanted to kill Moose as badly as I. We’d talked about waiting until he went to the outhouse. It was right there around the back of his house, a small shed surrounded by vast piles of brushwood, and cut logs, as if Schmidt had spent most of the summer so far preparing for winter. But, we’d agreed, he probably had a pot under his bed, and would be unlikely to use the outhouse until morning, and we wanted to get this done now. It’s not an easy thing to work yourself up to a point where you can shoot a man dead, but it’s a lot easier in the darkness. The town was sleeping, too. That said, it wasn’t something I was sure I could do, and I wasn’t sure Jia could either. I’d been thinking of my father, and of all those other men Moose had killed, trying to build up a head of killing steam. I thought of Moose shooting Jia’s mother in the back, of how he’d gone about killing her father and cousin, almost playing with them the way a cat played with a mouse once he had it cornered. It ought to be easy to kill a man like that. We’d be doing everyone else a favour. How many lives would we ultimately save by killing him? But still my bones felt chilled, my hands wet, and my throat dry. Maybe if he saw us? Maybe if he drew on me? Maybe if I was to look him in the eye it would be easier?

  I took another step.

  That walk across his kitchen was the longest, slowest, walk that I’ve ever made. For a while clouds obscured the moonlight and Jia and I were plunged into a darkness that made my breathing and heart-beat feel even louder.

  Eventually, I reached the inside door, and as I extended my hand to open it Moose stopped snoring again. I hesitated, and I imagined I felt something cold caress me. The chill crept over my skin like the touch of a ghost. I looked at Jia and could see that she’d felt it too.

  I heard something scraping.

  Wood against wood?

  Then moonlight filled the room again and with it the realization that we were deep inside the killer’s house. We’d come this far. We had to finish it.

  I waited for the snoring to start again.

  It didn’t.

  I had no choice. I pushed open the inside door.

  Moose Schmidt was asleep on a mattress with an Indian blanket over him. His back was to me. There was indeed a pot by the window, so the outhouse plan would have meant waiting until morning and daylight. A candle burned on the floor next to Schmidt’s head. I recall thinking briefly how dangerous that was – a candle burning down on the dry timber floor as he slept. Maybe he’d been too drunk to remember to blow it out. Although the candle was in a silver candleholder placed upon a saucer, so I guess it wasn’t too much of a risk. A man like Schmidt didn’t grow old by taking risks.

  Jia stood next to me.

  I slid my gun out of my holster, and I pulled the hammer back, the sound of the ratchet loud in the stillness of that room.

  Schmidt didn’t wake.

  I knew I couldn’t do this whilst he was asleep, no matter how much of a risk it was to wake him.

  Jia never felt the same.

  She shot him. Once, twice, three times. The gunshots deafening in the small room. Flames blazed from the barrel of her revolver. The smell of cordite and gunpowder filled the room in an instant. Smoke billowed around us both and dust rose from the blanket that had been covering Schmidt. Part of the blanket began to smoulder where the red hot lead had passed through it. Another part of the blanket was lifted and moved by the force of the bullets.

  Underneath was a feed sack stuffed with something that made it resemble the shape of a man.

  There was no sign of Moose Schmidt.

  Chapter 10

  I ran to the window and gave it a tug. It wouldn’t open and I realized now that something was blocking the moonlight from the outside. I looked at Jia. She stood still, totally confused. She had just killed a man – or so she thought – and yet a moment later he wasn’t even there. All that emotion and reaction became incomprehension. She went over to the try the window too.

  I rushed into the kitchen and I heard Schmidt laughing at the same time as I heard him dropping a length of timber into the brackets on the outside of the front door.

  ‘You thought you were lucky, no?’ he said, chuckling. ‘The fish thinks it’s lucky when it finds the juicy worm.’ He laughed again, and I heard something being pushed up against the bottom of the door on the outside. ‘Then it finds the hook, too.’

  Jia came back into the kitchen. She was shaking her head. Maybe in disbelief, maybe to clear the confusion. The smell of gun smoke came with her from the bedroom. ‘The window won’t open. It’s nailed or blocked on the outside. And there’s a hole in the inside wall.’

  ‘A hole?’

  She pointed to the wall. I saw a small black oval. It looked like a knot in the wood.

  ‘He must have been watching us as we crept across the kitchen.’

  Her eyes were wide and she was beginning to breathe rapidly. I’d already examined the kitchen window, but she checked it again. The frame that cast the crucifix shadow wasn’t a window frame but was two wide lengths of wood that had been nailed on the outside. They were broad enough to prevent us using that window as a means of escape.

  ‘The door?’ she said.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Then we’re trapped.’ I knew Moose Schmidt heard because he started laughing again.

  Jia heard him. She looked young and frightened.

  It took me a moment to realize what Schmidt was doing. His laughter came and went, and I heard him talking to someone else. I heard the rustle of something against the outside wall of the house. There was a pause, then I heard more of whatever it was being laid up against the house.

  I was sweating and I was shaking, but a chill froze the marrow in my bones.

  I pictured the shack next door – the burned down shack. I saw those piles of brushwood and cut logs and dry branches up against the outhouse. Schmidt hadn’t been saving them for summer. He had been saving them for us.

  ‘What is it?’ Jia said, seeing something terrible in my eyes.

  I shook my head.

  ‘What is it?’ she demanded.

  Then we heard the crackle of flames.

  It wouldn’t have happened to my father. It wouldn’t have happened to One Leg Hawk. But what did we know, Jia and I? We were just kids. My father and One Leg would never have walked into that trap the way we did. Certainly, if there had been two of them, they wouldn’t have both gone into the house. They wouldn’t have both taken the bait. One of them would have been outside right now and things would have been OK.

  Or, if not OK, a whole lot better.

  The breeze we had felt hadn’t been a ghost. It had been Moose slipping out of the window. It was barred now, as we had found out. He’d had it all ready – watch us, pretend to snore, and then at just the right moment a quick escape. After that, run around to the door and drop the barrier in place. The wooden slots I’d seen in the front door weren’t there because it was an old door that had been reused; they had been fixed there to allow a beam to be dropped quickly in place, locking us in. It had all been in front of me and I had missed it. We had both missed it. The lack of furniture and possessions that I had put down to Moose being a man living alone had actually been because he didn’t live here. The whole place was a trap, nothing else.

  ‘The fellow next door – you saw the burned out shack? – he screamed for twenty minutes,’ Moose said from somewhere just outside the kitchen window.

  I fired a bullet through the wall towards his voice and I heard him laughing.

  ‘He was a bounty hunter,’ Moose said. ‘He was a sorry sonofabitch.’

  I fired another bullet and he laughed again.

  Smoke was finding its way in through the tiny
gaps where logs and planks of wood met. The moonlight shining into the room was growing hazy now, and outside the flames reached up to the window.

  Sweat rolled down my face, my back, and my sides.

  Jia came in again from the bedroom where she had desperately been looking for something – a loose board, a gap in the roof, anything. She shook her head. ‘There’s no way out.’

  ‘I knew you were coming,’ Moose said, and as he spoke on one side of the house I could hear someone else piling brushwood up against the other. ‘Knew as soon as you left St Mary’s. I got eyes and ears all over.’

  Jia was blinking rapidly now. I don’t know if it was the smoke or panic or tears.

  ‘What are we going to?’ she said.

  ‘I heard you were at the bird fight,’ Moose said. ‘With that crippled old Indian. I could have killed him many times, but sometimes leaving them alive is just as much fun.’

  It was getting too hot. Over by the window where I think Moose had first set the fire I could see the wood glowing red. The flames would catch on the inside, soon.

  Jia tried the door again.

  It was as solid as it had been when we had both pushed against it minutes earlier.

  Jia was panting for breath. My hair was soaking with sweat.

  Now the wood over by the window did burst alight.

  ‘Cal,’ Jia said, shaking her head, her eyes wide.

  ‘I figured,’ Moose said, his voice a little further along the wall now, ‘I might go and see your mother next. Well, fact is. I’ve already been. Saw you too, Cal. Though neither of you knew I was there. Folks say your ma is the prettiest woman in the territory, and I tend to agree with them. Well, of her age, anyway. And that’s my kind of age. Yes, I think I might go and see her. You think on that, Callum Johnson. You think on that as you burn.’

  The room filled with smoke. It was hot enough that we had to keep lifting our feet, dancing like bear cubs on hot tin plates. It was almost impossible to breathe. The smoke scorched our lungs as we inhaled. Tears streamed down Jia’s face. She was holding onto me, her fingers digging in like claws. Her eyes darted around the room wildly. There was nothing we could do. We’d kicked every wall, wrenched both windows with all our strength, and we’d smashed the door with our shoulders. All to no avail. Now the fire was sucking the energy from us and it was all we could do to stand in the centre of the room, turning, looking this way and that, around and around, in the desperate hope that a wall would collapse before we were burned alive.

  Jia started mumbling something in Chinese. It may have been a prayer. She pressed herself harder against me and looked up at me but I don’t think she was seeing me any longer, or at least she wasn’t focusing on me. She was looking beyond me, at an eternity that was forming somewhere deep inside the fire and the smoke.

  I was weeping, too, tears streaming down my face from the hot smoke that was burning my eyes. I coughed and choked. My tears evaporated in the heat. I pulled a neckerchief over my face and I indicated to Jia that she should do the same. It was too hot to talk. It was noisy, as well; flames were roaring and crackling and heavy timbers shrieked as their weight shifted in the furnace. I found myself thinking of my mother, and of my father, trying to conjure up images of them. I pictured the boarding house back in St Mary’s Gap. I remembered the time my father and I met Jia’s mother in Natchez. I imagined fishing and swimming in cool refreshing water. I thought of those fighting birds back in Green Springs. I thought of the rooster named General dying in its handler’s arms, of the way that bird’s helpless eyes had looked as it faced death. I thought of how, just a few minutes ago, Jia and I had been up on the hill looking down on the sleeping town of Mustang and I cursed the fact that if only we hadn’t both come down here and both crept inside this house, we would still be all right.

  If only.

  Now flames started dripping from the ceiling. I brushed several burning embers from Jia’s hair. Still holding each other, we edged away from the place where the ceiling was raining fire on us, but the terrible reality was that there was nowhere else to go.

  I noticed that the hem of Jia’s coat was burning. I reached down and batted at the smouldering material and immediately I felt an intense pain on the back of my neck.

  Jia brushed a burning fragment off my skin. I flicked smoking ash from her boots. But more ash and fire and embers were falling all the time. It was like trying to avoid snowflakes in a blizzard.

  Jia gasped loudly and involuntarily – in fear or in pain, I wasn’t sure. But it didn’t matter. I knew in a few minutes, probably less, we would both be screaming.

  Outside, I could still hear Moose Schmidt laughing, although it might have been echoes inside my head. Surely he would have had to move away from the inferno.

  But no, there he was again. Real laughter. Real enjoyment.

  I drew my gun as the fire closed in on us. If I did nothing else I would do my best to shoot Schmidt through the burning walls. Maybe, now that he thought our end was near, he might have stopped moving.

  Keep laughing, I thought, trying to take a bead on his voice.

  Just keep laughing.

  The gunshot came before I pulled the trigger.

  My mind was running so slowly that I didn’t really comprehend what I’d heard. Panic and fear, pain and hopelessness, had seized me. It felt like everything – my life force, my bodily functions, my ability to think – had been squeezed to the point of no return. I was shutting down.

  I willed myself to shoot, determined that my final act in this life would be to try and avenge mine and Jia’s imminent death.

  But my muscles wouldn’t respond.

  Somewhere inside came the realization that I was drowning, not burning. Or rather it was both. I couldn’t breathe, and whether the situation was caused by fire or water was wholly irrelevant.

  I felt Jia slump against my body. I tried to hold her upright.

  I heard the gunshot again. And another.

  Now I realized what I was hearing and the fact puzzled me.

  How could there be gunshots when I hadn’t pulled the trigger?

  Suddenly the door of the house was flung open, and with it came a rush of cold fresh air and the flames all around us were blown backwards for a moment and I saw a shape, a man, in the doorway. He was crouched down holding and firing a rifle.

  ‘Get out!’ he cried.

  He worked the action on his rifle and fired again. I heard other gunfire, too.

  ‘Get out!’

  The man glanced at me and I saw from the shape of his head and his hat that it was One Leg Hawk. More questions filled my mind.

  ‘Callum!’ he cried. ‘Get out!’

  Somehow I found the strength to move, to drag Jia towards the door, towards that cool air. Behind me the fire raining down from the roof of the cabin turned into a storm – all those embers and burning fragments loosened by that blast of incoming air.

  Then I was at the door and I was breathing again, gasping for oxygen like a fish that had been out of water for too long. I saw that One Leg had a pistol out now. Smoke was billowing all around him, hiding him.

  ‘I brought the horses down,’ he said. ‘Go!’

  I felt a bullet whistle through the air between us. I could hear Jia coughing and choking, but at least she was breathing. I still had my revolver in my hand and I shot in the same general direction as One Leg was shooting, through the smoke, through the flames, into the blackness beyond. I fanned the hammer just like Samuel Johnson had taught me so long ago.

  ‘Go!’ One Leg yelled again. He was crouching now, still firing, but edging backwards into the billowing clouds of wood smoke coming from the door.

  I fired again. The hammer came down on an empty chamber.

  Then I felt something cut through my leg, a bright and intense pain amongst all the darker agonies that were raging from every muscle.

  I was still able to move so I ignored the new pain and pulled Jia backwards. A few yards from the house the smo
ke cleared and there were our horses, three of them, standing there in the cool night air, trembling with fear at the fire and the noise and the gunshots, but standing there, nonetheless. Jia bent over, retching, and a bullet sliced through the air where her head would have been had she been upright.

  I heard One Leg curse as his revolver hammer came down on an empty chamber too. Then I heard him grunt in pain.

  A second later he was alongside me, heaving Jia onto her horse as if she was a sack of feed, slapping the horse’s rump and sending it skittering up the hill into the night, Jia aware enough to hold onto something – anything. Then One Leg was helping me up on my horse, too.

  I heard the explosion and whistle of another gunshot.

  I heard One Leg hiss with pain, but then he was on his horse too and the pair of us were racing after Jia, the smoke from the burning house like a wall behind us, creating an impenetrable curtain across the track, the very thing that was going to kill us now shielding us.

  Chapter 11

  I have no idea how long we rode for before the horses slowed, and eventually came to a standstill. It may have been fifteen minutes; it may have been an hour. I was in a daze. My mind was racing even more widely and randomly than it had done whilst in the burning house. There were moments when I thought I was back in that inferno. Other times I found myself gasping for air as if I was still suffocating. I remember trying to talk to Jia and One Leg, shouting to them, my throat hoarse, my voice weak and lacking volume. I don’t recall them answering. So we raced on and I think we may have all ridden all night had the horses not decided otherwise.

  We stopped deep in a gully. There were trees silhouetted on the skyline, stars visible behind them. I could smell smoke and it took me a terrible minute before I realized that nothing was burning, that my clothes were impregnated with the stench of fire.

  The horses were foaming at the mouths and they were slick with sweat. Their chests heaved and I could feel my horse trembling with the effort it had put in.

  I looked over my shoulder, convinced that they – Moose Schmidt and his friends – would be there, just a few horse lengths behind us, guns drawn.