Prairie Gothic

by J. M. Hayes

  “Down!” the sheriff yelled. He didn’t know whether anyone heard.

  ***

  Sweat rolled. Two of Two had peeled out of her jacket and sweater and was working on the buttons to her blouse. She had Judah’s undivided attention.

  Heather English was the one who was sweating. She had been deliberately slower in her own striptease. Her jacket was off, but, as bits of another Heather’s flesh began to play peekaboo in the dancing light of the roaring forge, she sidled away from the action.

  She had a plan. She would put enough distance between the two of them so that Judah couldn’t watch them at the same time. If he noticed and turned to deal with her, she would bolt, try to give Two a chance to grab one of the hammers that lay near the forge and make good use of it. She had a spot she planned to bolt to as well. There was a double bladed ax hanging from the wall over near the door. If she could get to it, she could do some damage. If…like if he didn’t rip her head off before she got there.

  Shuffling toward the ax was slow work. Two was starting to look a little nervous. She was out of her blouse and at one of those scary decision points. If she opted for modesty and removed her jeans next, she might find them down around her knees when she needed to move. If she didn’t take off something else, and soon, he was likely to take it off for her.

  Two reached up to the clasp that secured her bra and paused. She tried to look seductive. Seductive worked better when you weren’t terrified. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” she stuttered.

  The idea seemed to appeal to Judah. He set his rifle down on the adjacent work bench and began to fumble with the zipper on his coat. “You keep going,” he said. “I’ll catch up.”

  One of Two was at the wall. She lifted the tool off the nails that suspended it. The ax was heavier than she’d expected. She choked up on the handle. This wouldn’t be sudden and dramatic like in the movies. The damn thing weighed too much. But once she got it going she wouldn’t be able to stop it short of hitting something—preferably Judah. She started edging back. She had to get close. She remembered what he’d done with the hoe.

  She was watching Judah and her sister so closely that she didn’t notice the coffee can full of hardware on the edge of the shelf. The ax hardly brushed it, but the can tumbled, slammed against concrete, and exploded nuts and bolts in every direction. Judah started to turn, only Two popped the clasp and her breasts sprung free.

  Judah made a low, throaty noise, audible even over the wind and the forge. Heather swung the ax. She was going catch him in the shoulder and hurt him bad.

  It didn’t work. Even the wonders Judah beheld couldn’t keep his attention. He spun, put out a hand, caught the ax handle just short of its blade, and ripped it from her grasp.

  “You oughtna done that,” he said. He swung it back at her, almost casually. It came handle first so she put up an arm to block it only a bolt slipped under her boots and she lost her balance. The other Heather was grabbing for the rifle, but the ax handle was coming fast. She had to duck, get down quick and…

  A nova exploded behind her eyes. Heather, the collective, ceased to be plural.

  ***

  Mad Dog lost sight of Dorothy before she’d gone a dozen paces. He knew he shouldn’t let her go alone, and yet he felt she was safe here. He wasn’t. Englishman and Judy wouldn’t be either.

  He was back at the farm he’d been so eager to leave this morning. Someone had tried to kill him less than a mile from this spot. Since then, things had gotten more complicated. He’d borrowed a Blazer and discovered the girl and her awful secret. Was that what this was all about? He should know. He was, after all, a natural born shaman. A wizard, according to Dorothy. He knew his brother was going to be in danger here, but he didn’t know why. Was this because of Tommie’s body? The bones Hailey found? Mary? Her baby? The ring?

  On the few occasions when Mad Dog had been able to successfully practice his shamanistic talents, and he had to admit there had been relatively few of them, he’d done it by ceremonially preparing himself for the task. He fasted first. Well, he hadn’t had anything but a cup of coffee at the Texaco before dawn, so he qualified there. He normally put on a breechcloth, covered himself in body paint, and spread his paraphernalia around him—a buffalo skull, his medicine bag, a pouch of Official Magic Faerie Dust he’d bought in a toy store to use in place of the corn pollen to which he was allergic. Then he would sit cross-legged on a blanket and concentrate on letting himself become one with the universe. He didn’t have any of his stuff with him, not that conditions were appropriate to sitting around next to naked anyway. And it shouldn’t make a difference. Those were just props, aids to help him achieve the right mind set, focus on what he was doing. None of it should matter.

  He squatted on the floor of the abandoned hog shed and folded his arms and legs in an approximation of his normal vision quest position. His heavy snowsuit imposed limitations. He couldn’t close his ears, though tightening the parka about his face helped cut the noise of the wind. He could close his eyes.

  At first he didn’t think it was going to work. Too many wild thoughts chased each other around in his head. But he’d taught himself the essentials of meditation, practiced forms of self hypnosis. He came up blank when he tried to determine where Englishman and Judy were, but when he thought about the evil…

  At some level, he’d recognized the evil most of the day. Felt it in the back of his mind like an insect bite somewhere he couldn’t reach. It meant to harm him and his family. He found it now, or he found something.

  It glowed. He would have been hard pressed to explain what he saw to someone else. He would have been hard pressed to find anyone willing to listen. It was like looking at the sun. Too bright. Looking seared his inner eyes. He couldn’t examine it directly. It was near, though. Very near.

  And then he realized there was something else. Even closer. Danger!

  Thunderbolts! Dorothy had recommended thunderbolts, and, somehow, he found one. Something pure and perfect and electric. He tried to grasp it, launch it, only it launched itself.

  An automatic rifle exploded, one short burst. Mad Dog felt the impact. Chunks of frozen earth, shrapnel from where slugs bit the earth near his feet, slammed his chest and face. The vision imploded. His eyes flew open. An AK 47 lay just inside the building. A little wisp of smoke rose from its barrel. No one was attached to the gun. No one stood in the opening just beyond, though there were footprints. Human footprints, and a wolf’s. And color. The snow was spotted with a fresh corsage of scarlet blossoms.

  ***

  Hailey didn’t think of herself by that name. She responded to it when he spoke to her, but it was only a word, not her name. Her name was somewhere in the song she occasionally sang about herself to the moon.

  She knew lots of human words, more than he thought. But she was a wolf. Wolves respond when they want. She wasn’t just an exotic dog, delighted to sit, or stay, or speak on command.

  Unlike dogs, Hailey didn’t like most people. She loved him of course. She liked or tolerated the humans he cared about. She didn’t trust the rest. She had reason.

  Hailey understood the world, perceived it, on something closer to the level where he went, sitting in semi-trance on the floor of the abandoned hog barn. He had to work at it. He was mostly visual. Her senses were more balanced. She could see passions, taste emotions, hear desires, smell anger, touch fear.

  They were in a place surrounded by enemies. If Hailey wasn’t so devoted to him she would have turned and run. Not from fear, but from a sense of self-preservation. Instead, she stayed and guarded him. And she understood, before he did, that one of the dangerous ones was coming.

  Strange, she thought, even as he discovered her, and failed to recognize her for herself, how oblivious he was, even when he began to sense the world as she did. She would never understand him, but she would protect him.

  The predator was almost on them, only it was as blind as he usually was. A dog might have barked. A
dog might have growled. A wolf was more efficient.

  ***

  Even in such an alien environment, the sheriff recognized the sound. In spite of the wind, the absence of jungle, the scentless cold instead of pungent heat, he knew it. Across almost thirty years, he knew it—Kalashnikov.

  He’d signaled his platoon to hit the dirt, only it wasn’t dirt, of course, and his platoon hadn’t noticed what he’d done. And it wasn’t just dirt he hit, but the trunk of a tree he hadn’t even known was there. No time for the fresh agony in his head. He reached behind him, seeking the M16 that must be strapped over his shoulder since it wasn’t in his hands. His eyes swept the ground for trip wires, swept the tree line for Victor Charles or the pros from up north. There were no wires. Wasn’t any ground even, let alone a tree line. There was only endless, swirling whiteness.

  He looked around for his platoon. They were gone, swallowed by the roiling cloud of crystals that seemed bent on covering the world. They couldn’t have gone far, but he suddenly realized he didn’t want them. He’d already lost too many friends in that last village. He thought he’d been hit himself. Would have sworn he’d taken a round in his thigh, but here he was. And his head hurt, not his leg. He could do it. He could go after the little men with the AK 47s again, and this time, would go alone. He wouldn’t need the radio at his belt anymore. He unclipped it and tossed it away.

  The sheriff checked the load in his Smith & Wesson. He couldn’t recall how he’d come by the weapon but it was better than nothing. He made sure the barrel was clear. He was ready, as ready as he’d been in the central highlands or the rice paddies. More ready than he’d been in the village.

  He scrambled to his feet, threw one last glance over his shoulder to be sure his platoon hadn’t come looking for him. Nobody there, for the few yards he could see. Check. He was clear.

  He sprinted into the icy fog. Sprinted toward the source of that burst of 7.62 mm. Went looking for little men in black pajamas. His .38 Smith & Wesson preceded him, swinging, side to side, seeking targets.

  ***

  The shots got Wynn Some moving again. He wasn’t sure what had happened to him. He remembered Black Death on his heels. Then, suddenly, black had turned yellow and gored him. After that, he’d been prom king. His prom queen was an amazingly lush young woman whose face he could never quite focus on. But the rest of her. Wow! The stuff of fantasies. Literally, as it turned out. She offered to pillow him between her magnificent breasts, only they’d been icy-cold snow balls and he’d known he’d found the phantom snowballer at last, only he was lying in a snow bank at the base of some unidentifiable bush and the wind must have dislodged a clump of snow and dumped it in his face.

  Wynn lay still for a minute, trying to find his way back into the dream. Prom queen or snowballer, either was preferable to the tempest around him.

  The string of firecrackers seemed to go off practically in his ear. They didn’t allow firecrackers at the prom and he struggled to his feet to tell them so, only to find his own prom more than a decade behind him.

  Wind and snow tried to dry shave his face. He stumbled out of the drift, his sense of direction gone as a fresh explosion of snow crystals blinded him. The shots had come from behind him, he thought, so forward, even though it was into the teeth of the storm, seemed the way to go. He put his head down and charged.

  Something dark loomed out of the storm. He thought it was Black Death for a moment and tried to decide where to hide. It was just an ugly little shed. Its walls looked too fragile to offer shelter, but he welcomed them, a place to lean against for a moment while he regained his breath. He hugged the rough wood, trying to shield his face from the merciless wind. There was something odd about it. It was wet. Snow grazed the shed and, instead of bouncing off, clung, turned soft, melted, and flowed down its surface.

  Sweet Jesus, Wynn thought. There’s heat in there. He hadn’t realized how cold he really was until the prospect of warmth presented itself. He slid along its surface, fought the wind to open its door, and practically fell inside.

  For a moment, he thought he was back in the dream. Only his prom queen hadn’t had breasts as perfect as these. Her face glowed in the light of an open flame and was instantly recognizable. So was the fact that she was holding a rifle. And pointing it in his direction.

  ***

  “What is this place?” Mary asked.

  What it was, was dusty and dark and cold.

  “It’s a library, Mary, or it used to be.” Doc wasn’t sure what he was doing. He just knew he couldn’t sit in the empty silence of Klausen’s anymore, trying himself before the hanging judge that was his conscience.

  Doc’s best, most trusted friend, along with his weird but honorable brother, were out there trying to solve a series of mysteries in the middle of the worst winter storm he could remember. He needed to help. He wasn’t sure how, but paying a visit to the home of the “guardian of the words” seemed like a place to start. Didn’t hurt that it was just down the block, within range of an aging doctor who didn’t get enough exercise, and the young girl who had become his temporary charge.

  “Wow. I always wanted to see a library.” Mary advanced across the foyer and gaped at the stacks of books that crowded the room just beyond. Doc wondered if she thought it was normal to enter by breaking out a window so you could reach in and unlock the door. She didn’t seem to have much experience with the outside world. How they’d entered surprised her less than the fact that the world held so many books.

  He dusted off a seat for her on a well-lighted sofa by the windows and found her a selection of Dr. Seuss books in a pile on a cart labeled RESERVE.

  Doc nibbled his lip and considered the Buffalo Springs Library. It had probably been a bank once. It had a big central room with a high ceiling that reached all the way to the building’s second story roof. That room was filled with bookshelves, some of which would be impossible to reach without the wheeled ladders connected to a rail that ran just below the ceiling.

  Doc’s day had started with a phone call. An illegitimate baby was about to enter the world. Because of what that baby was and how it got here—and what he’d had to do with the process—Doc hadn’t been able to think about much else. Because of the mysterious swastika on its forehead, he was sure the baby was involved in Englishman’s problems. But he thought it was bigger than that too. It hadn’t started with the baby. It had started with Tommie Irons and Mad Dog’s effort to dispose of his remains in such an unorthodox fashion. At least the combination kept it in the family.

  Becky Hornbaker was Tommie’s sister. Mary was what, a granddaughter of Becky’s? Doc thought he had it right, now. Simon must be the baby’s father. That made more sense. Tommie was already seriously ill when the child was conceived. He’d never thought Tommie was the type. Simon must have blamed Tommie to protect himself.

  It was a family affair, and a family disaster, Doc decided. But he still didn’t understand what Tommie might have possessed that had someone trying to kill Mad Dog, nor how a swastika fit in.

  Newspapers seemed like the best place to start. A weekly summation of the history of Buffalo Springs and Benteen County was what he needed. Fortunately, Louis Henry Silverstein had been proud of his Times. They were gathered and bound, in leather, no less, on one of the most prominent shelves not far from the front door.

  Silverstein hadn’t arrived in Benteen County until the mid-sixties. January of 1966 was when The Times began. He wrote with an urbane wit that made Doc wish their days had overlapped, but had him wondering who Silverstein thought his audience was. The man must have written to please himself, then trusted, since there was no other local news source, he would command readership by default.

  The first issue contained a prescient editorial about America’s commitment to winning a war in Vietnam. It was like stepping into a time machine. Doc wondered what sort of reaction Silverstein had gotten in this hotbed of compassionate fascism. The next issue contained angry letters to the editor, and mark
edly less advertising. That answered Doc’s question. Silverstein devoted more space to local matters after that, though occasionally the editor sounded off on the thorny issues that divided America in the days of flower power and Communist threat.

  Doc got lucky because the 1973 volume was shelved out of order. He found what he was looking for because the paper thinned for several issues thereafter as businesses pulled their ads again.

  The piece that had offended local merchants was an interview with a young woman. She claimed to be Southern Cheyenne. She called herself Brenda Stars-at-Night. Or maybe Silverstein invented the punning alias to protect her. She was on the way from Oklahoma to South Dakota, transporting guns and ammunition. She was part of a war party, or a relief column, bound for the standoff at Wounded Knee. The situation threatened to boil over into a second massacre if the army of federal and local law enforcement surrounding the place had their way.

  Silverstein described her as a most unlikely warrior. She was young and delicate, and very pregnant. Those factors combined to make her journey more poignant. The Great Plains once belonged to the Lakota, the Cheyenne, and other tribes, she said. Then the white men came.

  Her people’s traditional allies were threatened by modern Custers. She and her companions would go stand with them. They would arm their brothers and resist the white man’s latest efforts to wipe them from the face of the earth.

  Doc remembered the rise of the American Indian Movement and the series of battles fought on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the seventies. Some lives were lost. Some ethnic pride revived. And some members of AIM were still in prison for the events that followed.

  By itself, that article was troubling enough. It placed a pregnant Cheyenne girl in Benteen County, and Mad Dog was convinced that the fetal skull he’d found on the Irons farm was Cheyenne. But what made it chilling was the story in the next issue.

  TRUCK EXPLOSION ROCKS COUNTY! It was a bolder headline than usual.