Their first stop had been a closed store, its front guarded with only a flimsy door—easily kicked in. The man who’d become the pack leader—a loutish bullying type who’d gone by the name of Cyril—entered first, destroying everything in his way until he found a cask of liquor.
“Tequila,” he said, explaining to the other three in detail the nature of the fermented agave. To Cyril, it held none of the stature of whiskey, but tonight it would have to do.
A thin screaming man entered through the busted front door, his weathered brown face contorted as he rattled off a fusillade of angry Spanish. The Stranger noticed him first and, given the thin man’s gesturing and enraged demeanor, it became obvious they had broken into his shop.
Cyril’s eyes narrowed as he lowered a recently emptied glass from his lips.
“Shet yer mouth!” Cyril shouted above the din.
And as the shop owner continued to bark, Cyril fired the heavy glass in the old man’s direction. The glass exploded just above the shop owner’s eye, knocking the man to the ground as blood poured down his face.
Strolling over, his boots resounding against the floor, Cyril hovered over the wailing shop owner. With a quick draw, Cyril unsheathed the Bowie knife slung to his belt and slit the old man’s throat, stepping away as the gush of blood neared his boots.
Without remorse, Cyril wiped his blade on his pants and slid it back into its sheath.
“When I says, ‘shet yer mouth’, I mean, ‘shet your stinkin’ mouth!’”
One of the other soldiers, a mere boy of fifteen named Coffey, hooted and laughed.
“You show’d ‘im,” beamed the kid, stumbling drunk.
“Let’s git,” Cyril told the others, not waiting for a response as he headed for the door.
Having seen his share of blood, the Stranger didn’t even blink, instead just downing the rest of his glass of tequila before following the others out.
It was outside in the dark street when they saw the others who had come. What was, presumably, the family of the shopkeeper waited angrily for the intruders. When Cyril came through the front door, an old woman grabbed his arm and spat on him.
Angrily, he shoved her aside; her tiny body no match for his soldier’s arms. With a crunch, her head slammed into the adobe wall of the shop’s exterior before she collapsed to the ground.
From the crowd came a shot. The black powder clap of an ancient pistol—firing wide, perhaps meant more to frighten than kill—but it was all young Coffey needed to life and fire his own rifle. His bullet found its way into a young man wielding a club.
As another young Mexican wailed for his fallen family members, he came at Cyril with his fists, beating upon the killer’s thick chest. Suddenly the boy’s eyes bulged; his head tipped backward as he was lifted onto his toes. Cyril’s Bowie knife thrust upward into his gut, his shoeless feet dangling inches from the dirt sidewalk.
Cyril dropped the mortally wounded boy to the ground, where he laid futilely trying to hold his entrails in with his hands, screaming with the pain. With another single slash, Cyril silenced the boy.
The Stranger stood his ground. His rifle pointed outward toward the crowd, watching them flee for their lives. But one person remained—a girl, no more than a child. She stood as the others fled, weeping for her dead mother and brothers. Her soft brown eyes were full of tears, which pooled running down her dirty cheeks and onto her neck.
“Let’s git!” Coffey said—his young blood now as sober as the rest.
“No witnesses,” Cyril huffed as he stepped toward the little girl.
“No,” said the Stranger, moving in front of Cyril.
“I says, ‘No witnesses’.” And with that Cyril put one hand on the Stranger’s shoulder and pushed him aside, knife raised, grin across his face.
As the Stranger blinked his eyes in the darkness more than three years later, hearing the footsteps approaching in the blinding night, he thought of Cyril’s cold eyes. His fellow soldier became a man whose sole motivating force was to cause as much pain and chaos as possible. The Stranger realized now that it was those eyes and that face he had thought he’d seen momentarily through the closing door of the Sagebrush jail.
And Cyril was no ghost. As far as the Stranger knew, Cyril was still out there—and still searching for him.
He thought again of that moment on the street in Veracruz, watching in horror as Cyril took the little Mexican girl by her long, dark hair while he cut into her head with the bowie knife.
“Jus’ like we did wit them Injuns,” he turned and grinned at the Stranger, holding the bloody scalp in his hand.
Three years had taught him that he could not evacuate this memory from his mind.
“It can’t be him,” the Stranger said under his breath. The level of inhuman behavior those men had displayed that night, and many other nights, chilled his blood. He knew it would not be beyond the scope of Cyril’s savagery to have engineered the carnage he saw back at Sagebrush.
The footfall sounded again. The desert played tricks with your ears—the Stranger knew. In the dark it was difficult to judge distance—and from within the shoal, direction was impossible.
He thought of Blue, contemplating momentarily if the untethered animal could be the source of the steps. But as his eyes finally adjusted to the dim light of the moonless sky he made out the shape of the sagging old burro where he’d left it within the waterless river.
A footstep came again, this time slightly louder. Whatever was out there was drawing closer.
Slowly the Stranger lifted towards the rim of the shoal, knowing full well that if his own eyes were adjusting to the dark, the eyes of the on-comer would have been well adjusted by now.
Raising just one eye above the berm, he peeked out. Nothing. No movement. He glided his hand across the ground until he found one of the loaded Dragoons.
Another footstep—the loudest yet. He fully exposed his head, wanting to get a good look.
It’s entirely possible they don’t know you are here, his mind told him.
He cocked his head, trying to hone in on the noise. Minutes passed, he guessed, then what seemed like an hour. He tried to keep awake, his mind bordering on delirium, but unsated exhaustion pressed on his eyelids.
He relented: the Stranger sat back against the shoal and let sleep overtake him.
But before he could sink into the beckoning unconsciousness his mind desired, he heard it again: a footstep, and another, and another. As he scrambled in his semi-awake state to look over the top of the berm, his unrested hands dropped the pistol onto the dirt. The direction of the footsteps became apparent.
They were coming from up a gully a hundred yards away. And they were definitely moving towards him.
Faster now, and even faster yet.
The Stranger pointed the gun up the dry riverbed, which hooked sharply past a large outcrop of rocks.
Fifty yards.
His eyes saw it before he blinked, but it took another before it registered: a thin rim of yellow light bending around the outcrop. Salient light in the middle of darkness.
Forgoing any more caution, the Stranger thumbed back the Colt’s hammer and crouched down, feeling in the darkness for its mate; he kept his eyes on the light, relying only on touch to locate the pistol.
Twenty-five yards.
The second Colt was nowhere to be found.
Damnit, the Stranger thought. Quickly, impatiently, he gazed downward, hoping his eyes would help his hands. His spotted the second Dragoon behind his feet.
When he looked up, he gazed directly into the yellow ball of light coming from the center of the lantern. It was as if it radiated only at him.
His eyes, having adjusted to total darkness, lost they’re focus—the lantern’s owner obscured.
Fifteen feet.
The Stranger lifted the guns and squeezed both triggers. The twin clap of black powder thunder and muzzle flash lightning filled the minimal breach in the darkness between him and that other.
Miss. His mind, primed with the life of a gunslinger, did not hesitate; it thumbed back the hammers on both Colts for another salvo, as it seemed like the lamp itself came up to the very tip of his guns.
Inside the dim firelight, the Stanger saw the other’s face. He was paralyzed, unable to move. The twin Dragoons dropped from his hands to the dirt of the dry riverbed.
He pushed himself backward, scrambling like a crab to get away from that before him, his back finally hitting the wall of the riverbed
“It can’t be you,” the Stranger said, his terrified voice coming out like rushing air.
As the lamp lowered, the Stranger once again looked darkly upon the face of the young girl he had seen brutalized in the streets of Veracruz, blood pouring down her face from the bony wound left behind as Cyril pocketed her scalp.
Her face came down to his level, settling inches away. Her brown eyes pierced his gaze like a lance. When she opened her mouth, beyond her rotting teeth and gums seemed a bottomless chasm of never-ending darkness. He was almost shocked when from the chasm—indeed, her mouth—she spoke.
“Hello, Galen,” she said.
*****
CHAPTER 4
Months had passed since he’d been called by his name—the last time coming as he stood with his hands covered in blood. To him, it was a remainder of what he left behind and the darkness that hunted him nightly.
“No,” he whispered.
The girl’s face drew closer. In the firelight of the lantern, Galen could see the paleness of death in her skin.
“No,” he pleaded. The chill desert night began to envelop him—much like it had back in Kansas City, fleeing through the streets.
He had gone to visit the Gypsy and things had quickly turned wrong—very badly wrong.
It was a week getting there—by coach, horse, and foot. He came as a hired courier, bearing a small package to be “hand-delivered,” as him employer specified, to a banker in town. Galen was, at this point, going by the assumed name of Tom Holt.
When his employer, an aging rancher, asked him to go Kansas City, he began, “Tom, the only thing about a man I hold any coin in is whether or not that man can be trusted.”
Galen glanced at the door and then the window, imagining a posse waiting outside to take him away; he had not said a word about his past since be started on the ranch.
From a bookshelf the rancher produced a small rectangular box—no larger than a book—wrapped in brown paper and tied with packing twine. He held it out.
“Since I can’t go, I’d like you to deliver this to Kansas City for me,” the rancher told him.
***
Upon his arrival in Kansas City, Galen pulled his overcoat tight as an irregular mid-February snow had begun to fall. In the streets, dozens of people passed him; he was fascinated by the impersonal bustle of the city. Galen listened to his boot-steps crunch in the powder as he continued toward his destination.
He strode up along the riverfront watching the steamboats motor up the Mississippi, passing a docked riverboat from which raucous music and laughter could be heard. He knew he could have no part of such sociality. As he arrived, the realization suddenly hit him he had travelled all this way only to wait until the next morning, for the address he’d been given was a bank. He peeked in through the darkened windows, wondering if the intended recipient would be waiting for him after-hours. He tapped on the glass, seeing only his reflection. There was no answer.
There had been no shortage of places to stay in town; he had passed at least a half dozen different signs offering lodging. The rancher had, generously, given him enough traveling money to afford one of the finer hotels. Although he approached the front door of one, the Carthaginian, spending a single dollar for a room didn’t sit right with Galen—especially when he knew that in a town like this he could find a bunkhouse for just a dime a night.
He turned back to look for one of the boarding houses he’d passed eventually making his way off the beaten path. He saw a storefront window, behind which a woman in a black shawl sat in an ornate rocker. All of the other storefronts were closed, all windows darkened but this one. Across the pane, in large uneven letters, was painted one word.
Fortune.
As he crossed the street, he couldn’t make out much of her face; her long, silken, raven black hair hid her down-turned face. From this angle Galen thought the woman beautiful and his gaze lingered—until she lifted her own gaze—matching hers with his—and revealed the weathered, tan face of an old Gypsy crone.
Something in her gaze snagged at him like hooked barbs sunk into his skin, forcing Galen to fight to tear his eyes away from hers. As he continued down the street, he shuddered and pushed the thought of the crone’s stare out of his mind.
After checking into a simple but clean boarding house, Galen found himself restless—unable to lie down for the night just yet. An itch had started—first in his toes, then slowly traveling up into his body, ultimately leaching to his mind: the need for a drink. It had been weeks—since before he had arrived at the ranch. Finally, he decided it was madness to let this desire eat into his brain this way. He put on his duster and headed back into the cold.
The place he chose had no sign—or any indication of a name—but offered an open space at the bar seen through the double doors. The bartender, a mustachioed sort with a farm boy’s body, poured Galen a shot. Oh, that magnificent burn as it greedily went down. Grinning, Galen ordered another.
He hadn’t been at the bar longer than five minutes when he spotted her—a frill-laced, powder blue dress clinging to her voluptuous figure—as she sat at a nearby table, laughing along with a noisy cadre of gentlemen showing off in black suits. Momentarily, she gazed his way momentarily before turning back. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen—her face, that of an angel.
He must have been staring for quite a while, because at some point he finally felt a poke at his shoulder. He caught the bartender grinning at him.
“That’s Sally,” the bartender said. “Best piece of tail in three states.”
“How much?” asked Galen.
“If you have to ask—”
“I asked how much?”
“One hundred.”
“A hundred!” jumped Galen, saying it loudly enough that plenty of people around him heard.
With his hands, the bartender signaled for Galen to keep it down.
“For five bucks you can have Daisy,” the bartender said, nodding his head toward the staircase rail. Standing there, chewing her nails, leaned a dumpy and fairly unattractive whore. Her wide moon-face bore thin lips and a large nose. As Galen watched, she pulled her hand back from her mouth, checking her nails to examine her latest efforts.
Daisy closed the door to her room behind them. Deftly, she unhooked her dress and let it fall to the floor. Galen looked around. At best the room was plain, with an iron bed, a padded chair, and table a by the window. At worst it was a dim and grungy rat-infested cheap billet surrounded by thin walls covered in torn and yellowed parlor paper. Following suit, Galen undid his pants, kicked them to the side, and reclined on the bed.
Daisy rung out a cloth from a bowl of water and washed him down. She undid her undergarment, revealing pendulous and misshapen breasts and an unruly thatch of pubic hair that began just below her belly.
She climbed on top of him, riding him until he climaxed with a stern grunt. After it was over, Daisy climbed down off the bed, turned her back, and wordlessly put her clothes back on. The whole process took less than five minutes.
Galen stood and put his pants back on. “Would you like to sit and talk for a spell?” he asked.
“Sure,” Daisy answered flatly, her voice devoid of emotion. He smoothed a spot on the blanket for her.
“Been here long?” he asked.
“Mebbe, tuh— tuh— two years.”
Galen suddenly realized why she barely spoke. Daisy turned her eyes downward, obviously ashamed of her stutter.
&n
bsp; “Daisy, that’s a pretty name.”
She nodded sheepishly.
“My name’s Galen,” he said—then wondered why he’d done that. Not even the rancher knew his name. It had to have been the whisky talking.
“Guh— guh— Galen, that’s nuh— nuh— nice.”
“You always talked like that?”
“Yuh— yuh— yuh— yes.”
Galen scratched his head. It had been so long since he’d had a proper conversation with a woman that he had no idea what to say.
“I sh— should prolly get back downstairs,” she finally said.
Together they left the room, not speaking. As Daisy took her usual spot on the staircase rail, Galen went back to the bar to get another drink.
He had no idea what time it was when he stumbled out onto the street. He had watched another man—a dandy in a cheap suit—take Daisy to her room and decided he wanted to leave before she came back out.
Why did I even care? he wondered. A woman with a crippled voice like that was lucky to make a living selling herself, he figured.
The snow continued to fall lightly. As he crossed Washington Street heading back to the boarding house, he noticed the Gypsy’s window was still lit as the old crone sat in her rocking chair, unmoved since he last saw her. Her raven colored hair still shone in the firelight.
He had no intention of getting any closer, but before he realized it, his feet, which seemed to obey some external call, had brought his nose to within inches of the painted, gold-trimmed “Fortune”. As his feet entered through the front door a single bell jangled pleasantly above his head.
“Please sit,” mewed the crone, proffering a red cushioned seat across a table in front of her. Up close, Galen could see that the crone’s craggy face was older than he had first thought; her pale skin clung tightly to her skull and looked as thin as paper.
She slid a tin plate across the table. “Six bits,” she ordered.
It took Galen a moment to understand, but when he did he took the money from his pocket, then hesitated.
“If you want a reading from Madame Zenitska, you pay six bits.”
Shadow Falls: Badlands Page 5
