by Chris Miller
They mounted their horses and headed toward the cottage as Quentin and Avery set out after the man heading east. Dreary knew the man. Well, didn’t know him, per se, but knew of him. The man who seemed to appear out of nowhere years ago in the town of Duncan, north of here on the Chisolm Trail, and who’d been hunting the same place Dreary had for years. And they were so close now. He could feel it. Could almost taste it. But the elderly hag had tricked him and sent him off into Indian territory, and they’d damn near been killed for it. One of his men, Charles, had paid the ultimate price for the misdirection, and Dreary meant to see justice for the infraction.
Their horses clopped lazily out of the trees and onto the trail, and they made their way up into the dooryard of the old woman’s cottage. She was sitting in her chair, rocking lazily as she had been before the exchange with Dee, and seemed none too surprised to see them approaching.
“I thought you might be back,” she said as they dismounted their horses and strode up onto her porch. “Must say I thought there’d be a little more time.”
There was no fear in her voice or on her face. Only a quiet dignity and resignation.
“I do apologize for disappointing you so,” Dreary said as he tipped his bowler hat to her. “We had the misfortune to cross paths with a tribe of savages which halted our progress. My man Charles was killed in the skirmish. They took his scalp.”
“Is that all?” she asked, an amused look in her eyes as her brows rose. “A shame they didn’t take his balls.”
Dreary laughed then, but his eyes remained cold.
“They did indeed, madam. They took his scalp after.”
The old woman reeled back then, howling laughter and slapping her knee with a furor he might not have thought possible in the frail old woman. But she wasn’t really frail, he knew. She only appeared to be.
“Well,” she said between guffaws, “I reckon that was worth it, then!”
More howls of laughter ensued, and Bonham looked to Dreary, his hand on a blade in his belt. Dreary halted him with a hand.
“If you’re quite finished,” he stated. It wasn’t a question.
The old woman laughed a few more times, wiping tears from her eyes, and finally settled down.
“Just get on with it, Dreary. You’re not getting anything from me, and we both know it.”
He smiled and nodded. “I do not delude myself so as to believe otherwise, madam. But you see, I don’t need anything from you. Our mutual friend, Mr. James Dee, has all the information I need to find Dust, and he’s being trailed as we speak. Mr. Bonham and I shall join them directly.”
Her eyes grew cold and hard and she stood then, glaring at Dreary with an intensity which almost made him flinch.
“Unfortunately for you,” she said, her teeth grinding together and bared, “you have no idea who you’re dealing with in Mr. James Dee. I thank the good Lord and all the lessers I’ll get to watch him burn you and yours to the ground like a hay fire in July.”
She spat on him then, a thick, slimy thing, and it stuck to his considerable beard. He closed his eyes, shielding most of his frustration and disgust, and fetched a handkerchief from his breast pocket. He wiped his face clean, folded the handkerchief, and replaced it.
“Madam,” he said, the slightest waver in his voice as he locked his cold, gray eyes with hers, “I do abhor violence. I find it revolting and undignified. But what I find even more revolting and undignified is a liar. You lied to me about the location of Dust. We’d have been happy to leave you be. All we wanted was to arrive at that elusive town of myth. But you lied to us. It doesn’t matter now, what’s done is done, but I’m a man of justice. I cannot let such a crime go unpunished and I cannot abide a liar.”
He turned his head to Bonham and issued a brief and shallow nod. There was a metallic schlink as the blade was drawn from Bonham’s belt and the big man moved forward as Dreary took a step back.
“There’s nothing worse than a liar, madam!” he said as Bonham drove the blade deep into her solar plexus. She gasped, spitting blood. “Hell was built on the lies of the Serpent!”
Bonham ripped the blade down with jarring speed and strength, and stepped away from her as her intestines spilled from her opened abdomen like noodles from a bowl. She spat black blood from her mouth as her lips moved, though no words came out. She collapsed to her knees and Bonham slipped behind her as Dreary looked down past his nose at her, one corner of his lips turned up in a cold smile.
She spoke a final time.
“Like a hay fire in July,” she croaked through pints of blood.
“We shall see, madam,” Dreary said as he tipped his hat to her once more and nodded to Bonham behind her. “Farewell, my dear Miss Dupree.”
Bonham dragged the edge of his blade across her throat, high-pressured jets of blood spraying her porch and chair as he did, digging in past and through her windpipe. There were gargled screams which carried no volume, and before he was done sawing, they had stopped altogether.
As Dreary mounted his horse, the old woman’s severed head was dropped in the dooryard, mouth agape and coated in gore, her brilliant blue eyes filming over. Bonham mounted his own horse, then wiped his blade on his trousers before returning it to his belt.
“There’s a lesson to be learned here, Mr. Bonham,” Dreary said as they turned to the trail and began to pick up speed to catch up to the others.
“Oh?” Bonham replied, little more than a grunt.
Dreary smiled and nodded.
“Never poke a serpent,” he said. “They’re vindictive buggers.”
Bonham made a half smile as they rode toward Dust.
5
James neared the landmark Miss Dupree had described to him just before nightfall. On one side of the trail stood a mighty oak, its massive limbs sprawling majestically in all directions, its leaves golden and sparse. About four feet from the base, just where all the major limbs split into their various networks of wooded arms, stood a goat’s skull, seeming to glare directly across the trail. It was much too large, James deduced, to be that of any normal goat. Its horns were thick and coiled, and the remaining teeth were menacing and sharp. It was nearly two feet across at its widest, he guessed, and he began to wonder if it were fake. He decided it didn’t matter in the end; this was where the woman had told him he would find the trail to Dust.
“Just across from the giant goat head, you turn into the woods,” she had told him. “Try to keep your angle just so, no more than forty-six degrees, no less than forty-three. If you hit it just right, you’ll find the trail. Otherwise . . . you’ll never see it at all.”
Some odd magic, he supposed, or perhaps it was ingenious engineering on behalf of the town’s founders. Dust didn’t want to be found. The old woman had made that clear. The ones from the void had made that clear to James himself many years ago when he’d learned of all the abominable gods and had begun his crusade. Though this place hadn’t been where he’d started. He’d begun in another place—another world—entirely, one wholly alien to him. The next five had been equally foreign. This was the closest he’d come to being back home, though he was still roughly a century from his birth. He often pondered—since his seven-year journey from Duncan to Winnsborough had begun—if he were not to succeed on this current mission, he was unsure if he’d see his birth at all. If he were to fail, would he simply fade into nothingness? Would he blink out as though he’d never been?
Would it matter either way?
It would not, he concluded. And if he were to fade away or blink out or whatever happened when the past reset the future, he could not stomach the possibilities that failure would hold for the likes of the one person in all the countless universes he still loved with all of his ever darkening heart. The one person he envisioned when his resolve wavered. The one who would not be if he failed to be.
Joanna.
But he could not dwell on her now. It had been nearly two decades since he had seen her, yet her face was still ever presen
t in his mind. He found it difficult to push her image aside for the task at hand, but he would have to if he were to focus and get the job done. Dreary would likely be hot on his trail before long, the old woman had warned him of this, as well. And while he meant to see Dreary in the ground should they ever cross paths, Dust was of far greater import.
He veered off the road at what he guessed to be between forty-three and forty-six degrees. He kept his steed steady and moving, first into the brush, then between the pines and oaks and dogwoods, the road vanishing behind them. He would not travel all the way into Dust in the dark, but he would find the trail and then make camp. Tomorrow, Dust awaited, and his mission therein.
He moved between the trees, maintaining his angle and returning to it every time he was forced to veer off around a tree or bramble. He counted in his head as his steed clopped along over the dead pine needles and crunching leaves.
“Ninety-seven paces of your horse,” Miss Dupree had said. “Then you turn perpendicular to the road you just left. If you do it right, you’ll be in the middle of the trail to Dust. If not, you’ll have to begin again.”
Ninety-one . . . ninety-two . . . ninety-three . . .
He trudged on, his focus absolute, nothing else existing in all the world for him in that moment. He could feel the still warm air of early autumn swirl around him as a faint breeze wandered its way through the trees. The sweat cooled on his neck and his brow, then dried to a tacky finish on his weathered skin before being replaced by fresh droplets. He wiped them away.
Ninety-six . . . ninety-seven.
“Whoa,” he told his steed and pulled at the reins. The horse stopped at once, and obeyed as James tugged to the right. A moment later, he looked up and a narrow trail lay before him. It hadn’t been there a second before, he was sure of it. But this did not cause him to marvel any more than finding a dog shitting in the street might. After all the places he’d been and all the things he’d seen, this was a relatively unremarkable event.
A sign, little more than a plank of wood with poorly painted letters on it hung to the right of the trail, nailed into the pine it hung from, sap droppings smattering its top and running down in dried streaks.
DUST, it proclaimed, and was accompanied by an arrow pointing eastward. James Dee smiled broadly, slipping his ’72 Winchester repeater from the holster on his steed’s saddle and cradling it across his lap.
“Found you, you son of a bitch,” he muttered to himself as he clicked with his mouth and nudged the horse into motion.
He headed deeper into the woods toward the mythical, damned town.
PART II:
Complications
6
Denarius King sprinted through the woods, his frantic breathing bursting from his lips in loud, excited hitches. His eyes were wide and desperate, and he glanced back over his shoulder every twenty paces or so to see if they were still following him.
They were.
“You’re a dead nigger!” he heard one of them call to him through the trees as he ran, the clump-a-dah-clump-a-dah-clump-a-dah of their horses’ hoof-falls an ever-increasing drumbeat in his ears.
He darted around an oak and nearly sprawled as he tumbled through the golden-green branches of a dogwood, his arms spiraling to knock them away from his face as though they were spider-webs. His heart was racing. His lungs were burning. His mind was reeling. Where could he go? What could he do? He had only the bloody knife he’d taken from the stupid one, Josephus Tarly; the one he’d buried to the hilt in the idiot man’s throat not ten minutes earlier when he’d made his attempt at escape.
He was a free man, had been a free man more than a decade now. President Lincoln had seen to that. Three-fifths of a man, but a free three-fifths of a man. But these men seemed to disregard the decrees of Congress, instead opting to take him and treat him as property. He’d barely managed to keep his wife and child hidden from them when they’d come, Wild Bob, Taggart, and Josephus. He prayed they were safe. That they were still safe.
I’ll get back to you, Marlena! he thought frantically as he dodged around another oak and several pines. You and Martin stay safe!
Then his foot caught on a loose patch of leaves and his legs were no longer beneath him. He hit the forest floor hard with a loud oomph, the wind rushing from his lungs. Constellations of black stars danced in his vision for a moment as he gasped for air, trying to struggle to his feet again and falling once more.
Clomp-a-dah-clomp-a-dah-clomp-a-dah.
They were close. Very close. He had no time to lay sprawled on the ground. They were nearly on top of him, but he could hardly breathe. His yellowed teeth bared as he grimaced, desperately trying to suck in air and regain his footing. He had to move if he were to—
Something struck the back of his head just as he regained his stature and he was back on the ground, face down. He didn’t remember the trip. There had been a knock to the back of his head, then he was on the ground. The interim journey had been skipped entirely.
Denarius was faintly aware of Wild Bob climbing down from his horse about ten feet in front of him, though his main focus was on getting his world to stop swirling like the undercurrent of the ocean during a hurricane. He rolled to his back, wincing in pain and gasping for breath. His hands instinctively went to the back of his head to nurse the knot forming there.
“Goddamnit, you think you can kill one of my boys and just take off?” Wild Bob shouted as Taggart dismounted. “You got a reckoning coming, boy!”
Denarius spit dirt and pine needles from his mouth and managed to get up on his elbows, scooting away from the approaching men, desperation on his face.
“Please, suh,” he said, putting one hand before him in either surrender or to ward them off. He didn’t know which. “I gots a family. I ain’t done y’all no harm. I just want to get back to my wife and boy’s all. Why y’all doing this?”
The whining note in his pleas caused his stomach to twist, but he was unable to wrangle it into a more dignified tone. His lips quivered and he could feel the sting of tears in his eyes.
“I ain’t meant nobody no harm, never!” he nearly shouted, though the whine was still present. “And I’s a free man now! Making my own way, just like y’all! Let me be to see after me and mine, that’s all I want!”
Wild Bob and Taggart glanced at each other in turn, then began laughing hysterically, their mostly toothless mouths jerking open and shut beneath their unkempt beards, ropes of spittle slinging from them like glistening cords in the twilight. As they laughed, they drew their revolvers.
“I don’t give a good goddamn what Congress says you are!” Wild Bob said as his laughter died down to a chuckle. “Congress is a thousand miles from here. ‘Round these parts, your black ass is worth a purse of shiny coins. Well, the right parts of you is, anyhow.”
Terror streaked Denarius’s features, etching deep lines of horrified angst around his eyes and mouth. The dimples in his cheeks that Marlena found so handsome now looked like pits of pitch in a charred landscape of fear.
“Please, suh!” Denarius pleaded, on his buttocks now and both hands before him. He was in a posture of surrender now as he made his way to his knees before the approaching men. “What’s wrong with you folks? What I done to y’all? Ain’t you got no souls? Ain’t you God-fearin’ men?”
“God-fearin’?” Taggart asked, speaking for the first time. “The only one doin’ any fearin’ ‘round ought to be you! God ain’t got shit to do with your kind. Nothing but a knuckle-dragging ape with a goddamn voice box. All you’re good for is working fields and filling our purses. And that big black cock of yours will bring a fine payday for Wild Bob and me.”
Taggart drew a large knife with his free hand.
“Now drop trou and let’s make a eunuch of ya!”
Denarius screamed as they descended on him, but his scream was cut short when Taggart’s face burst out in a meaty pulp, leaving behind a dripping red skull, one eye glaring wide and lidless, jaw hanging open. The
ringing in Denarius’s ears blocked whatever Wild Bob was saying—or screaming, from the looks of it—as he turned and dropped to the ground, his revolver up and at the ready.
Taggart’s body finally collapsed to its knees, the one lidless eye still glaring in what Denarius thought was fury, confusion, and a certain sense of awe. Then he collapsed forward with a meaty thump to the forest floor before him, face down, and never moved again.
The ringing was beginning to wane, and Denarius could hear Wild Bob’s words now. Frantic, panicked barks.
“The fuck’s happening?” he screamed. “Who the fuck’s out there? You done killed a good man, god-damn you! I’ll see you hang for this, you hidin’ son of a bitch! Come out and show yourself, you coward!”
Wild Bob’s eyes were as wild as his name. They darted this way and that, and Denarius realized the man wasn’t paying him any mind at all. He remembered the bloody knife he’d dropped when he’d fallen, and glanced around for it. It was to his left, the crimson stain glistening on the blade, and he snatched it up.
“The law’s on my side ‘round here!” Wild Bob was crowing into the forest, which was thickening with shadows that seemed to move and crawl with the gentle breeze. “You hear me? The law’s on my—”
Denarius buried the blade deep into the man’s calf. Wild Bob had just come cautiously up on his knees, his revolver before him, pointing in all directions in turn. Denarius was sure he’d seen a tear leaking from the corner of one of the man’s eyes.
After the hilt of the blade butted against the soft flesh of the man’s calf muscle and the screaming began, he was sure both eyes were leaking now. The man’s hand swung around, catching Denarius in the mouth and splitting his lip. Denarius sprawled on his back, leaves and needles crunching beneath him. He looked up in time to see the revolver swinging around to point at his face.
“Goddamn nig—” Wild Bob began before the revolver was flipping away from his exploding hand in a mist of red and pink, chunks of meat and bone spraying in all directions, leaving only a ragged stump with the bottom fifth of the man’s palm the only evidence he’d had a hand there at all a moment before.
