Jesus Christ—what was he doing? She was a complete stranger . . . just like everybody else. And a woman was the last thing he wanted, or needed, right now. He looked away from her face, his gaze barely glancing off the rest of her as he let it fall away. Her dark hair hung free down her back like she’d never given it a second thought, and her pale, sand-colored dress covered her all the way up, and down to her practical boots. The dress had tiny flowers all over it. She would’ve blended into any background within a thousand miles of here. Nothing unusual.
The gun belt, on the other hand, was enough to make most men think twice about even approaching her. Not the friendly type. So why the hell was she standing there, staring at him?
“I know you?” he asked, finally.
The dog lying down beside him got up with a small whine and licked the woman’s fingers.
“No,” she said, looking at the dog with a faint smile. “But your dog likes me.”
He turned back to the bar and poured himself another glass of whiskey. “You can have him,” he said.
The woman made no response as he downed the second shot of rye. But she was still looking at him; he could feel her eyes.
“My name is Ella,” she said, when he went on ignoring her.
He had no name to offer in return, and so he said nothing. As if she’d decided staring at him had been a mistake, or maybe for some other reason, her gaze moved to the metal cuff he wore. “Where did you get your bracelet?” She reached out and touched it. He let her, and saw the strange intensity come over her face as her fingers made contact with its surface.
He frowned, pulling his arm away, out of reach. “There something you know about me, lady?” He met her stare, ready for it this time—or at least he thought so.
Her gaze reached straight in through his, like she was trying to turn his soul inside out. But then the look on her face changed, and her gaze let him go.
“You don’t remember anything . . . do you?” she murmured, as if somehow she’d actually seen the truth.
The man turned away, looking down at the metal band, feeling his flesh crawl. This day had started like a bad dream, and now it had just gone beyond strange into something completely outside of his comprehension. “What do you want?” he asked, his voice actually getting away from him.
“I know you’re looking for something. . . .” She hesitated, measuring his reaction. “So am I.” The intensity now radiating from her made him want to take a step back.
He reached for the whiskey bottle and poured himself another drink. But as he raised the glass, his hand stopped in mid-motion. Something was coming . . . danger. He didn’t know how he knew. But he knew—
“Move away,” he muttered to Ella. Whatever showed on his face, she obeyed it.
Deliberately, he set the glass back on the bar. His hand moved down, closer to his holster, as he turned to face the entrance.
The saloon doors swung inward. Blocking the exit he sawTaggart—Sheriff Taggart—backed up by all his deputies. Taggart’s grim stare was fixed on him; the barrels of shotguns and rifles shone in the light, all aimed his way.
“Need you to follow me to the office so we can have a little chat, fella,” the sheriff said. The matter-of-factness of the words didn’t match the way he held his gun, or how the deputies held theirs.
“No need.” The man settled his hat more firmly on his head, pulling down the brim. “Moving on.”
Apparently the sheriff didn’t agree. He entered the saloon, making room for his deputies to spread out in a human barricade as they all started moving toward the man.
The man recognized Duffy, the one who’d been shot by Percy Dolarhyde, from the blood on his shirt front. Duffy was glaring at him like it’d been his fault, and holding a shotgun in the crook of his good arm.
They were all watching him with expressions as mixed as if they’d stumbled on a stick of dynamite with a burning fuse. Why—?
“Jake Lonergan,” Taggart said, “you’re under arrest.”
Who the hell was Jake Lonergan? The name meant nothing to him. But the look in the sheriff’s eyes said it ought to.
The man backed up against the bar. He looked at the sheriff again in disbelief; then he looked down at the floor, his empty eyes suddenly seeing nothing at all. This was impossible. . . . The first town he’d come to, he’d walked straight into a trap? Was he really an outlaw, a wanted man, and he couldn’t even remember that—?
The sheriff and his men were slowly approaching from across the room; people who’d been sitting at the tables had already started to get up and back away. One of the deputies cocked his rifle.
“Wouldn’t do that—” the man said, raising his head. The deputy who’d cocked his gun looked into the man’s eyes, and his face turned pale. But Duffy only raised his shotgun to take better aim.
Christ, did the warrant say “dead or alive”—? The sheriff and his men were ready to use those weapons in a room full of innocent bystanders. Were they really that scared of Jake Lonergan? Or was “dead” just easier? Damn it, he didn’t want to hurt anybody. But he didn’t want to die, either—
The man’s hand moved away from his gun; his glance went to the bottle of whiskey on the bar beside him, before he looked back at the sheriff’s men.
The deputy named Lyle had gotten the closest, with his rifle raised to his shoulder, aimed at the man’s chest.
Close enough . . . The man caught the barrel of Lyle’s gun with one hand, yanking it free as his other hand smashed the bottle of rye over Lyle’s head. He flipped the rifle and shot Duffy in the leg. He punched the third deputy in the throat; the last one hit the faro table face first, and slid to the floor.
Only Taggart was left standing—his eyes clear and his rifle leveled.
The man grabbed the rifle’s barrel, heedless, jerking it upward just as Taggart fired. The bullet lodged in the ceiling, and then the rifle was in the man’s hands, and he was taking aim at somebody who’d just tried to kill him. His finger found the trigger and started to tighten—
“No—!” a boy’s voice cried out.
The man’s eyes flashed to the window. He saw a boy’s anguished face: the boy who’d come running out to greet the sheriff . . . and now was going to see his grandpa shot dead by a total stranger—
The man eased his finger off the trigger. Slowly he lowered the gun.
Taggart stared at him, astonishment replacing the fear in his eyes.
“I don’t want any trouble,” the man said.
The butt of a pistol cracked against his head, and his body dropped out from under him. He lay on the floor, fighting to stay conscious as rushing blackness began to smother his brain. He rolled onto his back, and he saw Ella’s face, blurring, her hand still holding the gun that she’d hit him with.
Taggart drew his own pistol, pinning the man in place as effectively as if he’d put a foot on his neck. He kicked the rifle aside, and leaned down to pull the man’s revolver from its holster. The man lying on the floor looked toward his hat, lying overturned beside him, at the photo wedged inside the crown. . . . the nameless woman smiling back at him with love. . . .
In a waking dream, she was smiling as he entered the cabin, their refuge . . . as he took her into his arms and kissed her . . . as he proudly dropped his saddlebags on the table . . .
No, don’t . . . No—
. . . her smile disappearing as she saw the gold spill out . . . as she turned to him, furious, and she said, “No!” . . . and then . . .
No—
Then it all—
. . . a glass vase shattered . . . he heard a voice—her voice?—screaming . . .
. . . the cabin . . . the blinding light . . . a maw of devouring darknes . . . screaming . . . pain . . .
No . . .
The image of her face blurred into patterns of light and darkness, and everything faded to black.
5
He was dreaming . . . or was it—? . . . the faces of demons, leering down at him . . .
pain like the torture of the damned . . . screaming . . . human eyes gazing upward, white and opaque as milk-glass . . . a cavern, where nightmare shapes shifted all around him, things he couldn’t even put a name to, flickering and fading like flame-shadows on the stone wall . . . on a cabin wall . . .
. . . the wall, the ceiling, torn away . . . deafening noise and blinding light . . . a cabin, a cavern . . . the woman from his picture, her face filled with fear as she cried out, and he tried with all his strength—
But whatever he was trying to do or stop was lost, along with her face . . . as the whole world turned upside down, inside out . . . as it all changed. Light blinded him, blue light brighter than the sky, and the last thing he heard was her voice, screaming in terror . . .
THE MAN THE law called Jake Lonergan jolted awake, with screams still echoing inside his head. He squinted in the sudden brightness . . . only lamplight, not sunlight, this time.
Not blue light . . . He rubbed his eyes and groaned, rolling over. His face and hair were wet with something that didn’t feel like water or smell like blood. Something slimy.
As things came into focus he made out a face looking down at him: Percy Dolarhyde’s face. Percy spat on him, again.
That dung-eating maggot—Jake bolted upright, with murder in his eyes.
Percy dodged backward out of his reach, laughing at him from behind bars . . . the same kind of bars, Jake realized, that caged them both now. He wiped the spit off his face, swearing under his breath. As the rest of his senses began to come back, he remembered what had happened in the saloon to make him wake up here, and why his head hurt so much. . . . He touched the lump on the back of it, beside his ear; felt his hair matted with dried blood.
Ella. That woman, she’d knocked him out just as he’d. . . . Damn her, that bitch, that witch—
Jake wished he hadn’t sat up so fast; his head left him feeling queasy from the change of position. Blinking more of reality into focus, he recognized the inside of a jailhouse.
Nobody official was in the sheriff’s office right now; there was no one here at all but him and Percy.
“You’re gonna burn, boy,” Percy Dolarhyde said. His voice peeled Jake’s nerves like a skinning knife. Percy was pressed up against the bars again, still wearing the same ugly sneer from Jake’s memory. Jake had to look away from it, or be sick to his stomach.
But turning his head couldn’t shut out Percy’s voice, the diarrhea of taunting threats. “My daddy’s comin’ for me. He learned how to kill a man slow from the Apaches. I’m gonna watch you suffer a long, long—”
Without looking back at him, not even bothering to get up from the bunk, Jake stuck his arm through into the next cell, grabbed Percy, and slammed his damnfool skull into the iron bars, knocking him out cold.
Hell was other people. . . . Jake lay down on his bunk again, relieved to finally have peace and quiet so he could nurse his aching head. His body hurt almost as much, and he remembered his wounded side . . . remembered Preacher Meacham stitching it up . . . remembered everything back to the moment he’d come to, early this morning. Before that, nothing. Still. Like he’d dropped out of the sky, he’d said to the preacher.
He remembered what Meacham had said to him in reply: “. . . another such story . . . fella by the name of Lucifer.”
He stared at the bars of his cell. His name might as well be Lucifer, from the reception he’d gotten in this town. The sheriff claimed he was Jake Lonergan . . . and Jake Lonergan was a wanted man: wanted dead or alive. That meant the territorial government had put out a bounty on him—and up in Santa Fe they didn’t pay bounties on dead men unless the law had declared they were of no use either way, to anybody but the Devil.
Jake Lonergan, in the law’s opinion, was the kind of man who deserved to be shot down like a dog. Or, if taken alive, hung from a scaffold to choke away his final moments of life in agony and humiliation.
He sat up again, slowly this time. He crossed the cell with equal care and hung onto the bars, peering out into the sheriff’s office. He spotted the wanted poster lying on Taggart’s desk. With his body pressed up against the bars, he could only read the largest print from where he stood. But that was enough:
JAKE LONERGAN
WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE
$ 1,000 REWARD
If you wanted a man dead, you put out a poster like that on him. If you wanted him dead a lot sooner, you offered a big reward. But a $1,000 reward . . .? The territories were dirt poor; they didn’t have the resources to spend that much on one man, no matter what kind of murdering lowlife bastard he was. Whatever Jake Lonergan had done, he must’ve woken up the wrong passenger when he did it . . . one with a whole lot of money and influence.
If he was really Jake Lonergan, with a thousand dollar bounty on his head, why the hell was he still alive?
Jake Lonergan. Jake Lonergan. “Jake Lonergan—” He repeated the name out loud, saying it over and over, but it stirred nothing inside him.
Not his name, not his past . . . not his crimes. He didn’t feel like a cold-blooded killer. But then, how could he explain what he’d done to the three men who’d tried to bushwhack him this morning . . . to the sheriff’s men . . . to Percy.
He glanced over at Percy, sprawled on the floor in the next cell. Well, maybe that had just been doing the world a favor for a few hours.
This entire day seemed like one long nightmare, only with some of it worse than the rest . . . the part with the screaming, the undead faces, the pain . . . the bright-darkness, and sounds like nobody on earth had ever heard or made. . . .
But waking up from that had only left him trapped here: Was this Hell? He didn’t know much about Hell, or Purgatory, any more than he really understood absolution.
Absolution was just a place. But somehow it had come to seem like Hell on Earth. “Come into the light,” the preacher had said; but he’d only meant to fix the wound in Jake’s side.
Jake went back to the bunk and lay down again, shutting his eyes, blocking everything out. Even if he never opened them again, the darkness was the only hiding place he had, at least for now.
OUT ON THE Dolarhyde spread, the cowhands had taken Mr. Dolarhyde down to the river, to see for himself the mystery of the dead cattle. Torches lit the darkness of the same field where, not long before, a blazing cottonwood tree would have given them all the light they needed.
Woodrow Dolarhyde stood on the edge between light and darkness, staring down at the remains of a steer. His perpetual frown deepened, etching the bitter lines of his face into an even bleaker, more unforgiving mask.
If he hadn’t known that was a cow before, he wouldn’t have known what it was, now. . . . He kicked the carcass with his boot.
The men who’d ridden out here with him stole glances at him again; they were as skittish and wary as their horses right now, but not entirely for the same reasons. The horses were only animals; their senses told them things about this place no human could detect, told them to be afraid.
The men knew enough to be afraid of the unknown, too, but it was fear of the known—of him—that made them the most fretful now: his ruthless anger, his pitiless vengeance . . . his absolute control over everything and everyone that so much as touched his life. That was how he preferred things; that was how he intended to run things and keep things, forever—
He became aware again of the man’s voice still whimpering and pleading, at the center of the torchlight: Roy Murphy, the only man left out of three, that some of his other men had found when they’d ridden out to check on things.
Just around dusk, he’d been told, the men had seen and heard unbelievable lights and sounds coming from clear out here by the river . . . things none of them could adequately describe. To hear them tell it, the strange phenomena had scared them shitless, even at that distance.
It hadn’t scared them as much as he did, obviously, or they wouldn’t have gone out to check on what’d happened.
When he’d ridden out himself to s
ee what in hell the problem was, the men who’d been waiting there had still found only Roy Murphy, lying in the grass, reeking of alcohol—and half a dozen dead steers.
“Please!” Murphy’s voice rose, intruding on Dolarhyde’s thoughts again. “I didn’t kill your cattle, Colonel Dolarhyde! You gotta believe—”
Dolarhyde raised his finger: the gesture was barely visible in the torchlight, but silence still fell at his signal. Dolarhyde was accustomed to prompt obedience—as well as to men who disappointed him.
What he was unaccustomed to was anything that made him doubt his own eyes and ears, or question his fixed view of the world. Right now, although he’d never admit it, he was confounded by the dead animals on the ground around him, and amazed almost to the point of amusement by the audacity of the lie that Roy Murphy had been swearing was true.
He moved closer to the place where two of his most reliable men, Greavey and Parker, had tied Murphy between two horses—his arms fastened to one horse’s saddle, his legs to the other. The horses stood obediently, waiting, for now . . . but not for long.
Dolarhyde came close enough to look down into Roy Murphy’s wide, frightened eyes, letting the man have a good look into his own. “You only been riding for my brand what, ’bout two weeks?” he said. “You don’t maybe know who you’re dealing with, Roy. Nobody calls me ‘Colonel.’ Ones that did are mostly dead.”
He paused, letting that sink in, satisfied when Roy’s eyes got even wider and more desperate. “Now: You, Ed, Little Mickey was s’posed to be picking up strays. . . . How many you get?”
Roy strained just to form words. “. . . b-bout twenty-four, boss. . . .”
Dolarhyde’s expression didn’t change. “You say you weren’t drinkin’ . . . I can smell it on you. Don’t you respect my rules, mister? What kinda man blows up other people’s cows, and tells a bullshit story. . . . Couldn’t do no better than that? Where’s the other eighteen animals, Roy?” Roy shook his head. “It’s like I said, there was a bright light. . . .”
Cowboys and Aliens Page 5
