The Good the Bad and the Infernal

by Guy Adams

  THE TIMING OF Jones’ shout was not good. Hicks and Hope had been moments away from freedom, facing the bolted saloon door. George Campbell was a couple of feet behind them, the shotgun held steadily at their backs. The moment he heard Jones, that calm intent, that conviction of a viable plan, vanished.

  “Damn you!” he shouted. “Trying to trick me were you? Got your friends out there waiting to jump me?”

  “He ain’t no friend of mine,” admitted Hicks. He meant it, too; another thirty seconds and he would have been free.

  “Yeah, I just bet that’s true,” Campbell laughed. “You keep your distance!” he shouted. “I’ve got the preacher and his woman here and I’m a heartbeat away from shooting the pair of them. You just stay where you are.”

  He moved to the shuttered window, opened it and looked carefully out onto the street. He could see a solitary man stood next to the retard. One man, he could handle. Keep him out there long enough and the snakes would do it for him.

  “You been making enemies, Hicks?” the man shouted. “Christ’s sake, you’ve only been here an hour.”

  Hicks didn’t deign to reply.

  JONES TURNED TO face the building. He could sense the people inside, five in all. Hicks and the nurse, plus three others. What had the idiot got himself caught up in?

  As precise as his senses were, the unfamiliar location and the barrier between them made it hard from him to build an accurate picture, not helped by Hicks’ silence.

  “You in there,” Jones shouted. “Can you hear me?”

  “Of course I can hear you,” the stranger’s voice replied. His voice was different now, coming through the glass of a window. That was good. Jones moved, scuffing his boots in the sand, listening to the echo of the noise come back to him, reworking his impression of the building in front of him, isolating its weakest point.

  “And you, Hicks?” Jones called.

  “I hear you,” the preacher said.

  “And what about the girl? She still alive?”

  “I am,” Hope shouted back.

  “Who else you got in there?” Jones asked.

  “None of your business,” the first man replied. That was all Jones needed to take the shot. He mentally confirmed the angle, the gun swinging up and firing, a fraction of a second’s work.

  Jones heard the scraping of a chair as one of the other strangers moved. Panicked, no doubt, and probably reaching for a weapon. He fired again, shooting three bullets through the now shattered window, not willing to rely on chance.

  “No!” Hope Lane shouted and Jones wondered if he’d been too slow. He heard someone fall to the ground and decided not.

  “If you’re finished in there,” he shouted, “get the hell outside. We need to make cover.”

  He lifted Soldier Joe to his feet and began leading him down the street towards the livery shed where the rest of them were waiting.

  WHEN THE FIRST shot had rung out, Hope couldn’t quite believe it. Campbell’s head rocked back, blood and brain splattering over the dusty tables of the saloon.

  Genevieve, concerned for the safety of her son, had snatched him into her arms and turned to run just as three more shots came through the window, two of them passing both through her and her young boy. She fell, face down, crushing the already dead body of her child beneath her.

  “No!” Hope shouted. What the hell was the man thinking? Why had he shot them? What possible threat could they have been? And then she realised. Jones had not even seen them; he had simply known someone had moved and taken the shot.

  “If you’re finished in there,” Jones shouted, “get the hell outside. We need to make cover.”

  Satisfied he was unlikely to fire again, she ran over to Genevieve. There was nothing to be done. Both she and her son were dead.

  “Could be worse,” said Hicks, retrieving his satchel. “At least I got my money back.”

  JONES PICKED UP his pace. The snakes were nearly on top of them, close enough that he could hear the brushing sound their bellies made in the dust.

  “You killed an unarmed woman and child,” the woman shouted at him as she and Hicks caught up.

  “‘Thank you’ is the expression you’re looking for,” he replied. “Though you might want to save it until we’re behind closed doors, there’s a ton of snakes heading our way and they’ll be all over us any second.”

  “Dear Christ,” said Hicks, “there’s hundreds of them!”

  They were in sight now, flooding up the street towards them, hanging off the balconies and porches, slithering beneath the buildings and forcing their way between cracks in the doors.

  Hicks turned to run back the way they had come but Jones grabbed his arm.

  “There,” he said, pointing at the livery shed that was still between them and the serpents.

  “Open up!” he called. The four of them made it through the doorway just as the first wave of the snakes reached the building.

  Harmonium slammed the door behind them, catching two writhing serpents. They hissed and coiled as the door cut them in half. Hicks, with a yelp of panic, stamped down on their heads.

  “He really meant it about the snakes,” he said, the outside wall taking a pounding as the things hurled themselves at it, desperate to gain entrance.

  “I’m not in the habit of making things up,” said Jones.

  “Not you,” Hicks replied. “The useless bastard that had us at gunpoint.”

  “Anyone else in this town that’s likely to cause us trouble?” Jones asked.

  “Nobody else in town at all,” Hicks replied. “You just killed the last three citizens of Serpent’s Creek.”

  “Good riddance,” said Jones.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE GREAT SILENCE

  BARBAROSSA WAS A town in which nothing ever happened. Its residents took pride in the fact. Many of them chose to live there for that very reason. It was a standing joke in the bar of the Pine Bluff that Barbarossa was where people went to draw breath. A town to retire to after a hard life. A warming glass of spirit after an indigestible meal.

  This was certainly true of many of its residents. The sheriff, a lean old man by the name of Garritty, had done his time in the ranger service. He had killed his fair share of men and seen a number of friends die too. He would be a happy man indeed, he told his wife, if the gun he wore stayed forever in its holster. He had no desire to put finger to trigger again.

  The doctor, Ellen Quarshie, had been a nurse throughout the war. Hands stained with blood so often she had believed they would never be clean. Now she dished out powders and bound up sprained ankles. She couldn’t be happier.

  The owner of the Pine Bluff told his customers that he had previously run a restaurant in San Francisco. This was a lie. He had run a band of horse thieves on the Mexican border. If wanted posters were currency he would have been a rich man. Now he polished glasses and cooked a mean steak. He didn’t own a horse of his own. He claimed he had no need of one and had never got on with the damn beasts anyway.

  Their stories were mirrored in countless others. People who had done their fair share of violent living, only to survive it and find themselves desperate for peace. And peace they found in Barbarossa. A town where the annual barn dance was the height of excitement.

  Then, one day, that changed.

  HOPE LANE COULDN’T get the sight of a dead woman and her child from her mind. Whenever she tried to think of something else, she heard the short cry of pain and surprise with which Genevieve had met Henry Jones’ bullets, and the vision of her and her son, their blood running together into the floorboards of the saloon, returned.

  She had seen violence its equal. She had seen good people die and no doubt would again. But there was something about the sudden, random, pointless death of these two that clung to her. It made her sick in her belly, and her heart despaired. Not even the warmth of Soldier Joe as they lay together in his cage could get the chill out of her.

  She had spent a sleepless night in th
e livery stable in Serpent’s Creek. She had lain there, listening to the muted sound of rattling tails and darting heads as they rapped at the wooden walls around them. It seemed that nothing would distract the snakes from their prey, not even a bolted door. She imagined how the serpents were even now coiling around the cooling bodies in the saloon. No doubt sinking their fangs into the lifeless flesh.

  It was almost more than she could bear.

  She knew morning had come because of the silence. A wave of noise ran past their door as the snakes retreated to the long grass and the dark banks of the creek. Then nothing.

  “I think we’re safe to find some breakfast now,” Toby had said, stirring from out of the blanket he had rolled himself up in.

  The Joneses had made themselves a bed in the short hay loft and Hope found herself clenching with fear at the sound of Henry’s boot heels descending the stairs.

  One day, she thought, that man is going to be the death of us all.

  He moved to the front doors and pressed his ear against them. After a moment he nodded. “They’ve gone.”

  Even with his assurance, there was a palpable nervousness as he unbolted the door and swung it open.

  “Well,” said Hicks, “I suggest we head back to the saloon and see what else that bastard had been storing up in there.”

  “I can’t go back,” said Hope. “Not with them still lying there.”

  “Then you’ll go hungry,” Hicks replied, sympathetic as ever.

  THEY WERE ON the road again half an hour later, having raided George Campbell’s supplies for food and munitions. There was limited space in the caravan with so many passengers. Harmonium would have preferred they shot the preacher to allow more room, but Henry was still insisting the man could prove useful.

  Soldier Joe had said that they should bear left at Serpent’s Creek. Following the road they had travelled the previous evening, they were soon back out in open country.

  “So how long do we keep driving?” Harmonium asked. “It’s about time our talking map earned his keep and gave us a few more directions.”

  Hicks was only too aware of this, most particularly because his longevity was tied to the usefulness of his charge. “I’ll talk to him,” he insisted, climbing back into the caravan and Soldier Joe’s cage.

  “He needs to start talking!” he said to Hope, keeping his voice low. “Has he said nothing?”

  She shook her head. “Not since last night.”

  “Useless fucker.” Hicks prodded Soldier Joe, who appeared to be happily asleep. It was alright for him; he was too stupid to know his life was on the line. “Bear left at Serpent’s Creek,” the preacher said. “And then what?”

  SOLDIER JOE WAS dreaming.

  Usually his dreams were incoherent affairs, a mess of noise and colour. This was different. He recognised the Tennessee River, its waters flowing pink with the blood of fallen soldiers. The air was alive with shouting and rifle fire. Someone was begging for death, lying back in the undergrowth with an open stomach that revealed a glistening cage of ribs. His cries had turned him from an adult to a child, desperate and alone, driven wild by pain. Soldier Joe couldn’t help, knew as much instinctively as he walked through this remembered battlefield like a ghost.

  In the trees ahead, a small table was set for tea, its bright gingham cloth and pristine china a ludicrous reflection of blood and bone. At the table sat a man, his clean suit and bright vest a world away from the tattered uniforms of the soldiers that fought and died around him. He smoothed back a stray curl of light blond hair as the shock of a nearby explosion rippled past. It seemed to him no more than a light summer breeze.

  “Take a seat,” he called, gesturing to the empty chair next to him. “Come and talk to me for a while.”

  Soldier Joe did as he was asked, never one to question the logic of dreams.

  “Take some tea?” the man asked.

  Soldier Joe was so used to silence that the sound of his own voice seemed as shocking to him as the carnage that surrounded them. “I guess. Can’t say I’ve ever drunk it.”

  “You’ll like it,” the man assured him. “It’s somewhat out of fashion these days, but I’m not one to bear a grudge.”

  He poured a dash of milk into a small cup then added the tea. That arc of glistening amber liquid seemed the greatest anachronism of all. It shone in the morning sunshine, a thing of beauty.

  “Help yourself to cake,” said the man, passing Soldier Joe the cup.

  There was another explosion and the table shook slightly, with a jingle of china.

  “Who would live in a place like this?” the man complained.

  “Nobody does,” Soldier Joe replied.

  The man smiled and shook his head. “You do, or we wouldn’t be sat here.”

  Soldier Joe had no reply to that.

  The man sipped his tea and looked out at the fighting as if basking in a beautiful view. “So ephemeral,” he said. “All these brief little candles of life flickering out one after the other. Why do you always end up at war?”

  “God knows.”

  “If He does, He’s not telling. Maybe you can ask Him yourself when you see Him.” He put down his tea cup. “Do try the cake, it’s quite delightful.”

  “Who are you?”

  The man shrugged slightly, as if this were an awkward question. “You can call me Alonzo. Beyond that it gets complicated.” He smiled. “You didn’t ask what I meant when I said about you seeing God.”

  “We all see Him sooner or later.”

  “In your case, sooner.”

  “I’m dying?”

  “You all are from my perspective, faster than you seem to think. But no, I mean literally, once you get to Wormwood.”

  Wormwood. The name triggered a strange sensation in Soldier Joe’s head. He suddenly felt as if he was away from this battlefield, lying on his back in a moving caravan. He could see a fat, angry face leaning over him. “Wormwood?” he said, and the face began to smile. “That’s it!” the fat man said, “that’s it!”

  Then he was back in his seat, a tea cup in his hand.

  “You’re not quite in one world or the other,” Alonzo said. “It must be difficult. You spend more time here than there, which is never healthy. Why live in the past, when the future is so small?”

  “Where is Wormwood?” Soldier Joe asked.

  “You’ve reached Serpent’s Creek, turned left...” Alonzo gazed into the middle distance as if recalling something. “You need to aim north, towards the town of Barbarossa.”

  “North? Barbarossa?” Soldier Joe suddenly had the sensation of being back in the caravan. He could feel dry straw pressing at the back of his neck. A woman’s hand sliding across his brow. The fat man was laughing, getting up and moving away from his line of sight.

  He was back at the table.

  “Of course,” Alonzo continued, “Barbarossa is normally terribly dull. Nothing ever happens there.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  Alonzo looked up. Soldier Joe followed the man’s gaze and marvelled at the sight of snow beginning to fall through the trees. It fell on the warring soldiers, evaporating on their hot cannon and soaking up their blood.

  “Beautiful,” said Soldier Joe.

  “Death often is,” Alonzo replied. “It appears our little chat is coming to an end. I’ll see you again soon.”

  “I never want to come here again,” Soldier Joe replied, looking at the fallen bodies all around him.

  Alonzo shrugged. “That choice is yours to make.”

  With that, he vanished, the cup he had been holding falling to the floor and tipping its contents into bloodied leaves.

  “My choice,” said Soldier Joe, returning to the prison of his own, tortured head.

  “IT’S UNBELIEVABLE,” said Harmonium Jones as the snow continued to fall all around them. “I haven’t seen snow in years.”

  Not since she had been a child, in fact, growing up in northern Wisconsin. Then she had seen more than her fair s
hare. Ice cold winters that had seized their home and crushed it hard. Her father had worked the timber, and she would always picture him as a mountain of a man, wrapped from head to toe in clothes, buried in fabric, as he headed out the door to chop and saw. One day he had simply never come back. For years she had imagined him caught out in the snow, frozen to death in the forest, bright eyes turned creamy white as they grew solid in his skull. Then, because it was easier, she stopped imagining him at all.

  “It’s colder than a well digger’s ass is what it is,” Hicks complained, pulling his jacket tighter around him and taking a nip on the whisky jug.

  “Then get inside,” Harmonium replied. “‘North to Barbarossa,’ you said. We can manage that with your constant complaining, or without. I know which I would prefer.”

  Hicks wasn’t in the mood to argue, he just clambered back inside, glad to be out of the sudden chill.

  The weather had appeared out of nowhere, bright skies suddenly filled with grey clouds and thick snow. After their night in Serpent’s Creek, the bizarre no longer seemed so surprising, and at least snow wasn’t venomous.

  For Henry Jones, the weather was having an altogether more unpleasant effect. As he sat there on the driving bench, the world around him slowly but surely began to lose its clarity. The flakes of snow swirling and dancing in the air were too light to register, and as they hit the ground and began to stick it was as if everything around him were being swathed in soft wool.

  If this continues, he thought, I really will be blind.

  And continue it did.

  For all her initial enthusiasm, Harmonium was soon cursing the weather as the snow piled higher and higher around them, the air so thick with it that she could barely see a foot or so of the road ahead.

  “Someone fetch me a blanket, for Christ’s sake!” she shouted behind her. “I’m liable to freeze to death out here.”