by Lila Bowen
“Dan, what happens when I kill Trevisan?” he asked as they kept back the remaining herd, several of whom were whinnying at their friends as they trotted away.
“You know what will happen. Something else will call the Shadow, and you will answer with violence.”
“What if I wanted to just… live?”
Dan looked at him, his face a mix of pity and amusement. “We’re all prisoners of our birth and circumstances, Rhett. Most folks wish they lived bigger lives, but they aren’t strong enough. They would crumble if they got what they wanted. You’re different.”
Rhett snorted and patted the neck of the horse currently pulling at his halter to rejoin the parting herd. “Same as always.”
“As if you could be content doing nothing.”
“Still, I’d like to give being ordinary a try.”
Sam came up and put a hand on Rhett’s shoulder. “I don’t think you would.”
When Sam looked at him like that, Rhett wouldn’t trade his life for anything.
He didn’t feel quite the same, that night.
Everything was relatively calm as they settled in that evening. Losing half the herd lightened the load on Rhett’s shoulders, and he also got to experience something completely new: helping somebody without killing anything. His heart felt all swole up, but in a good way. Dan had shot a nice little antelope for dinner, and Rhett’s belly was pleasantly full. Sam was already asleep, just inches away under the buffalo robe and radiating heat like sunshine. The horses had calmed back down, and the women were in their wagon, and all was pretty much well with the world. Rhett closed his eyes and smiled, settling his head back into the worn seat of the Captain’s saddle.
He was just drifting off when he felt something skitter over his bare foot, and before he could brush it away, he felt its bite. A hard, hot pinch, and the skittering disappeared. Rhett bolted upright and threw back the buffalo skin to find possibly the worst thing he’d ever seen: spiders. Huge ones. Hairy ones. Dozens of them. As he watched, horrified, one reared its front legs back and sunk its fangs into Sam’s ankle.
“Spiders!” Rhett roared, slapping them away from Sam with his bare hands. “Wake up, goddammit!”
Sam was up and brushing the spiders away, dancing toward the fire and shouting curses. Across the fire, Dan leaped to his feet, slapping spiders off his bare chest and into the flames. The ground seemed to move and shift, the hairy brown spiders crawling everywhere. Rhett stuck his feet in his boots, hard, feeling spider bodies squash and gush, and ran to the wagon, hating every second. He threw open the door and shouted, “Wake up, y’all. Spiders. Bad ones!”
“Spiders don’t hurt anybody,” Winifred said sleepily.
Then one of them must’ve got to her, because she screamed and hopped out of bed, dragging a mostly naked and spider-covered Cora with her. They were soon outside, shaking spiders from their clothes and blankets and hair.
Shots rang out, and Rhett looked up to see Sam shooting at the ground and then, to his horror, at Dan.
“I’ll kill the big one,” Sam shouted. “If it’ll just hold still.”
Rhett ran up behind Sam and yanked his arms down right as the Henry jerked back with a bang, putting a hole in Dan’s leg instead of his chest. Dan fell over hollering, gushing blood and covered with spiders. But Rhett wouldn’t let go of Sam, and Sam wouldn’t stop trying to wrestle the gun away, claiming he had to kill the big spider. After getting his nose slammed and his feet stomped on, Rhett finally got the big rifle out of Sam’s hands and threw it down, wrapping Sam in a bear hug. The cowpoke was stronger than he should’ve been, violent and thrashing and mad.
“She got my Henry!” Sam shouted, as if he didn’t even know Rhett was there. “A giant spider stole my goddamn gun!”
“Shh, Sam. It’s me. I’m right here,” Rhett said, doing his level best to sound soothing.
Pain was radiating out of his foot where the spider had bitten him and Sam had stomped him, pulsing and swollen against his boot, but it was almost as if he could feel the magic in his body overtaking the venom, pushing it back out. Judging by the fact that Winifred, Cora, and Dan weren’t trying to shoot one another, he had to assume that the crazy part of the venom only affected humans. And that meant that Sam was poisoned, didn’t it?
“Goddammit, spider. You let me go. I got to help Rhett,” Sam growled.
“I am Rhett, fool!”
“You’re a goddamn lying spider is what you are, and I’m gonna kill you!”
Sam managed to elbow Rhett in the gut, grab one of his pistols, and put a hole in Rhett’s thigh before Dan got close enough to snatch the gun away. Together, they relieved him of both his remaining guns and his Bowie knife, but Sam continued to fight them with the strength of three men, cussing them and insulting them and assuming they were giant spiders hell-bent on stealing bullets from good men. No matter what Rhett said, no matter how sweetly or gently he whispered to Sam, he couldn’t get past whatever madness gripped his best friend, and it just about broke his heart to see Sam’s face twisted in hate as he tried to beat and stomp on whatever came into contact with him, all while striking out at anyone who tried to hold him back.
“I hate spiders, you asshole!” Sam hollered.
“A little rope would help!” Rhett yelled at the women, who were still dancing around as spiders kept trying to run up their legs.
Dan managed to get Sam’s lariat off his saddle, and together, they trussed up Samuel Hennessy like he was a furious bull calf about to lose his nuts. Poor Sam struggled on his side, tied at ankles, waist, and wrists, angry enough to spit. The spiders seemed to be running in from every corner of the prairie, and it was all Rhett and Dan could do to stomp on every hairy body that tried to bite poor Sam. The girls finally got their wits back and picked up rocks to smash their own share of eight-legged monsters. Rhett kept waiting for the spiders to join together and form into a giant spider, but the insidious little bastards did just fine on their own, skittering into crevices and lunging out from every shadow. For every ten he killed, ten more rushed up, stupid but determined. He got bit more times than he could count, but he’d just swoon a little and recover. And get back to crushing.
“Goddamn Bernard Trevisan,” Rhett muttered as he stepped on another spider.
“You’re sure it’s him?” Dan asked.
Rhett took a moment to glare at the man. “You know anybody else who commands hundreds of God’s worst creatures, full-up with poison and hell-bent on my vexation?”
Slam. Dan squished a spider with a rock. “Are you sure you don’t have any more of his possessions?”
Smack. Rhett stomped on one with his gut-splashed boot. “Yes, I’m goddamn sure.”
Slam. “Then how is he tracking you?”
Squish. “If I knew, I would put a stop to it.”
Dan stuck a stick in the fire and held it to an encroaching spider, setting it aflame. The spider made a screaming noise and bumped into another spider, setting it on fire. Rhett and Dan stared at one another and realized that the entire desert could burn up if they let these spiders get loose while on fire. Slam. Squish. The spider fires went out under their boots.
Rhett stomped on another eight-legged fire, grimaced at the white, creamy guts oozing out from under his boot toe, and smacked his own forehead.
“Goddammit, Dan. I already told you how. He has a piece of my bone. He took one of my toes. Probably one of my teeth. So maybe it’s not me. Maybe it’s him.”
Dan stared at him like he was an idiot. “Then I guess we’re out of luck.”
“Would you two spiders shut up and find my friend Rhett?” Sam howled.
Rhett and Dan watched him struggle against the rope, inching across the prairie on his side, his pupils so wide that they swallowed up his pretty blue eyes in black.
“This is a goddamn inconvenience,” Rhett offered.
For once, Dan just nodded in agreement.
“You think he’ll recover?”
The lo
ok Dan gave him was one of pity. “I don’t know, Rhett. Poison is poison, and humans are easily poisoned.”
Rhett looked at Sam, struck to the marrow. The man was still on his side and trussed, unmoving. Rhett couldn’t even tell if Sam was breathing. He was so accustomed to his own ability to bounce back from every wound that he’d never considered that something as piddly as a spider might be able to take Sam from him.
“Then we got to get rid of the poison. We got to fix Sam.”
The look Dan gave him was brim-full of pity. “We don’t know how.”
They went back to stomping on spiders.
Dawn was a long time coming. It took another hour to kill all the remaining spiders, which wanted nothing so much as to sink fangs into anything moving. Sam didn’t sleep a wink, just kept hollering and going totally still at intervals all night. The horses were jittery and single-mindedly stomping whatever spiders came their way, but it was hard to settle down when an entire herd of horses couldn’t settle down. The women slept by the fire, claiming that there were now spiders hiding in the wagon, which was chock-full of dark crevices. Rhett didn’t enjoy lying next to Sam when Sam was bugnuts crazy and shouting at him, and his brain was wide-awake and jumpy, in any case. He kept telling himself that Sam would pull through, but Sam wasn’t doing so well. His color was bad, his eyes sunken, and his lips dried out and covered in froth and spittle. His visible wounds were an angry red, hot and hard.
Rhett tried to pop one of the bites, but nothing happened. He tried to suck out the poison, but none came, and Sam just got more addlepated, screaming that a spider was clamped on him and after his blood. Dan poked through the wagon for a book on magic potions, but in between the dark and the spiders, he couldn’t find anything. Rhett took to helping Sam sip a leftover bottle of Buck’s wine, hoping that whatever had healed their wounds last night would help again tonight. He chewed Buck’s grapes, just a little, pulled off their skins, and slipped them between Sam’s lips, helping him swallow. It was almost as bad as his night with the Captain, but even that had held a certain peace. Now, watching Sam’s shallow breathing, peace and sleep were things much longed for.
Sometime near dawn, Rhett saw the thing he’d both dreaded and expected: a spider, larger than most, scurrying right for him. It had a body the size of a stack of dinner plates and legs as long as Rhett’s arms, and it could skitter like a bastard. Rhett stood, feeling his back creak all the way up to his neck, and tried to stomp the thing, but it was wily and sidestepped him every time. Instead, he took up his gun and shot it. Chunks flew off it, but it kept lunging for him until he’d shot off most of the legs. Even then, like the giant scorpion, it didn’t stop trying to end him, even when it had only one fang left, and that one dangling by a gooey thread. Finally, Rhett put a boot on top of what was left and poked his fingers through its hairy back, hunting for the ball of wax he knew he’d find. It was slimed in white, but it crumbled easily enough. The spider shivered apart into brown sand shot through with long, whiskery hairs.
Exhausted beyond belief, Rhett picked through the mess in his hands and found bits of a regular spider crushed among the wax, along with the usual chips of bone and gold. Holding up the bone, he couldn’t tell what it was from, but he had his suspicions now.
All the little spiders were suddenly dead, curled on their backs and still. Sam shut the hell up and slept, and Rhett fell to uneasy dreams wriggling with spiders and scorpions and centipedes. Then he was the bird, soaring overhead, watching a tiny girl drive a settlers’ wagon pulled by two brown mares. It was Meimei, her bright red jacket traded for a light blue coat like the mayor’s children had worn in Gloomy Bluebird. As the bird hovered overhead, Meimei set down her reins and crawled into the wagon bed, where an array of horrible notions were laid out. Bottles, jars, a crow’s leg with the toes curled in death. Meimei – or Trevisan, really – unwrapped something from a scarf and pulled out a chunk of bone. Using a peculiar knife, she sliced off a little chip of the bone and picked it up from where it had fallen on the scarf and smiled a smile that no small child should know how to make, empty of sweetness and full of madness and horror. She took up a bit of wax from a melted black candle and began shaping it with her tiny fingers. The bird that was Rhett couldn’t quite see what she was doing, but he understood the message well enough. Trevisan was riding toward his goal and using Rhett’s toe bone to send monsters against him, just as Dan had suspected.
Rhett woke with a shuddering start, and it was full light out. The first thing he saw was Sam sleeping. The man’s cheeks were pink and feverish, his brow wrinkled as he moaned and fought against a nightmare. Rhett put a hand on Sam’s shoulder.
“Shh, Sam. It’s okay,” he murmured.
Sam relaxed and smiled, and Rhett rubbed his shoulder. For a strong man, Sam was so fragile. The spider’s venom that couldn’t touch anyone else in their group had driven him to shoot at his own friends. Cora had inspected the first wound, the big one, while he was tied up last night and found it red, hot, and hard. When she’d gently poked it with a knife, vile white fluid had leaked out, what she considered to be a worrisome amount. Rhett almost wished he’d left Sam somewhere safe, some lily-white town or maybe with his own mother, rather than bring him along on a journey with this many dangers. He’d rather live without Sam for a time than see him hurting. So this must be how Dan felt about Winifred, then – not wanting to be bossy so much as to save himself the torture of watching someone he loved suffer.
Rhett helped Sam sip more of Buck’s wine, which seemed to calm him some. He slipped more skinless grapes and bits of cheese between his lips. Sam wasn’t calling him a giant spider anymore, but the boy was weak as a kitten, and they were far away from any sort of sawbones. Cora couldn’t help him any more than she already had, and the wendigo doc probably wouldn’t have offered up his services, anyway, now that the Captain and all the Rangers were gone under damning circumstances. If Buck’s wine couldn’t fix Sam, chances were nothing could.
“C’mon, Buck. I know you’re watching. What’s the point of a god if you can’t make miracles happen?” Rhett whispered to himself.
When Sam quit drinking and fell into an uneasy sleep, Rhett closed his eye for what felt like a heartbeat. Almost immediately, he startled awake and sat up and stretched, feeling the noon sun on his face. When he opened his eye, he held stock-still. All around the camp, crows and ravens were feasting on the dead spiders, which hadn’t turned to dust. Hundreds and hundreds of birds, pecking and swallowing like they’d found a blood-soaked battlefield. The sight was repulsive and fascinating, but Rhett had nothing left in his heart for black birds, other than hatred.
“Get on!” he shouted, throwing a stone into the throng. “Get the hell out!”
The birds rose in an angry cacophony, spiraling up into the sky with furious shouts. Rhett didn’t know if they were Trevisan’s things or just wild birds who’d found a feast, but he was having none of it.
“Stop the shouting,” Dan said, hands over his ears. “Everything I’ve got hurts, and I just want to keep sleeping.”
“We got to leave,” Rhett said, standing and looking about in disgust. “This place is nasty, and the faster we find Trevisan, the faster he’ll stop sending bullshit animals to do his work. Sam ain’t looking good, and pretty soon something’s gonna get him permanently. I got to find a creek and wash off the spider guts.” He looked at his boots, dreading what he was going to find inside once he pulled them off his feet.
“Sam’ll pull through,” Dan said, but Rhett could tell when he was being lied to.
The birds settled in the scrub trees overhanging the creek. While Rhett washed himself and his boots and cried to himself, they laughed and talked among themselves. He counted one new bullet hole, sealed over with fresh pink scars, and twenty-two spider bites, red and pulsing, but nothing as bad as Sam’s.
For the first time, Rhett began to realize the truth of it: Sam might not make it.
Rhett felt a little better once th
ey were back on the trail – but not much. Sam’s color was improved and his many spider bites weren’t as angry, but he wouldn’t wake up, either. His chest barely moved with each shallow breath, and his heartbeat was so slow that even Cora found it worrisome. She gave him what few curatives she’d managed to keep with her on the trail, but nothing seemed to help. They could only settle him into the bed in the wagon and hope for the best. Rhett bolstered him with pillows and tucked the buffalo blanket around him and whispered sweet things about how they’d ride together again one day soon, with nothing more vexful than a frachetty bull to deal with.
The trail to Trevisan brought little comfort but some relief at being on the way to revenge. Rhett’s anger was always a simmering thing, but now it was goddamn personal. The morning was cool and sunny, the wind high and blowing crispy leaves across the prairie. BB felt solid and warm underneath him, the beast’s fine spirit and gentle gait making Rhett’s firm frown twitch the tiniest bit. The best part was being far away from thousands of stiffly curled spider corpses, but he always felt better in transit. Winifred rode Kachina while Cora drove the wagon with Sam inside. Dan rode in back, partly to keep the smaller herd together but mostly, Rhett figured, to give him some space. For all his vexfulness, Dan cared about Sam, too, and he hadn’t gotten preachy or sassy since Sam had fallen ill.
