Storm's Thunder

by Brandon Boyce

  The rifle is close.

  I summon my strength and crawl toward her, belly to the ground. The pistol lay at her feet. I pick it up and roll onto my back to reload, pawing through the coat for the spare rounds. The rifle fires again, and I feel the air sizzle inches from my head. The shot pings off the rocks. I slam the cartridges into the cylinder, snap it shut, listening.

  I hear a click as he chambers another round.

  I grab the dead Apache’s knife for good measure and lift my head and see him. The Chiricahua elder—his long, silver strands half-way down his back and tied with a red string—from his position behind a rock. The stallion stands behind him.

  Storm.

  My heart leaps. The stallion, his charcoal coat gleaming in the high sun, looks all right. Hell of a lot better than I do. My whole left side has gone from searing heat to feeling like it’s buried in ice. And the joints are stiffening so fast, I fear soon I’ll have no movement at all. I have to keep moving and I can’t stay here. I come into a crouch and slink along, below the elder’s line of sight, to an outcropping of stone about twenty yards closer to his position.

  I realize, as I catch my breath, that Storm could cause trouble for himself. Any sensible man would think I’d come out here for the woman, not the stallion. That old Chiricahua has no clue as to Storm’s provenance, and I don’t need his vengeful mind getting any ideas. I peek around the edge of the rock. The Apache peers down his rifle, combing the ridgeline where Clara May fell. I have a shot, but it’d be tough with this pistol. But it might well be the only shot I get.

  I swing out from the boulder and take aim. His back foot extends behind him at an angle. I lay the pistol over my forearm and try to steady my breath. I squeeze the trigger.

  His foot snaps back behind the rock. I’ve hit him, so I charge the rock, my speed far below normal.

  He pops up with the rifle, ready for me, and fires. I drop and roll behind a low rock. Springing back up again, I fire the pistol, the shot skimming off the rock in front of him and funneling toward him. He falls back, hit again. I slink over to a large boulder, only ten yards separating us. As I move, I hear the familiar blow of the stallion and then it drifts into a low, long nicker—a sound a horse reserves only for those it loves.

  No, you blasted fool—the thought blaring in my head. I spy around the rock. Maybe the Apache didn’t catch it. The Chiricahua stands there, his mind turning. He looks to the stallion, then to me, then back at the horse.

  Then he aims the rifle at Storm.

  I rise up and peal out the loudest whistle I can muster. Storm’s ears twitch as he rears up, excited. I aim the pistol at the Apache, but if I miss I hit Storm and if I hit the elder and the bullet passes through, I hit the horse as well.

  “Don’t shoot him,” I say. “Don’t shoot him.”

  The Apache turns to me, pointing the gun at me now. I stand there, out in the open. Storm dances at the sight of me, but the Apache raises a flat palm, his tone stern and soft—a born horseman—and Storm doesn’t know what to do. He blows in frustration. The elder yells at me, pointing off to the side, then back at my gun.

  “All right,” I say, throwing the pistol. I throw it far and it thumps to the ground. “It’s not his fault.”

  The elder admonishes me, waving his free hand, the rifle on Storm. I pick out the word “son” but not much else from his lecture. Slowly I move toward him. The Chiricahua reaches back and touches the stallion’s neck, telling me something about the fire in the horse.

  “Yeah, he got a mess of fire in him,” I say.

  But the elder hasn’t stopped talking. He wants me to understand something. I nod my head, telling him I understand, both of us speaking over each other. Storm braces for whatever comes next. I raise my arms. It looks like surrender. Storm turns his wall-eye to me to get a better look. His ears flatten.

  “Ya! YA!” All I at once I slash my arms downward. Storm sees the command and bolts left and back, away from the Apache, who spins from the waist, aiming the rifle up at a rapidly disappearing target. He fires, Storm jukes left and keeps running.

  I pull out the skinning knife and charge at the man, oblivious to the pain. As I close the distance, he spins toward me and fires. It feels like a bull just kicked my femur. He cocks the rifle and I throw myself in the air.

  He catches me, the blade slashing into his hand. We fall back, I on top of him. The blade slices off two of his fingers and still he struggles for the knife. We lock eyes, a hundred stories passing unspoken, every sinew of muscle straining for an inkling of advantage. Nervous strength pounds through my body, but behind it, I feel the weakness coming. I am losing blood.

  Flat on his back now, the old man seems to age. His breath, like rancid meat, pours over me through his brown, gritted teeth. But his arms are starting to waver. The knife, suspended between us in a mass of bloody and stiffening arms, begins to move toward him. He makes one last thrust of his hips, trying to buck me, but I hold on. And then he stops fighting.

  He looks at me and says, “I go, Diné. I go.” He pulls his hands away from the knife and the force of my arms drives the point straight into his ribs. He lets out a breathy sigh, his eyes turning to glass. And then he is still. I collapse onto him, too tired to even gulp the air my lungs scream for.

  * * *

  I roll off him onto my side and then flatten out onto my back, staring up at a sky of perfect blue. As far as a last image to look at, I could do worse. Then I feel the ground start to vibrate, and I hear the stallion skipping over the ground. He blows when he gets close, and blows again, irritated when he sees I’m not standing up with a handful of apples. His giant head cuts into the blue sky and nearly blocks out the sun.

  “Amigo” is all I can muster. He brings his head down and sniffs me and gives me a lick to make sure I’m really there. Then he waltzes back a step, eager to be getting out of here, and stamps the ground in case I wasn’t listening.

  “I ain’t got it in me, pal. Can’t feel my left side, or nothing below the waist.” Storm squeals and rears back, and slams both front hooves down a few feet from me.

  “You didn’t think I was gonna let you go to Mexico, did you? I’d be following a trail of frustrated Apaches until I found you dead.”

  He kicks a little dirt on me and skips around to the other side so I can see him better.

  “Looks like we both need a bath. Sorry I won’t be able to give it to you, pal. But I can’t mount up. My hip and leg and shoulder are bust up. Losing blood too. You’re gonna have to go it alone.”

  Storm scratches at the ground and blows again.

  “You got a better idea?” I ask.

  Storm comes back around on my left. To my surprise, he bends down onto all four knees, his belly resting on the ground. He nudges his nose into my side. A laugh comes out of me that I can’t help.

  “Well, I didn’t think of that.” I try to move. With all my strength I roll over onto my side. The pain swallows up my legs and bites into my hip. A cry blurts from deep inside.

  “I got no lift, amigo. No power. Even on your belly, I can’t make the climb.” Talking to him exhausts me, but it feels good to have my friend with me at the end. I sink down flat to the ground again, on my front this time, and just lie there, listening to him breathe.

  * * *

  Hannah’s face comes to me.

  Oh God, not her again. Let me die, please. I either say it or think it. I can’t be sure which. I close my eyes and let the image wash over me. Storm nudges me all down the side. I barely feel a thing.

  “We tried, amigo. It ain’t meant to be.” I open my eyes and he rolls that wall-eye over to me and gives me that look.

  “Don’t look at me like that. I can’t get up there.”

  Storm blows one more time and then does the darndest thing I’ve ever seen. He flattens out on his side, all four legs extended outward.

  “Oh, pal, I ’ppreciate the effort. But I can’t do it. I got no feeling in my legs.”

  Storm
cranes his neck and chomps his teeth down on my ankle.

  “Ow, you broke the skin, you sonofabitch!” I bring myself up to one elbow just to make sure he heard me. His gaze holds me, unwavering.

  Climb on.

  I fall back. “I got a good mind to climb on and run you straight to the glue factory.” But then Hannah is standing on the other side of him. She looks back at me, like she did at the baseball game, and smiles. She touches her hand to her belly.

  I drop my head and sigh, resigned.

  This is really going to hurt.

  Forbidding the agony to stop me, I pull with arms, clawing at the dirt until I grab his front knee. Storm doesn’t flinch. I draw myself up his body, sliding over his legs until I get a hand on his shoulder. I scooch my hips around and, with every last drop of power, will my leg over his flank.

  The stallion, so as not to throw me, eases back onto his knees and then, feeling that I am centered, straightens his back end. I grab onto his neck with all I got. He extends his front legs, slow, and then he is standing upright.

  “How ’bout that, amigo?”

  I got you.

  “Well, I hope you smelled a barn or some such because I ain’t got much in me.”

  I GOT YOU.

  I see the ground below me start to move. The jarring motion of his trot nearly throws me. My arms burn like raging fire. But then his speed builds, first to a canter, the motion smoothing, like a boat on a lake. Until, finally, trusting that I will not let go, he hits his full stride.

  And that’s when we start to fly.

  Did you miss the first episode

  in the adventures of Harlan Two-Trees?

  Go back to where the legend began . . .

  It happens in a sudden flash of terror.

  A band of kill-crazy outlaws smash the bank

  in Caliche Bend, New Mexico. And by the fine

  white powder that covers everything—

  even the dead—everyone knows the Snowman

  has struck again: for this notorious bank robber

  uses bags of flour to stabilize the nitroglycerin

  used in his dynamite blasts.

  This time the Snowman has done more than

  rob a bank. He has made a blood enemy.

  Harlan Two-Trees loved the murdered sheriff

  like a father and sets off to bring the Snowman

  to justice. Harlan cannot guess how many times

  he will be betrayed, how a beautiful woman will

  cross his path, and how violence will rain down

  all around him. But Harlan knows this:

  somewhere along the line he himself

  must become a killer—to stand a chance

  when he finally looks evil in the eye . . .

  CHAPTER ONE

  The way the clerk tell it—and the clerk, a churchgoing man name of Frank Wallace who always calls me by my name, never that other word, has no reason to lie—the four men come into the Loan and Trust together at quarter past four, brims pulled low, mascadas covering the rest. Wallace is no fool, sees their Colts drawn for business, but before he can reach for the bell cord or the ten-gauge behind the counter, the voice of the fifth man cuts him cold.

  “Leave the scattergun be.” The fifth man steps in from the street and takes his time moving across the plank floor to the window where Wallace stands behind a few steel bars that seemed a lot sturdier five minutes ago. “Farley does not pay you enough to get killed, so do not be pulling on the bell either.” The man flashes a snarled grin of neglected teeth stained yellow from coffee and whiskey.

  Wallace wishes he had a slug of rye himself right now, because this fifth man is taking no care to conceal his face. That bothers Wallace, as if the man is daring him to remember his pocked jaw, or lake-water eyes, or hair so black you would swear he scalped it from a Chinaman. Or maybe he is saying without saying that remembering his face hardly matters because it is the last face you will ever see. That bothers Wallace even more.

  “What is your business, then?” Wallace asks, keeping his eyes straight ahead and his voice strong. The fifth man smacks his lips a bit and the four with him grow perceptibly agitated by the question.

  “Our business is relieving financial institutions of their fiduciary responsibility. That and blowing holes in them what try to stop us.”

  “Enough talk.” The blue bandana muffles the tallest man’s voice, but not the seriousness of its tone. He shoves the leather satchel through the window at Wallace, who takes it and clangs open the till. Wallace does not mind surrendering the hundred or so dollars in his drawer. The concern is that these men are dumber than rope and that he will pay the price for their dumbness with his life.

  The real prize, any fool would know, is not the pocket money in the till, but the stout wads of bills, pallets of silver ingots, and bundles of gold coin resting under the protection of seven inches of steel in the safe behind him. And when these goats realize Wallace has not the numbers in his head to open it—only Mr. Farley has those, and he will not be here until five minutes before closing time, when the time lock releases and allows the heavy knob to turn at all—they will surely kill him in frustration. But maybe these men do not know about the safe, even though it squats in the center of the room like a green, pregnant heifer. Wallace hides these thoughts as he loads up the satchel and passes it back through the bars.

  “Now open the door,” the barefaced leader says.

  “You have your money,” says Wallace.

  “We are not here for your farm boy’s allowance! It’s the vault we want. Now unlatch that side gate or, I swear it, I’ll send a lead slug straight through your eye.”

  Wallace looks out at four pistols and a sixteen-gauge aimed square at his head. Resigned, he slips off his stool and thinks, Tuesday is as good a day to die as any other. The tall one in the blue mascada—a fine silk one, Wallace notes, now that he is closer to it—hovers outside the office door. Wallace keys the latch and turns the knob a twitch. The man in blue does the rest, pushing through into the office and going straight for the safe. The other men come in behind him, the leader entering last. The four hands set to clearing away all the furniture around the vault, upending tables, scraping Mr. Farley’s desk to the corner, tossing chairs aside like kindling.

  “Time lock,” one of the men says.

  “I cannot open it. Even if I wanted to,” Wallace blurts out, his voice weaker now.

  The leader steps up to Wallace. “No one asked you to.” A lump of cold fear takes hold in the belly of Frank Wallace. The man is close enough for Wallace to smell the coffee on his breath, the boiled, cowboy kind, the drink of nomads. Beneath that is the dank, wet stench of leather, sweat, and what he believes is Mexican tobacco. But when the man grins again, letting out a half-breath of bourbon-tinged vapor, Wallace knows in that moment that these men have come from the East, riding hard. These are not broken gamblers, or rustlers in search of a stampede, or even desperate laborers from the mines, sick with boredom and hunger now that the copper has run dry. These men are professionals.

  * * *

  The barefaced man reaches into the burlap sack and comes out with a pound bag of wheat flour, sopped wet with liquid, like the whole lot of it had dropped in a creek without breaking open and got pulled out ten minutes later. Except this is no creek water oozing out of the paper. And that is the thing that bothers Wallace most of all, because the Snowman leaves no witnesses.

  “You know what this is?” the Snowman asks through his piss-colored teeth.

  “It appears to be a sack of flour,” Wallace says. That lump of fear in his belly squeezes the base of his spine, leaving his voice little more than a whisper.

  “And do you know the purpose of this sack of wheat flour?” Every soul in two territories knows the bandit’s legend. The Snowman—so named for the simple, ingenious modus operandi represented by what he now clutches in his weathered, buckskin glove—didn’t even have to ask.

  About here is where poor Widow
Daubman comes through the bank door that the bandits did not bother, or care, to bolt. Her eyes go big. She lets out a gasp that is more breath than sound and turns her little frame back toward the door. The nearest of the Snowman’s men—the stocky one with the gray tasseled topcoat—swoops through the office door and buries his six-inch bowie through her paper skin so hard that Wallace hears her ribs crack before she hits the ground. No discussion. No gunshots. No witnesses.

  The Snowman’s eyes alone stay on the face of Frank Wallace, still awaiting an answer. “I say, friend, tell me to what end do I carry about this here pound of wheat flour?”

  “They say it stabilizes the ni-ni-nitroglycerin.” I suspect this is where Frank Wallace loses control of his bladder, but he was not as precise with that particular as he was with the rest of his account.

  “I see my reputation precedes me.”

  The Snowman catches Wallace’s gaze flicker toward the far wall, where hangs the notice of the bounty. The Snowman crosses to the posted sign and yanks it down. “Precedes me, and how.” He holds the sketch up beside his own visage, inviting the comparison. “This artist has done my nose an injustice. Would you not agree, friend?”

  Wallace need not answer. Despite its vagueness, there is not a curve of the rendering, nor a word of the type, that Wallace has not committed to memory:

  WANTED

  for MURDER and BANK ROBBERY

  Garrison LaForge

  A.K.A. THE SNOWMAN

  $10,000 Dead or Alive

  $3,000 for all known accomplices

  In truth, the artist had done the Snowman a service, tempering the more pronounced Roman nose—presently huffing at Wallace—with a charcoal retelling of no discernable distinction, but no grotesqueness either. The sketch is blocky and indiscriminate, a product of winnowed hearsay and conjecture. The Snowman leaves no witnesses.

  The fear gurgles up Wallace’s spine into the root of his skull and digs in behind his eyeballs, drunk-spinning the room. He thinks of the sheriff, one of the few living men ever to see the Snowman’s face. And that was in a card game years ago. The sheriff never thought much of the likeness on the wanted notice, but he figured it was better than no likeness at all and ordered a dozen bills printed and posted around town as the governor requested.