Walt Longmire 07 - Hell Is Empty

by Craig Johnson

  Virgil whipped his face back to me and spoke in a hurried whisper, as if the medicine that held the wind-bear might not last long enough. “I was busy and not paying attention when he came on me.” He raised the war lance, and I watched it dance again; this time, the teeth of the coyote skull gnashed, and the elk teeth and deer hooves clacked. The horse tails swished, and the ermines slinked up and down the elongated shaft covered with felt trading cloth and sinew.

  The giant bear continued to hover over Virgil as he spoke. “I could not see him, but I could feel him there.”

  I fell forward but kept my face up where I could watch the spectacle. “Virgil, you’ve got to let me tell you something.”

  “I grasped the lance in two hands and then rolled it back, rotating it.” He swung the broad, obsidian spearhead toward the heavens in the opposite direction as a strange St. Elmo’s fire flickered on its edge, growing and cracking until it sparked like metal in a microwave oven. Virgil then grabbed it firmly and thrust it into the floating bear behind him. The grizzly collapsed onto the point of the spear, and all at once the wind began blowing again and the snow continued to fall.

  Plucking the headdress from the end of his war lance, Virgil swung the cloak around and enveloped himself, the bear’s head once again shrouding his own. He laid the lance on the snow between us.

  He stared at me, his face only inches from mine. “You must remember how I did this.”

  I nodded; it seemed so important to him. “I will . . . but Virgil, I’m not going to make it—and I need to tell you something.” His face had a patient look, but there was no inquisitiveness there. I lowered my head so that all I could see was the spear in the snow. “The man up there, he’s the one who took your grandson—the one who killed him.” The words spilled from my mouth like broken teeth. “He took Owen’s remains, and he’s got them up there with him.”

  I stopped speaking and took a few deep breaths in an attempt to regain my wind, but it didn’t seem to be working. I rolled my weight back onto the rock, slouching to the side enough to elevate my view. I’m not sure how long I leaned there like that before opening my eyes again. When I did, the lance was on the ground but Virgil was gone.

  And so was the rifle.

  17

  I listened to myself breathing and thought about whether or not I was dead—it felt like it.

  My breath was ragged, and no matter how fast I thought I was, I couldn’t catch it. When I tried to stand the first time, my kneecaps had sounded like heads of iceberg lettuce being twisted apart, and I’d fallen. This is how it ends with everyone. You fall—you don’t get back up. I wondered if Henry and Joe would find me, or if some unfortunate alpinist would stumble across me. If I was as off the main ascent routes as I thought I was, then it was possible that no one would find me for years. Like the man who disappeared into Lake Marion, I wouldn’t come home and people would say, “Hey, do you remember that sheriff of Absaroka County that up and disappeared?”

  Dumb ass. Yep, that’d be me.

  I crouched a little lower against the boulder and tried to concentrate, but my head was killing me again, if I wasn’t dead already. Thinking had become more and more difficult since Virgil had left.

  I’d never given up on anything in my life when I was alive. I hadn’t always won, I hadn’t always been right, but I’d never given up. Not till now. Now that I was dead.

  So, was that my purpose, to lead Virgil to this point? Maybe this was what it was like to be dead, going through the motions until you came to a grinding halt thinking about all the things that you still had to do. It certainly didn’t seem so different from being alive.

  Who would they send for me—the same individuals who had saved me before on this mountain and who had haunted Shade throughout his lifetime? Maybe it was like Virgil’s statements about the Inferno, that all horrors are horrors of the mind. We summon up the devils we need to punish us for the things that we’ve done. If that was the case, then why had they sent me for Virgil?

  Cady.

  I wanted to talk to her about Virgil’s prophecy. I thought about the cell phone and what the chances were that it still had battery power—Slim to None: The Walt Longmire Story.

  I moved my hand up the length of the lance and could feel the horsehair wrapping around my hands with the wind, almost as if it was gripping me back. The deer hooves clacked together like chimes and the elk teeth mimicked them. In that small darkness with my eyes closed, I thought specifically of the things that I had to do, and the order in which I had to do them. I had to move, dead or alive. I couldn’t allow Virgil to face Raynaud Shade alone. It was his responsibility, but it was my duty.

  You have haunting to do.

  I decided to put Virgil’s beliefs to the test. My back felt like it was going to snap, but I hoisted the ascent pack onto my shoulder and used the lance to stand, my knees once again doing the vegetable melody.

  I stood there in the blowing snow feeling like some mountain sentry, but it helped to stand, not to fall down, not to concede, not to die—not again. I readjusted the balaclava back over my face, pulled the collar of the jacket up, the Gore-Tex encrusted with iced condensation and frozen mucus from my runny nose.

  I growled in my throat, just to give my body a warning, and then turned to let my eyes follow Virgil’s footprints as they angled up. I could see only two steps before they vanished into the low-flying clouds and blowing snow.

  Two steps.

  “Two steps.”

  I smiled at my cracking voice sounding back the words of my mind like the echoes from the rock walls below. I knew they were my words because ghosts’ teeth didn’t chatter—or did they?

  Just two.

  “Just two.”

  Swallowing what moisture there was left in my mouth, I turned and looked up the boulder field toward the summit, or where the summit should’ve been—and started up.

  My right leg had become weaker than my left, probably because it was my dominant side and I had used it more strenuously. The strain on the tops of my thighs was excruciating, and my ankles moved like nineteenth-century hinges connected to my lead-encased feet. I kept my head down, dragging the snowshoes and concentrating on the rapidly disappearing prints, using the lance as a walking staff the same way the big Crow had.

  I remembered that there was still a water bottle in the ascent pack, so I rested the lance against my shoulder and fumbled to get the container out. I found the thing and took no comfort in the fact that it felt like an anvil encased in plastic. I used my teeth to unscrew the top and then stuck the mouth of the bottle into my own. There was no residual water so I put the cap on as best I could and tucked the frozen bottle inside my coat next to the paperback of Inferno. The second the bottle got inside, I realized I’d made a mistake and plunged a hand in to get it away from me. My core body temperature was fighting a battle of its own, and I’d just dropped a thermal bomb on it for its trouble. I yanked the bottle from the neck opening in my coat and watched as it arced through the air like a mortar and disappeared into the darkness.

  “Well done.”

  I took the spear back in my hands and looked at it. Why had he taken my rifle? It was the one of the two weapons that I would’ve chosen, but not the one I would’ve suspected for Virgil. Even with only one round left, maybe he wanted to make sure.

  “Vengeance is mine.”

  Maybe so, but maybe it’s only the living that can kill the living.

  “And the dead that can kill the dead.”

  At least I still had my .45, and for close work it would do just as well.

  “You just have to get to the top.”

  I stumbled and almost fell, catching myself with the lance and pressing it against my face, the coyote skull against my own. The decorations on the staff were acting as wind chimes, but I could hear something overlying the rhythm—a pattern that was staccato and sharp. A sound from my past.

  I took another couple of deep breaths and listened, but it didn’t repea
t itself.

  Vertigo slipped my perception just a little, and I almost felt as if I was falling again. I swallowed, but there was nothing there. I tried to remember what it was that I was doing, why I was leaning against a war lance. The top, I had to make it to the top of this mountain—something about Virgil and his grandson, Owen.

  “Raynaud Shade.”

  I kicked off again, and this time headed straight up the incline. The big Indian’s steps were rapidly disappearing, and if I didn’t get moving and fast, I’d never catch up with him. He had angled his ascent, possibly to lessen the climb, but more likely in order to reach the top in some other direction than the one Shade might anticipate. There wasn’t much room to maneuver with the cliffs on all sides, but Virgil was highly motivated. The only problem was that I’d seen Virgil die by Raynaud Shade’s hands once, if not twice, already.

  The rhythm repeated itself, more sharply this time, and it felt as if something flew by me, something small that sparked off of one of the larger boulders to my right, ricocheting deep into my memory. Gunfire. It was the Armalite set on automatic, and then the single, thundering shot of the Sharps.

  I pushed off with a great deal more urgency, actually finding the momentum easier to sustain. I switched the war lance to my left hand and dropped my right one down to my holster—and felt nothing.

  I panicked and yanked at my jacket with stony fingers, but the holster was most assuredly empty.

  My eyes blinked in the safely encased goggles as a fullblown gust traveled from the center of my body. I could not remember holstering the Colt on the Knife’s Edge. I’d been so startled by Virgil’s appearance, the .45 must have slid from my chest when I stood.

  There’s no feeling like the one you have when you realize you are desperately in need of a gun and, in one of the few times in your life, don’t have one. That short-circuited, spasmodic split second shot through me as I tried to think of what else I had in the way of firearms, but there was nothing. I couldn’t go back; I barely had the energy to make it the twenty yards to the top, let alone a round-trip close to two hundred.

  Never find it.

  “Never make it.”

  The spear.

  “For heaven’s sake.”

  Dropping my head like a buffalo bull, I charged up the hill as if I was in slow motion, and the only thing I was conscious of hearing was my breathing. My lungs felt like they were going to burst from my mouth as I continued to push in a direct line for the top. It took forever, and I was sure I was going to stumble into a firefight, but when I did stumble it was because I had reached a flat spot.

  I stopped and looked around, breathing so hard I was afraid I might swallow the balaclava. The wind was even stronger near the summit where there was nothing between the North Pole and me, the blowing snow enough to prove it; streaming diagonally, the flakes looked like meteors.

  “Hell, they might as well be meteors for as high as I am.”

  I was at the apex of the Bighorn range. There was a downgrade to my right and a large outcropping at the center, but the entire summit was no larger than the size of a basketball court, a basketball court with out-of-bounds lines that plunged in a sheer vertical drop of a mile.

  I stepped to the left and could feel the platform of granite rising another three feet against my leg. I didn’t move but listened for something, anything that would give me an indication of where Virgil or Shade might be. I could only see maybe three feet ahead of me. I stretched out an arm and watched as my hand disintegrated and disappeared.

  I drew it back, afraid that it might not still be there.

  There was movement to my left, and I yanked my head around to see nothing except a few Tibetan prayer flags that someone had placed there. There were capsules lodged in the cracks of the rock as well, some of them evident and others half covered with snow.

  They had to be here, unless they had already shot each other. I grazed my hand along the granite platform, leaned forward, and picked up the end of a tail.

  Carefully, I lowered my goggles and, lifting and brushing the snow aside, could see that it was the painted buffalo hide that Hector had mentioned had been hanging on the wall at Deer Haven. Why in the world would Shade have dragged that all the way up here?

  I sat and pulled my legs up after me, effectively joining the buffalo hide as if I were at a picnic. I sat there for a minute before noticing there was a lump at the center of the ceremonial robe that was now in the center of the Crow and Cheyenne world.

  I laid the spear on the snow and leveraged an elbow to get closer, passing my hand over the surface and clearing the portion that read DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE EVIDENCE.

  I pulled the black, rubberized duffel toward me, the yellow letters looming large like passing a billboard on the highway. I lay there for a second, then snagged the large zipper pull and drew it back a little. I could see bones, so I reached into my coat pocket, pulled the femur from the protective Gore-Tex, and poked it into the bag.

  Owen was whole again.

  I rested my face against the rubber and felt like I had accomplished something—that even if I was dead I had finished the job.

  “You just won’t die, will you?”

  At the sound of his voice, I rose on one elbow and rolled away with the duffel still in my hands. There were no more words from the darkness, and unless his one eye was better than my two, he couldn’t see me any better than I could see him. I tried to come up with something pithy but then decided that remaining silent might be a pretty good idea since the range of my weapon was only about six feet.

  I grazed back across the buffalo hide and grabbed the war lance, dragging it back to me.

  “I’m glad to see you.”

  The direction of the voice had changed, and he was now to my right.

  “We’re the only ones that they speak to, you and I.”

  To the left.

  I raised myself up, aiming the head of the spear into the gloom.

  “I can’t believe you’re still alive after all the times I’ve killed you.”

  Continuing left.

  “You must be dead.”

  Right.

  “Hell, I don’t even have any bullets left. No bullets. Do you believe that?”

  No.

  “You probably have bullets left in that rifle of yours, even if I shot you a few minutes ago, huh?”

  Maybe.

  “No blood though. That concerns me; no blood.”

  It was quiet for a moment, and I took the opportunity to slip the goggles back up over my eyes. The way he had positioned himself, I was looking directly into the storm and the barrage of darting flakes.

  “Are you a ghost now, Sheriff?”

  I struggled onto my knees with the duffel between my legs.

  “I sometimes think that I’m a ghost; that I wasn’t really meant for this world. It’s been that way ever since I was young and especially since I killed the boy. I think I knew what I was at that point, and what it was that I would become. There is no shame in it, becoming what your nature says you must be.”

  The spear in my hands felt like a telephone pole as I swung it slowly to where the voice continued speaking.

  “Why are you here? I would have thought that you would’ve given up, but I suppose these same demons chase you. What is it you have done, Sheriff?”

  I didn’t move and still could see nothing except the shifting shadows of wave after wave of the snow in the air. It seemed as if the wind was lessening again and the flakes were now taking advantage of the situation to move in the air in patterns of their own, making it even more impossible to see.

  “I think they answer to a terrible need—what is your terrible need?”

  This time his voice came from my left and sounded closer. I planted my knees so that I could move quickly to the side.

  “I have not finished my work. I must bury this boy here among the forever snow and ice, leaving his spirit behind so that mine may continue onward. It is like that; sometimes you
must cut a part of yourself away so that you may grow. I was not sure if I needed blood sacrifice for this medicine, but I brought the woman along for that purpose. When I saw that you were determined to follow me, I changed my plan. I could see that the demons wanted you here, or why else would they keep dragging you back from the grave?”

  “Maybe I’ve just got friends in high places.” As I said the words, I pivoted to the right and dragged the duffel with me; the .223 fired high but still sliced through the sleeve of my jacket.

  One shot, and then I heard the telltale click of the empty magazine; unless he had others for this particular weapon, he was out. He could still have one of the semiautomatics from the Feds, but to be honest, I was beyond caring.

  Maybe I was beyond everything.

  I raised myself up on my feet as silently as I could, propped my legs against each other, and prepared for whatever was coming next. Teetering there like a tree ready to fall, I held out my lone branch in an attempt to keep the demon at bay.

  I stood like that, breathing the air through my collar and listening for anything. He’d gotten quiet, having played his main gambit, and now it was just going to be a battle of his nerve against mine.

  My breathing was taking a toll on my equilibrium, and I found myself billowing back and forth with each breath, almost in a hypnotic state.

  I was looking north, ever north at the house. It was as if I were the house, shuddering in the arctic wind. I felt the broken dishes in the sink and the emptiness of the exploded canning jars in the cellar. There were shoes by the bed, large, steel-toed workboots with the toes curled where they have sat for almost a year. There was a bottle there, empty and broken at the neck. It was lying on the floor, the glass shrouded by dust.

  His last thoughts are of him, the boy; of what will become of his son.