After the Fall

by Darrel Sparkman

  At least that is how it had been, until two weeks ago. Two weeks ago he had been in Pine Bluff. Two weeks ago he had killed another man. As he scanned the forest around him, Trent's mind pushed and pulled at the memory that just would not go away.

  That particular day two weeks ago had started innocently enough. Trent had ridden into a little jerkwater town, having about four buildings with three of them falling down, two jumps ahead of a bunch of raiders.

  He did not know if they were true raider, or just a bunch of ‘good ol’ boys’ out to hooraw the stranger out of their neck of the woods. Both scenarios were entirely possible. About twenty of them had come bursting out of a draw next to the road where Trent was riding, half of them on foot, the rest on horses, screaming and yelling.

  Trent was already hot and tired, and more than just a little cranky, so instead of running he had pulled his old Chinese SKS Paratrooper out and laid ten rounds into the asphalt in front of them. The 7.62mm bullets had shattered on the pavement, and the ricochets took out the knees of some of the horses. The resulting bedlam and confusion had allowed Trent to get ahead of them, and into town.

  Coming into the town, it reminded him of a picture postcard he had seen once. The caption was, “How do you know you're in the Ozarks? If someone's front porch falls in ... it kills more than twenty dogs.” This town seemed to have more dogs than people. It was always good to know where you were.

  Pulling up in front of what he guessed would pass for a saloon, Trent entered and pushed his way up to the bar.

  "Got anything cool?” he asked.

  Cool seemed to be a matter of interpretation. Cool was the stare he got from the man behind the planks of wood they were using for a counter.

  "All right,” Trent said, conceding the point, “do you have anything to drink?"

  Anything turned out to be a glass of bust-head moonshine, which threatened to rip his hair right off his head. He held the glass gingerly up to the dust-filtered sunlight coming in through the door, then gently set it down on the counter, as if he were afraid it would explode.

  "Man,” he said, “that corn is a little green!"

  The natural reserve of the hill people was broken a little. The barman grinned and said plaintively, “Been aged to perfection. Almost a week."

  Trent, his eyes still watering from the drink, heard a chair scrape back on the floor. He turned to see a man standing in the corner of the room, legs spread, his right hand near his weapon. Around the table he had backed away from, three more men were holding cards and looking like they wished they had business somewhere else.

  "C'mon, Lenny, leave the man alone,” one of the men said. “I got a good hand goin’ here."

  Lenny's face was in shadow, but Trent could plainly see his sidearm. It was a semi-automatic, maybe a Browning or Colt, slung low in a cloth holster like the old SWAT teams used to wear. Fast draw artist? Gunman? Nut case? You never knew.

  All this flashed through Trent's mind in the few seconds it took the wannabe bad man to think of something appropriate to say.

  "You.” Lenny's voice sounded loud in the small room. “In the buckskins. You one of them Army scouts we been hearing about?"

  Trent looked at him for a moment, then said neutrally, “I am a courier for the Army. I'm also tired, thirsty, and not looking for trouble.” It was in Trent's mind to turn back to the bar and ignore the trouble hunter, but it wasn't to be.

  The man's hand rested on the butt of his gun. When he moved to draw his weapon, Trent shot him in the chest. The mushrooming bullet left a conical pattern of blood on the wall and the half-pulled gun fell to the floor, followed closely by the man.

  Shocked silence followed the deafening blast of Trent's revolver. Apparently no one really liked Lenny, but he was one of their own and he was down on the floor. Sure, he was a trouble hunter and fast with a gun. He had even killed several raiders who had come to town hunting trouble.

  The gaze of the men in the bar finally moved away from the body on the floor. All eyes were riveted on Trent. One second he was standing there, the next he was holding a smoking revolver. No one saw him draw; it was that fast. Even the bartender missed it.

  Trent walked up to the man he had shot. There was not any doubt he would die. Trent knew where he had aimed.

  He looked down and was shocked at the age of the man. Man? He was scarcely more than a boy, and he was bubbling his life out of a small hole just under his left nipple. An older man kneeling by the boy looked accusingly at Trent.

  In a voice low and ponderous the man said, “You didn't have to kill him."

  "He started to draw his gun.” Even to Trent his explanation sounded lame and hollow. “He would have killed me if I hadn't stopped him."

  "He was just a kid,” the man said, “and you are a soldier. You could have wounded him, if you had wanted to."

  And there it was. As he stood there, watching the boy vainly rolling his stomach, drowning in his own blood as he tried to fill his lungs with air, Trent's shoulders slumped. Could he have simply wounded the boy? The question kept bouncing around in his head. The answer was ... no. It had never occurred to him.

  The men in the saloon turned their backs on Trent and left him standing alone in the middle of the floor. Finally, he walked out to his horse, mounted up, and started out of town. As he left, he heard a woman screaming.

  Two weeks later, and he could still hear her screaming.

  Pushing his brown Bushman's hat back on his head, Trent enjoyed the brief coolness as the sweat, trapped by his hatband, gave up its moisture to the breeze. A man of infinite patience, he slowly scanned the country, looking for signs of passage by other men. For in this time and place, the most dangerous animal in the forest was man.

  As Trent rested his horse in the shade, his mind worked on two levels. His subconscious mind was busy with the minute-by-minute evaluation of possible danger. Having an acute sixth sense, he was barely aware on a surface level of all this. It was more than simply being raised in the forest, he was a part of the forest, its every sound and breath, and he was of the forest as much as any animal that lived there. It was his home.

  Movement across the valley caught his attention. His eyes narrowed as he sat motionless in the saddle, his gaze focusing on a small area of the forest. Without taking his attention from the place where he had seen the movement, he reached back and took a small pair of binoculars from his pouch. They were a two-toned green in mottled design, and rubberized to keep the weather out. At least, that is what the instructions said. Trent wanted them because the rubber coating would keep the glasses from making noise.

  All his equipment was like that. A clink, or rattle at the wrong time could spell disaster on the trail.

  Moving the small wheel between the barrels of the glass, he focused again on the spot of movement. Several buzzards wheeled in formation over something, coming lower with each circle. Something had scared them up and now they were settling down again.

  Returning the glasses to their pouch, Trent settled his hat and clucked at the horse to get him moving. The roan gelding had been with Trent for several seasons and seemed to know his every mood and whim. Tough and mean, the horse was a lot of trouble in the mornings, liking to buck and twist, trying to unseat his rider. The horse was a fighter and stayer though, which meant more to Trent than a few minor altercations.

  Trent knew he had to see what had attracted the buzzard's attention. There were too many birds for it to be a small animal. It could be something large, like a dead cow or horse; maybe a deer, or it could be like the army patrol he had found a few weeks before, shot to rag dolls and scattered along the trail like so much trash along the road.

  Trent could not see the buzzards now, but did not need to. He could feel the oppression coming, like the low clouds of a summer storm. He did not know what he would find, but his gut feeling was that it would be bad. Really bad.

  Chapter 2

  TRENT STOPPED IN the dappled shade of a huge sycamore tree
to let his horse rest a moment. The mountainous terrain of southern Missouri did not lend itself to fast paced movement, especially if you wandered off the main roads and trails, and he hardly ever used the main trails.

  He had just traversed the valley the hard way, picking his way in a zigzag pattern down the slope of one mountain and up the side of the next until he had finally come to the area where he had seen the buzzards.

  The air was hot and sticky, with hardly a breeze fanning the trees. A few horse flies had found them a couple of miles back, following the sweaty horse like a bear to a honey tree. Rippling its skin and swatting its tail, the gelding was skittish and irritable. The horse wanted nothing more than a good roll in the dust, but Trent held him in with a firm hand on the reins, patting his shoulders and making small sounds to comfort him.

  Once the gelding was finally under control, Trent returned his steady gaze to the open glade in the forest ahead. He started to urge the horse forward, but stopped abruptly.

  If asked, he could not explain it, but somewhere on a subconscious level, alarm bells were ringing like a church belfry gone mad. There was something ahead. It was like a tangible force, an unknown presence. He could feel it, nearly taste it, and because of it, every pore of his body was screaming caution. He was not about to move. Not yet. Not until he knew.

  As long as they did not move, he and his horse would be nearly invisible to anyone watching the area. That is, if his horse had not already given them away by prancing around.

  A flurry of wings beating the ground, and a raucous squawking from the turkey buzzards, divided his attention away from the surrounding forest. At their sudden flight, his hand swept toward the revolver at his hip and as quickly come to rest on his thigh. The buzzards were skittish too. Restless. And, even though they had to be the ugliest birds in creation, he still trusted their senses over his own.

  Still and silent, the man and horse seemed to be made of stone. Trent's eyes relentlessly searched the forest, all his senses keyed to the slightest thing out of the ordinary; a sound or a shadow in the wrong place, anything to justify the feeling he had.

  The sense of something being wrong remained with him, covering him like a shroud from a casket. Making a small sound of exasperation, Trent scanned the clearing one more time. Nothing. Just another bald spot in the forest. Time to move.

  He stood at the edge of a small clearing, brush and small trees nearly obscuring his horse. He quietly dismounted, taking the Black SKS from its scabbard on his way down, not liking even the small noise it made leaving the scabbard. The thirty-round clip was full, but the chamber was empty. He did not want to pull back the charging handle to load it. Not yet. Noise would carry too far in the forest, especially a sharp, metallic sound.

  Trent let his breath out slowly. It was quiet, too quiet. The silence of the forest was so loud it made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. No birds sang, no insects buzzed. Even the breeze seemed to hesitate, like it was waiting for permission to move, or waiting to see what would happen. The heat was oppressive, even in the shady confines of the forest.

  He had been standing in one place over ten minutes. In a country filled with raiders who preyed on settlers and army patrols alike, it did not pay to be in a hurry. Army dispatches could wait, and he had not lost anything on the other side of the clearing.

  For just a moment, he felt a presence ahead of him, something real and tangible ... then it was gone, leaving him with an unfathomable feeling of relief. Not once did he doubt what he had felt. A mystical concept to most people, it was something you had to feel to understand. The sixth sense of any good woodsman was a phenomenon he could not begin to explain.

  Finally, the blanket of silence lifted like fog leaving the ground and the small creatures of the forest took up their daily business. A thrush called inquiringly for its mate, a tree frog began a perfect insect imitation, and a blue jay looked disgustedly down at a beetle it had just dropped to the ground. The forest finally gave up a small breeze, whispering through the pines with a lonely sigh and cooling his sweaty brow.

  The clearing was about a hundred feet across, surrounded by tall trees that kept half of the open space always in shadow. Outcroppings of rocks dotted the glade and the native grass was cropped short in places, evidence of the thousands of deer living in the area.

  The girl's body lay near the center of the clearing, the afternoon sun sending its creeping shadows slowly around the edges, leaving her in the light. A stray thought came to him. Trent stopped a few feet from her. He was usually indifferent at the face of death, having seen so much of it. Today, his feelings started at nausea, then gave way to dull, throbbing anger. He stood for a moment, swallowing the bile rising with his anger. He filed the anger away for a more useful time. Turning his gaze away from the body, he took in the surrounding area. He had seen hundreds of dead bodies, but never anything like this. No one could be ready for this.

  Even through the assault of his senses, Trent could not shake the feeling someone was watching him. With the completion of that thought, he deliberately pulled back the charging handle on the SKS, letting it go with a loud clacking sound as the first bullet was chambered. Noise be damned. If someone was watching, let it be a warning.

  Trent turned from scrutinizing the forest and forced himself to contemplate the body. He had been a woodsman since childhood, and he could read the message on the forest floor as easily as someone else could read a book. It was just a matter of understanding what you saw.

  There was not much to see. No tracks, or anything to give a clue about who had done this. Nearby was a branch, presumably used to rough up the grass, getting rid of tracks and indentations. The leaves on the branch were wilted and wrinkled, but they still had some color. Today then. Early.

  When he had looked at everything he could see from his position, he reluctantly walked closer to the body. Hours, no more. The buzzards circling had not worked on her yet. Small scavengers had not found her to do their damage.

  Trent took in the smooth features of the girl's face, the luxurious canopy of hair, blue eyes fixed on something only the dead can see. She had been beautiful, but death had robbed her of that ... especially this kind of death. Now, she was just one more naked piece of garbage left on mankind's doorstep with stark horror stamped on her face.

  He tried to force himself to be objective. Anger that he had suppressed earlier was flowing again. A man who would do this to anyone, but especially a girl ... I want him.

  The girl lay spread-eagled on the grass. Judging from the cuts and rope burns on her wrists and ankles, she had been restrained, her arms and legs tied to short stakes driven in the ground. The holes seemed to be about the size for tent stakes, like you could find in old abandoned hardware stores, or make yourself. Her clothing had been cut from her after she was staked down, and remained under her, catching the pooling blood that was now black and covered with ants. She was alive when he staked her down.

  The cutting appeared to be done with a finely honed, thin bladed knife. That was not all the work done with the knife. The sharply defined wounds on her body were distinct, her face covered in blood, brown hair matted with leaves and dirt.

  Still feeling the danger of the forest, Trent looked away a moment, hoping to calm his anger a bit. He forced himself to examine her again, trying to use the same skills he would use to trail an animal. The girl's breasts had been sliced open and her nipples were missing. The cut was too sharply defined to have been made by an animal. Why take her nipples. Her legs were scratched and bloody, with much of her pubic hair gone. Scalped? Souvenirs?

  He rose and took a huge breath. Starting with the body as the center of his search, he walked around the clearing in ever widening circles. As he walked, he swore in a low monotone, dripping with anger and loathing. He had seen dead people before, had killed more than he liked to think about in the name of survival. Neither the smell nor the look of death was new to him. He looked back at the girl. Nothing like this. Never anythi
ng like this!

  "Damn!” His soft curse was a one-word epitaph of emotion and feeling. No one deserved to die like that. He could see where the pieces of rope tying her to the stakes had cut into her arms. The girl had possessed spirit. She had fought ... fought hard! Looking at her, Trent was obsessed with the ‘why’ of the killing. Why this way? Why so brutal? Revenge? Maybe. Rape? It happened. But mutilate the girl afterwards? No. Kill her? No. Even a raider would not do that. He would want to save her for later.

  So, this was not raiders out on a killing spree. Although the wounds would have been terribly painful, they did not coincide with the kinds of torture Trent had read about. He searched his memory, thinking of all the men, or women for that matter, that he knew. He searched for anything to help him understand. Finally, he admitted to himself that he did not have a clue.

  Raiders killed in anger. They killed to protect hunting rights, often laying claim to a certain section of country. Some of the wilder ones he knew would kill just for the sheer joy of battle, but that same battle would involve another man and be in a stand-up fight, like the men he'd fought with earlier. Who would do this?

  This killing was different, and that difference chilled him. It was not a killing over clean water, or a place to sleep, or something to eat. Someone had done this for the sheer joy of killing. From this perspective, an inkling of understanding dawned on him and he looked at the body again. All the wounds were precisely made. If there was anger here, it did not show in the way the girl died. At least, nothing showed on the surface. There was no mad slashing or stabbing wounds. One thing he suspected. Whoever had done this ... had liked it.