by Hunter Shea
When Matthias rested his hand on my shoulder, I was too overcome with disbelief to twist it until his wrist broke. “I understand your anger, Mr. Blackburn, Nat. I know you’re uncertain as to our intentions and how we came about this place. But where you see only evil and suspicion, I see the work of the Lord. There isn’t anyone else in this whole country who could help you, and yet here we are. Brought here through the miraculous gifts bestowed upon Angus in your time of need. This is what we do. Don’t turn away from us, and most of all, God.”
I felt my face flush red and my hands began to twitch. They wanted to smash Matthias in his pious mouth. Teta whistled and narrowed his gaze at me. I rested my hand on the butt of my pistol and stepped away from Matthias’s touch.
“You’re going to help us,” I said in as measured a tone as I could muster. “But if you talk to me about God or quote Scripture one more time, I won’t be responsible for my actions. Are we clear?”
Matthias’s swallowed hard, but he gave a half smile and said, “Crystal.”
“You think your car can fit all of us?”
“I don’t see that being a problem.”
“Good. You fill up the canteens while we get the lamps and ammo.”
“What about food?”
“If we have time for a sit-down meal, we’re not doing things right.”
“Angus, get the tools.” The giant lumbered over to the car. “We’ll need about an hour before we can leave.”
“We don’t have an hour!”
“Whatever has Selma will wait for as long as it takes for us to arrive. It doesn’t want her per se. She’s only a means to an end. You asked me if I thought we could fit the evil of Hecla in our spirit box and the answer is no. We need an hour to construct a bigger one using the scraps of the town. There’s a special kind of power in that.”
I didn’t have the foggiest what he was talking about. All I heard was one hour. I was about to tell him to get in the car now when something made a thunderous crash behind us.
My head whipped around so fast my neck crackled with pain.
The house we’d been staying in, weakened now that one wall had been demolished, had finally fallen in on itself. A slow-moving cloud of dust carried itself to the soft but always present winds.
Angus came up beside us with a box full of various rust-flecked tools. Matthias said, “It appears we have fresh lumber for our purposes.”
I looked around. “Where’s Teta?”
The three of us turned 360 degrees on our heels. He was nowhere in sight. “I think he may have gone in to retrieve your lamps,” Matthias said softly. “Teta!”
I ran to the ruin of the house, knowing that if he’d been inside he was never coming out alive.
* * *
It was hard to make out anything through the dust and dirt that had been stirred up. My eyes stung from grit as I shouted for Teta, pulling on planks of wood, peering into the darkness below. Nails and shards of wood dug into my skin. My flesh was riddled with bloody pinpricks. Inch-long splinters stuck halfway into my hands and forearms.
“Teta, can you hear me? Make a noise so I can find you!”
Wood clattered behind me. It was Matthias and Angus, joining in the search. Angus hefted bundles of wood that would have taken three men to lift, casting them aside like they were toothpicks.
First Selma, now Teta. Hecla was picking us off one by one.
I stopped breathing when I saw his boot wedged between a heavy beam and a heap of fractured wood. Dropping to my knees, and ignoring the pain of a sliver that wedged itself deep below my kneecap, I tore at the wood, desperate to reach his boot. The bottom was facing up, which meant he was buried deep. It was the worst case scenario and my stomach lurched again, but I kept it in check.
“Angus, I need your help!”
His wiry sideburns were peppered with dust and bits of wood. He staggered on the uneven debris. I pointed at Teta’s boot. “We have to dig down.”
Angus nodded and thrust his hands into the remains of the house. Wood snapped and cracked as he pulled up an incredible amount of wreckage. With a great grunt, he threw it to the side. In one swoop, he’d managed to expose most of the area around Teta’s boot.
It was empty.
I reached down and pried it out from under the beam.
Matthias had come up behind me and was staring at the boot. “Where’s the rest of him?”
I got down on my belly and burrowed into the hole that Angus had made like a foxhound going in for its prey. Enough light filtered in through the gaps in the wood so I could see. And what I saw was nothing.
I was about to ask Angus to dig some more when I heard a groan. We all froze. “Did you hear that?” Matthias said.
I shushed him.
“Uunnngh.”
“Over there!” I said, scrabbling to the edge of the pile. The south face of the house had fallen pretty much intact. The sound was coming from underneath it.
I jumped off the wood pile and barked, “Angus, Matthias, get on either side of this! We have to lift it up. Teta, can you hear me?”
The groaning had stopped. Bad sign.
It turned out, I didn’t need Matthias. Angus squatted, gripped the end of the wall and rose to his knees. I knelt down and saw the top of Teta’s head.
“Can you hold it like that?”
“Yes,” Angus said.
“Matthias, help me drag him out.”
We each grabbed a shoulder and tugged. For once, our luck held out and his bottom half wasn’t snagged on anything. As soon as we got him free, Angus dropped the side of the house with a tremendous boom. A blast of dust swept over us.
Teta wasn’t moving. I had my knees on either side of his head and pulled his eyelids back. All I could see was the whites of his eyes. I tapped his cheeks, trying to wake him up, if he was, in fact, still alive.
“You know how to check a pulse?” I asked Matthias.
He pulled up Teta’s sleeve and placed his fingers on his wrist. I studied Teta’s chest, looking for any sign of movement.
“Come on, partner. You’re not allowed to check out on me yet. We’ve still got work to do.”
Matthias solemnly looked at me. He still had Teta’s wrist in his hand. He shook his head slowly.
“No!”
I slapped Teta hard across the face. His head moved to the side from the force, but his eyes didn’t so much as flutter. His chest was still as stone.
“Dammit, Teta, get up!”
My hands and feet were going numb as I shifted over him and shook his entire body. He couldn’t die. Not like this. The man had stared down the barrel of too many guns to count, had gotten in more scraps than he could barely get himself out of. Every man had to die, but the way you lived your life should determine how you died.
Matthias whispered, “Nat, he’s gone.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
I jumped to my feet. My hand was on my Colt before I even knew what I was doing. “Shut your mouth.”
To his credit, Matthias didn’t back down. He rose to meet me eye to eye and said, “It’s okay to be angry. I could see the two of you were very close.”
“I said to shut your mouth.”
“He’s in the hands of our Lord now.”
I twirled my pistol so the barrel was in my palm. I pulled it back to pistol-whip him across the side of his head when my wrist was locked into a vise. I turned to see Angus had caught my arm in midarc.
He squeezed and no matter how much I tried to push the pain away, I could no longer hold on to my gun. That was twice now that he’d been able to disarm me like a weak child. He kicked my gun aside, then shoved me towards Matthias. The reverend caught me and kept me on my feet.
Angus eyed Teta’s cooling body with confusion. He cocked his head, giving particular attention to his chest.
“Get away from him,” I said, rushing the big man. He swatted me with the back of his hand and this time I did go down.
“He’s hurt inside,” he said, kneeling down.
He made a fist and I shouted for him to stop. Angus raised it above his head and brought it down into the center of Teta’s chest like a blacksmith hammering an anvil.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Angus turned to me and pulled his lips taut against his teeth. “Starting the insides again.”
He lifted his hand. I knew one more blow would shatter Teta’s corpse. I’d be damned if I let him defile his body.
Then Teta coughed.
His body shook with spasms and he brought his hand to his mouth, then his chest. He winced, groaning with pain.
His voice was raw and parched. “What kicked me?”
Matthias clapped his hands and raised his face to the sky. “Praise Jesus! Miracles happen in your name every day.”
More like, Praise Angus. I didn’t know how he did it, but I was grateful that he did.
I helped Teta into a sitting position. He rubbed his head with one hand and chest with the other. He looked to me with glazed eyes and asked, “Why do I hurt all over?”
I pointed with my chin toward the remains of the house. “First, because that fell on you, and, second, because Angus punched you in the chest to get you breathing again.”
“Breathing again?”
The next words were hard to say. “You were dead.”
“That’s not possible. You must have thought I was dead. I’d think the same thing if I saw you crushed under a house.”
I shook my head. “No, we checked you out. You weren’t breathing. Your heart wasn’t beating. Angus brought you back.”
His job done, Angus gathered wood for his bigger spirit chest. Matthias helped by gathering nails.
“You all right to get up?” I asked.
He took a moment to consider it, then said, “With a little help.”
I draped his arm over my shoulder and lifted him to his feet. “Just lean into me until you feel steadier.”
We walked slowly to where we’d pulled him out. “Well look at that, I’m not the only miracle around here.”
The two lanterns were still very much intact. The shattered window frame boxed them in, but they hadn’t gotten so much as a scratch.
Teta said, “I felt the house starting to go and tried to get out the window with the lanterns. I guess it’s better it came down on me because I don’t think Angus would be able to put them back together.”
I laughed despite myself and our dire situation. The odds were sorely against us to start with. With Teta hurt, they got much, much worse.
Angus moved fast. He was already hammering away, with Matthias feeding him nails and holding slats of wood in place.
Teta reached behind himself and cursed when he got hold of his sombrero and pulled it over his head. It had been smashed flat and was torn in several places. He punched his fist to pop it out and tried his best to get it back in shape. “It’s still lucky,” he said, securing it to his head.
As we moved along to where the front of the house had been, we stopped and stared in quiet horror. Teta tensed and stepped out of my grasp. “This isn’t good,” he said, almost reverently.
“It most certainly is not.”
I dug my knuckles into my eyes in a useless attempt to get them to see something that just wasn’t there.
The creatures that we had shot were gone. In their place was a series of smoldering piles of ash. I counted seven in all.
“At least they’re not disgusting like the dead dog,” Teta said. “So much for getting a chance to look at one up close.”
“Maybe that’s for the best, huh, jefe?”
I turned around and called out for Matthias. He jogged over, his vest flapping open and closed, pulling up short just before he stepped into one of the wild-man ash mounds.
“Notice anything missing?” I said.
I thought the shock would crack his cocksure veneer, but I was wrong. He extracted a pencil from his pocket and dipped an end into the cinders. He sniffed it but didn’t recoil. His sniffer must have up and left him a long time ago. Reaching into another pocket, he pulled out a glass vial and proceeded to gather as much of the stuff as he could into it. When it was three-quarters full, he topped it with a small cork.
“Very, very interesting,” he said. “Definitely worth further study at a later time.”
“At least you’re optimistic that there will be a later,” I said.
He almost seemed happy about it. What kind of man were we dealing with?
Matthias carefully tucked the vial in his shirt pocket. “I can talk more about that subject when we’re in the car. If you’ll excuse me, I have to help Angus. We should be on the road shortly.”
The road. Selma.
I scanned the hills and felt a knife twist in my guts, thinking she was in there, somewhere, held prisoner by something only a madman like Matthias could understand. I was suddenly very anxious to get moving. I thought of hopping in the car and taking off by myself, but something held me back.
“That man is loco,” Teta said. He was still rubbing his chest but he looked firmer on his feet.
“Before long, we all will be.”
We watched Matthias and Angus work on the chest and I knew with certainty that none of us were long for this world. With that came a sense of clarity and an end to any trepidation I may have felt. If Matthias was right and whatever had taken Selma was using her as bait so it could have us, I was happy to oblige.
If we were the main course, I’d make sure we didn’t go down easy.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Angus tied the new chest, which was big enough to fit a couple of good-sized men, to the back of the rumble seat. Teta and I climbed in back so we could keep an eye on the preacher and the creature, as Teta had nicknamed them while we watched them working on the chest.
Matthias got behind the wheel and turned to us. “She won’t go as fast as she normally can, because of all the weight, not to mention the terrible terrain, but we’ll get to the hills faster than your horses would have. We placed the smaller spirit box in the rubble of one of the homes for safekeeping.”
I sighed and leaned forward. “Just go.”
Matthias pursed his lips, his head bobbing up and down. “Right. You might want to hold on.”
He started the car and hit the gas. The car lurched forward and Teta and I almost flipped over the rumble seat.
We headed down the deserted main street and hooked a left past the mercantile, through an alley that spilled out onto the flat plain leading to the Deep Rock Hills. I couldn’t help thinking how the gray, jagged rocks in the distance resembled giant tombstones.
“I guess it doesn’t matter where you’re buried.”
“What?” Teta said.
“Nothing.”
The car bounced along at a pretty good clip. The engine made a hell of a racket. A couple of times we hit depressions and I thought the wheels would come off. Teta and I had to grip the sides of the rumble seat to keep our asses from falling out.
Give me a horse, even one with a bum leg and a nasty disposition, any day. Our faces were pelted with small stones and our eyes filled with dirt. We held on tight to our hats. I had no idea what we’d do when we made it to the mines, but I had to get there quick. The thought of Selma trapped and afraid made my blood boil.
Matthias tried talking to us but his voice was drowned out by the steady thrumming of the wind. At one point, the sun glared so hard off Angus’s bald head it blinded me. I was tempted to square my Stetson on his head but thought better of it.
We’d been driving for a good while when Teta tapped me on the arm and leaned close to my ear.
“Maybe I’m still daze
d, but does it look to you like we’re no closer to the hills?”
The vision of those damned hills jounced as the car rocked along. It was hard to tell. “Maybe we’re taking it from another angle,” I said. “You know how sometimes a point in the distance looks like it’s out of range until you’re right on it.”
Teta eyed the hills warily. “I don’t know, jefe. I’d swear on my mother’s grave that they look even farther away than when we started.”
I was about to say that was impossible, then recalled all we’d seen and experienced.
I gave it a few more minutes, locking my eyes on a point at the top of the highest crag in the hills.
Either my eyes were going on me, or Teta was right. The hills were receding. I leaned up and tapped Matthias on the shoulder.
“Slow down a second,” I shouted.
The brakes screeched and he took us to a stop. His goggles were flecked with grit. “The hills are running away from us,” I said.
Relief swept over his face. “I thought it was just me. I was trying so hard to keep the car in one piece and headed on a straight line that I thought my perspective was off.” He stood up in the car and looked behind us. “I can’t even see the town, so we have put some distance between us and it.”
I said, “We got to the hills and back on horseback days ago at a decent trot and would have been a lot closer than we are now.”
Matthias settled back into his seat and the car jerked with a groan. “I say we try for a little bit longer and see where it gets us.”
“Look,” Teta said, pointing to our left.
A three-foot, black-and-yellow bull snake wound its way past the rear tire. Remarkably, it was the first snake we’d seen since we’d gotten to Hecla. It was nice not worrying about them crawling on you while you slept, but unsettling in their absence just the same.
Teta threw his knife and pinned the snake to the ground just behind its head. Its tail lashed back and forth, the body twitching with pain. Teta jumped off the rumble seat, put his boot on the snake’s back and extracted the knife, wiping the blood off on the side of his pants.
