A Fistful of Horror - Tales Of Terror From The Old West (21 page)

Where else are they going to go? John asked himself as he turned his head away from the stench.

The dangers below were preferable to the ones out in the open country.

John had to press through the brush as the line became wider and more frantic near the base.

Armed thugs stood in a scattered wall of flesh as dusty as the road on both sides of a wooden, town sign. It stood on tall, smooth poles with protruding knots going all the way up to the message, Scratch’s Backside. John knew the ridge behind him was called Noah’s Scratch after some interpretation of the effects of the Great Flood, but this was an unfortunate name for this outpost in his opinion.

Between the posts, a man sat behind a desk writing acceptances with long lists of ordinances or issuing brief rejections. Women were crying as they were escorted at gunpoint along a muddy path back around the other side of the town and back over the ridge to die slowly somewhere else.

As John rode into view, a grisly doctor looked back at the desk over his glasses and shook his head again. The fellow at the desk signed the rejection notice without looking down and handed it off to a moustached, barrel of a man who walked forward to deliver the paper in the same hand holding the stock of his scatter gun. The wagon was turned aside by the pair of oxen as John came around the side.

The doctor was waving the next miner and his mule with the heavy bundle into the clearing for inspection. They all looked at John with disapproval as he cut around them. The wall of men became more lively and John found himself looking down dark barrels instead of along their black and silver sides.

The fellow at the desk looked up at John without lifting his palms off the weathered surface of the wooden desk in front of him. The back of his chair creaked as he leaned back to look at John from under his sweaty visor. His expression remained flat as his eyes surveyed the rider through the small shadow created by the brim.

John pushed his own hat up on his forehead as he looked down reining his horse to a stop.

The man said to John, “I see the star you’re poking out on your chest there stranger. You can breathe back out any time you like.”

John said, “I’m John California…”

“Of course you are,” the man agreed.

“…I have business here…”

“Of course you do.”

“…and then I’m moving on.” John finished.

“Of course you will,” the man said.

John looked over the weapons still pointing at him on both sides of the town’s entrance. Everyone stood silently.

Look like you aren’t scared, he thought. Look like you got it under control.

“How about you have your men lower their weapons and relax their trigger fingers for a while?” John suggested. “Does it look like I’m going to start shooting up the place?”

The man didn’t smile and he didn’t order the men to lower their guns.

“We are well prepared for someone that thinks they’re going to shoot the place up…it’s the other thing we can’t allow.”

“I understand that,” John said, “but I need to pass on through and be on my way.”

“You could pass on around quicker?” the man suggested.

“I’m looking for someone,” John said.

“Of course you are.”

“I need to see if he landed here,” John finished.

“Of course you do,” the man said. “We can check our excellent records for you. Tell us his name, I’ll assure you that he ain’t here, and then you can get along with your search.”

The man lifted his left hand and motioned a curve off around the muddy trail away from Scratch.

Make him believe it, John thought.

“That’s not going to be good enough. This ends with me riding into your fine town. It ends with me passing on through. It ends with me leaving on out while causing no trouble to your business. It does not end with you dictating terms to a lawman or…contributing lead to my diet.”

“We wouldn’t do that, lawman,” the man assured. “We have a process what with ‘the business’ messing with our business.”

You’re almost there, he thought. Hold it together. You are almost there.

“I’ll be moving on through then so you can get back to your process then,” John said.

He snapped the reins and trotted forward around the desk. The guns were raised around him on both sides.

“Whoa, lawman,” the man lifted both his hands off his desk into the air now.

Some of his papers blew off into the muddy street behind his desk inside the town.

John shouted. “Get your monkeys to point their guns away from me before I lose my patience with you. I’ve entertained you long enough. I will not interfere with your town ordnances, but your bureaucracy doesn’t extend to me. Good day, gentlemen.”

John closed his eyes once he had passed and tried to manage his breathing. He heard the guns shift again behind him, but none of them fired and none of them bit into his back.

The man hollered. “Doctor, get on with it. We’re all day bound as is.”

***

The street through Scratch’s Backside was mud and dung up the horse’s leg as John slogged through the animals and men parting around him. The stores were built from flatboard and mostly focused on mining equipment. The saloons were all whorehouses and were guarded at the door by individuals that looked kin to the line out by the town posts.

It wasn’t any rougher than the other mining posts he had encountered since he left the states and began passing through the territories in his search. They were outside the legal settlement areas of the Federal government. Their respect for a federal badge was mostly residual like an impression of a memory or a habit left over in a mind that was dying, but not yet still.

He passed the open shop of a blacksmith. Smoke billowed out under the top lip of the double doors. The smith wiped his hands on his apron and then took up the dark, iron rod again. He looked up at John and then turned his broad back around to the side of the anvil facing away from the street. He returned to sharpening the orange hot blade of what could have been sword or a long dagger. It might have been one of those gladiator blades that John had learned about before he stopped travelling out to the schoolhouse just after his father left when he and his brother were still kids.

If ‘the business’ hadn’t come along, this man would still be hammering out horseshoes instead of blades.

Strange times in a strange land, John thought as he left the smith without questioning him.

John didn’t need their help and he didn’t want their unreliable information. He did need to find one area of town to get the answers he sought.

Citizens stayed to the boardwalks along building fronts and they turned aside from John’s gaze. In John’s opinion, this was preferable to their over interest.

One man in a suit in front of one of the salons held John’s eye contact without fear or breaking away. He tilted his head and chewed on the inside of his mouth. John’s horse stopped in the street before he realized he had pulled up on the reins. The man stood back up straight and squared his shoulders at John.

“I’m assuming your visit ain’t about gambling nor territory rights… am I correct on that count, marshal?” he asked.

John nodded. “That would be correct.”

The man said, “I’m inclined to answer your questions to move you along…business suffers when the customers are nervous, you understand. Our customers are particularly nervous by nature and more so with the recent unpleasantness in the world.”

“That would serve us both well, I think,” John said.

The man rubbed his bottom lip with the pad of one of his fingers. “Out with it then, lawman. What has you patrolling the end of the world?”

John said, “I just need reliable directions to your meat district and then to the back edge of town.”

The man looked down the road ahead of John’s horse. A group of men looking on turned away suddenly and found something to occupy themselves as they crossed the deep muck in the road with their wading boots and packs. The pans, picks, and pails tied to the outside of the loads clanged against one another as the men hustled across the street.

The man answered without looking back at John. “I’m assuming you don’t mean the butcher shops in the Chinamen’s district.”

***

John dismounted once he reached the only empty street in town and stepped forward between the shacks. His horse tried to pull back on the reins, but John forced him along on the bit. The beast twisted its head from side to side, but obeyed John’s insistence.

John was careful to step outside the washes of black muck in the fouled dirt. He drew his peacemaker from its holster and held it to his side.

The black man in the butcher’s apron stepped out around the racks.

John lifted the gun suddenly at the stranger’s appearance, but then lowered it back to his side again.

The man’s apron was just as dark as the blacksmith’s, but John could tell the difference. The man pushed aside one of the slabs as he stepped into view. His engineer gloves were stained with dark filth in the hard grooves of the wet leather. The hanging meat swung on the hook as he let it go.

The man looked down at John’s gun and up at his face. “I assure you they are not biting any longer, marshal.”

John’s mouth turned up at the corners the way it did when he was nervous. It could have been mistaken for a smile.

John said, “I’m looking for someone in particular.”

“I imagined as much,” the meat man said. “Not all the faces are intact, but you can have a look around, sir.”

John looked at the slabs waving slowly on their hooks along the racks that ran from building to building all the way back through the alcove.

I don’t want to do this, John thought.

He lifted his gun hand and used the butt of the pistol to push his brim down to protect his eyes from the sun and what was coming next.

The meat man held out an iron poker he grasped by the hook offering John the handle. “Marshal, you’ll want to use this to avoid fouling your gun.”

John holstered his weapon and adjusted his knife around to the side behind his hip along his belt on the opposite side as his gun. He took the iron tool from the man. The meat man nodded and pulled one glove off by the gory fingers. He reached out with the bared hand and took the reins from John. The horse drew back again, but held at the end of the grip. John could see the ashen calluses around the exposed, black hand.

The meat man was swayed slightly by the horse’s reluctance and bumped one of the larger slabs of rotten meat on the hook behind him. The bodies hanging from the racks waved again as they brushed along the line of hooks from the first impact. Their faces and eyes remained frozen as their bodies rocked one another from side to side hanging upside down in the secluded space.

No one wants to see this, John thought as he surveyed the hidden alcove.

The horse twisted its head and snorted.

The meat man said, “Not to rush you, sir, but I have to dismember these and pack them for burning directly.”

John hefted the poker in his hand to test its weight as he stared at the bodies. Some were pierced through both ankles.

Like Christ…

He shivered, but steeled himself again quickly. He tried to see if the man noticed the moment of weakness, but he couldn’t tell in his peripheral vision and he didn’t want to turn his head to look.

Some of them had their arms tied down to their sides by lengths of rope around their bodies, lengths of rope which no one would ever use again even for hanging criminals.

…because no one wants them to come back…

Other bodies had the hands clasped and bound behind their backs by rope or even chains in at least two examples he could see from where he stood. In those cases, the arms folded back at an unnatural angle and remained up in the air together behind their backs.

…like some mockery version of prayer to some dark, forgotten god…

Some were hooked through just one ankle so that the other leg jutted out in some profane way.

When John was a kid, his brother had shot a deer and they had tracked it. By the time they had reached it, a mountain lion had taken the prize and was devouring the belly of the deer. As it ate, the slender legs of the deer stuck out stiff in four random directions. It had looked so lifeless and bizarre. John’s brother, Campbell, had taken John’s shoulder and had led him backward away from the feasting monster.

“Why don’t you kill it, Campbell?” John had asked as they had gone back to the cabin where their mother had waited alone for them to bring dinner.

Campbell had answered his younger brother, “Someone should be allowed to eat…it might as well be the cougar this time.”

The meat man jolted John back to the present in the mouth of the alcove of hanging bodies from his drifting thoughts. “Marshal?”

John blinked, but didn’t look at the man waiting on him.

All the bodies hung upside down by their pierced ankles swaying in death.

Like Saint Peter…