Bitter Cold (12 page)

SEVENTEEN

HE COULDN’T REMEMBER WHEN he’d closed his eyes. Something jarred him from his comfortable position, shocked him into sitting up straight.

“Huh?” he said involuntarily, his heart pounding from the sudden activity. He’d been startled by something. A noise. Steady, rhythmic. A drum beat. It sounded close. Right outside.

He went to the door. Getting his shotgun crossed his mind. It was downstairs, locked away in a gun safe. He didn’t need it, though. Something told him to just go, to follow the sound of the beating drum. He opened the door and the winter wind whipped his clothes, forcing pins of ice against his skin. He squinted and walked down the steps.

A dense layer of clouds blanketed the moon, yet the night had an unearthly glow, bathing everything in colorless light. In the whistling gale, the drumbeat sounded further off. He felt he had to catch up with it. He had to find its origin. His house was the only source of artificial illumination in the inky shroud of night, and it was getting dimmer and dimmer behind him as he pushed through the knee-high snow. The constant drumming beckoned him. It tormented, yet eased him with its rhythm. On and on and on, like his footsteps. Soon, he found himself walking in perfect cadence with the drum, picking up his tempo as it did. Faster, faster.

BOOM!BOOM!…BOOM!BOOM!…BOOM!BOOM!

His pace became a full sprint.Up the driveway, past the gate, and onto Jack Falls Road. From there he went left. He realized where his feet were taking him, though he had no idea why.

He glanced down and gasped, seeing he was wearing black, cracking cowhide boots with looped pull-up straps. The boots galloped onward quite on their own, not giving him any choice but to pass the driveways on Jack Falls, through a trail made by ATV riders and deer, to a clearing that belonged to nobody in particular. As he crossed the meadow, something else joined the drums, another noise breaking the monotonous beat. Laughter. The childlike, giddy giggling of grown men getting drunk on either booze or something just as intoxicating. It made him want to stop. His feet kept going against his will, step after step through the heavy snow.

He noticed more strange things about his clothes. His pants. A pair of heavy tan canvas trousers, not his Levi’s. He also had on a dark blue wool flannel fatigue
coat. It didn’t look good on him, either. A horrible fit. The coat sleeves were too long and the pants were too short. Then, as he continued to stride through the white, sparkling field, he saw something that made his heart stop.

He was carrying a rifle.

Looked like an old Springfield Carbine, though he couldn’t tell for sure. He wanted to study it closer, but found he couldn’t control his arms or his legs. He couldn’t control his mouth or vocal chords, either, otherwise he would have screamed. He wanted to call out to his neighbors, to his son, to anyone that could hear. His mouth remained closed. His voice remained mute.

The laughter got louder as he approached the edge of the clearing, a break in the treeline near a rocky outcropping. He’d been there many times, though this felt much different. He felt an evil presence. It didn’t come from the bottom of the canyon. It came from somewhere else.

The frivolous banter turned suddenly serious. He heard a voice clearly over the others.

“Get yer ass over here, Samuelson! Yer a part of this fire team, too, Buck Private! Now, hotfoot it!”

More laughs and snorts of happy men. Not normal happy, though. Vicious, ravenous happy. The howls of hungry coyotes before taking down a hare.

Automatically, Jeff followed the direction of the noisy group. He bowed and pushed through some heavy, low-hanging pine branches. The boisterous teasing grew even louder. The last limb swished past his face and he saw five men, all wearing the same clothes as his. Uniforms, dark blue and heavy. They also had identical rifles, each pointed into the canyon below.

“Get over here, Samuelson,” the man closest ordered. He had the stripes of a sergeant. “Yer not gettin’ outta this! We’re all in it together, now come here and take aim, yuh son of a bitch!”

Jeff inched closer, toeing the rocky rim that overlooked the canyon. At first, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. A few groups of trees, steep, stony sides, various miniature caverns and rock formations, and a narrow, level floor. Then he saw what the men were laughing at while aiming their guns. He didn’t want to believe it, but the truth pummeled him like a bag of bones. When he heard a baby crying, it sunk into his chest with the force of a sledgehammer.

A dozen or so people stood in the valley, wrapped in blankets, but still shivering. Despite the dark, he could tell they didn’t look modern. Come to think of it, neither did anyone else.

The sergeant took his eyes from his sights and looked at Jeff again. “Samuelson! What’re you up to? You want a court-martial? I won’t hear any more of it. We’ve got a job to do, and by thunder we’re gonna do it. Now
AIM!
”

Completely against his will, Jeff raised his weapon to his shoulder and directed it toward the cowering group. They stood petrified, staring at the soldiers.

He saw a man and woman, bent with age, leaning into each other’s arms. The heavy, coarsely stitched blanket they used as a covering made the two of them seem as one. He noticed their faces. Folds of skin curled over their eyes, deep wrinkles and grooves in their cheeks and brows.

Next to them were several women, one of them clutching a tight bundle. She turned to shield her baby from the relentless gusts which tossed her long, black hair. Then she faced Jeff. He stood straight, stepping away.

“Samuelson! What did I tell you?” Jeff wanted to point his gun at the sergeant and kill him. Nothing those people could have done, no crime on God’s green earth could have warranted such cold-blooded punishment. His arms wouldn’t move, though. Jeff wasn’t in control, and that drove him insane with helplessness.

“Team ready!”

His rifle barrel fixed on the elderly man. He felt his trigger finger twitch, though he wasn’t moving it himself. Some other person, Samuelson, readied to let loose with an explosion of malicious violence.

“FIRE!”

To his surprise, the gun didn’t shoot in the direction of the old couple. Instead, it fired just to the left. He felt an instant rush of relief. The sensation washed away in a wave of grief as bodies fell anyway. The other soldiers were not as principled as Samuelson. Or maybe they feared retribution more.

A vivid moonglow cast cruel light on the scene, allowing Jeff no reprieve from the horror. He had to watch it all. Bodies falling on bodies. Bloody spray mists mingling with the haze and steam from their belabored breaths.

After the first volley, most of the people were down. The old man and woman lay unmoving in the whiteness, with dark pools oozing from serious wounds in their necks and heads. Despite their trauma, they held tight to one another. Nothing could murder their love.

Three remained on their feet. Two girls and the woman holding the child to her chest, running like deer.

“Reload!”

Jeff watched Samuelson’s hands move swiftly. The actions came as instinct, as if the exercise of loading had been repeated over and over until the task could be performed in his sleep. Within three seconds, each man in the fire team had his rifle recharged, ready, and resting in the pits of his shoulder. The women had only made it a few feet in the daunting snow cover.

“Aim...
FIRE!
”

He flinched and the rifled kicked once more, the
Crack!
causing his ear to ring and go deaf. All three women went down. He wasn’t sure if Samuelson had shot one or not. His heart said ‘no,’ but his gut told another tale. He doubled over, a river of bile burning his throat as it spewed onto the ground. Putrid ooze came out his nose. He wiped it off on his oversized cuff and stood at attention at the officer’s command.

“Stand up straight, soldier! You’re just doing your duty. Those things down there ain’t human beings. They’re savages. Dogs. Rabid dogs. And you know what you do with rabid dogs, don’t you?”

Jeff felt Samuelson nod. The sergeant continued.

“Of course you do!” he turned to address the entire team. “It’s the mission of the US Army to keep peace with the Indians, but only with the ones who keep peace with
us
. These savages conspired against us. They were the enemy, and we have a duty to destroy the enemy at all costs.”

The sergeant looked like he wanted to say something else when the strangest noise stopped him, a strident, piercing shriek. The distinct howl sent a shiver through Jeff’s bones. He even saw the officer shudder, but the man disguised his surprise quickly behind a veil of contempt. To him, these people were all expendable, even crying, motherless babies.

“Take aim!” the sergeant wielded his bayonet, eyeing the canyon floor. The men disobeyed his order. He glanced at them, then spun and looked at Jeff, or Samuelson. “Looks like you’ve got the rest of them to follow your lead,” he snatched the rifle from Jeff’s hands and stepped to the ledge.

The crying grew louder. The little child’s voice had become hoarse, yet it continued bawling. Confused. Afraid. Alone. 

“If you yellowbellies won’t do it, I will!”

Jeff was relieved Samuelson turned away as the shot rang out, echoing down the successive valleys. Mercifully, the crying went quiet. All went quiet. Even the wind weakened, paying respect to the dead. The soldiers wiped their eyes, stunned, nothing to say.

The officer had a smug look on his face. He almost seemed to get joy from it. Jeff had heard of psychic vampires. Not bloodsucking monsters, but worse. These hell spawn got pleasure, even energy from the deaths of others, like they could actually devour souls from the air as they perished. That’s how the officer looked to Jeff, like an unearthly beast, something not human.

Then the drumbeats started again, and the sergeant aimed his Springfield into the woods, changing direction, undecided where to shoot. The drumming seemed to come from all sides. With nowhere to fire, he lowered the rifle and backed up, dangerously close to the drop-off. He stopped and put his hands to his ears. It didn’t seem to help.

“What is that!” he looked at his men one by one.

A muffled noise directed all attention down into the darkened valley. Among the bodies, something trembled. The soldiers watched, horrified, as the elderly man, in his bloodstained blanket, stood straight and proud. The snowfall picked up and became a swirling blizzard. The drumbeat grew faster and louder, on and on and on. The Native elder, visible wounds in his neck, scanned the line of soldiers with a menacing, white-hot stare until he got to the sergeant.

Then the drumbeat stopped. The wind perished. A shaky, low-pitched voice broke the deafening silence. It sounded at the same time frail, yet powerful. Jeff realized there was no weakness in the old man’s words, only a warning. A terrible, terrible warning.

In rhythm with the hidden drum, he chanted of a fearsome beast, unleashed due to the hatred and evil that whites had perpetrated against the people of that land. He said that place where he stood was now and forever cursed with this beast, a hideous force that would destroy any living soul unfortunate enough to come near. He said his message was not just a warning, but a promise. He promised if the white man continued to treat the land and its inhabitants with such wicked contempt, then the creature would get hungrier. He said just like the white man consumed, so too would the dark curse consume. He told of a time when the dark curse would devour the world the white man built if they didn’t change their ways.

The sergeant turned and pointed his gun into the valley at the old man, still standing, arms crossed, silver hair whipping in the wind. Jeff could see the man’s eyes, penetrating the night with their metallic glow.

The sergeant squinted and clenched his cheeks.

“Tricks!” he returned to a shooting stance. “You won’t fool me, old man! Medicine men are nothing but con artists!”

POP!

The report bounced along the trees, bringing with it a tomblike silence. Jeff didn’t believe what he saw, or didn’t see. Nothing. No bodies. Where there were once several fresh corpses on the steaming ground, now he saw only a shadow in the snow.

His heart felt like it nearly seized. That shadow. He knew what it was. Nobody else did, though. And since he hadn’t the power to tell anyone, none of them would know until it was too late.

“Where’d they go?” the sergeant pushed past his men, through a cluster of trees growing from the cliffside. Jeff knew the spot well. It was the same hill the kids used for their sledding run, the only way in or out of the canyon, really, without ropes and harnesses. When the officer made it ten yards down, he stopped and scanned the trees, the crevices, the boulders big enough to hide a person. Apparently satisfied, he refocused on the mysterious dark area ahead of him, at the far edge of the narrow valley, where the bodies of the slain had been before they’d disappeared.

He took an arrogant step forward. “I know this is a trick!” he kept his gun pointed. “Seen this in Wyoming. Didn’t hornswoggle me none then, and won’t now!”

He raised the gun stalk to his shoulder and fired into the blackness. It reflected away, with no visible effect. The officer ejected the cartridge, reloaded, aimed, and shot again, this time on the move, advancing toward the target. The second bullet had the same result as the first. Nothing.