Bloodstained Oz (2 page)

      For just a moment, the wind died. Out
across the farm she could see her daddy walking in the corn field. It was a
meager crop, wilted and dry, but most of the farms in Hawley couldn’t get corn
to grow at all this summer, so they were lucky. Something swayed in the corn,
dark and stiff, and she saw that it was the scarecrow that daddy had put up
when he’d seen that the corn was going to come in after all.

      “Wishful thinking,” Momma had called
that scarecrow. Gayle wasn’t exactly sure what she meant, but hadn’t liked the
way momma had said that.

      As daddy turned and headed for the
house, buffeted by the rising wind, a big gust blew in. There was a loud crack
like her daddy’s shotgun, and Gayle saw the scarecrow tumble over, blowing end
over end across the field. The wind had snapped the wooden post right in two.

      And the storm hadn’t even reached the
farm yet.

      Gayle watched it, a wall of black cloud,
moving toward her.

      The wind died. Her hair settled on her
shoulders and the storm door stopped its banging, but she wasn’t fooled.

      The storm kept on coming, and it brought
the darkness with it.

      The guards at Guilford Prison’s work
camp didn’t seem to know a hell of a lot about the project the prisoners were
laboring over. Something about irrigation ditches, which—in light of the
hard, dry earth—seemed about as sensible as knitting sweaters for sheep.
On the rare occasions when the rains came, they swept through quick, splashed
enough water down to flood the plains for a day or two, and then they were
gone, leaving the land even more ruined than before. The cisterns might be
filled, but the ground was so parched than it sucked up every ounce.

      Irrigation ditches were only useful when
there were rivers and streams with water to divert. But there wasn’t so much
as a creek within ten miles of Hawley, Kansas that hadn’t gone dry as a bone.
Some days the prisoners were set to work harvesting what little could be grown
in the soil, the pitiful wheat and corn, but more often thistle and scrub to
feed the livestock. If not for the labor of the prisoners, no one at the work
camp would have eaten, not the inmates, nor the guards, nor the warden.

      But these ditches . . . far as Hank
Burnside was concerned, he might as well have been digging his own grave.

      The guards kept to whatever shade they
could find, shotguns and rifles resting over their shoulders or cradled in
their arms. The sun was blistering hot, and the prisoners had to walk a fine
line. The guards were so lethargic with the heat that they weren’t going to go
out of their way to stir up trouble—not even for amusement, the way they
did so often when the weather was cooler. But tempers were on a short fuse,
and that meant the inmates knew better than to push their luck.

      Hank paused in his digging, jammed his
shovel into the ground and leaned on the handle. He wiped the sweat from his
forehead with a rag, making a good show of his exhaustion, letting the guards
know how hard he’d been working. But when he took up the shovel again and
plunged it into the crumbling, dry soil, he moved slowly and did not overexert
himself. He’d seen other men just crumble in the field, toppling over to
sprawl in the dirt, and he didn’t intend to share their fate. As long as the
guards saw that he appeared to be working hard, they weren’t going to take a
closer look.

      Too damned hot for that.

      He gripped his callused hands tighter on
the handle of the shovel, ignoring the exhaustion that had become routine now
after two long years at the camp. Just yesterday he had reached the halfway
point in his sentence. Now there were fewer days trapped here ahead of him
than there were behind. With that in mind, he could ignore the heat and the
sweat, the ache in his bones, and the way the dirt caked him and the grit stung
his eyes.

The shovel split the gray, dusty earth with a scraping rasp. Hank paused.
A fresh trickle of sweat ran down the center of his back, almost cold compared
to his sun-baked flesh, and he shivered.

      The wind kicked up suddenly and he had
to turn his face away to avoid getting a mouthful of flying dirt.

      “Jesus God, look at that.”

      Hank shielded his eyes with a hand and
peered toward the horizon. The breath froze in his lungs. Four or five miles
off it looked like the world simply ended, as though he could have walked over
to the edge and thrown himself into some infinite abyss. From sun-bleached
earth, the landscape gave way to a wall of pure blackness, a churning cloud of
coal black shadows.

      “Son of a bitch, Hank, you ever see a
storm like that?

      The words came from Terry Pritcher, a
cattle thief who’d been in Guilford since the age of seventeen. Fourteen years
working the fields had made him lean and ropy with muscle, but it hadn’t made
him any smarter.

      Hank didn’t even look at Terry, only
shook his head. “Never.”

      In seconds, the wind kicked up hard,
whipping at them and raising loose dirt from the soil, swirling it around them,
scouring their flesh. Hank covered his eyes, but could not stop glancing at
the storm.

      It was coming their way.

      Already, the sky above was darkening.

      “What do you think, boss?” Pritcher
called to the nearest guard. “We ought to get to some cover, don’t you think?”

      Fat drops of warm rain began to fall.
It felt to Hank as though they seared him instead of soothing, and the dirt in
the air sucked at the moisture as though refusing to share.

      The guard, J.D. Cotton, scowled, but
turned to look where Pritcher was pointing. When Cotton looked, they all
looked. All of the guards and all of the prisoners out digging in the
withered, lifeless earth.

      The upper edges of the dirt storm had
begun to spread, mushrooming outward high above, so that it seemed grim black
thunderheads were reaching out to claim more of the world. Soon all of the
sunlight would be blotted out, day would become false night, and they would all
be choked by the wind and the dirt.

      “All right, boys,” Cotton said, raising
his shotgun and firing once into the air. “Get moving. Stay together. Anyone
takes on the foolish notion that this might be a good time to rabbit gets
buckshot in the balls. Go!”

      The men began to move toward the
equipment truck, carrying their shovels and rolling wheelbarrows to load into
the back.

      The air changed.

      Hank felt it. He stopped, and someone
collided with him from behind.

      “Damn it, Burnside, what the hell’s
wrong with you?” an angry voice barked.

      He wasn’t listening. With a frown, he
turned to look at the storm again. The pressure of the air had changed. The
wind had shifted direction. He squinted and had to blink a few times to make
sure he was really seeing what he thought he was seeing.

      The crest of the storm had blotted out
much of the sky, quickly moving their way. And in that churning darkness,
several funnels had begun to form. Fingers of furious nature and swirling dirt
reached toward the ground.

      “Tornadoes!” Hank shouted, pointing.

      Inmates and guards alike began shouting,
cussing, and took off at a run. The guards climbed into the two trucks.
Inmates pulled themselves into the beds of both, no one giving a damn if they
were kneeling on shovel blades. The gates of Guilford were mostly barbed wire
around the outside, but the buildings inside were like bunkers. They ought to
be safe within the walls, in cells or cellars.

      Hank Burnside wasn’t afraid of anything,
but only a fool wouldn’t have run in the face of that storm. As he gripped the
back of the equipment truck, the engine roared and the driver put her into gear
and started off. Hank glanced back to see a lone figure in dirty prison
overalls racing for an irrigation ditch.

      Terry Pritcher figured this was his
chance. With the guards distracted, he was on the run.

      J.D. Cotton put down his shotgun and
picked up a rifle, calmly judging the wind and the distance. He raised the
rifle to his shoulder and shot Pritcher in the head from a hundred yards out.
Blood and brain and bone sprayed out, mixed with the dirt and the wind and
disappeared, even as Pritcher fell into a ditch, dead as the bleached earth.

      The truck rattled onto the dirt road and
headed toward Guilford Prison.

      The storm kept coming. The sky turned
black. One after the other, the tornadoes touched down. The ground shook and
the wind began to scream.

Jeremiah wailed inconsolably, and only one thing could soothe him.
Elisa bared her breast and settled her baby against her, doing her best not to
wince. He was starting to teethe and she was tender. Though that sharp pain
paled by comparison to the deep ache in her temples, the pressure pounding at
her skull with each beat of her heart. The throbbing of her pulse was like the
fist of a giant, squeezing her head.

     
Breathe
,
she told herself.
Fresh air will help.
And a few minutes of quiet . . . a few minutes without fighting.

She loved her husband, Stefan, but he shared the blame for her
headache. Elisa had begun the argument, but the man was so stubborn that they
could not have ended it peacefully. She wished now she had not yelled at him.
Then they could at least have pretended to be happy today.

Instead they rode together on the seat at the front of the wagon in the
silent aftermath of their argument. Stefan held the reins and willfully
avoided looking her way.

Some days she could not remember what it had been like before they came
to America, before his dreams and the arrival of their baby son had taken away
any hope they had of comfort and peace. Elisa loved Jeremiah with all of her
heart and soul—and she still loved Stefan in spite of it all—but
the life they had made was misery for her. They fought because she could not
keep silent about it, and because Stefan was not willing to admit that perhaps
his dreams had led them down a treacherous path. That this had been a mistake
. . . that they should leave Kansas, and try to find a new life somewhere else.

      Elisa flinched as Jeremiah scraped her
nipple with his teeth. She looked down at her baby and saw the tired
contentment on his face, the closest thing to bliss that existed in the world,
and she smiled. As long as she had Jeremiah, she could endure whatever came.

      She bent to kiss the baby’s head, and
when she glanced up, she caught Stefan studying her with love and regret in his
eyes. But he said nothing. Only shook his head and turned to gaze at the
darkening sky on the horizon.

      After a moment, he finally spoke, but
his tone was clipped and distant.

“There’s a bad storm coming. Dirt storm, most likely. We need to find
shelter.” The wagon creaked and swayed beneath them, the wheels moving over
the uneven ground and rocking them like a boat upon a turbulent sea.

Elisa bit her lower lip and resisted the urge to tell him that shelter
would be easier to find if he hadn’t been swindling the people at all of the
surrounding farms. She looked at the mass of clouds that churned in the
heavens and blinked the grit away from her eyes. Then she cradled Jeremiah
even more tightly to her as he fed. Jeremiah made it all worthwhile, even the
deceptions.

She knew her anger was fruitless, but that did not stop it coming. Her
family was Rom, and they’d traveled all of Europe in wagons much like this one.
But that was three generations ago and she could not live her life the way
that her ancestors had. She’d gone to school; she’d been educated and—in
her mother’s words—civilized. This wasn’t any sort of life she had
wished for.

All of the things that Stefan did—including selling his camphor
and alcohol elixir and making absurd promises about its virtues—he did
for the sake of their family. She could forgive him that. But he would not
need to make up such lies if his damned wanderlust had not stranded them in
this blighted land to begin with. They would never have gotten rich on what he
had earned as a fishmonger in Boston, but they would have made due. Now their
house was a distant memory and he held onto the belief that he could somehow
make enough as a traveling salesman to earn them a better life somewhere else.

Elisa had her thick, curly hair pulled back into a ponytail. The wind
that harbingered the storm buffeted her and her hair whipped across her face.
That same growing breeze lifted dust from the ground in a rising ghost of a cloud
and cast it across the rutted path the wagon moved along.

Stefan called to the horses and pulled the reins, halting the wagon.

“Elisa! Take Jeremiah and go inside!”

His voice was strained, but she knew her husband well enough to know
that it was not anger than unsettled him now. It was fear.