Gut-Shot (8 page)

There was no trail where the Pawnee rode, just a deer path between the trees. Apart from the creak of saddle leather and the soft pad of the horses' hooves on a carpet of pine needles there was no sound.

The wan moonlight lit the way and the ozone smell of lightning tinged the air.

After an hour O'Hara drew rein and pointed into the distance ahead of him. “Frank Constable's cabins are close,” he said. “Over the rise.”

“Glad to hear it,” Flintlock said. “It's getting up to rain.”

“Thunderstorm by and by,” O'Hara said. He fixed Flintlock with a stare, his black eyes glittering. “Barnabas says you are an idiot,” he said.

“Sounds like him,” Flintlock said. “Barnabas has a way with words.”

“He say go find your ma and your name. He says you should kill McPhee and then leave here.”

“I stopped listening to Barnabas as soon as I stood taller than a Hawken rifle,” Flintlock said. “Best move I ever made.”

“Then more fool you, Flintlock. There is evil in this wind. Its chokes me like the smoke in my grandfather's lodge.”

O'Hara kneed his horse into motion as a few fat raindrops ticked among the pine canopy. Ten miles to the north lightning flashed over the peaks of the Sans Bois Mountains and thunder rumbled like a dim distant drum. The air was cool, edged, but Flintlock could sense no evil on the wind, but then he was a white man.

As the moon hid its face behind clouds, he could barely make out the buildings ahead of him. A cabin and two larger structures for sure and probably three or four smaller shacks.

O'Hara led the way directly to the cabin. The rain was heavier now, the thunder closer.

He pointed to one of the large buildings.

“Barn, Flintlock. Put your horses there. O'Hara goes now.”

Without another word or a farewell wave, the breed swung his horse and rode away into the teeming, glittering night.

“Right sociable feller,” Flintlock said to McPhee, rain drumming on his hat.

“I'll take the horses to the barn,” the young man said. Then, “I guess he figured his job was done.”

“I guess you're right,” Flintlock said. He looked around him. “But I think mine is only beginning.”

He swung out of the saddle and stepped into the darkness of the cabin. After allowing time for his night vision to adjust, Flintlock made out a table with an oil lamp in the center of the floor. A box of lucifers lay close by. He lit the lamp and its orange glow spread throughout the cabin but angled shadows remained in the corners where the spiders lived.

Imagine a genteel Victorian parlor, relentlessly middle class, set down in the middle of the wilderness and that was Frank Constable's cabin.

A prime indicator of social status at a time when clutter meant class, the cabin was packed with vases, lamps, china ornaments, lace doilies, tea services and, what old Queen Vic herself considered the ultimate display of good taste and breeding, several stuffed birds and small animals under glass domes.

A portrait of a very young soldier in Confederate gray struck a somber note, draped as it was with black crepe, and a dark red curtain adorned with a Chinese dragon cunningly wrought from colored, metallic threads separated the parlor from the kitchen. The room was cozy enough but a little threatening, as though a murder had been committed there.

Flintlock found the shelves amply supplied with canned and dried food and by the time McPhee returned, the stove was lit and coffee simmered.

“You've been gone a long time, McPhee,” Flintlock said.

The young man was white to the gills. “You'd better come see this, Sam,” he said.

Something in McPhee's expression stilled the question on Flintlock's lips. The man was thoroughly spooked, his lips pale from fright.

“Lead the way,” he said.

The barn was a spacious building with eight stalls and it smelled clean. McPhee had lit a lantern and it sat on an upturned barrel at the door. “There's plenty of hay and I found some oats,” he said. “Well, as much as the rats had left.”

“Is that what you wanted to show me? Oats?” Flintlock said.

“No. Come follow me.”

The young man led the way to the last stall and held the lantern high. “When I was looking for oats I discovered this.”

“What the hell is it?” Flintlock said. He peered through the dim orange gloom at a charred object on the barn floor.

“Can't you see? It's right in front of you.”

“McPhee, are you showing me a burned tree trunk?”

“No. It's human, or it was. Look closer. You can see the teeth.”

Flintlock took the lantern from McPhee's trembling hand and bent over for a closer look. “My God,” he said. “It is human. I think.”

“It's human and he, she, whatever it was, died a terrible death,” the younger man said.

“Uh-huh. You got that right. Burned to a crisp.”

Teeth gleamed white in the blackened skull and the body's right hand was raised as though in defensive posture. Most of the skin had burned from the fingers so that yellow bones showed. The entire body looked as though it had been transformed in an instant from a living, breathing human being into a cylinder of black, carbonized flesh and bone.

Flintlock looked around him and instinctively his hand strayed to the handle of the Colt in his waistband. Restless rats rustled in the corners, but there was no other sound, only the steady munching of the horses.

“How did it happen, Sam?” McPhee said.

In the lantern-splashed gloom the young man's eyes looked like black buttons sewn on to a flour sack.

“How the hell should I know?” Flintlock snapped. His fear made him irritable.

“I think I know,” McPhee said. “It was the infernal machine.”

Flintlock stared hard at the young man. “You don't believe all the crap that Constable told us, do you?” he said. “About men in the moon and sich.”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

“The only infernal machine I ever saw was back in '64, a Gatling gun that executed a bunch of black Yankee prisoners down Alabama way,” Flintlock said. “When the damned thing started to shoot it sounded like a rusty iron bed dragged across a knotted pine floor.” He nodded to himself. “Now that was an infernal machine.”

“A Gatling gun shoots only bullets, Sam. Mr. Constable said his infernal machine hurls bolts of fire, and fire harnesses the power of hell.”

Rain slanted across the open barn door and lightning seared and flashed and shimmered like sheets of polished silver. Immediately thunder crashed, as though angry at the lightning for stealing the show.

“Let's get out of here,” Flintlock said. He glanced at the charred body. “Maybe he—”

“Or she.”

“Was struck by lightning.”

“Not a chance,” McPhee said. “This person was roasted by hellfire.”

 

 

The way to the cabin lay past another barnlike structure, but a chain and a massive iron padlock secured its double doors. The building had an air of foreboding about it, like a crypt in a story by Mr. Poe.

“I bet the infernal machine is in there!” McPhee yelled above the roar of the storm and the serpent hiss of the relentless rain. “That's why the place is chained and padlocked.”

“It's not bothering us, so we'll leave it alone,” Flintlock said. Lightning shimmered around him and the rain pounded.

“Don't you want to see it, Sam?” McPhee yelled above the storm.

“Hell no, I don't. And neither do you.”

“It could be interesting. I think it killed the poor soul in the barn.”

“Maybe so, but I'm not messing around with infernal machines, McPhee. Keeping you alive is hard enough without any distractions.”

“Roasted him or her alive it did. One moment a human being, the next a charred, lifeless corpse.”

“Quit with that, McPhee,” Flintlock said. “Now you're spooking the hell out of me as well.”

“It's a terrible weapon. Mr. Constable told us that.”

“Maybe you're thinking about wiping out Open Sky with it, huh?”

“No, but it's an idea.”

“A bad idea. I'm sorry I said it.” Sam Flintlock shook his shaggy head like a coon dog with a bug in its ear. “Damn it,” he said. “What is that?”

“What is what?” McPhee said.

“Something on the back of my neck like a cold breath . . .”

Then he knew it for what it was.

Out there in the darkness something or someone watched him.

Hamp Collins felt sorry for himself.

He'd hoped to have had a shot at Sam Flintlock by now, drop him with a bullet to the belly then let his knife take it from there. But he hadn't reckoned on a damned summer thunderstorm.

Huddled under the thin cover of the pines, he studied the cabin. It looked snug and dry behind the chain-mail fall of the rain and Collins believed he smelled coffee and frying bacon.

Damn. He
could
smell coffee.

Flintlock was still tormenting him, belittling him like he'd done in the middle of the street in Open Sky. And in front of everybody! That made Collins's blood boil.

He rose to his feet, his Winchester in hand. Now was the time to interrupt the tattooed man's cozy little dinner party. Let's see how Mr. High and Mighty Flintlock enjoyed seeing his balls floating in a bowl.

For a moment Collins hesitated and ran through a plan in his head. He was a slow-thinking man and he laid it out in his mind . . .

Step by step.

One: Kick the door in.

Two: Shoot Flintlock first. Hit hard enough to put him down but not too hard. He'd have to live for two or three hours while the knife did its work.

Three: Kill McPhee.

Four: Time to geld Flintlock, slice by slice. Do it slowly and tease him, torture him, let him know what terrible thing was happening to him.

Five: Piss on Flintlock's dead body, do a happy dance and then get some coffee.

Collins held up his hand. Five fingers. Five steps. He wouldn't forget. It was a good plan. A crackerjack strategy that he knew would work.

But then happy Hamp Collins got his throat cut and it spoiled everything.

 

 

The cut was as thin as a whisper, but deep.

Hamp Collins thought it strange that initially he felt little pain.

But then blood filled his mouth, his breathing choked off and he realized what had happened to him. Luckily for Hamp he was already dying at this point and knew only a few fleeting moments of terror.

O'Hara held him fast and hissed a vision of hell into the gunman's ear.

Hamp tried to scream, but mercifully when the breed let go of him and his body slumped to the ground, he was already dead, his wide, terrified eyes staring into a fiery eternity.

His long black hair plastered to his head and shoulders in tight ringlets, O'Hara stripped Collins of his rifle, gun belt and knife. Then he scalped the dead man and hung the dripping trophy on a pine branch so that the soul of this enemy would not come back to haunt him.

He used Collins's own knife to cut off the gunman's head and then dragged the body deeper into the trees.

After he collected Collins's horse, O'Hara mounted his own paint and rode close to the cabin but remained hidden in darkness. As thunder roared and lightning lit up the land around him the breed chanted his war song, his voice rising and falling in the complex Pawnee cadence.

When the song was over, O'Hara stood in the stirrups and yelled, “Flintlock!”

A few moments passed . . .

The cabin suddenly went dark and the door creaked open.

“Who's there?” Sam Flintlock called into the teeming rain.

“Flintlock! From now on do your damned job!” O'Hara yelled a war cry and kicked his horse into a gallop. As he rode past the cabin door he threw something at Flintlock's feet that bounced once in the mud then rolled.

Taken by surprise Flintlock took a step back into the cabin. He caught an ephemeral glimpse of a rider on a paint horse . . . then only rain-lashed darkness.

“Who was that?” McPhee said.

“I think it was that crazy breed, O'Hara. He threw something.”

Flintlock stepped into the downpour and pushed a round object with the toe of his boot.

Illuminated by a flicker of lightning, Collins's stark, staring upturned face glared at him.

It was unexpected and Flintlock instinctively jerked away.

“What is it?” McPhee said. His voice sounded scared, an octave too high.

“Hamp Collins's head,” Flintlock said. “And it's been scalped.”

From somewhere out in the torn night, Sam Flintlock heard someone's derisive laugh.

O'Hara or old Barnabas?

He couldn't tell.