award-winning author Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff
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Free Summer Reading: Badlands Chapter 22
Sep 9th
CHAPTER 22
Nena grabbed Galen by the hair and stared deeply into his eyes. And though she held it back as much as possible, the tears welled up inside began to flow down her cheeks as she continued to tell the tale from over a lifetime ago when she used to be Alyson Lawton.
“I huddled under a fallen tree and spent the night in the woods, trembling with unbelievable fear, terrified of what was waiting for me out there, terrified of what would find me if I even made a sound.” She swallowed hard, her breath hitching slightly. “And when daybreak came, I had to know if anyone was left. I walked the path back to the settlement in a complete daze. When I got there, my worst fears had been realized. Every single person there was…” her voice trailed off.
“Slaughtered,” Galen whispered as his mind flashed upon the terrible images of the aftermath at Sagebrush.
“Not just slaughtered,” Nena said angrily. She could see it now as clear as if it were yesterday. “Ripped to pieces!”
As Alyson stepped into the clearing where she could see the church the scent in the air had struck her. Into her nostrils flowed the pungent fragrance of decay and death, of blood and rotting flesh. Tentatively, she moved forward step by step, willing herself to continue even though every fiber in her body cried out for her to run screaming back into the woods, as far away from this place as possible.
But continue she did, trying to find someone alive, anyone. In her mind she clung onto this hope.
But all at once she felt that hope shatter inside of her the moment she stumbled upon Father Henri. The priest had been dragged, his legs and head removed. Around his neck was his white collar, bloodied and ragged and still clutched in his cold, dead fingers was his crucifix.
From the massive bite wounds it appeared that the beasts that had attacked the Father had tried to pry the tiny cross from his hands, but it was the one thing Henri had not given up.
There had been others, all the people Alyson grew up with—the women who had helped raise her lay eviscerated, their innards left dragging behind. She turned over body after body, looking for any signs of life, and found none. Some were barely recognizable given what little flesh the coyotes had left behind.
She turned away, only to see the young man.
Karle had been the boy who had found both her and Miles in the woods all those years ago. He had been Odile’s secret boyfriend, a romance they had kept hidden for fear of what their parents would think. The only person who Odile had confided in about her relationship with Karle was Alyson and it had only been recently since they had both come of age that they were willing to reveal their secret love.
Alyson looked down at Karle, his throat slashed so deeply that she was certain his end came quickly as did Odile’s.
At least that’s what Alyson hoped, that they didn’t suffer much, and that somehow they would now be together, forever walking hand in hand into the setting sun.
And as she collapsed and fell to the ground sobbing Alyson felt the wail of inconsolable loss come from the deepest parts of her soul.
I failed, she thought to herself. She had come all the way back here to find Father Henri as Miles had asked her to do.
“Miles,” she whispered. Something had taken control of his body and was killing him from the inside and now without Father Henri to help, Alyson feared the worst for her brother.
I’m all alone, she thought. Her family, her friends, had all been killed.
They all had been murdered by beasts Alyson knew in her heart were creatures of supernatural intent and not beings of God’s making.
And there was a good chance, at least in her mind, that they could possibly come back looking for her.
But they had seen her. She recalled the moment they killed Odile and not so much as even touched her. And by way of the one that had looked back at her before rushing off with the pack toward the settlement, they had acknowledged her. Deep inside Alyson knew that if she chose to run, they could find her if they so wanted.
However, she would still do it. If they were to come for her it would be at her back.
With the palms of her hands she wiped the tears from her eyes and got to her knees. The wind shifted slightly and the smell of death and decay filled her nostrils again. Above, crows began to light in the trees around the clearing and their incessant cawing grew louder to the point of being maddening.
I have to go now, Alyson thought. I can’t watch these birds pick apart my friends for their dinner.
Entering the house of one of the women who had helped take care of her, Alyson found a wicker basket with a handle. From their kitchen she took half a loaf of bread and a towel. On her way out, she saw a waterskin hanging on a nail by the door. She considered it for a moment before taking that as well. Given how light it was, there was no surprise when she removed the cork to find it empty. She would go to fill it and then leave this place forever.
As she approached the well, her mind started playing tricks on her, imagining that as she neared, one of the beasts would spring out from within and attack her. With each step her chest tightened and as she stood at the edge looking down she almost expected to find a pair of those glowing yellow eyes staring back at her.
But all that was there was complete darkness.
Alyson took the wooden bucket and made sure the rope was attached to the handle before dropping it down into the well where it vanished for a brief moment before she heard it splash into the water below.
Wrapping the line around her small hands she began pulling up the rope. The bucket indeed felt full and she strained from the extra weight. She brought in the rope hand over hand the way Father Henri had taught her but with each passing moment the bucket seemed heavier than the last.
Again, she peered over the edge, wondering if the bucket or the line had caught on anything and for a moment she shuddered thinking of the possibility that one of the settlers had tried to escape the coyotes by jumping down the well and the resistance she felt on the line was from their dead weight.
But there was nothing to be seen other than the rope disappearing into the darkness.
Alyson continued pulling up the bucket, pushing the morbid thoughts from her mind while trying to figure out where she would attempt to go. The Father had mentioned another settlement far off to the west but Alyson couldn’t remember which direction that was.
Is it where the sun rises or the sun sets? She wondered and then suddenly she felt the push on her back.
Instantly, she was off her feet and tumbling headfirst into the darkness of the well, falling for what seemed like minutes before crashing down into the water below. Beneath the surface her head smashed against the stone lining the well and as she cried out, her mouth filled with water.
Struggling, she made it to the surface, gasping for breath and coughing from the water that she had painfully sucked into her lungs.
Her head buzzed and her ears rang from the blow and it was moments before her eyes came back into focus.
And then she saw him.
“Miles?” she called out, recognizing him.
Standing more than twenty feet above her, looking down from the edge was her brother. But he made no movement or effort to do anything to help her.
“Miles!” she called out again. Even with the light behind his head and his face in shadow, she could tell it was him, the sibling she’d spent her whole life with.
“They’re all dead,” Miles said.
“Help me, Miles!” Alyson called out, frantically treading in the deep water.
“And they died so that I shall live,” he told her. His voice echoing down upon her, falling as cold as winter rain. “For the selfless sacrifice of their lives helped me survive to fight again.”
“Selfless?” cried Alyson. “They were murdered!”
“They were fulfilling their purpose, dear sister. Why do you think God in all his infinite wisdom chose to put them here?” Miles mocked. “They were like seedlings that had been sown to be reaped at my needing.”
Just then, a horrifying thought came to Alyson at the very same moment Miles verbalized it in his own words.
“And it was you, dear sister, who I asked them to follow in order to find this place. You led them here.”
Tears fell down Alyson’s cheeks as his words cut into her like knives. She knew every bit of it was true.
“I asked them to spare you,” he continued. “I was going to let you live, but I have been badly injured and I fear that it will take one more sacrifice to give me the strength I need to keep going.”
Her breath caught in her throat as she tried to speak. The cold water had begun to numb her arms and legs.
“This is my sacrifice, too, Alyson. For I do love you,” he said and then he was gone.
“Miles!” Alyson whispered as her teeth began to chatter.
The hypothermia was setting in quickly. She could barely kick her legs.
Moments later she could sense the shadow from above and looked up. Once again Miles peered over the edge.
“I don’t want you to be alone down there. I brought you some company,” he called down to her.
From below she could see him lift something over the edge of the well before dropping it down. Momentarily, it blocked the light from above as it fell, splashing violently into the water just next to her causing her to jump back against the wet stone inside of the well.
The object Miles dropped bobbed once before righting itself and in the dim light Alyson could see the bloodied face belonging to the limbless torso floating next to her.
Her sudden shriek filled the well, echoing upwards into the sky where it floated ignored into the heavens.
Again Miles pushed something over the edge and another corpse of a sacrifice victim plummeted down toward her. Gathering her strength, she screamed for him to stop but her pleas were ignored.
Still another body came down and with nowhere to go at the bottom of the well, Alyson could only close her eyes and wait for the impact.
Miles whistled as one by one he gathered up the shredded bodies of those who had been sacrificed in his name and tossed what was left of them down into the well.
Within minutes he couldn’t hear her voice anymore from inside the pitch-black darkness and sometime before nightfall he had neatly disposed of the remains of everyone in the settlement before leaving.
Nena’s eyes were full of anger and what Galen could see were tears welled up inside that she was using all of her will to hold back.
“So you see, if it is that land, the cursed killing fields of Shadow Falls that are calling out to you, summoning you to return, then the only thing you will leave in your wake is death and suffering.”
And with her words, she withdrew a dagger from underneath her cloak and pulled back on Galen’s hair as she held the blade to his throat.
“And there is no way I can allow that to happen again,” she told him.
Galen shut his eyes. At her hands, his deliverance would be swift and merciful. His journey would end here.
But as she brought the knife back to plunge into his throat, the pock-marked man called out frantically.
“Someone’s coming down the road! Someone’s coming down the road!”
And as if it were in the air, Nena froze in sudden fear and looked directly at Galen for he sensed it to.
Miles had found them.
Free Summer Reading: Badlands Chapter 21
Sep 6th
CHAPTER 21
Miles’ body convulsed, his eyes rolling backwards into his skull as he shook.
“Miles!” cried Alyson. “Miles!”
Tears began to stream down her cheeks as his body temperature rose so high his skin was scorching hot to the touch. A choking sound escaped from his mouth and Alyson stuck her fingers inside to keep him from swallowing his tongue.
Over and over she called out his name, but inside Miles’ head his sister’s voice was nowhere to be heard, for he was now quite far away from that plane of existence.
When he opened his eyes, the rain was beating down on him, falling in thick sheets that soaked him instantly to the bone. Miles stood and looked down at the rocky ground upon which he was standing. He gazed down at his arms. They seemed longer, thicker. He squeezed his hands into fists, hearing his joints crackle like dry firewood. They felt stiff, as did all of his body. From the bottom of his peripheral vision, he saw something on his face, just above his lip and quickly tried to brush it away. But what his fingers found where the bristles of whiskers. He reached again, more carefully this time, to find a full moustache under his nose and then a thick beard upon his face.
Instinctively, his hand went toward his hair where he found a soaking wet mop of it hanging just below his shoulder. Though he had no way to see his face with his eyes, his fingertips could feel the creases in his damp skin. He had grown older somehow, the exact amount was a mystery.
Ten years? Twenty years? Inside his head were none of the memories that would allow his mind to fill that gap. It was as if he had only aged physically.
And as he marveled at his own body, he heard neither the footsteps coming up behind him in the pouring rain nor the massive fist that hissed through the air toward the back of his head.
But it was the voice in his mind—Move! Now!—that saved him. Quickly, he bent forward at the waist as the hammer-like blow missed him by less than an inch.
And as Miles twisted around to his left, in the opposite direction from where the fist came, he saw his attacker, the same darkened figure that had approached him inside the killing field of his youth. The beast with the silhouette of a man but eyes that appeared as if all that were behind them were orange flames, like looking through a portal of a furnace door.
The heat that radiated from the dark figure’s body was so intense it caused the rain to turn instantly into sheets of steam coming from his ruddy flesh. And though Miles had moved fast enough to avoid the first blow, he wasn’t so lucky with the second. The other fist of the dark figure crashed into Miles’ chest, hitting him with the force of a boulder and he flew backwards through the air, landing on his neck and shoulders, skidding across the wet and hardened ground until he came to a stop twenty feet away.
An intense pain radiated through his chest where he’d been struck and Miles rushed to catch his breath. As he looked up he could see the dark figure, coming toward him, its body looming as large as an oak tree, its piercing and orange eyes glaring down at him meaning to…
Obliterate me, Miles thought. With each step the hulking dark figure took, the ground literally shook. And as Miles tried to scramble backwards, he felt the cut open on his hand. He held it up and the very knife cut his father had made all those years ago had split again and from inside the wound, as it did before his father’s death, came a blinding light. One growing from a point into a glowing ball.
And again, as it had then, the vision came to Miles, endless images flashing by his eyes as if time were rocketing past him while he was standing still. There was flame and smoke. An Earth scorched. The sky opening. A battle of darkness and light.
And there before him was his father in the moments before his death standing before Miles with the pistol pressed to his temple.
“I’m not the Coyote,” William said “You are. And you will be victorious.”
And with a steady hand, William Lawton pulled the trigger.
“NOOOO!” screamed Miles and from the bloodied cut in his hand came the light emanating brighter than a thousand candles, illuminating the ground they were standing upon as if it were day and not this seemingly endless night.
And as it shone on him, the darkened figure stopped and turned its head away as if struck, but Miles did not notice for he was looking at what was just on the light’s periphery.
Hundreds and hundreds of yellow eyes, deep-set pairs surrounding him in a giant circle. Watching every move. Watching this…
Battle, Miles thought. For that’s what it was. And from the edge of the light came the voices in a cacophony of whispers and instantly Miles understood.
They were the voices of the dead.
And it took no longer than the firing of a single synapse for all the pieces to fall into place in Miles’ mind.
The images of those thousands of Native Americans sacrificing their captives and young, the slaughter of the entire traveling party of the Majestyk including his mother and brother.
Their blood, which had soaked into the ground, called out to him because it was their battle he was being summoned to fight.
Over who controls Death itself, the voices told him.
Death had never been an independent entity but had always served at the whim of its master, taking as few or as many from the mortal plane as the master saw fit. Satiating that hunger only so much as the master needed. And for centuries, the Indians knew the fight for control over the realm of death had fallen between the spirit of the Wolf and the spirit of the Coyote. That every so many decades they would come together to renew their blood feud.
And though Miles was unsure how this fit into the apocalyptic visions his father had suffered from, he was certain they indeed did and what was to become of him on this battleground in the pouring rain would potentially be another step towards the end of mankind.
The blinding light faded from his hand, plunging the yellow-eyed observers back into eternal night and the darkened figure came toward Miles once again.
“I’m the Coyote. I will be victorious,” he said in a whisper under his breath, feeling the ground shake with each coming step of The Wolf.
“Miles! Miles!” Alyson called out as she cradled Miles’ seemingly lifeless body and sobbed.
And suddenly she saw it.
On the ground, no more than a foot away, was the eye of their father which Miles kept with him at all times. The twin to the one that she shunned because she could see what was within the cursed orb.
And as she reached down and closed her fingers around it, the feeling in her chest was like the massive eruption of a clap of thunder. Immediately she could feel the energy coming from his body, like balls of heat lightning erupting all around them. Tremors began in Miles’ legs, turning from spasm to fullblown shakes but Alyson held his body as tightly as possible for fear that he would hurt himself.
“Miles!” she called again, but he seemed not to hear her voice at all.
However, though his mind and spirit were far away on a distant plane, he was aware of her presence even as the darkened figure approached. And he knew she would be his only chance. Using all of his concentration, he was able to summon his body and all at once he broke from Alyson’s grip and sat bolt upright, his eyeballs rolled back showing nothing but shock white.
And from within his throat came his voice as if telegraphed to this location.
“Take the eye to Father Henri. Run!” Miles spoke before his body fell completely limp again.
And run she did, through the woods along the pathways that darkened before her as the sun slipped from the sky.
She ran until it felt like her heart would explode and each breath seared her lungs, and still she was too far away from the settlement to believe she could reach it in time. As her legs started to cramp, she could feel the presence of something behind her, trailing not too far behind in the woods.
Something that Alyson knew had hungry, sharp teeth.
Even as the pain grew inside her chest and in her legs, she kept moving.
It burns, she thought, quickly acknowledging it would be much worse if whatever was following on her heels actually caught up to her.
Run! Don’t stop! Her mind cried out as she thought of her brother Miles and the danger he had put himself into.
And up ahead there was a rustling in the woods and Alyson stopped dead in her tracks.
Surrounded, she thought, trying to figure out if there was a chance to outrun whatever was out there. And just then, stepping out where she could be seen, was a familiar figure.
“Odile!” Alyson shrieked, running toward her friend. But as Odile saw her she froze.
Behind Alyson, she could clearly see the presence looming behind the little girl.
And the literally hundreds of yellow eyes gleaming in the darkness rushing toward her.
The fear overcame Odile, no longer could her brain process that it was Alyson standing in front of her needing help, the same dear friend who she had run into the woods to find. Instead all that remained was the most primal urge to flee as she turned on her heels.
But the charging creatures came swiftly. The coyotes emerged from the woods, rushing past Alyson as if she was a rock in the middle of a stream, and they descended upon Odile.
There was no scream as their teeth quickly silenced her and flayed the flesh from Odile’s body.
As a shriek arose in Alyson’s throat, she cupped both hands over her mouth for fear that the beasts would turn their attention towards her. But as quickly as they came, the coyotes were gone into the woods at a run, leaving behind practically nothing of Odile other than bloodied bone, hair and gristle.
And as the murderous beasts fled, the last to leave turned back and looked at Alyson, meeting her gaze with its yellow eyes before following the rest of the pack into the woods.
Oh no, thought Alyson with great horror. They’re heading toward the settlement.
Miles lay beaten with his head over the edge of a crack in the earth, a crevasse going down into a bottomless void. The heel of the Wolf pressed down on his throat, choking the very life out of him. Blood dripped from the corner of his mouth, down his cheek, falling into the pit and there was nothing he could do to stop his impending death.
Until a feeling arose inside his body, an energy welling up inside that hit him like a jolt of electricity. All at once, Miles felt the strength come back into his arms as he grabbed the Wolf’s foot with both hands and reveled in the surprise on the face of his attacker.
As he sat at the one table in his room, lit only by a single candle, Father Henri paged through his thumbworn copy of the Bible. Though not anything he was willing to share with the others, he had been sowing the seeds of concern for longer now than he could remember. He had first felt it when they had arrived here and then more so as it increased dramatically upon the unexpected arrival of the boy and his sister some seven years ago.
He had never expected to live out his days with a grey beard until old age took him, but over the past few hours Father Henri felt that what he ultimately feared was finally upon him, catching him very unprepared. He had to warn the others immediately, but how do you provision someone for something like this?
And there, as he turned the page, he found it: Revelation 18:08
Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.
Suddenly he felt a chill run through his entire body. He closed the book and laid it before him. Coming from the woods outside was the pounding of hundreds of feet getting closer
As he arose, he took his crucifix from around his neck and kissed it before opening the door. Outside, he could see them rushing toward him, toward the settlement, their yellow eyes and sharp teeth visible in the moonlight.
And in the air it was there growing louder, the last sound he would ever hear as they bore down on him, the sound of countless voices hushed into a whisper.
We shall live in His house…
We shall live in His name…
Free Summer Reading: Badlands Chapter 20
Sep 2nd

CHAPTER 20
Miles stood at the edge of the settlement for hours, staring into the woods until his eyes went vacant and glassy. What he told nobody was that he was listening as the woods talked to him. Not a single person questioned the strange behavior. Miles had done the same thing nearly every day for seven years, ever since he had arrived here with Alyson.
Nearly everyone paid no mind to Miles because of the circumstances which had brought him here—the brutal death of his family and the four dozen members of their traveling party. Nonetheless it did not prevent most others in the settlement to consider Miles to be a bit strange. When called upon, Miles was a hard worker, often toiling in the vegetable fields for hours without a single complaint, but it was when they were in his company that many spoke in hushed voices that there was something about him that essentially gave them the creeps.
One man remarked to his wife that Miles had cried once for his slain parents, the day he arrived, but never did again afterwards.
In fact Miles had shunned closeness with anyone at the settlement, including Father Henri who made every attempt to be a surrogate father to the boy. Miles, however, chose to be distant, even refusing to learn the native language of his hosts. In this way he ensured that the only ones there who could communicate with him were Father Henri and his now nearly eight year-old sister Alyson.
And now that Miles had reached the age of seventeen, he had grown into a strapping young man and when he chose to go off into the woods for days by himself, nobody stopped him.
On these occasions, Father Henri would sit at night, sipping wine with a watchful eye to the woods for Miles’ return. Though he was unsure what the boy was doing, he was concerned. He had imagined on several occasions that Miles had been journeying back through the woods to the scene of the massacre. And though he himself had not ever gone, it was the day after Miles arrived that a small party of the men from the settlement made the trek to the spot Miles described in an attempt to find any other survivors.
What they had found were bodies torn to bits and a field full of four-legged and winged scavengers eager to fill their bellies with the flesh of the dead.
The clouds of blowflies that had accumulated and the decay of the corpses had made it difficult in some cases to tell man from woman. As they went from wagon to wagon the results were the same, appearing just as Miles had described.
They had even found the single victim who had died not by animal attack but by his own hand. Maggots crawled from the self-inflicted head wound and wriggled through the empty eye sockets in his skull.
Between them, the men could not decide if this one man had been lucky to take his own life or a coward for not trying to save the others.
Later they returned to the settlement and reported their findings to Father Henri. The priest asked the three men to never speak of what they had seen, certainly not to Miles. They all agreed it best be left to fade into memory.
But fade it did not, Father Henri feared. The strange boy he had partially raised was returning time and again to somehow commune with the spirits that the priest suspected haunted the boy to this day.
And even if he had known he had been even partially right, Father Henri still would not have been able to do anything to stop what was about to happen.
Once again, Miles stepped through the thicket and walked across the overgrown grass to the remains of his parents’ wagon. The seasons had ravaged it until all that remained was a rusted and rotted hulk sitting in the tall weeds.
There was no illusion in Miles’ mind. He looked out at the skeletal remains of the other wagons in the Majestyk’s party and did not see the vibrant faces that rode them when they were almost new. He saw the wrecks for what they were, splintered remnants of the past that would continue to fade with time until they were nothing but dust.
There was no nostalgia for this place, none whatsoever, for it was not the memories that brought Miles here, but the blood in the ground that had given it power. The bones of the dead had long since been dragged away, the flesh consumed but the blood of the innocent that had been spilled here in sacrifice acted like a magnet to Miles’ soul.
And over the years, as he grew older, that pull to this land grew stronger until it became the ever-consuming force of his life.
The face he wore around Father Henri and the others was a mask. They had proven very useful during a period of time when he had needed the food and shelter they could provide, but that time was soon coming to an end. He had chosen early on to not develop close relationships with those who he was certain would not live long enough to warrant the necessity.
And as dusk began to set, he stood in the field and could only imagine the thousands of lives before his family’s that had been taken here going back hundreds of years. People who had been held down onto the ground while their still beating hearts were carved out of their chests by high priests wielding razor sharp obsidian knives. Those who had been buried and burned alive, including children. The young were especially valued as sacrifices because they were thought to be pure and unspoiled and it was thought that the more they cried and wailed during their slow torturous death, the better the omen.
From his pocket he took his father’s kerchief, now slightly yellowed and wrinkled from age. What he had kept inside however, seemed as pristine as the day he’d obtained it. Gently, he picked up the single eye of his father, the one he had kept. He had given the second one to Alyson, who had shunned it for reasons Miles still did not understand.
He gazed into the eye, willing his mind to enter into the same visual pathways enchanted in the orb, to see that which his father had seen during the years preceding the journey to the new world—the same visions, Miles was convinced, contained the keys to unlock not only his destiny but that of every man, woman and child in the mortal world.
But hard as he tried, he could not bring forth the visions from the long-dead eye. The images his father had seen, that he knew his sister Alyson had seen as well, were eluding him now as they had his entire life. Frustrated, he wrapped his fingers around the eye and took a deep breath. Again he pulled every ounce of inner strength from within his body until his arms shook and his legs caved under him. Miles fell, the eye slipping from his hands onto the ground just inches away from where he lay, breathing heavily, his heart pounding with furious intensity inside his chest.
And it was there that he sobbed in the grass. The draw of this land was so great, like a giant magnet pulling upon every cell inside his body but the one thing that he felt lay behind destiny’s door continued to elude him. Inside his father’s eye was the portent of what was to come, the very thing he sacrificed his family and the families of those he brought with him on the Majestyk.
With the knife he had used all those years ago to remove those eyes from his dead father’s skull, the same knife that his father had used on him to slit the palm of his hand, Miles drew a pentagram in the dirt and placed himself inside. Again he focused his mind on the orb until the ache in his brain pounded so hard it forced him to his knees. There he stayed with his head hung low.
There had never been a moment in Miles; life quite like this, one where the feeling of utter failure washed over him with such totality.
“I’ve failed you,” he spoke out loud. Cupped in his hands, the eye rolled to its side so that only the veiny backside pointed toward Miles.
“Why do you cry?” the voice asked, startling Miles. He looked up. Silhouetted against the setting sun was the figure of what appeared to be a man coming toward him.
In the woods, Alyson carried a basket of freshly washed laundry as she walked the path back from the creek toward the settlement. Behind her rose the tuneful voice of Odile, the French girl who had found both her and Miles seven years ago in the woods. Over the years Alyson and Odile had become close friends. It was Odile who had taught Alyson her native language, though Miles did his best to make sure she learned her fair share of English, and it was Alyson whom Odile had grown to confide in and visa versa.
From Odile’s mouth came an old folk song, one about the plight of a washerwoman who ran off with a man who didn’t love her and Alyson began to laugh.
But no sooner did she start than her chuckle caught in her throat.
Miles is in danger! Go! Now! A voice in her head told her.
Before she could give it any thought she let the basket of clean wash fall to the ground and was running into the woods.
“Alyson!” Odile called after her, a little bit confused and very much concerned.
As the figure approached, Miles felt a sense of utter fear in the pit of his stomach unlike anything else he’d felt since that night his father dragged him away from the camp and into the woods.
The night of his trancendence, he often thought of it in his mind. He had never forgotten the feeling of being trapped inside the pentagram while his father chanted.
But now he again faced the unknown.
In the last seven years the voices, the ones that spoke to him from the woods, always seemed to guide him, to assure him that he would soon take his place in the changing of the world.
And as he remained frozen, on his knees, those very same voices seemed to all at once abandon him.
As did his breath for the air around him suddenly turned dry and hot, pushing toward him as if a furnace door had just been opened in his face. Each attempt Miles made to inhale seemed to burn his throat and nostrils, and it became quickly apparent that with each step the darkened figure took, the heated air Miles was breathing in was radiating from the dark figure’s body.
Miles tried to get up but his legs felt weak and useless. And suddenly, his hands began to shake as the dark figure stood over him, blocking out all the light from the sky.
“Do you kneel before me out of respect? Or do you kneel out of fear?” The figure spoke as it reached down for Miles.
Alyson ran as hard as she could until it felt as if her heart would explode. The path toward the field she had left behind as a baby seemed to open up for her guiding her way. Though she had only ventured back here once in the intervening years, it was as if something were pulling her to her brother’s side.
And as she broke through the woods into the clearing, she could see the overgrown patches of weeds that now mostly hid the skeletal remains of the rotting wooden wagons that had been left behind. But as her eyes darted back and forth, Miles was nowhere to be seen.
But she could sense him. He was here. She pushed through the weeds, feeling his presence stronger and stronger until she found him, lying bleeding and badly hurt on the ground.
“Miles!” she cried out as she went to him, pulling him to her chest to comfort him. “Who did this?”
It was hard for Miles to answer for at first he could not speak and when he finally could what came out of his mouth was a warning.
“He’s here,” Miles revealed. “The Wolf.”
Free Summer Reading: Badlands Chapter 19
Aug 30th
CHAPTER 19
I don’t believe you, screamed Galen’s mind. He looked up into Nena’s face, searching with every hope on earth that this news just wasn’t possible. His mind ran through any memory, any single thought his brain could muster to find some kind of recollection of her, of a sister, of a family, but there was nothing, not even a glimmer. He had been lied to by countless charlatans, con men and crooks looking to rook him—men and women like the Gypsy Crone who would mislead their own mothers if it meant getting what they wanted. He’d ducked their oily advances time and again based upon his intuition. However, it was impossible for Galen to admit that there wasn’t a part of him hidden deep down inside his soul that believed her.
“It’s true,” Nena told him. “You are my brother and you left us.” She held the petrified eye of William Lawton up to Galen’s face. “You have witnessed that which our father saw. Death, destruction for many. The most devastating war this world has ever seen. It is coming. And your arrival can only mean a great many wheels are in motion.”
“If I am your departed brother then why do you imprison me? Why do you whip me as if I am your mortal enemy?”
“Because, Dear Thomas, in whatever form you inhabit currently, you do not represent my brother. You may have been him at one time, but now you are much more dangerous.
“How am I a danger?” Galen croaked.
“Because there is absolutely no chance that brother Miles does not know about you being alive and you being here. What he intends to use you for is most likely something which I, and the rest of the Magus, should fear because your sudden arrival here means it has started again.”
“He doesn’t know,” the pock-marked man said and Galen’s inner reaction to hearing the man’s voice was of anger. If there was any way out of this he promised himself he would kill the bastard.
“Ah, I sense rage,” Nena said holding out her hand, palm facing toward Galen. “That is a good thing, but I do fear the part of you that is any use to me is too far buried inside the man who has become nothing but a killer.”
Momentarily, she lowered the whip, her hand relaxing.
“I know where you are headed. It’s calling to you. What do you know about the town of Shadow Falls?” she asked.
“Shadow… Falls?” he responded, his mind drifting. That had to be it, he thought. Galen realized Nena’s utterance had been the first time he had even heard the name of the place he’d seen so clearly in his mind all these many weeks. “What can you tell me?” he finally inquired.
He had been walking for close to an hour, carrying Alyson in his arms. Miles cursed the souls of those who made this happen.
Following several feet behind him was Elsibeth, the seven year-old daughter of one of the other families who had come aboard the Majestyk. Along with himself and Alyson, she was the only other survivor of the attack.
“Why?” she cried out as she sobbed. Elsibeth was inconsolable. Her parents had been eviscerated in front of her—torn apart before her very eyes. It had taken Miles hours of begging to get Elsibeth to leave the scene of the massacre. She had refused. Clutching hopelessly to her mother’s severed torso, clinging to her bosom as if she were just an infant.
Finally, he convinced Elsibeth to leave when he told her he was going without her, and she would be forced to stay here all night, all alone. Finally she agreed and almost immediately he regretted his choice to save her life.
And now, with the non-stop crying, Miles had begun to wish the predators had taken her as well for he was afraid she would upset baby Alyson.
“How much further?” whined Elsibeth as Miles continued to trudge west in the path of the setting sun.
“I don’t know,” he grumbled.
“Speak up,” mewed Elsibeth “I can’t hear-”
“I said I don’t bloody well know!” he turned and screamed. The sudden shriek of his voice caused Alyson to begin wailing and scared Elsibeth enough to make her burst into a brand new salvo of tears.
“Now look what you’ve done!” shouted Miles as he put Alyson down and tried to get her to stop bawling.
“Shhhh, shhhh. There, there…” he whispered into his sister’s face. “Don’t cry.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Elsibeth sobbed.
Miles looked up at her with her red puffy eyes from crying all day. He thought of how terrified she must have been while the attacking beasts circled her parents’ wagon and dragged them out with their dripping fangs.
And as he gazed at Elsibeth’s face he realized there had been a terrible mistake.
Her survival of the attack should not have happened, the voice in his head told him. It’s wrong. She had no part in what was to come and would only stand in the way. Alyson began to bawl louder and Miles started to wonder how he was going to feed her.
“I want to go home!” Elsibeth cried out. “I don’t want to go any further.” She plopped down on the ground and sat there crying.
It’s wrong… the voice told him. She doesn’t belong here. In our house. In our name.
“It’s going to be okay,” Miles told Elsibeth as he approached her. “I promise.”
The reach of his hands across her neck surprised Elsibeth but he had caught her between sobs so there was no air in her lungs for her to cry out. He pushed her onto the ground, squeezing tighter. Elsibeth’s mouth gaped like that of a dying fish. Her arms flailed wildly as her brain was running out of oxygen.
All around him the sounds of the woods faded away into silence. Using his thumbs, Miles applied pressure on her windpipe, feeling it crush under his fingers. Her small body bucked once, then again, and afterwards Miles could feel Elsibeth fading away. Even as her movement stopped and her gaze glassed over in a frozen stare, he held onto her neck for several more minutes until he was certain she was dead.
Very good, the voice in his head told him. Very good indeed.
And with a whoosh the sound all around him rushed back in like a crashing tide and Alyson’s braying tears cut through the air like a blade.
Miles turned to her, the small bundle of life, helpless in this world. She would be his responsibility and he resented it. There was already too much to do without the burden of a baby to deal with.
He looked down at his hands. The same ones he had just used to kill the only other person left from the Majestyk other than himself and his sister.
His hands were rock steady. He was prepared to use them for whatever was needed to accomplish his intended goals.
And with his hands he picked up baby Alyson and cradled her against his chest.
“There, there. There, there,” and slowly he rocked her until she fell back into a slumber.
Once he was sure she was sleeping, Miles gently put her down on the ground. He dragged Elsibeth away and covered her body up with sticks and leaves then went back for his sleeping sister.
And as he picked up Alyson once again and stroked her sleeping face, he heard footfalls coming toward him in the woods from the same direction he’d just come from. From where he’d taken Elsibeth’s body.
He turned to see them emerge from woods toward him. A young man holding hands with a young woman, their clothes simple and plain. To Miles they looked like farmers. As they looked up, they seemed as surprised to see him as he was to see them and they both exclaimed out loud in a language he didn’t understand.
French, Miles thought.
“Comment allez vous?” the young woman asked, her voice sounding full of concern.
Miles shook his head and, as if on cue, began bawling. His crying startled baby Alyson because she began bawling as well. “I don’t understand you,” Miles sobbed through his very convincing crocodile tears.
“Anglais,” the young French man said to the girl, motioning toward miles.
“Oui,” she responded, then whispered something to him, to which he nodded before swiftly heading back into the thick woods.
The French girl then held out her hand to Miles. “Allez,”she invited him.
The settlement had been no more than an hour’s walk and when baby Alyson had grown heavy, the French girl took her and carried her in her arms, all the while singing softly to her in a hushed and soothing voice.
Once they arrived, the French girl gave Alyson back to Miles. “Arretez vou,” she told him, motioning with her palm out for him to wait. They stood outside what Miles could tell was obviously some kind of a church.
Moments after going inside, she came back out with a man. The familiar collar around his neck identified him immediately as a man of the cloth.
“I am Father Henri,” he said to Miles in reasonably clear English.
Miles had already anticipated his next move. He wrapped his arms around Father Henri’s neck and burst into tears.
“They came out from the woods and killed everybody!” he shrieked. And judging from Father Henri’s horror-stricken face the priest completely understood the significance of it.
The French priest took the children inside the humble wooden church and as Miles entered he saw over his shoulder how the French boy had arrived and how he seemed to pretend not to notice the French girl was there also.
You two have a secret, Miles thought. Very interesting. Within minutes other women from the settlement had arrived at the Church, bringing food and blankets for the children, hovering over Miles and Alyson with bowls of warm soup, fresh bread and milk. Chattering away incessantly in French, they stroked his hair and thankfully, due to the language barrier, Miles was spared from having to repeat the lie time and again. Father Henri was the only one Miles could find who was conversant in English.
It was much later, in the church’s one-windowed back room, as the good priest was tucking Miles into a fresh straw bed that he explained.
“I attended seminary in England,” he explained. “I have been lucky in my lifetime to see many beautiful places. Africa, the Far East. I came here to this New World because I was called by a higher purpose. Maybe you and your sister were, too.”
He nodded toward Alyson who slept soundly in a wooden box that had been fashioned into a crib. Father Henri patted Miles’ head and gave the kind of smile, one full of solace, that only a priest could give. He rose, taking the room’s one candle with him, but paused before leaving to look back at Miles.
“Although it may not seem so now, maybe fate has big plans for you.”
And as Father Henri shut the door, Miles got up and tiptoed across the mostly darkened room to the makeshift crib where Alyson was sleeping. He reached down with both hands and pulled the blanket up to her neck and his touch, a familiar one for a change, must have woken her up. Her eyes opened to look at Miles and she cooed softly as he stroked her cheek with his finger.
From his own pocket came a kerchief, one monogrammed with his father’s initials. He unfolded the small bundle to reveal the eyeballs that had, until recently, belonged to his father—the ones that he personally removed.
Delicately he picked up one of the still sticky orbs between his thumb and forefinger and held it up to his sleeping sister.
“What do you see? Alyson? What do you see?” he quietly asked. “Because if the visions within are the same things that Father saw, I’m afraid the world will soon be coming to a most difficult and violent end and I believe you and I will play some kind of part in allowing it to happen.”
Free Summer Reading: Badlands – Chapter 18
Aug 26th
PART 3
CHAPTER 18
She was swept up in the air, her body as limp as a rag doll. Even in the dead of night he could see it all perfectly. Her bare feet swinging back and forth slightly, toes pointed downward toward the Majestyk’s wooden deck. He kept waiting for her to open her eyes, to see the peril in front of her, but it never happened as she was lifted higher until the man holding Anne Walsh tipped her over the starboard side rail where she fell wordlessly and was swallowed whole by the churning black waves of the Atlantic Ocean.
The deed was done. As her body tumbled lifelessly into the abyss the man in the frock coat turned without so much as spotting him.
Galen came to just as the sunrise brought with it the sound of birds in flight, taking off toward the sky on their way to warmer climes. One, a single black crow had stayed behind and cawed angrily at Galen from the top of a nearby tree. From which direction Galen was not sure for this marked his third dawn in the pillory and he was unable to raise his head due to the agonizing strain that being confined in this posture had caused on his neck.
One thing for sure was Galen had been certain that crow was the same that had shown up yesterday and sat in the trees incessantly mocking him and constantly drawing closer. The bird, Galen reckoned, had already identified him as a trapped and tasty morsel and was sitting back just biding its time until Galen died and it could sup on his body.
Or perhaps if it grew impatient enough it would realize its prey was powerless to fight back and would swoop down to greedily take Galen’s eyes.
In a few hours the boy would arrive with the bucket to splash water in Galen’s face and place a palmful of wet gruel into his open mouth. The bucket boy had no fear of Galen trying to bite off his fingertips in the process for Galen was too weak to put up any kind of fight. If they had intended to squelch his bravado then they had done so quite effectively. He was currently using whatever physical strength he had left to keep himself on his feet no matter how much the muscles in his legs burned and cried out for relief. If they were to give out, his body weight against the wooden stock would surely strangle him. And with the distinct possibility that his subsequent death would only be temporary, such a hellish scenario could indeed repeat itself over and over again without end.
While his body fought desperately to remain upright, Galen’s mind battled its own demons. When darkness fell, the nightmarish visions would creep in to haunt him. He struggled to keep his eyes open, to overcome the exhaustion of it all but even so they came in the form some horrible waking dream he could not escape. His mind vacillated between moments of mental twilight and complete delirium. It was here the scene of the burning church replayed itself again and again—the screams and helpless cries.
Quickly they moved, the ones still alive. Feet shuffling down the rickety steps, their panicked voices muffled by hands and sleeves over their mouths to block the smoke from their lungs.
“Hurry!” Galen yelled and blindly they followed his every word and threw themselves into the dark, round hole in the ground desperately trying a last ditch escape from the fate that awaited in the conflagration upstairs. In their terrified voices they screamed as their bodies thudded against each other, the thick wet sounds of flesh on bone and bone on rock as they hit bottom.
That sound, Galen’s mind cried because his voice could not. That maddening sound!
Men and women falling down a well turned into the image of the body of Anne Walsh tumbling into the ocean and the man in the frock coat, his face completely visible.
But this time, it seemed as if the gaze of this very man lingered on him longer than it had in any of his other visions. This time it stared knowingly back into Galen’s eyes showing a very distinct glimmer of recognition until the vision faded into nothingness.
And as Galen’s mind cried for the images appearing before him to stop, the scene faded back into a dusty sun-beaten haze. Dozens of ruddy, red faces peered up at him as he stood above them on the gallows, their voices calling out for his neck. And in the moment the noose was being slipped over his head he saw the man standing unnoticed among the angry crowd. The man with the remains of two burnt wings protruding from his back. And Galen could only watch the man’s lips silently move but it was the man’s eyes, his dark and piercing eyes that bore into Galen’s brain, drawing the two of them together. He could see those eyes as he saw them before, turning toward him and now they were back in the church as the man cackled “Brother Thomas, do something!”
And with a whoosh, again it was all gone—the fire, the church and once more he was on the deck of the Majestyk
“Father?” Galen’s voice croaked out loud.
But there was no answer. Instead, as he blinked, he found himself again standing on the gallows with the rope around his neck, the cheering faces of Sagebrush’s poor calling out for his death.
“Father?” he asked again. But as the trapdoor opened under his feet and his head jerked upwards, this time he was vaulted back into consciousness by way of someone holding a handful of his hair.
Galen wanted to cry out but couldn’t for his mind was still trying to process the face of the hooded woman leaning forward to stare directly into his eyes. Nena cocked her head at Galen trying to read his face. Here, in the daylight, he could finally make out her pupils, which appeared like two cut pieces of raw jade.
“What did you see?” she asked.
Galen let out no answer save for a low grunt.
“I asked what did you see?” Nena bellowed.
Again Galen held his tongue, which angered Nena to the point of violence. She yanked hard on the handful of hair again, hard enough to pull a good portion of it out by the roots.
“Let him out,” she hissed.
The pock-marked man produced a set of iron keys on a ring. He opened the pillory lock and, with a grunt, lifted the heavy upper half of the stock off its frame. Immediately, Galen fell backward, slipping through the neck and wrist cutouts before collapsing on the ground.
As he lay there he could smell the reek coming from him. Nena did too because she turned her head away from him and ordered bucket boy to douse him with water from head to toe. The splash caught Galen as he gasped for air and he inhaled it into his lungs and began coughing.
I’m going to drown on bare land, he thought. The irony. He laughed and a chortle escaped his mouth.
“What is so funny?” demanded Nena.
Galen couldn’t help himself; that which started as an innocuous slip had now grown into full gales of laughter.
“I said what is so funny?” Nena roared this time, obviously losing patience.
Enraged, the man with the pock-marked face grabbed the wooden bucket from the boy’s hand and, with one swing, smashed it over Galen’s head. The boy turned his head as to not be hit with flying pieces of his former vessel.
“Shut yer goddamned mouth!” he shouted down at Galen who had been dazed and nearly knocked unconscious by the blow.
Galen groaned and tried to reach up to touch his head but his arms were so weakened by his confinement that even lifting them was impossible. Days locked in the pillory made his limbs feel as if they were now encased in stone.
All that was left of the bucket in the pock-marked man’s grip was the steel handle and he tossed that aside and grabbed Galen by one of his arms and began dragging him across the grass. Galen tried to cry out in agony as it felt as if his arm would be dislocated from its socket but when he looked up he saw he was being dragged to a circle of about two dozen men. The circle opened and the men parted to allow them inside and immediately Galen spotted the pole, which had been erected in the ground. Galen’s eyes opened wide in horror as he thought of what they had done to Maria and weakly he tried to fight and pull away. Stubbornly, he dug his heels into the dirt refusing to be moved. In his mind, he willed for his physical strength to return and with one swift movement, pulled away from his surprised captor.
Get up, dammit, his mind screamed at him and as he could feel his legs start to respond, dozens of hands were on him. The men from the circle had descended upon Galen and were pulling him upwards toward the pole. In moments he was pinned as one man lashed his hands to the pole above his head and another used a knife to cut his clothes away and stripped him naked.
“Burn them,” Nena motioned toward Galen’s stinking and fetid shirt and pants. Clothes that originally belonged to Maria’s dead husband but were now ruined by Galen’s blood, sweat and waste from being confined in them.
Galen turned his head toward Nena but the cut that had been opened up over his left eye by the bucket was oozing blood and he could not see through it.
She has something in her hand, he thought. What is it? A torch?
He tried to squint but could not make it out through his clouded vision. But as she got closer and raised her hand Galen could clearly see the whip.
Crack! The leather sounded as the lash snapped against Galen’s chest forcing his pent-up scream to birth itself from his upturned mouth.
Before the sound of Galen’s wail could die down, Nena’s whip hissed through the air, cutting a line across Galen’s stomach so deep that crimson droplets surfaced from the now raised and reddened flesh.
Again Galen screamed into the air, his head arching back straining against the veins bulging in his neck. From Nena’s other hand came something and she shoved it in Galen’s face. Flinching, he turned away. But something, a force beyond his control, pulled his gaze toward it again. Through the blood covering his vision he could see it and recoiled in horror.
In Nena’s hand was the eye, the same cursed thing he had left behind after fleeing Kansas City. But as she held it up to his face, Galen could see it was different. Whereas the eye he had killed the Gypsy Crone for was perfectly preserved, the one in Nena’s hand appeared to be chipped and yellowed with age.
He was pulled into the singular gaze of the eyeball and once more his mind flashed to a vision. One of columns of demons marching up from the depths of the abyss, their legions clashing headlong with winged warrior angels. The scorched earth left only as a scarred battlefield.
The vision was torn from his mind as Nena pulled away the eye.
“What did you see?” she demanded. As Galen’s own gaze fell to the ground, she seemed to register the answer she was looking for.
“Where did you get that evil thing?” grunted Galen weakly.
“This eye, and its twin, were carved out of the skull of my father after he put a bullet in his skull and left us in the woods to die. This eye belonged to William Lawton for I began life as his daughter Alyson and if I am not mistaken, you are my older brother Thomas.”
Free Summer Reading: Badlands – Chapter 17
Aug 23rd
Previous chapters of Badlands can be found here
CHAPTER 17

Cyril’s head nodded forward. He had been on the horse for nearly twelve hours straight and time and again he jarred himself awake. It was obvious the nag was exhausted as well but Cyril pushed the beast, not caring if he killed it in the process. He was so close he could feel it. It had been four days since he’d left the town of Sagebrush, the air so thick with the reek of death that each breath choked his lungs. Everywhere he looked there were bodies, weeks dead, mostly picked clean, their sun-bleached bones laying in disarray where the scavengers had tossed them about.
The bodies left inside were a different story though. Using the heel of his boot, Cyril had kicked in the door to the town’s one hotel. Through the haze of dust he’d stirred up, he found them, the family of four huddled in the corner of the small dining area. They had been spared the scavengers by virtue of the four walls that had become their tomb, but the maggots had descended on them in force. The wriggling white shroud covering them flowed across their bodies like liquid, crawling in and out of their mouths and eye sockets with gleeful abandon as they feasted upon what was left of the rotting corpses of the man, his wife and two children still huddled in the fearful pose in which they’d been killed. Cyril could imagine their death, the wonderful moment in which the coyotes sent on their mission of vengeance had struck these folks down, tearing at their soft throats and pleading eyes.
Cyril had wrapped a kerchief soaked in a mix of water and camphor around his face to keep out the heavy odor of death as he went to the jail where they had kept Galen, first as a condemned prisoner, then later as a hanged man laying with a broken neck on the hard and dirt-packed floor. Inside, Cyril could feel Galen’s presence in the room but then stopped.
He cocked his head. There was something else. The presence of someone, no, something else that had been in the cell as well.
He closed his eyes. There was no doubt of the existence of the second being Cyril felt in the room because he could sense… fear.
Fear that could not have come from Galen due to the fact that there was no such self awareness in Altos to warrant such an emotion. Whatever the second being had been, it had come in haste and left no more than a trace of its presence. Cyril squeezed his eyes tight and tried to get a closer bead on it. He stood silently in the still air, arms outstretched to the sides, palms facing upward and willed it to happen, but could not get a clear image to coalesce in his mind. After several attempts, Cyril gave up and shut the cell door behind him as he left.
There was indeed something different about him now. Before he’d been as sensitive to such things as a dry sponge to water but now he felt as if his ability had diminished since he’d left his post at Fort Jones. The incident there had left him…
“Stop it,” he muttered to himself. The mere thought of it brought the memory of cordite to his nostrils and Cyril recoiled from it.
“Get a fucking grip,” he chided himself. But his hands were shaking. Once his work was done with Altos, he promised himself that those back in his old regiment would get the surprise of their lives when he returned.
He now looked around the deserted town.
It was this place, he thought, that was causing this temporary shift from control to a borderline insanity. This land was cursed. This town had been done a favor by its annihilation. That he was sure of.
Back at the hotel, Cyril refilled his provisions then went about setting the town aflame. With a torch in hand and several rag-stuffed bottles of whiskey liberated from one of Sagebrush’s corpse-filled saloons, Cyril began the process of returning the town back to the earth.
In less than one hour the deed had been accomplished, and as Cyril stood outside the burning schoolhouse watching his work, he fell to his knees on the ground in front of the fire and felt the heat on his face. By nightfall the dozen wooden structures that had made up this small town were little more than embers that would in short time be swallowed up by the Texas sand.
Cyril knew the direction Galen was headed. He could also sense how the horse he was riding was grateful to be leaving as well given how much looser its gait had become since exiting the town’s boundaries. The animal had been so tight, Cyril reckoned, he could have stuck a lump of coal up its ass and within moments pulled out a diamond. There was little doubt the ghosts of Sagebrush had lingered heavily in the Texas air, but Cyril knew better than to be afraid of such things. Ghosts, he knew, could not harm you; only trick you into harming yourself.
There was little about the other world that frightened Cyril. He had given himself to the powers that he served.
No, that wasn’t quite right, he thought.
He had been taken by the powers he served. There was nothing voluntary about it. He had been killed in the woods and his bones had been left to rot. He himself was a ghost by all manners of definition.
But that was not true, he thought. He was real. He was flesh and blood. He was…
Being followed.
The trail out of town had been deserted; it had been only him, the horse and dirt and rock for as far as the eye could see. But there seemed to be something else. A feeling the solitude was being broken by another being. The hairs on the back of Cyril’s hand stood up. There was a sense of something lurking at the very edge of his vision, but when he turned back, there was only the empty trail behind him. His hunter’s instinct was being piqued. It was a feeling prickling the back of his neck but he dared not look again so soon for fear of appearing aware of what it was that was watching him. Still, as Cyril rode, he could feel a pair of eyes on him, cold and dead like slime on a pond. Whatever was following was getting closer, to the point where Cyril started to believe it was almost breathing down his back.
Slowly he cocked his head, trying to catch any sound only to find there was none whatsoever, save for his own breathing. Even the light breeze blew silently past.
Ghosts, Cyril thought again. Wisps of things unseen that dared not appear before him. The air everywhere you went was full of them. Millennias worth of spirits of the dead, hiding in walls and between dark shadows at night. This plane belonged to those who walked the ether between this world and the next, unaware of their own banishment. Cyril forced his eyes into a squint to see them, like dust floating forgotten in the air, the countless dregs of the departed appeared in their indistinct forms as tricks of light or haze. Those just beyond the mortal world could do him no harm and he was far past being haunted by them or any of the faces of those whose lives he had taken.
He laid his grip on the butt of his gun and even though a little voice inside his head warned him the steel pistol and lead slugs would prove as useless as tits on a bull, feeling it underneath the palm of his hand was reassuring. And as he looked again, it hit him what he was now seeing.
Footsteps.
Fresh ones cut into the dirt between the deep ruts driven long ago into this dusty and infrequently traveled corridor.
Cyril blinked. Those tracks were not recent. Given the lack of traffic, it was still feasible this particular road must have been used at some point. Rain would have erased the footprints but as far as Cyril reckoned it had been dry here for months.
It was then that he noticed it. Suddenly it seemed the horizon was further away than usual. As if it had been pushed back while he had been watching it.
Must be the heat, he reckoned.
He had been in the sun for weeks and knew how that kind of exposure took a toll on a man. He opened his canteen and tipped it to his mouth. During the war he’d seen soldiers with heat stroke drop their weapons and run directly into the path of enemy gunfire, thinking themselves indestructible even up to the moment the bullets kissed their flesh and tore them to bloody ribbons.
Even Galen, Cyril thought. On the night he’d accompanied him into Veracruz, Altos had gone on some murderous tear after spending too much time in the…
But Cyril’s thought stopped dead for as he lowered his canteen, he saw more footsteps.
Footsteps now in front of him coming in his direction.
Not even a breath escaped him. He had been certain they had not been there before. The trail ahead had been…
Empty, Cyril thought.
Though there they were, fresh and new in the dirt stretching all the way down this narrow road for as far as the eye could see.
But whoever had owned those boots was nowhere to be found.
Cyril looked down. The prints went directly under those his horse was making but as he gazed back toward the road behind him, he frowned.
How could that be? He wondered, and stopped his horse. Getting down from his saddle, he knelt on the ground to see if his eyes had played tricks on him. But now he could see it clearly. The footsteps coming from behind him had been so new they lay on top of those just made by his horse, as if whoever had come down this road had doubled back following him.
And when Cyril felt the presence standing just behind him, he drew his pistol and sprang to his feet.
Standing in front of him was a man with what appeared to be the remains of two badly burnt wings sticking out of his back.
From the stranger’s mouth came the voice of a southern gentleman. “I don’t suppose you’d shoot someone without first hearing what they had to say to you.” The stranger grinned. “Oh I’m sorry. I forgot who I was talking to.” He laughed in a near mocking tone.
“Who are you?” Cyril asked
“Someone with a bit of information you may find important.”
“I asked who are you?” Cyril demanded. But inside he could sense that part of that answer lay in his perception of the other presence that had obviously been inside the Sagebrush jail cell with Galen.
“Well if you must ask, mah name is Ghent, Briar Ghent.” His mouth curled upward in a knowing grin. “And your name is Cyril, though you’ve gone through quite a few last names, I reckon.”
“Do not presume to know anything about…” Cyril started but was cut off.
“I know you were stationed at Fort Jones out there in the California territory when a mysterious letter caused you to try and go AWOL from your post, and that a day later you were captured by members of your own regiment who dragged you back to the commanding officer. The same Captain who had you lined up against a wall and shot by a firing squad for being a deserter. Isn’t that why it took you so long to get to Kansas City, to the man who sent you that alarming letter in the first place?”
Cyril bristled at hearing his own story told back to him with such blunt detail. Briar Ghent continued.
“Though waiting a couple of weeks wrapped in a shroud buried in shallow ground out there sure beats the heck out of laying around rotting in the woods for more than a hundred years, waiting to be needed, now don’t it?” He finished with a cackle. He reached out and pushed Cyril’s gun aside, and as their hands briefly brushed against each other, Cyril saw the flash in his mind, an image of Briar helplessly plummeting from dizzying heights in the sky, his once majestic wings now aflame.
“You see, my boy, you and I seek the same thing—a closure that will bring an end to our interminable wait on this useless world,” Briar said. “But you killing Altos will get you exactly the opposite of that which you seek.”
Cyril eyed the man before him, confused. His own senses were unsure whether he could trust Briar. But now, they were telling him what he’d already been denying since his last encounter with Miles Lawton.
Briar leaned in closer, carefully eyeing the area around them. He brought his voice down to nearly a whisper and began divulging a truth about Galen, which caused Cyril to realize that everything Miles had told him from the beginning had most certainly been a lie.
Free Summer Reading: Badlands – Chapter 16
Aug 19th
Previous chapters of Badlands can be found here
CHAPTER 16
Hovering barely a foot above the ground the two yellow beads came swiftly toward Galen and for the second time that day, he reached for one of the Colts. The thin quality of the moonlight angling through the tops of the trees lining the road was playing tricks on Galen’s eyes, causing a strobing effect as the yellow beads vanished then reappeared, but this time closer still.
Galen cocked back the hammer on the gun. His heart raced thinking that the loud report of a single gunshot could bring God knows what else from the woods. His finger tensed on the trigger.
And as he squinted to see, the shape of the four-legged creature became clear to him in the shadow. He raised the pistol and aimed it dead between its eyes and steadied his hand. But something, a bit of instinct, told him to hold off a second until it came closer.
Because as the animal trotted into the light of the moon he could see it clearly and watched as it padded toward him without even glancing in his direction. He chuckled to himself it was nothing more than a vagabond mutt walking down the road, carrying a bone.
But as it passed, a chill ran down Galen’s spine because he could now see that what was in the dog’s mouth was not a bone, but instead a severed human hand.
Galen rubbed his eyes. Can’t be, he thought. The little voice in his head told him to turn around and avoid the camp ahead but it was so close, and to do so would be like signing Maria’s death warrant.
He pushed the horses forward to the end of road, which opened into an acre-wide clearing. Galen could see dozens of tents all facing a single cabin placed on the rise of a small hill. He headed in the direction of a campfire around which he could see several men standing. Quickly he gained their attention because as the wagon drew closer, the men broke from the fire and came toward him. One of them, the closest to him, raised a hand for Galen to stop.
“Who are you?” the man asked. His pock-marked face carefully examining the stranger before him.
Instead of answering his question, Galen went into a quickly worded explanation of Maria’s condition.
“Is there a doctor in camp?” Galen asked.
“Nena!” the man called out over his shoulder.
Moments later, Galen could see the front door of the cabin open. Briefly silhouetted in the light coming from inside was the figure of a woman. She shut the door and came down the hill toward the wagon. But even as she drew closer, Galen could not see her face. It was not until she approached that he realized she was wearing a hooded cloak.
“This fella says he has a dying woman in the back,” the man told her.
Not even glancing at Galen, the hooded Nena went to the back of the wagon and looked inside. She then turned back to the man who had summoned her and whispered something in his ear.
Suddenly, he drew his pistol and pointed it at Galen. The other men who had accompanied him from the fire did the same, raising their guns.
“Get out of the wagon, Mister.” His voice was deadly serious.
“What’s going on here?” Galen demanded, raising his hands.
But instead of an answer, the man with the pock-marked face grabbed Galen by his arm and yanked him out of the driver’s seat and onto the ground. “Don’t you move!” he yelled.
And as Galen looked up, he could see the outline of Nena’s face as she pulled the hood from her head.
She pointed to the back of the wagon and the unconscious Maria lying there. “This woman…” she shouted. “Is a witch!”
“What are you talking about?” screamed Galen as the men pulled open the rear gate of the wagon, but instead of an answer what he received was the butt of a rifle delivered to his skull with stunning force. Instantly his head filled with stars and he felt his arms grow rubbery and weak. As they gave out under him he fell face first into the ground.
Through the ringing now braying in his ears, Galen could hear the men as they dragged Maria out of the wagon. He tried to get up, to help her, but was too woozy to even move.
With all the strength he could muster he tried again to get to his feet but his body was unresponsive to the desires of his mind.
“Stop,” he shouted but it only came out of his mouth as a whisper. His head felt as if stuffed with cotton.
Two more men yanked him to his feet, holding him up under his arms. Weakly, Galen lifted his head to find himself staring right into the face of Nena, her dark, handsome eyes gazing directly into his dilating pupils. She reached out with a finger and ran a nail along his cheek down to his chin and cocked her head as she examined his face.
“Restrain him,” she said to the men holding Galen up.
“What about her?” the man with the pock-marked face shouted as he and another man held up the unconscious Maria.
“Burn her,” Nena said coldly. She turned to Galen who was fading into unconsciousness. “And make sure he sees everything.”
The splash of water in his face brought him around. His vision was hazy at first. The blow to his head still rung in his skull as he took a moment to resurface to consciousness.
Immediately, Galen was aware of the crippling pain in his neck and back and that he was locked in a bent over position. As the fog in his brain cleared even more he realized his hands were immobilized and as he tried to turn his head he could now sense the block of wood locking him in place by his neck and wrists.
“Quit fighting, yer not going anywhere,” the beady-eyed boy said as he threw another bucket of water into Galen’s face. As Galen struggled to see what kind of infernal contraption they had locked him into it occurred to him what they had done to him. He’d heard that the pilgrims had used the pillory to restrain and punish criminals and now could fully understand why. From here there was no chance of escape. Bent at the waist like that, it was difficult for Galen to breathe and when the boy threw another bucket in his face he coughed until it felt like his ribs would snap. As his lungs stopped seizing and he caught his breath, the bucket boy grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head up where he could see.
Ahead, no more than a hundred feet away, Maria had been tied to a stake atop a large mound of wood and dried bramble. At the nod of Nena’s head the man with the pock-marked face touched the tip of a flaming torch to the bramble causing it to ignite like kindling. Within mere seconds the fire spread to the whole pile.
“No!” Galen tried to call out but the compression of his lungs caused the words to only spill out of his mouth. And even as the smoke began to rise, to his horror, Galen could see that not only was she still alive but indeed fully conscious as well. She struggled against the ropes that bound her to the pyre, her mouth silently crying out for help or mercy to no avail.
“Witch!” bellowed Nena. “Dost thou ask for His forgiveness? We can spare you the agony of a slow death in the flame.” She nodded to a man a few feet away who raised his rifle and took aim at Maria’s head.
Galen tried to open his mouth to tell the bucket boy but when he did was instead greeted by another onslaught of dirty water.
The wood under Maria’s feet had ignited. Through the choking smoke Galen could see Maria’s head thrash around wildly as the fire consumed her legs.
“Witch, hear me,” Nena bellowed again. “I can release you but you must ask for His forgiveness.”
Again Galen tried to speak and forced his cracking voice out as loud as he could. “She cannot talk! She has no tongue!” But even so, the roar of the fire drowned out his plea, for no one heard it.
Maria’s mouth opened again as the flames now rose to her waist, licking at her chest and back. Her thick black hair began to curl and ball up on the ends from the heat.
And when no cries of forgiveness were heard, Nena motioned the man with the rifle to lower his gun. “Suit yourself,” she said.
From his location, Galen could see Nena’s face was placid as she watched the flames.
Maria’s head whipped back again as the fire rose to face level. Her mouth drew open as she struggled for breath inside the burning ring of superheated air. Tears streamed down Galen’s cheeks and he lowered his eyes as to not watch but the boy with the bucket grabbed his hair once more and yanked his head up, forcing him to see everything. Maria tried to turn her face away from the orange monster consuming her, roasting her flesh, and as she did her eyes met his, if only briefly, and Galen could see they were full of hate. The contempt she felt for him was more than apparent on her charred and blistering visage as it vanished moments later in the growing wall of smoke and flame.
And as Galen tried once more to avert his eyes, he saw them reveling in a small circle by the fire, their naked bodies swaying to a rhythm only audible in their minds. A circle of undressed men, their hands joined, chanted in low voices as they watched the ritual taking place inside the ring. There crouched Nena in the nude, up on all fours as if she were imitating the attack stance of an animal. Behind her stood a man holding her by the hips, thrusting into her as the other men watched and continued to chant.
By this time they were oblivious to the pyre, whose flames had entirely consumed their witch. Its greedy orange fingers reaching ten feet into the sky. The bucket boy refused to let Galen look away so he watched, and he wept.
The nearly primitive ritual went on for what seemed like hours as each naked man in the circle had his way with Nena, though not once did it ever seem as if she were submitting to them. It ended as the flames died, the fire leaving behind what was left of the slumped and roasted figure still lashed to the pole, its mouth still open in a never-ending cry of unspeakable pain. The boy finally let Galen’s head drop down as he picked up his bucket and walked away.
Hours later as a group of men cleared the pyre, and Maria’s charred bones along with it, Galen was surprised by a visitor. It was Nena, once again dressed in her red cloak, she reached down and raised Galen’s head by using just her fingertips to lift his chin.
Galen could not even bear to look at her.
“She had no tongue!” he screamed. “How could she have asked for mercy with no ability to speak?”
She ran a finger along his cheek and asked how he knew such a thing and Galen told an abbreviated version of how he’d come upon Maria in the woods, leaving out the part about his death and resurrection.
Before he could go on, Nena stopped him. “Why do you think they cut her tongue out?” she asked. “A witch cannot cast a spell if she cannot speak.”
“You’re crazy,” Galen told her, his voice full of contempt. Though now something in her words bothered him. “Where am I?” he demanded.
“You’re in the camp of the Magus. This is our settlement and you intruded. And I will decide what will be done with you.”
“Lady, I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. I mean, what state are we in? Arkansas? Tennessee?”
Nena looked at him, her dark eyes examining him closely. Then suddenly she broke out into a braying laugh. “What makes you think, dear stranger, that you are still in the mortal world?”
FREE SUMMER READING: Badlands – Chapter 15
Aug 16th
Previous chapters of BADLANDS can be found here
CHAPTER 15
Galen lay on the ground staring up into the morning sky as he replayed the scene in his head. It hadn’t been a dream, this much was certain. Dreams were wispy and hollow memories whose details faded quickly like ripples in a pond. What he’d seen was a dormant memory, as fragment unearthed in the shifting sands of his mind as if dug up by an archaeologist. Over and over he was able to replay every moment of his incarceration, every sleepless night in that stuffy cell, every beating he’d been given at the hands of Kentuck and the fat sheriff. All of it leading up to his trip to the gallows and his short five-foot drop and slow, agonizing strangle. As it did each time, the memory of Sagebrush ended moments after he had seen the man with the charred wings and the dire warning had been delivered. Galen remembered the pain he felt, the unrelenting pressure of asphyxiation exploding behind his eyes each time that trapdoor fell open beneath his feet.
What it truly meant though was the fine folks of Sagebrush had indeed made good on their promise to execute him.
The day I woke up in the cell… he wondered as it hit him. It had to have not been the day of his hanging as he originally thought but a day or more later. Though he had no memory of it Galen reckoned they must have taken his dead body back to the jail while the entire town celebrated. Just waiting until there was someone sober enough to bury him. He did remember what he’d seen though as he walked alone through the town’s deserted streets—the mangled and bloodied bodies of every adult and child who had been freshly slaughtered.
Whoever had done this had come in a large pack, he thought.
Who or what?
The thought bothered him greatly because, in the recesses of his mind, this memory was somehow connected to… something he was not able to see. A mist still beyond his grasp.
There was one thing he was certain of though. His stopping to help Maria was a detour he’d consciously taken in order to purposely delay his progress.
However it was clear to Galen that there had to be more than just procrastination involved here. This woman had been put in his path for a reason, he reckoned. He’d been given the choice to intervene or walk away and he chose the former at his own peril. Whether it was a test or not, he now believed that ensuring this Mexican woman’s survival was key to his journey and the end result therein.
Is it selfish to offer up a selfless act for this reason? He wondered. Is it too late to buy my salvation?
Suddenly, with a loud crash Galen’s mind was torn away from this train of thought when the wooden gate on the wagon fell open. Maria had awoken in the back, disoriented and in tremendous pain. Her foot finding the door. After looking up, Galen ran toward the wagon and at first the woman he had begun calling Maria looked at him with an expression of relief but as she began to realize the approaching man was not her husband but another man dressed in the clothes of her husband, her expression turned to one of complete horror. It was at that moment her recollection of the recent past came crashing back with terrible brutality and she began trying to emit a hysterical scream from her butchered mouth. She remembered how the hillbillies had ambushed them. She remembered how they had dragged her husband from the wagon and how two of them held him down on the dirt by his shoulders while the third cut his throat with a large dirty knife.
Galen came to her and first she shoved him away, punching at him. He did not try to block her hysterical swinging blows but instead drew her closer until she finally fell sobbing into his arms.
It was when he put his cheek against her forehead that he could feel the intense fever that was burning her up.
Galen made the decision quickly. Once she had calmed down and expelled all of her strength and energy, she laid down and sobbed herself back into unconsciousness. He harnessed up the two horses with the intention of heading out and looking for a town of some kind. Hopefully one that had a doctor. He climbed into the driver’s seat and picked up the reins when the absence of the burro came to mind.
Blue, he thought. But the deaf and mostly blind creature was nowhere in sight. Galen reckoned the old thing most likely wandered off and passed away in its sleep. In a way it really was a relief, mostly because Galen realized he would have had to leave old Blue behind on account of how he’d been slowing them down. If Maria indeed had some kind of infection, every minute would count.
He took the reins and nervously pointed the cart eastward for they still had not picked up the trailhead and there had been no indication they were headed in the direction of one. In truth, Galen had no idea what state or territory they were in or how far away the next town would be.
As Galen pushed forward the woods began to thin and the ground began to rise until there was nothing above his head other than sun and air. The forest had opened up into a half-mile wide corridor lined with trees. And though the woods seemed to thicken on either side of him, what lay ahead appeared to be a clear path.
For the next two hours he pushed the horses up the hill noticing the rise was growing steeper and steeper until he found himself at the top of a fairly large gorge.
He dared bring the wagon only so close to the edge before dismounting. Below him another forest spread as far as the eye could see, the leafy green canopy headed all the way to the horizon. From his many travels Galen knew the country had been carpeted with these thick ancient woods everywhere.
But it was off to the north just a bit that Galen spotted it.
A thin plume of smoke miles off in the distance. He squinted and looked again. This time his eyes caught it, the grey wisps of at least two other smoky plumes. Telltale indications of some kind of settlement or town. Galen’s eyes darted back and forth, scanning the woods until he saw it—a thin break in the treeline headed directly toward where those fires were burning.
The trail, Galen thought.
But where was the way down into those woods several hundred feet below? It had to be here somewhere.
He kept looking from the rim of the gorge into the basin where the forest started anew. Nowhere in sight was there a way down. Galen scratched his head. Suddenly, from his right he heard a noise and fast as the single beat of his heart he had drawn one of Colts and turned, pointing the barrel of one of the heavy dragoons in the direction of the noise. The rustling of feet came again and Galen quietly drew the second gun, thumbing back both of the revolvers’ hammers at the same time. He took a breath and held it to keep his aim steady. The moment whoever it was coming toward him stepped out where he could be seen, Galen was going to let the twin Colts make short work of him. The rustling grew closer still and as Galen tensed his fingers on the triggers ready to fire, out from the brush stepped…
Blue? Galen asked, quite stunned to see the animal he’d thought dead.
The burro’s aged and scarred face along with the deeply bowed spine had given it away immediately. Blue stepped right up to Galen and licked his hand, the typical Blue indication that he wanted jerky.
“Sorry old pal, I don’t have any,” Galen spoke then noticed the spot from the underbrush where he’d seen Blue emerge from.
There was the trailhead.
Galen took another look at the burro. Given the pace in which Blue walked the old fleabag had to have left camp last night to get here.
“Blue!” Galen shouted right into the burro’s ear. And when the beast didn’t startle or even respond, Galen was certain it was indeed the same deaf creature he’d been dragging with him since leaving Sagebrush. He reached down and scratched the burro between the ears and shook his head in disbelief before tying Blue’s lead to the back of the wagon. Maria was still asleep and as Galen reached over to put a hand on her forehead, her fingers shot out and wrapped around his wrist like a steel trap. Instantly, her eyes opened wide, full of hate and anger. Her mouth, still encrusted with the dried blood and mucus on her chin, parted and from untold depths within her throat came a hiss.
A hiss that evaporated into a deep growling whisper. “We shall live in His house. We shall live in His name. We shall live in His house. We shall live…” the whisper from Maria’s throat faded away, as did her grip on his arm. Slowly, her eyes closed and her body relaxed, resuming the same heavy unconscious breathing as before.
Galen watched her chest rise up and down to make sure she was indeed alive. “…in His name.” Galen said to himself. “In His name.”
Galen spent most of the remaining daylight navigating the two-horse wagon down the serpentine path cut into the woods by the gorge, through brush that appeared dense from afar but then seemingly vanished as he got closer. After one sharp turn he spied what looked like trouble ahead—a thick deadfall obstructing the way down.
With the path so narrow there would be no way to turn the wagon around and Galen cursed himself for not walking the trail first to make sure he wasn’t going to get himself into trouble by taking the wagon down here.
There was a heavy sense of foreboding coming from the woods for though there was nothing he could hear, Galen was almost sure something lurked out there and whatever it was, was most likely watching him.
For the first time, Galen felt the horses become scattered in their focus. He was not the only one getting spooked by this dark and uneasy trail. With the reins, he pushed them ahead to get a closer look at the deadfall and again as he got near, what at first seemed to be an impassable juncture was indeed navigable, if just barely. Galen drove through the opening carefully as its edges brushed lightly against the side of the wagon. To Galen’s surprise the breach was exactly the same width as the wagon itself and he heard the branches rattle through the spokes of his wheels as he passed.
And yet, moments after he had gone through the opening in the deadfall, he turned to look back and again it appeared to be an unbreachable wall of forest debris.
Just a trick of the light, Galen thought to himself. That’s all.
As he reached the bottom of the basin the woods gave way to a clear-cut path that was obviously some kind of road.
Galen held his hand to the sky. The sun was exactly four fingers width above the horizon. He knew that meant he had, at best, another hour of daylight. He pushed onward knowing it would be tough on Blue, but Galen aimed to get to that settlement tonight. A clear moon would keep the road in view.
Though will the dark keep away that which you may find out here? He wondered.
As he had first seen from the rim of the gorge, the road was a straight shot and as he neared the settlement he could feel a bit of unease creep into his body. Galen suddenly realized the last time he’d been around a lot of people, he ended up dangling from a noose and they ended up brutally slaughtered.
If Maria hadn’t been in such dire need of medical attention, he would have turned the wagon back, even risking climbing up the gorge path. But the fact was she was dying and would most likely not live out the next few days unless he did something.
She was most likely to die anyway, he thought. But at the very least he had to try.
The closer he got, the more evidence was visible that there were indeed a number of people ahead. As the night slipped in all around him, he could see the dim firelight of their camps glowing, first as pinpricks in the distance.
As he got within a half mile, he could even hear their voices, laughs and rowdy shouts punctuating the otherwise silent night.
And then in the shadow he saw it and blinked to make sure his mind wasn’t playing tricks on him. But again there it was, the two eyes glowing in the moonlight coming toward him.
Free Summer Reading: Badlands – Chapter 14
Aug 9th
Previous chapters of BADLANDS can be found here
CHAPTER 14
Cyril rode until the mid-afternoon sun vanished behind the dark grey storm heads that had been threatening since morning. The road from Kansas City had been swift and he fixated upon his task with all the focus his renewed energy could muster. There was little doubt in his mind the master he served would indeed reward him for completing the work he had begun so long ago. For as far as Cyril knew, the master’s dawn had finally arisen. Ending Galen Altos was what was now standing in the way.
Cyril tried not to be frustrated over all of the times he had been so close to Altos all those years ago in the war, within arm’s reach in fact. All the times he could have easily killed Galen but had been prevented from doing so by the one he served.
However, the reason still perplexed Cyril for it was the master who had originally given him the word that he was to only observe Galen for it was not known how strong Altos’ powers truly were. And during all that time he had observed, Cyril had not once seen a single hint at all that Galen even had any powers whatsoever. It was only by way of Dunburton’s surprise correspondence that Cyril realized Galen had somehow survived the conflagration at the church in Juarez. And now, in Cyril’s mind, it had sunk in that he’d made a grave mistake in underestimating Altos and letting him get away.
Cyril shuddered at the thought of what the master would do to him if he found out Altos was still alive—though it seemed highly unlikely he wouldn’t already know for the master obviously knew plenty about Galen.
But why wouldn’t he have said something? Cyril wondered.
It was not his place to question, but there had always been something about the master’s handling of Altos that seemed puzzling.
A carefulness, he thought as he bedded down for the night.
Even so, Altos’ survival was worrisome. Though Cyril had successfully hunted down and dispatched several men and women at the behest of his master, never once questioning his orders, it was this single failure he feared would not only lead to his being held back from his final reward but to his facing unspeakable and merciless retribution at his master’s own hands. The mere thought was enough to make Cyril get back upon his horse in the rain to continue pushing forward.
Within an hour the feeling he’d been seeking since leaving Kansas City had begun to sprout inside him like a compass needle finding its bearing. There was no doubt. He was definitely on Galen’s trail once more. He could sense it.
As Cyril came down the road toward the abandoned farmhouse, he felt the sense of Galen’s proximity grow with each step his steed carried him.
The very moment he entered the long-abandoned dwelling, Cyril knew Galen had been here shortly after fleeing from Kansas City. The scene he could see in his mind was clear as day. Altos had spent the night here huddled in front of the hearth trying to keep warm.
No, Cyril thought. That wasn’t it. He held his hands out trying to further divine what the room was attempting to tell him.
Galen’s imprint by the hearth was indeed quite strong. With his bare hand, Cyril fished through the cold ash in the hearth unsure of what he was looking for but when his fingers closed around the hard orb, a feeling like daggers of ice stabbed through his body. Cyril pulled his hand from the hearth and found himself trembling at what was in his fingers.
There in his hand was the petrified eye-the same one Cyril knew had come from some ancient creature that roamed the earth long before he had.
As Cyril’s gaze fell into the unavoidable pull of the eye’s milky white iris he was suddenly aware of the other connection this horrid object had between Galen Altos and Major Dunburton.
That old fool, thought Cyril. It pained him to think Dunburton had no idea of the true cursed nature of the eye. Like most mortal men who had heard of it and attempted to possess it, the Major had no real idea of its province.
Quickly, the vision changed to show someone Cyril could only identify as a gypsy. Though it seemed highly unlikely, she had knowledge of Galen. Through the actions he could se that she had made, Cyril was certain this old woman somehow understood exactly what Galen was.
And then as he saw in the eye how Galen crudely killed her, Cyril was dumbstruck because it was obvious Galen himself was still completely oblivious to his own identity.
Which would explain certain things, Cyril finally reckoned. Especially why the master himself had been led to doubt Altos was even a threat.
How could the master be deceived? Cyril puzzled. And as he tried to pry his gaze from the eye the cursed object began to show him something, a flash of what could only be an event in the future. What he was seeing sent a wave of terror through Cyril’s body. From his shaking hand fell the eye where it hit the floor and stopped without a single bounce. Without a moment’s hesitation, Cyril left the abandoned house, and the eye, behind as quickly as his feet could carry him.
He was no more than a few yards out the front door when, from behind him, came the voice.
“You disappoint me,” it said coldly.
Cyril turned slowly as to not provoke. There, standing before him in the house’s ramshackle doorway was Miles Lawton. And though the appearance he always took in front of Cyril was that of a young boy, the Coyote was no less dangerous now than in his natural form.
Cyril dared not show hesitation in his submission to the boy. He lowered his eyes as Miles Lawton approached.
“The way you held that wretched thing,” the boy said with an air of disgust. “You stood there trembling like a scared girl.”
Cyril made a great deal of effort to choose his words very carefully. “The eye is cursed. It’s a fool’s toy of madness and folly.”
The boy stooped down to pick up a small stone that he rolled in his hand. “They’ve said similar things about that petrified relic for…” his voice momentarily trailed off. “For longer than you can imagine,” he finally finished. The boy arced his arm back and threw the small stone away from the house. “Tell me Cyril,” he said. “What exactly did you see in the eye? What truths did it reveal to you?”
“I saw Altos,” answered Cyril. He focused his mind on the part of the vision he dared talk about and tried, at least for now, to block out what he’d seen concerning the boy who stood in front of him. He told Miles about the Gypsy’s fatal encounter with Galen and of his suspicion that Altos seemingly still had little idea of who he was or where he’d come from.
“Of course not,” hissed miles. “Which is why we must find him before he finally wakes up to the truth.”
That would be easier said than done, thought Cyril. Galen had a head start consisting of several weeks.
“Why did you not tell me that Altos was still alive?” asked the boy.
“I didn’t even know until…” Cyril said, realizing any answer would appear as just an excuse, as a sign of weakness. “Because I didn’t know,” he finally said. It was an admission he believed would draw the least of the master’s ire.
“I’m pretty certain I can track him from here,” Cyril said quickly. “If my gut tells me correctly, Altos headed to Mexico. He’s got a soft spot for those people.”
“I would say that’s a pretty good guess,” Miles responded. “For not too long ago a man was hanged in a small Texas town who fit the description of the man you are looking for.”
“But he’s not dead.”
“What do you think?” barked the boy. He picked up another small stone and tossed it against the side of the house. “The town was dealt with.”
“And Altos?”
“He’s gone east. Now you must find him.”
“And then?”
“Follow him,” said Miles. “You’ll get instructions how to deal with him later.”
Cyril nodded, trying his best to hide the uncertainty he was feeling for the first time. He had served solely at the boy’s pleasure, hunting down the enemies of the Coyote and taking care of them. On many an occasion his duties included extracting information using methods suggested by Miles himself. Methods using sharp implements and fire on soft flesh. Tasks he found himself quite good at due to his ability to tune out the screams of his victims.
Before the war he had personally taken a family away at gunpoint because Miles had told him of his wish to do so. He had taken the mother and father, both bound and gagged, and forced them to watch in utter horror as he slew their two young daughters, his knife cutting into the young girls’ flesh slowly and methodically. Afterwards the man and woman had willingly given up their secrets before suffering the same slowly drawn out fate as their children.
They were but one example of the tool of death Cyril had become in the name of the Coyote. A task he had taken on with the ultimate hope that his loyalty and service would eventually win him his release.
But it was the strange treatment of Galen Altos that Cyril now questioned. During the war, it had only been after Galen had gone AWOL that he’d been given Miles’ blessing to hunt him down with whatever force necessary. Though it now occurred to Cyril that it was possible the boy had only done so to test both of them.
At first Cyril had thought the boy was just being cautious of an unknown enemy, but now with the news that Miles had taken vengeance on the townsfolk who had hanged Altos, it seemed like the boy was protecting Galen for some unknown reason.
And given the last vision the eye had shared with him, Cyril’s unwavering belief in the beast who chose to appear to him as this innocent young boy was not the same as it once was.
“Altos was delayed for three weeks in that wretched town while awaiting his execution. Then spent the next month on foot. With a stout horse you can catch up to him in a week’s time,” Miles said assuredly. “He is headed east.”
Cyril felt a familiar shudder.
“He is headed to Shadow Falls where he will meet his destiny,” said Miles before turning and walking away from the house.
Cyril mounted his horse and rode south. He’d head to Texas, to this small town where the Coyote had brought his own brand of death. There he’d pick up Galen’s trail again and if Miles had been correct that Altos had been on foot, he would catch up to him in a short time indeed.
The day grew long as Cyril rode, but his mind never wandered once from the thoughts needling him from deep inside. He had blindly followed the master ever since Miles had resurrected his forgotten bones from the woods—bones that on some cold nights could still feel the teeth of those yellow-eyed beasts gnawing on them.
He will never release you, Cyril’s mind told him. It was true he had begun to question the master. He thought of the eye, now hidden in his saddlebag and the apparent truth of what the cursed object had revealed to him.
“He is headed to Shadow Falls where he will meet his destiny,” he heard Miles’voice echo in his head.
And apparently, boy, Cyril thought to himself, where you will meet yours.
Free Summer Reading: Badlands – Chapter 13
Aug 5th
Previous chapters of BADLANDS can be found here
CHAPTER 13
The jolting of the heavy vehicle over the roughening road notwithstanding, they had been riding in silence, Galen and Maria, for that’s what he had taken to calling her though he had no idea what her name really was.
Regardless, she had not been able to make any indication to the contrary. In fact, the very last noise she had made came moments after Galen had returned to her after sending those hillbillies to their deserved reward. She had been quite near death and in her delirium appeared a specter in bloody and torn clothing walking toward her. With the sun to his back, he indeed appeared to be ringed with a bright halo of light; an angel come to take her to heaven. Even in her state, she knew she was dying and had come to accept her fate with little of the fight that had kept her alive this long.
But instead of ascending with her up into the sky, the specter knelt down on the ground and forced her mouth open with one hand as he emptied the contents of a paper cartridge into it with the other. The black powder burned her mouth setting all of her nerve endings afire. Her body bucked uncontrollably as if afflicted with the most violent of seizures but Galen kept a hand sturdily clamped over her lips to prevent her from spitting out what he had put in there, at least not yet.
“This is gonna prevent infection,” he told her over and over, not even knowing if she could even understand him, or if his words were getting through her ears given the heavily traumatized state she had plunged into. His energy had been sapped but he fought to keep his grip on her mouth until he finally let her spit out the hastily concocted preventative. There was no further fight. Mercifully, within minutes she passed out completely from the pain.
Unsure if he had inadvertently pushed her over the threshold of death, Galen put his ear to her breast and listened for a heartbeat. As he brought his face up against her chest and found her shallow pulse, he noticed how warm she felt.
He waited for her to awaken though it didn’t come, finally lifting her up in his arms and carrying back to the wagon. Galen marveled at how light she felt, her body as slack as a rag doll. As he made it to the wagon he was grateful for the foresight to have dragged the hillbilly, what was left of him, into the woods along with the body of the Mexican man the hillbillies had slain, the man Galen had reckoned was Maria’s husband. The last thing Galen wanted was for her to wake up and see either of those things.
He laid the unconscious woman in the back of the wagon while he hitched up the remaining horse. At first the creature seemed afraid of him but Galen put his hand out and let the nag sniff it. To his surprise, he gained the horse’s trust immediately. Galen reckoned it was due to the fact that, given what it had seen, the animal wanted out of there as soon as possible. It wasn’t stupid.
With both horses harnessed and Blue tethered to the wagon’s back, Galen took the reins and, after checking the sun, headed east. The pace they kept was slow partly due to the old burro Galen refused to leave behind, but mostly because if the trailhead reappeared, he didn’t want to miss it. Even if his speed was barely faster than walking, Galen’s feet were quite happy for the respite no matter how short it may be.
During the first few hours he stopped several times to check on Maria to make sure she was still breathing and though she was, she remained comatose. For this, Galen was grateful because she was bound to be in a world of hurt once she did awaken.
As night began to fall, Galen found a clearing where he could safely build a fire and pulled over to make camp. In the back of the wagon he found a blanket to put over the still unconscious Maria. He also found clothing and food—and what had to have been the extent of Maria and her husband’s worldly possessions. Where they were headed when they were waylaid by the hillbillies was anybody’s guess, though Galen reckoned it was off to find a new life somewhere.
Among the clothes, Galen found a shirt, one that must have belonged to her husband. He agonized over the decision but chose to put it on given the shabby state of his now torn and blood-stained clothes. Briefly, he thought of Maria’s husband and how he had left his body behind when they set off. The hillbilly had still been alive though. Left paralyzed and mute, he had attempted to crawl into the woods to presumably die. Galen had found Harley pulling his useless legs behind him with just his arms, and placed Maria’s husband directly in the hillbilly’s path, giving the dying man full view of the Mexican man he and his brothers had murdered in cold blood.
Now, as he buttoned the dead man’s shirt, Galen considered the rest of his attire and found a pair of pants that fit him as well. Luckily, he had lost some weight since beginning his journey.
Galen fed the horses with handfuls of oats from a sack found in the back of the wagon but when he tried to give some to Blue the burro rejected the offering. Galen reckoned the old beast had grown used to a diet of jerky, a sorry development as such since he’d recently just run out. He tied the horses up for the night and left Blue to wander knowing the poor old thing wouldn’t stray too far. Galen was unsure if it wouldn’t just be for the best if he woke up to find Blue dead or missing considering the animal’s obviously deteriorating condition.
After making a small fire, Galen finally sat and immediately he could feel the exhaustion closing in. He’d been much more peaked today than usual and reckoned it had everything to do with his body still dealing with what he’d been through earlier. In truth, he wasn’t sure how many times he could go through that again.
But if his past were any indication, today wouldn’t be the last time.
When was the last time? He thought to himself.
What Galen was just beginning to understand was that each return from the darkness resulted in his memory becoming slightly altered from its previous living state. Some things would be forgotten, others revealed from the dark-clouded uncertainty of the past. Almost like a puzzle rearranged, though mostly still hidden.
As his eyelids grew heavier watching the fire he could feel himself falling into the twilight of sleep. Gladly, he accepted what he figured would be slumber’s warm embrace.
What he received, however, was anything but.
It was the metal clang that woke him up. A jarring noise one could never forget, for what it signified, or more precisely what it signified about one’s immediate situation, was that it was severely fucked. And that is why the moment Galen heard the unmistakable sound of his jail cell door closing he sat bolt upright as if a shot of electricity had run through his body.
For when he opened his eyes Galen found himself once again in the stuffy jail cell back in Sagebrush, Texas, disturbed from slumber in the middle of the night.
And standing before him, visible in the thin light of the moon shining through the barred window of his cell, was a tall man whose face remained in shadow save for his penetrating stare. A gaze that was both cold yet as clear as a star on a winter night.
“You the undertaker?” Galen said from his haze. “’Cuz some other man already come and measure me for-”
Galen stopped in mid-sentence. He was suddenly aware the man standing just a foot away was asking him a question, though he had not even spoken to Galen nor had he even uttered a sound.
“I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I just…” Galen said, his voice trailing off as the man interrupted. Though he didn’t speak Galen could hear the man’s heavily countrified voice in his head.
“I don’t underst-…Yes, I know what day tomorrow is. I’m ready to go to the gallows,” Galen answered. “I’m so very tired.”
The man gave no reaction. His unwavering gaze continued to fall upon Galen.
“Do I know you?” Galen finally asked, all of a sudden starting to feel a sense of dread welling up in his belly.
“I don’t understand what you’re asking,” Galen responded to the voice he was hearing in his head.
The question came to Galen once more.
“Of course I know who I am. But you still haven’t told me who you a-” he answered though cut off again.
“I don’t understand what you’re say-” Galen responded.
“I’m Galen Altos!” he finally shouted. And though he put his hands over his ears he could not block out the endlessly inquiring voice he was hearing in his mind.
“I don’t understand! I told you I am Galen Altos!”
“What do you mean before that? Before what?”
Galen shook his head. “I’ve always been Galen Altos!” he cried. “I don’t understand! Before what?”
With that the man’s mouth opened slightly, his thin lips breaking into a cruel grin.
If I could only place why this man seems so familiar, Galen thought to himself.
But somehow the real truth eluded Galen’s mind, which had become invaded by the man’s voice, the smooth timbre of which had begun to have somewhat of a hypnotic effect on Galen.
If you only knew who I was, you’d realize how very mistaken you are, he heard the voice whisper in his mind.
The man with the penetrating stare’s mouth opened and from the depths of his throat came a chuckle. One Galen could very much hear with his own ears.
Feeling the stab of anger in his heart, Galen lurched off the bed at his tormentor only to wrap his arms around nothing but air, for the man who had come to visit him in his cell had vanished like a wisp of smoke.
Galen opened his eyes to find the sun shining through the bars of his window. He sat up, puzzled for what he’d imagined had been another in a series of nightmares. From outside came the sound of a public gathering, a rare occurrence he knew, given his experience sitting in this cell for three weeks. And it wasn’t until he peered out through the bars that he realized the gathering was at the foot of the gallows.
No sooner had he turned away from the window when the front door of the Sheriff’s office opened. Entering behind the stone-faced Sheriff Overton was the grinning rail thin Deputy Kentuck holding a pair of old manacles.
“Time to go,” growled Overton.
As they led him out to the gallows, Galen kept his head low for he was too tired to stare back into the eyes of a group of townsfolk who’d come to watch him hang just for sport. The crowd parted and Galen was very aware of the murmurs along with the hissing coming from nearby. The family of the man he’d accidentally killed had obviously come to pay their last respects to the condemned.
Galen climbed the steps very slowly. Not out of fear but because Overton held him back by his cuffed hands to milk every last second of the spectacle. Once up on the platform, Overton made a big show of reading the sentence that had been imposed. Today on the twenty-third of June, the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and fifty meting out this punishment of an eye for an eye was the way God had justified in the Bible. The Sheriff’s words were met with nodding heads and unspoken assent.
No blindfold was offered, nor was the opportunity for last words, instead the ten-strand hemp noose was placed around Galen’s neck. Galen looked up. His worst fears were confirmed. The rope was indeed short. There would definitely be no quick neck break for him. He was going to dangle and dance for the crowd’s delight. He promised himself to let loose and give them a good show.
Overton nodded to Kentuck who put his hand on the lever for the trapdoor under Galen’s feet. It was not until this moment that Galen finally looked at those folks staring so intently back at him. Men, women, children, some who he imagined had traveled to town for this very occasion, their faces hungry for the excitement they’d been promised.
And it was there among these people, that Galen saw him, the man who had come to visit like a wraith in the dead of night.
Suddenly Galen realized where he had seen that face. His chest tightened for the man standing before him, the man who spoke in the accent of a southern gentleman was the very same man who had appeared in Galen’s new nightmare of the burning church—the very same man who, in the midst of the flames and those dying around them, addressed him not as Galen but as someone named…
Brother Thomas.
With a whoosh the world passed before his eyes as he plummeted downward just until the rope pulled taut. Galen’s head jerked upwards and the weight of his body began cutting off his air. The muscles in his neck tensed and burned like fire. Galen squeezed his eyes shut but then he could hear the man’s voice again. Galen’s legs kicked uselessly under him as his body refused to give up without a fight. With every last bit of effort, he forced his lids to open though the pressure in his head made his eyes feel like they would explode. Again he saw the man, this time draped in a halo of light.
But visible only to Galen were the mangled and burned vestiges of what appeared to be wings coming from the man’s back.
And this time as the man spoke without uttering a sound, what Galen heard in his mind was a very distinct warning. “The Coyote is coming for us, Galen. Today I flee, but tomorrow you must find me before it’s too late.”
Free Summer Reading: Badlands – Chapter 11
Jul 29th
Previous chapters of BADLANDS can be found here
CHAPTER 11
In the distance came the shriek of a child’s scream.
“The camp!” exclaimed Cyril.
“We’re too late!” Lucius yelled. “Run for your life!”
He turned and bolted as fast as he could, making the choice to drop the extra weight of his rifle. However, Lucius’ young and strong legs were no match for the pack of four-legged beasts on his tail. Together, they swept past Cyril as if he wasn’t there. Their leader, a hulking creature, easily twice the size of any of the others, ran with the speed of a wildfire. Bearing down on Lucius, the beast sprang into the air. In mere moments it brought down its human prey with swift brutality, sinking its fangs into the soft flesh of Lucius’ neck. Like a rag doll, Lucius tumbled to the dirt, pinned to the ground with the coyote on his back. Lucius lifted his head and tried to scream just as the massive beast’s mouth clamped down around it, the powerful and unforgiving jaws severing it from the rest of Lucius’ body in the blink of an eye.
Within mere moments other members of the pack descended upon Lucius, tearing at his carcass, feasting on his flesh.
Cyril stood thirty feet away, stunned into a state of utter paralysis, his feet feeling nailed to the forest floor.
Run! The voice inside his head screamed again, finally awakening his instinct to flee. He spun on his heels and bolted just as the leader of the pack turned its head up from Lucius’ carcass, its muzzle thick with blood. Cyril bothered not with checking behind him to see if the beasts were giving chase for to do so would be the waste of a precious second and he was plenty certain he had not one to lose. Cyril pumped his legs as fast as he could, carrying the rifle in one hand. He had one shot and he was going to save it for just in case, though it crossed his mind in a sudden flash that contingency should not exclude using it upon himself if the worst were to happen.
The sudden attack on Lucius had turned Cyril around to the point of having lost his direction and it was only his best guess that his feet were carrying him back toward camp. He had to make it. He had to save the others.
His mind began to play with the concept of escape when he started to feel their hot breath upon his heels and the sound of their paws beating loudly on the dirt.
Don’t look back, keep running! He told himself.
Now he could hear their growls thundering at his feet as they closed the distance in mere seconds. Cyril thought of the rifle in his hand. One shot. That’s all he had. They were many, he was alone. He had seen what they had done to Lucius, rending him limb from limb, their razor sharp fangs ripping into his flesh. With no time to reload, there was only one choice. Cyril made the decision to not go out the same way as Lucius.
He just needed to make sure the rifle was aimed correctly though. Not something he could do on the run. He needed time.
The first coyote was upon him, foaming at his heels. Cyril turned and slammed the butt of the musket into the beast’s muzzle, crushing the cartilage underneath. The coyote collapsed, tumbling forward while it shrieked in pain. There were others, Cyril was sure, and they were coming. Ahead was a large rock jutting from the earth, a massive boulder rising ten feet above the ground. Cyril ran toward it, scrambling to reach its rounded peak.
Behind him, another member of the pack sprung from the ground at his feet but Cyril was too fast, luckily pulling away in the nick of time as the beast instead smashed headfirst into the boulder and tumbled aside with a loud yelp. Cyril knew what he had to do, his nimble fingers cocking back the hammer on the musket. There was no time to waste. They were practically upon him. Cyril didn’t bother with a prayer he just jammed the loaded musket’s barrel underneath his chin as his right thumb scrambled to find the trigger. There was no moment of hesitation or reflection, only action. The rumble the rest of the pack made as they bore down on him, charging at full gallop was deafening and it caused Cyril to look up, only momentarily.
In an instant, the pack leader left the ground at full speed, its body arcing high into the air. By the time Cyril saw the leaping beast it was too late. The coyote crashed into him before he could get off the fatal shot, knocking Cyril clean off the rock. The musket flew from his hands as he abruptly thudded to the ground, onto his back with the coyote leader right on top of him. Instantly, the wind was knocked out of Cyril’s lungs and coupled with the heavy beast pinning him to the ground he could not get up nor breathe.
In complete terror he could only lay there, staring into the yellow eyes of the coyote as it bared its fangs, the hot saliva dripping from the beast’s dark muzzle onto Cyril’s face.
Cyril braced himself for the unspeakable. His heart shuddered as his brain exploded with panic. The air around him was thick with the scent of the pack—smells of earth, dirt and especially blood—as they surrounded him. The other coyotes circled their leader, blotting out everything in Cyril’s periphery. He tried again to move but couldn’t. The pack leader began to emit a low, angry growl that shook every bone in Cyril’s body and though Cyril had turned his gaze from the coyote leader out of extreme fear, he turned his head slightly and peered upwards into the eyes of the massive beast. Again, it growled, this time louder and deeper, rumbling like thunder. But something about its voice seemed to be trying to compel Cyril to look deep into its eyes.
Though deeply struck with paralyzing fear, Cyril obeyed the command he thought he heard in his mind. He turned his head even more to gaze into the face of the beast. And as he did, the image of the coyote changed before his very eyes into the figure of a man. A man whose scarred face was mostly hidden in shadow. And suddenly all around him, Cyril could hear them, their voices lost in a cloud of whisper. A hundred conversations going on all at once. His head snapped around and the coyotes which once surrounded him had all changed into human form—cloaked figures, their faces barely visible in the dim light of the forest. To his left was a man with raw empty sockets where his eyes had been. Another bore extreme facial disfigurement obviously caused by disease. Cyril could see their lips moving slightly as the whispers around him grew louder.
With a deafening snarl, the pack leader brought Cyril back to his impending future. In the blink of an eye the shadowy human figure pinning him to the ground returned to it’s hulking coyote body. Its yellow eyes piercing deep into Cyril’s soul. And it was then that Cyril suddenly realized, as his heart lay frozen in terror, that the eyes he was staring into were the very eyes of death itself.
“No,” he uttered with his near-last breath just as the coyote’s mouth clamped down upon him, engulfing his face from his cheek to his neck.
Cyril’s arms flailed and shuddered as the beast’s powerful jaws tore at him, ripping away not only flesh but sinew, muscle and bone in an instant. The pain was unbearable as Cyril’s brain responded by firing every synapse in his body in a desperate attempt to mercifully overload his nervous system. His eyes, still fully functional, locked onto the coyote leader, unable to look away as its bloody jaws came at him again, this time clamping down onto his open screaming mouth, its teeth sinking into Cyril’s soft palate. He felt a sharp tugging at his head and then a ripping from within his ears as the coyote pulled away Cyril’s bloody lower jaw from his skull. Cyril’s mind, still fighting, registered this as if a bolt of lightning had struck his body.
The coyote leader shook its head violently, tossing aside Cyril’s mandible.
His life was draining though Cyril could still feel his fingertips as his shaking hands balled into fists from the trauma that had been inflicted upon him. His brain could not form a single cohesive thought; only a deafening ringing filled his ears.
And then the rest of the pack descended upon him, first ripping at the soft flesh of his limbs. Each new bite became a tug, then a tussle turning every new puncture into ragged gashes. Within moments the fingers on both of his hands were taken followed by both of his feet as the coyotes made quick work of his shoes.
From either side of him he could feel them yanking at his arms, jostling his body back and forth. At the same time he was being dragged downward by the ones chewing on his legs. He was hemorrhaging blood so quickly now that his mind barely clung to the precipice of conscious thought, but still he could sense their teeth tearing into him. As their sharp fangs ripped into his torso, severing connective tissue from muscle, all of his physical awareness drained from his mind. When they continued to gnaw at what was left of Cyril’s limbs, stopping only at the bone and then chewed into the flesh between his legs, he felt nothing.
But still his body hung on to dear life, even if just barely clinging to a morsel of fading consciousness.
Within moments his mind registered complete darkness as the pack leader took Cyril’s eyes with its hungry jaws.
Cyril’s heart struggled then stammered and then suddenly, in a flash from deep within his failing brain a voice rose from the pure nothingness.
Its words to Cyril were absolute. His part in all this was that of a human sacrifice. In no uncertain terms, he had been made into an offering.
And we thank you, the voice said.
Just as that offering was being accepted hungrily by the creatures feasting on his body.
In what was left of his mind there was no question. No wondering of why. That part of his brain, which managed such things, had been closed down, shuttered like an abandoned house. All that remained was a bare flicker of life clinging to his mortal body.
And we thank you, we do… the voice in his head repeated, over and over. Still there was no release as each living moment of this hell faded slowly into the next, the voice repeating and rising into a crescendo.
And we thank you…
And we thank you…
And we thank you, we do…
Only to be suddenly silenced as the pack leader tore into Cyril’s neck and ripped his throat away.
From within the chasm Cyril was instantly plunged into there was no conscious thought, there was no awareness. All that existed was a void, a vast nothingness between himself and the world of the living. And it was in this darkness that he remained until summoned forth by a force beyond his comprehension.
For it was in those very same woods that Cyril’s eyes reopened and his lungs let out a mighty gasp. Although a period that spanned over a dozen decades had passed since the world he had left behind, it was, to Cyril, as if not one moment of time had elapsed.
Suddenly, he felt something pulling him forth and his gaze snapped to a young boy standing before him staring back with soulless black eyes.
The boy then opened his mouth to Cyril and spoke. “I am Miles Lawton, and you will serve me.”
Free Summer Reading: Badlands – Chapter 10
Jul 26th
Previous chapters of BADLANDS can be found here
CHAPTER 10
The pain was excruciating as the hillbilly ran the bayonet through Galen’s chest. As Galen looked up he could see right into his killer’s dull eyes, the hillbilly’s teeth bared in a feral grin as the muscles of his neck strained against his skin, pulling it taut. Galen’s killer let out a whooping scream spraying spittle into his face. As he fell to his right, onto his side, the hillbilly used the leverage of the gun to lead his victim’s body to the ground until he lay on his back.
Quickly, Galen’s vision began to grow dark as his killer hovered above him appearing only as a silhouette against the dim tree canopy overhead. Suddenly Galen felt his body rising up from the ground, but only a couple of inches as the hillbilly withdrew the bayonet from his chest. Even so, there was no sensation of feeling as his body began quickly shutting down. No sense of pain until the hillbilly ran him through with the bayonet again, this time through Galen’s midsection. The cold, sharp steel penetrating his gut felt like stabbing sheaths of ice. Every nerve ending in his body felt as if it had been struck by lightning. Galen lay there, unable to summon his brain to will his arms to fight back, his legs to get up and run away. He was powerless to do anything as the hillbilly twisted the blade inside his guts.
And then as the light closed in his eyes, Galen Altos tumbled headfirst into the infinite night and left this world behind.
Dunburton had gone to relieve himself, leaving Cyril alone in the study. As he waited for the Major’s return, Cyril’s feet grew antsy and he found himself wandering around the room examining books on Dunburton’s shelves. He stopped at the glass case holding the shrunken head and gazed upon the peculiar specimen from South America. And suddenly he was overcome with a bizarre sensation, first in his chest and then in his entire body, a sensation that felt as if something inside his very soul was being ripped away. The feeling was strange, as if someone were pulling his insides out of his body. Cyril stood there for a moment clutching his stomach, before finally succumbing to the feeling that grew more painful with each passing second until he found himself doubled over in complete agony. Finally he could take it no more. As quick as his feet could carry him, Cyril made his way down the hall, through the great foyer and then outside. His hand covered his mouth, but as soon as he could smell the fresh air, his stomach roiled and he barely made it off the front stoop before vomiting onto the ground. The purge came in several waves until Cyril felt there was nothing more possibly left inside him. But then the nauseated feeling struck again, but this time he felt that not only would he throw up the bile in his gut but quite possibly his internal organs as well. His body heaved violently as he resigned himself to what was about to happen. Doubled over in immense pain, he closed his eyes and let the sick come from his gut and out of his mouth. Afterwards he wiped the ropey strands of mucous from his lips and waited for the world around him to stop spinning.
Cyril’s eyes caught sight of the puddle he’d left on the ground. In it were tinges of crimson. He checked the back of his hand where he had wiped his mouth. On it were obvious streaks of blood as well. He touched his fingers to his lips to find the same.
What is happening to me? Cyril wondered to himself. It felt like he was dying.
His body suffered from tireless pursuit. It had been a chore he’d been tasked with during a seemingly forgotten period of his existence, a part of his world he had long reckoned over and done—his life relegated to the same grim duty faced by every simple man, that of filling whatever indeterminate time was left before the sunset with just enough to keep him from going insane. Cyril had managed that quite well since the end of the war. The infantry had, at least until recently, treated him well. And it was there that he had planned to spend the rest of his days until he was ultimately called to his final reward. One that he figured he had truly earned.
But now to hear Altos was still alive meant the pursuit would begin again. The counter of his service, the coin which he had thought would buy his way to his final peace, had just been reset to zero.
His mind rocked with a sudden burst of anger and, as if struck, Cyril felt a jolt of electricity shoot through his body. The pain behind his eyes felt like fire raging between his temples. Cyril brought his fists up to his face and clenched his jaw but the intense sensation would not pass and as he let out a scream the world of Kansas City around him outside of Dunburton’s house disappeared in a flash of light.
As Cyril looked up from his pile of sick he realized with a shock that he was now in a dense forest bracing himself from falling down with a stiff right arm against a tree. He could feel the rough bark against his hand and it was this, sensing the tree underneath his hand, that made Cyril suddenly realize he had faded back in his memory more than 150 years to the moment that changed everything.
There on the ground, not far from him, as it had first been all that time ago, was the lump of black fur, its paws splayed to the side, its shattered and blown away skull turned at a grotesque angle.
“Don’t touch it!” William Lawton shouted as he poked the now dead beast with the barrel of his musket.
“Nice shot, William,” Lucius said to him, still looking quite stunned, much like the others.
The fourth man in the party examined the dead beast. “What is it?” he inquired.
“Wolf,” William said. “We must have surprised it.”
And as the words left William’s mouth, Cyril noticed the severed human leg on the ground much as he had the first time.
Back at the camp, Cyril could not help but notice the unease from the other travelers. The journey across the ocean to the new world, to say the least, had indeed not been easy and William Lawton had instructed the members of that afternoon’s search party to keep quiet about what they had found in the woods. The body of the creature stuck in his mind, a stinking beast with matted fur and a shattered mouth full of teeth. It looked like nothing Cyril had ever seen before, living or dead, and William’s explanation that it was the kind of wolf to be found in these woods seemed, at the same time, impossible and utterly terrifying.
With shaking hands, he was attempting to pour water from a cask into a tin cup when a voice came from behind him.
“Take a walk with me.”
Cyril turned to find the young man, Lucius, holding a rifle and looking quite uneasy. “There’s something I’d like to have a word about,” Lucius said quietly.
Beneath their heels, the crunching of twigs and dirt filled the silence between the two men. Together they quietly ventured toward the forest surrounding their camp, out of both eye and earshot of the others.
“William asked that nobody else leave,” Cyril said.
“We’re not leaving,” Lucius responded, still appearing nervous. “We’re just checking the perimeter.”
Cyril acknowledged Lucius’ tone as that of a little white lie. They continued into the woods in silence for another few minutes. Cyril strode next to Lucius, both men cradling their muskets under the crooks of their arms.
“Did you hear that?” inquired Lucius, whipping his head around. “Do you think someone is following us?”
Cyril shook his head. “Perhaps its a roughed grouse.”
Lucius laughed nervously and ran a hand from his forehead to his chin and then through his sandy brown hair. “That really would be something.”
“So, Lucius, tell me what is of such importance to get me all the way into the woods?”
“I have a grave worry about William Lawton,” Lucius spoke in a hushed voice.
“Lucius, what in heaven’s name are you talking about?”
“Today, when he fired his gun at that thing, it was as if he knew there was something lurking there. It was as if he was… prepared.”
“We found a man ripped apart,” Cyril said. “I for one am grateful that William Lawton was vigilant.”
“Do you remember young Anne Walsh?” asked Lucius.
“The woman who vanished aboard the Majestyk? It was presumed she must have fallen overboard.”
“Aye, Anne confided in me that she believed William Lawton was up to no good. And two morrows later she goes missing? Is that not suspicious to you?”
Cyril considered his friend’s words before answering. “Anne Walsh could have been struck by madness from the long journey. Perhaps she leapt overboard, or was washed over the rail by a wave.”
“Pffft,” Lucius sounded. “She told me that she overheard Lawton silently praying in a language she described as being something other than human.”
“Lucius, if William Lawton was praying silently, then how did she overhear him?” Cyril said with a smile.
“Then what do you make of this?” From Lucius’ pocket he withdrew a small swatch of black leather. Cyril took it and inspected the triangular piece.
“’Tis the patch belonging to that one-eyed guide Lawton chased away,” Lucius said. “You telling me that man left without it?”
Cyril looked up at Lucius, then back at the patch, which appeared to be stained with blood. “Where did you find this?”
“When we were packing up to leave that morning. After Lawton told us the guide had left us, I went into the fringe of the woods to relieve myself. And there, next to a tree, I spotted it. Those bloodstains were fresh and tacky when I picked it up.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” asked Cyril.
“There are those among us in the party who believe the guide was telling the truth about this land, these woods being filled with evil. Cyril, I have seen things here, in the dark, that I cannot explain. Eyes. Movement. And Lawton’s insistence that we enter into this valley against the strict warning of the man who was hired to bring us here causes me great concern.”
“We don’t have the luxury of time to waste getting to our new land. Winter is upon us.”
“I believe not a single one of us will survive until winter if we stay in these woods. A number of the men have asked me to talk to you.”
“What is it you want from me, my support? Because I…”
“No. Cyril we wish for you to lead.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Cyril, you have a quality about you.”
“Lucius, I am far from being a leader.”
“I beg to differ.”
“Why me? Why not you?”
“I am the son of a simple carpenter. None respected me at home. Who do you imagine will respect me here? Cyril, you run from responsibility, but if you chose to, you could lead this flock. You have a quality about you that I am not quite able to put a finger on—”
And before he could finish, Lucius stopped in mid-sentence, his eyes fixed twenty yards away just past Cyril’s left shoulder.
“Do not make a sound,” Lucius whispered.
“What is it?”
“They’re here,” Lucius’ voice chattered, for in the woods, coming toward them were dozens of black forms on four legs, their yellow eyes staring down at him.
Free Summer Reading: Badlands – Chapter 8
Jul 19th
Previous chapters of Badlands can be found here
CHAPTER 8
An orange ball of fire hung in the sky, having just risen only hours earlier. Galen scratched his beard. The growth on his face itched like mad. He’d let the beard sprout over the last two months for no other reason than he’d come to consider himself a different person. Truth was he had begun the exile from himself a long time ago. As he had sat in that cramped and fetid cell in a small town whose name he could now no longer remember, he recalled being repeatedly referred to as “The Stranger”. It was a moniker that had stuck even though at the time of his arrest he had given his name as something even different than his previous alias of “Tom Holt”. That false name also escaped him as well because as the townsfolk came by to gawk at the condemned man, Galen decided to begin referring to himself as the Stranger as well. His true name and identity would die on the gallows, he reckoned. And that would ultimately be fine with him.
Blue followed closely behind as Blue tended to do, wandering no further than a half dozen paces back and often bumping his wet nose disgustingly against Galen’s left hand.
Galen had come to accept this somewhat bothersome behavior as the aged burro’s direction finding system given that it had become apparent Blue’s failing eyes were going the way of its useless ears.
A month back it was obvious Blue was going blind when, while taking a turn through a wooded pass, he trundled headfirst into a tree.
“Time has not been kind to either of us,” Galen said out loud to the burro.
Galen had begun to think the pathetic beast didn’t have too much longer. The idea worried him because Blue had quietly accepted the heavy burden laid upon him. Without the burro Galen would be forced to stay closer to towns where he could replenish supplies more often. He preferred the route he was taking, through more desolate terrain.
So desolate in fact, Galen had not seen another human being for nearly a month, the last being a group of families headed west along this trail to satiate their lust for gold. His contact with them was brief, lasting but a few hours while they swapped traveling conditions. Galen had liitle to tell since he himself had only been on this particular trail since leaving Texas. The traveling group’s leader, a stout man named Lindstrom, had inquired about conditions west of the Rockies and the passability of the land come the later months of the year. Galen had responded that he was not familiar and then wondered moments later why he had lied to Lindstrom about it. They shared a meal together before going their respective ways and as the Lindstrom party departed Galen watched the sullen and haggard faces on some of the women and children who had no idea how much more trying their journey would become in the weeks and months ahead.
The story Galen had not shared with the Lindstroms was the tale of the Donner party. The Donners, another family caught up in the ‘westering fever’ of the last decade had been snowbound in the Sierra Nevadas and resorted to cannibalism to survive. Galen had made the decision at the moment not to tell the grisly tale for fear of terrifying the already weary travelers. Galen had served with several men who had been part of the army rescue team that had been sent out to the Donner’s campsite. Men who told stories of finding piles of gnawed boned cut with human teeth marks and staring into the eyes of survivors who had consumed the human flesh of their own family members in order to stay alive.
Galen often wondered about the Lindstroms and hoped they were still surviving their journey, though the conditions of the trail often worked against larger groups moving slowly. Groups who were easy prey for the many predators on the path. Predators who spent their waking hours laying in wait for throats to slit be it man, woman or child—often just for the sheer sport of it.
Shortly after the sun reached its peak in the midday sky, Galen came upon a wooded bluff, making extra careful to yank on the rope around Blue’s neck to keep the nearly blind burro from going over the edge.
“Whoa there,” Galen told Blue as he stared out over the hilly terrain below the rim. He unslung his waterskin and took a sip. The view was magnificent but from this elevation the path seemed to wind on forever without end. The thought disheartened Galen. His journey had barely begun and he could feel the toll it was taking on his body. His feet especially, which ached with each step. He needed a horse but dared not consider trying to steal another given the last time he ended up rotting in a Texas jail for weeks awaiting a date with the gallows.
Perhaps there are worse things than dying, he thought to himself. Given the choice between the gallows and what he feared lay ahead, Galen wasn’t quite sure which was preferable.
The road broke off in the woods sometime late in the day. The Lindstroms had mentioned the possibility due to the heavy rains that had fallen this year and the routes other travelers had broken off towards, all in search for that elusive shortcut. Galen sighed and pulled Blue along with him as he looked for another fresh trailhead. He spotted fairly recent ruts in the dirt from another wagon.
“What do you think?” he asked Blue who, as usual, gave no response.
Now you have yourself talking to a deaf burro, Galen thought.
From the look of the tracks in the ground there had been at least more than one wagon. Galen knelt down and ran his hand over the ruts. Though not a tracker he reckoned they were indeed very fresh. He began to relish the possibility of catching up with whoever it was. Human conversation would be nice, as would a cup of fresh, hot coffee.
By sunset, Galen still hadn’t found where the trail picked up, nor had he any sign of the travelers whose wagon tracks he’d been following through the woods. His feet ached and Galen sat on a rock to take off his boots. He was paying the price for the weeks of walking as they were easily starting to fall apart. At some point they’d have to be replaced which meant going into a town somewhere. Which meant making the decision whether or not to drink whiskey as the itch would certainly be upon him once the opportunity to imbibe presented itself. He couldn’t even remember the last time the thought of a drink had even crossed his mind. But cross his mind it did as he sat there looking at his worn out boot. He took the other boot off and placed them on the ground before walking barefoot back to where he’d left Blue standing. He unstrapped the saddlebags from Blue’s back. Even without the bags, the curvature of the ancient burro’s back made old Blue look as if he was still carrying a heavy burden. Galen hunted around inside his bag. He pulled out a hunk of jerky which Blue noisily began eating.
Running low on food, too, Galen thought as he dug for one of the last pieces of jerky. He’d have to do something about that as well. From what he could see, hear and smell, there was definitely plenty of game in these woods.
Galen crept through the woods looking for jackrabbit. The thought of one roasting over a small fire made his mouth water. If he was lucky enough to get two, he’d treat Blue to something other than jerky. He crouched behind the trunk of a fallen tree and waited.
He saw the white jack enter the small clearing, completely unaware it was being hunted. With a steady hand, Galen lined up the rabbit in the sights of one of the Colt Dragoon pistols he’d been carrying. Galen waited, took a quiet inhale and started to squeeze the trigger when he heard the scream of a woman coming from what seemed like not too far away.
Galen began running toward the sound, at first unsure where it was coming from until he heard the scream again, this time coming from just over a rise above him. Quietly, he scrambled up the hill, pistol in hand. Once more came the horrible noise, this time cut off in mid-scream. Now Galen could hear other voices, that of men, yelling.
“I tole you to shet up!” yelled one.
Galen crawled on his belly to the top of the hill and peered over into the clearing. Standing fifty feet away, with his hair-covered back to Galen was a shirtless hillbilly, his gut hanging over the top of his pants, one hand holding a knife, the other clutching a bloody pink nubbin of flesh. Below him on the ground lay a fragile-faced, brown-skinned woman, her dress torn open and hiked up past her thighs while being viciously raped by a second fat and hairy hillbilly—his large pale white ass pumping back and forth with every grunt he made.
Galen turned away, unsure of what to do. He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed the barrel of the Colt against his right temple.
Dammit, he thought. From this distance he could hear the knife-wielding hillbilly egging on the one committing the rape. “Do it! Do it!” he was braying, his voice taking an excitedly high pitch.
Galen took a deep breath. He thought of the promise he’d made to himself and to a god he wasn’t quite sure he believed in. A promise made after leaving Sagebrush to never take another human life.
He gazed toward the sky. “I’m sorry,” he muttered under his breath before turning and dashing toward the hillbillies, Colt blazing. The hillbillies looked up, stunned. Galen’s heart pounded wildly as his first two shots went far wide. The third and fourth found their mark in the ribcage of the fat hillbilly lying on top of the woman. The one with the knife found his feet fast enough to begin running as his accomplice lay dying, not even once thinking to stop and save him. Galen emptied his revolver at the escaping hillbilly. Half-heartedly firing in his direction without actually aiming.
He holstered the weapon and turned back to the woman but as he took his first step he saw it on the ground, the pink nubbin of flesh the now escaped hillbilly had been holding. Galen stopped in his tracks because he recognized instantly what it was.
A tongue.
Now shriveled and lying in the dirt. Immediately Galen understood why her last cry for help had cut off in mid-scream.
He looked toward the woman, sure she was dead until she turned her head toward him and coughed up a large, messy mouthful of blood. Her face was turning purple.
She was suffocating under the weight of the dying fat hillbilly rapist.
Galen rushed to her side. With his boot, he rolled the fat hillbilly off her and she immediately gulped for air to fill her lungs. The hillbilly moaned. Hillbilly blood pumped from the two holes in his side. He looked up at Galen, eyes wide in terror.
“Help me,” he gasped.
Galen looked down at the rapist, his dirty dungarees pulled down below his knees, his filthy, pathetic and tiny prick shriveled up. Galen reached into the small leather ammo bag slung around his neck and withdrew a percussion cap and placed it on the cylinder nipple of the only unfired chamber of the Colt. As a precaution he’d been taught to leave one uncapped to prevent accidental discharges. There would be nothing accidental about this. Galen aimed the gun between the dying hillbilly’s eyes and fired the round into his skull.
Galen holstered the now empty Colt and knelt down next to the woman. Her mouth was filling up with blood and she was choking on it so Galen turned her head. He looked back toward where he had found her severed tongue on the ground and wondered if she was going to die.
She was obviously Mexican or at least of Mexican decent from her features and Galen tried to brush away the tears streaming from her eyes.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said, fairly certain it wasn’t.
From her mouth came a series of sounds as she tried to speak. Without a tongue, her words were unintelligible at best.
“Shhh,” Galen told her. “Don’t try to talk.” He wanted her to conserve her strength, but she began pointing back to the woods in the direction the escaped hillbilly had run towards. She spat out another mouthful of blood and hysterically gestured again at the woods.
“I… I can’t understand you,” Galen said, frustrated.
But what she was trying to communicate became very clear the moment the gunshots rang out from the woods and the bullets began flying in their direction.
The rider had come a long way to Kansas City. He had endured quite a bit to get here but as he entered the town he suddenly felt refreshed, invigorated. He had memorized the address of his destination and found it without trouble. He stopped his horse in front of the house along the waterfront and dismounted. Squaring his shoulders, he approached the mansion’s front door and knocked loudly.
And when Dunburton opened the door, he was only slightly surprised to see his old charge standing before him.
“Major Dunburton,” Cyril spoke, clicking his heels together and saluting.
Dunburton returned the salute and smiled.
“Please, come in,” the banker said. “I’ve been expecting you.”
Free Summer Reading: Badlands – Chapter 7
Jul 15th
Previous chapters of Badlands can be found here
CHAPTER 7
Galen gazed down at the smoking Derringer. As the Gypsy Crone had fallen, her blood had sprayed onto his hands and coat. He tossed the gun aside and took one last look into the open eyes of the dead crone. Galen stepped over to where the ebony box still lay face down and open upon the wooden floor of the parlor. He picked it up, reached into his pocket and replaced the box’s original contents before closing the carved ebony lid and dropping it back into his coat.
Hastily he made his way down the street, picking up the pace with each step until he was at a full run, the vapor of his breath trailing in the frigid air. Halfway to the waterfront, Galen came across a steed that had been tied to a hitch. Checking up and down the street for its owner, Galen untied the horse and rode away into the night.
For nearly two hours he could feel the box inside his pocket alive and slithering until he could bear the madness of it no longer. Finally, he came across an abandoned house that, by the looks of it, had recently been vandalized. Galen tied the stolen horse to a tree out of sight and carefully entered the dwelling.
The place had been thoroughly picked through though there were signs that squatters had been there recently. Galen checked to make sure he was alone. He found a broken chair and used it to start a small fire in the hearth. His stomach rumbled from hunger but quickly that faded from his mind, because again he could feel the box slithering inside his coat pocket. He sat on the floor by the fire and with a trembling hand brought out the carved ebony box. The carvings, snakes of unknown origin seemed to move under his fingers and Galen fought the fear rising up inside of him. With a soft click, he threw the latch and opened the box.
Inside was the eye.
The eye that had once belonged to a living creature of some sort, but had over time grown into a petrified state, was what the Gypsy Crone and the banker had both coveted. Galen now understood why, for it had certain cognizant powers.
He picked up the eye and cupped it in the palm of his hand. The outside felt smooth and uneven save for the slightly rough area in the back where the nerve stalks had long broken away.
As he had done before returning to the Gypsy Crone’s parlor, he stared into the eye’s black iris and could instantly feel himself drawn into it, falling. Like tumbling down into a darkened well.
The first time he’d gazed into the milky cornea of the eye, he’d seen how the crone had drugged him and used him to gain that which he had brought to the banker. But that scene was now replaced by a new, much more terrifying one. That’s when he felt it, an intense pressure building up between his temples, a dull pounding ache as if something inside his skull were to break through like a hatchling busting out of its shell.
Galen screamed as the pain grew and without warning his body felt limp, as if it were no longer attached to his cerebral cortex. The intensity welled and his brain felt like it was on fire. He screamed again but this time no sound came forth, only the hiss of air escaping his throat.
The mounting pressure inside his head built to the point that every molecule that made up his human body began shaking violently as if trying to escape the atomic gravity keeping him inside this existence. Then suddenly, as quickly as it started, it stopped and all Galen could feel was an overwhelming sense of light and silence save for the soft whoosh of air gently passing him.
Here, where he was, there was no pain, there was no suffering there was only an inescapable brightness all around him. Galen looked around, finally gazing down. Below his feet, several hundred yards down he could see the ground. He was above a dense forest, serene and silent, stretching as far as the eye could see against the blue sky. Galen cocked his head. From here he realized he could hear birds singing in the trees. But suddenly, their music stopped and from the woods below, thousands of birds took wing, scattering every which way as if escaping.
And that’s when Galen spotted it. At first the smoke rising in black wisps, funneling into the sky masked the orange corona of light rising from underneath the thick green canopy. But as the first flames broke through, the speed in which they spread was astounding. Within moments the fire rushed toward Galen’s direction with a deafening roar, consuming everything in its path, reducing the forest to a cinder.
The birdsong Galen heard before was now being replaced by something more sorrowful. First one voice gently sobbing in the distance, followed by another, their anguished cries for help rising at the level of a whisper that grew louder by a thousand, then ten thousand, then a hundred thousand. Voices swarming all around him as the sky suddenly began to grey, finally giving way to a frightening and oppressive sense of total dark.
And now Galen could sense their ascendancy from untold depths, monstrous creatures of the abyss spreading like plague across the world below, their gnashing yellow teeth making short work of all flesh unfortunate to fall within their clutching grasp. Those unlucky enough to survive then cast into chains, turned into slaves.
With a crack of thunder, the sky above Galen opened as a single shaft of pure illumination punched through the darkness. From here Galen could see them, winged figures of light pouring from the sky.
Together they come, darkness and light, in a deafening clash of weapons, holy warriors locked in ancient combat. From above, Galen can see as the battle rages. An archangel impales a slobbering horned beast on the end of a mighty sword while another has his wings torn asunder by the razor-sharp claws of a dozen hellspawn. The blood of the righteous and unrighteous flow until every last river on earth runs red.
The carnage is magnificent, no quarter offered, none taken. And as the thunder rolls, Galen could see it. Standing at the head of this unending phalanx of darkness was a man with eyes like smoke and the head of a coyote.
And it is upon this face that Galen zooms in as if speeding toward it like a rifle shot. Inside of him, he knows he’s seen this face before.
With a flash, he’s back on that dirty ghetto street in Veracruz, watching as a now coyote-headed Cyril carves the scalp from the young girl’s head. With a second flash he’s back to door of the church that Cyril set aflame, locking the innocent Mexican Catholics inside. And as Galen stood immobile to the atrocities before his eyes, Cyril turned to grin at him, again his head that of the Coyote.
And as the cursed eye fell from Galen’s trembling hand, the spell it had cast over him was broken and he was back sitting on the floor of the abandoned house. For minutes he stared at the eye, which lay on the floor gazing blankly upwards through its milky cornea.
“Why do you show me these things?” Galen shouted angrily at the eye. Then in a fit of rage he scooped it up off the floor and threw it into the fire burning in the hearth.
The night brought a fitful sleep for Galen for the images he’d been shown were burned into his mind. Every time deep slumber knocked at the door, it was quickly turned away by the horrors that kept him awake. As dawn broke, Galen picked himself up off the hard and freezing cold floor and fled the house, leaving the carved ebony box behind.
The horse, by some miracle, had survived the night out in the cold and, not surprisingly, was not happy with Galen. Nonetheless, when Galen saddled himself on the steed it trotted away, most likely pleased to be moving.
Several miles away, Galen came to a junction. The road forked both to the east and the south. Though he was not sure why, a voice in his head told him east would bring him face to face with what he had seen in that terrible eye. Turning around the way he had come, however, back toward Kansas City and the possible consequences for his actions, was not an option. Galen shook his head and pointed the steed south.
Dunburton had spent the night in his study, drunk and despondent over the sudden loss of the object he had spent so many years coveting.
To have it slip through his fingers, he thought. It was maddening. When he had opened the box to check its contents upon arrival, the eye had given him a brief look into the man who had brought it. A mere glimpse but enough to see that Tom Holt was certainly not who he pretended to be. That “Tom Holt” was actually one of the only San Patricio deserters to escape final judgment. Had he been able to coerce a confession over dinner, he could have had him arrested, or more appropriately, killed him on the spot, claiming the rights of his former military rank.
Instead he allowed Tom Holt to take the eye. The object he’d procured by using his own money to purchase the bank deed to a particular ranch and applying pressure on the owner until the object he so desired had come loose.
Perhaps the rancher knew this would happen, Dunburton thought to himself. If the man had used the eye to divine the outcome of this transaction, it was quite possible. The thought very much angered Dunburton.
Had he been a younger man, still in his fighting prime, he would have gone after Tom Holt himself.
That’s not his real name… thought Dunburton. The eye had told him the true identity but it all seemed clouded in his mind through the bourbon and anger.
But it burned inside of him. Here he was, an outlaw, a deserter. A traitor who had cheated justice during the war.
Dunburton slammed his fist against his desk hard enough to knock his near empty bottle to the floor. He’d be damned if he wasn’t going to see justice served. From his desk, he withdrew a sheet of paper. Steadying his hand with another sip from his tumbler, he began a letter to the only other man he knew who would want to do something about it.
The weeks passed as Galen drifted toward the Mexican border. As he got closer his pace seemed to slow. Galen knew why of course. It had been years since he’d been in Texas, years since he’d been a soldier who had fought for his country in the name of Manifest Destiny, and then shortly thereafter against his country to preserve decency as he saw it. His time in Texas had been nightmarish from the start of his service and his time south of the border hardly better, but he had heard rumors that those who had served under the Mexican flag with General Santa Ana in the brigade of St. Patrick’s would have been given a hero’s welcome in Mexico had they lived.
As far as Galen knew he was the only surviving San Patricio, the only one who could genuinely testify to the reasons for his desertion.
Perhaps we were killed to keep us quiet, he often thought, though Galen knew the dead often found ways to tell their secrets.
Of everything that had happened, everything he had seen and been part of, the atrocities committed against the Mexican civilians scarred him the deepest. If there was a place to even begin to atone for what he’d done, and what he had been unable to prevent, it was Mexico, Galen thought.
A new life, a new start… he imagined.
As far as his best guess, he had crossed into Texas a few days earlier and would make it across the border soon. He gazed out past the shimmering heat rising from the desert floor before him and that’s when he felt the first thump.
The horse, the same one he’d stolen during his quick departure from Kansas City had hardly taken to him during their weeks together and had become increasingly sullen. The last two days it had barely eaten and with one final weakened step the animal collapsed, throwing Galen onto the ground.
Galen thudded hard, face first. He pushed himself up to his elbows, spit out a mouthful of dirt and looked back at the horse which now lay dead just a few feet away.
He got to his feet and brushed himself off. The border was close. He’d just steal another horse to get there.
How hard could that be? He reckoned.
At half past noon on May the 12th, the postbag had been delivered to Fort Jones. The mail had been routed west via stagecoach to their outpost in Scottsburg in the California territory. The coach itself had been delayed a week during a scheduled stop in the mining town of Hooperville when it was reported there had been a hostile Indian attack further up the trail just a few days earlier.
The coming of the mail at Fort Jones had been met with a crowd of soldiers since its arrival marked the first postbag in two months.
Nearly all the men stationed there had been expecting letters or packages sent to them from somewhere. All the men but one—a Lieutenant who had no family other than the Army. All of his family was here as far as he was concerned so when a slack-jawed private brought him a letter addressed to him, he was quite surprised.
The envelope had been posted some weeks back from Kansas City, the home of one of his former commanding officers. Given the advanced age of the man, it was all the Lieutenant could do to not think the letter contained notice of the great man’s passing. Instead, he was pleased to discover the note had been penned in the old man’s own, albeit shaky, hand.
“My dear friend,” the Lieutenant read. “It is with great consternation that I report this news, but I have discovered something that I believe is of great interest to you. One of the last surviving betrayers to the flag known as the San Patricios has crossed my path as I live and breathe. Though I was not able to make his true identification until he had left my presence, I am positive this man is the last of the traitorous mob you have diligently brought to justice. I am but an old man now, unable to do this duty for my country but I trust as one of the soldiers formerly under my command that you still have the desire, and the general orders to hunt down any surviving San Patricios so they may answer for their crimes.”
Quietly, Cyril read the rest of the letter containing the details with which he’d need to begin his hunt. After he was done, he folded it neatly back into its envelope and tucked it away inside his tunic. He took his hat in his hands, the hat of an officer of the U.S. Army, and placed it upon his head and stepped outside into the sun and that’s when a very wide grin crossed his face.
When Galen finally opened his eyes, the flash had ended. He had come completely back to the present. Again, he was there in the dry riverbed, a day’s walk from the town of Sagebrush. Holding the lamp and staring back at him across the dim firelight was the ghastly and rotting face of the girl whose life he had done nothing to save back in Veracruz.
Galen had run from so much over the past few months, the past few years. It was all he knew. But that was about to end. Deep inside, underneath the fear he felt in his heart, Galen sensed the running was over. After tonight he would be moving forward, though toward what he was unsure. This terrified him much more than what he had already left behind.
“What if you aren’t real?” Galen asked the apparition before him.
The answer came as the girl from Veracruz raked her boney and splintered fingers across his cheek. Galen reacted, stunned. He pulled his hand away to find his own blood on it.
“The powers that wish you to take this journey are stronger and more unforgiving than you can ever imagine. What you left behind in the town of Sagebrush will be nothing if you choose to disobey fate’s warning,” she hissed. “If you do not take the path that has been laid out for you, death will follow in your wake, taking with it the innocent.”
“And what exactly is waiting for me there at the end of this path?”
“If you are wondering if you will be saved then you labor to ask the wrong question.”
“Will I be damned, then?”
“You are already damned, Galen Altos, but tonight there is reason to believe your fate has not been completely written as of yet.”
And as she turned her face away, with a puff of breath, the dead girl from Veracruz blew out the lamp and plunged both of them into total darkness.
*****
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Free Summer Reading: Badlands – Chapter 6
Jul 12th
Previous chapters of Badlands can be found here
CHAPTER 6
The noise in his head forced Galen to cover his ears with his hands. He dropped to his knees with the slushy water from the sidewalk soaking through his pants.
Again there was a sudden flash followed by a clap of thunder rumbling from inside his head. From the far echoes of his mind he could hear her screaming plaintive wails of terror as the knife carved into her flesh. The sound she made, a shrieking, as she fell to the dirt was almost animalistic, feral, as the young girl from his past died in the filthy streets of her Veracruz ghetto.
“Be still, you,” he hissed through gritted teeth just as he noticed he was down on all fours like a dog right at the front door of the gypsy’s fortune telling parlor. And as he looked up from his place on the ground, Galen had no recollection of crawling across the street to get there. There was a click of the lock being thrown and a creak of the door opening. Galen looked up to find the Gypsy Crone standing before him, her body outlined in the light coming from her parlor, and from deep inside his mind a little voice told him what he seemed to know all along, that his arrival here was an inevitability which he could not have changed if he had tried.
“I don’t think this was my choice,” Galen responded.
“As long as you understand everything that is to follow is your destiny at work and any attempt to fight it will only result in grave consequences.”
“Please,” Galen pleaded, and the crone stood and stared at him for a long time. Finally, she spoke.
“Come in and warm your bones by the fire. I think I know why you’re here.”
He had been sitting by a small cast iron stove for nearly a half hour when the gypsy brought him a steaming mug to drink. “This will warm your bones for sure.”
Galen drank from the hot mug. What was inside was bitter but he kept drinking because the warmth of the liquid easing down his throat felt good and also because something in his mind told him he could not have put the mug down even if he had wanted to.
“What do you know about your past?” asked the crone.
The question alarmed Galen, raising the hairs on the back of his neck to near-standing.
When he didn’t answer she pressed him.
“Where were you born?”
“I don’t know,” came the response.
“Who were your parents?”
“I don’t know.”
“When is the date of your birth?”
“I DON’T KNOW!” bellowed Galen.
“There is a curse over you,” she mewed, nodding her head. “One that is ancient. One that is unforgiving. The gypsy spat onto the floor. “You are an abomination!”
To Galen all this crazy talk coming from the crone buzzed about his head like flies. “I’m a man,” he blurted out. “Not whatever you’re trying to make me out to be.”
The crone’s sickly laughter filled the air between them and that’s when Galen started to smell it—the crone’s breath stank of disease. Her sallow skin pulled tightly across her skull made him see her for the first time as a corpse. It came as a sudden flash but there he stood in his mind’s eye over her dead body.
He blinked and his eyelids suddenly felt weighed down. With effort he opened them again but the drowsiness overwhelmed him. He could feel his shoulders go slack as the energy drained from his body.
“Very good,” said the crone, grinning. She ran a bony finger down his cheek. “Very good.”
Galen’s eyes opened to the sight of a small white mouse crawling out of a hole gnawed in the baseboard that covered only a couple of inches of the torn and yellowed parlor paper. Its nose wrinkled and its tiny red eyes stared back at him momentarily as if examining him as much as he were examining it.
“Hi,” Galen whispered but cut himself off, startled in half breath when the shoe heel came down upon the white mouse, smashing it into the floor.
Daisy stood there nude, save for the shoe in her hand. “Duh-duh-dirty cuh-cuh-critter,” Daisy muttered, she looked at the bottom of the shoe, now splattered with blood and bits of fur before tossing it aside.
She crawled back into the bed, getting under the covers while straddling Galen’s naked frame.
“Let’s guh-guh-go again?” she whispered into his ear. Daisy stared into his eyes and the wisps of thought Galen was having concerning how he had gotten here were pushed away by her misshapen breasts brushing playfully against his chest. She began to grind her hips into his and Galen could feel his natural response come to life. But as he entered her he looked up into her face to find it had changed to the ugly visage of the old Gypsy Crone, her skin pulled tightly around her skull, baring her stained and crooked teeth at him.
“No!” he screamed.
His heart pulsing with fright, he roughly shoved her off him and leapt from the bed. But when he looked back he only saw Daisy lying there, in her natural form, staring back at him curiously.
“I have to leave,” Galen told her, nervously gathering his pants from the floor.
“If yuh-you’re worried about m-m-money, yuh-you p-p-p-paid for all nuh-nuh-night,” she said.
Galen ignored her. He slid into his pants and shirt and sat on the bed with his back to her to put his boots on. With her duties obviously over, Daisy got up and put on a dirty and tattered silk robe.
He picked up his second boot and pulled his foot out when he felt something hard inside. He turned the boot over and falling to the floor was a small nickel-plated two shot Derringer. Daisy paid no mind, too busy washing herself from a small bowl of water. Galen picked up the gun, holding the rosewood grip in his hand.
The flash in his mind overtook him. Instantly he was back to the previous night in the lair of the Gypsy Crone. In the lamplight her bony hand slid the very same Derringer across the table to him.
“Bring me that ebony box,” her voice intoned, her gaze piercing deep into his soul.
And then with a flash he was back in Daisy’s shabby room holding the Derringer in his shaking hand.
It had been just before daybreak that he left, stepping out into the cold winter air. The streets were already busy and he dodged carts and horses to make his way from the bar as fast as he could. At first he was disoriented, unsure of which direction to turn. He stumbled across a curb into the arms of a fine-suited gentleman going the other way.
“Watch where you’re headed, fool,” said the gentleman brusquely as he passed.
Galen turned again, trying to spot any familiar landmarks. The first time he had visited that bar he had been mere blocks from his boardinghouse. He crossed one street, then another. Finally he spotted a man loading dry goods into the back of a buckboard.
“Can you tell me the way to Washington Street?” asked Galen.
“Standing on it,” came the answer.
“Which direction is the Gypsy fortuneteller?”
Looking at him like he was crazy, the man guffawed heartily before going back into the store.
Galen looked around. He walked up one side of the street, then down the other.
The storefront with the window marked “Fortune” was nowhere to be found. He had only seen it at night, and while drunk at that so his only landmark was that window with the wide and crooked letters.
Again he tramped up the street, looking carefully at every building as he passed.
Perhaps the window was replaced, he reckoned to himself. As the snow began to fall lightly, he trudged up the length of Washington Street and then again back down to the waterfront with no luck.
It’s only there at night, he thought. And as unlikely as he realized that was, he was now certain this was the case.
Galen drifted down to the edge of the water and plopped himself down onto a rock by the shoreline. He put his hands in the pockets of his duster and felt the Derringer. Pulling it out, he took a long look at the small gun. Hefting it in his right hand, he arched back about to throw the Derringer into the river before stopping himself.
The inside of his head hurt as if someone had torn a great rift in his mind. Galen violently rubbed his temples. Before him the river seemed to fade away and again he was back in the gypsy’s parlor repeating a scene buried in his memory.
“Where were you born?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who were your parents?”
“I don’t know.”
“When is the date of your birth?”
He rubbed his eyes, watching as the candle-lit room disappeared and the river faded back into view. Finally, Galen stood from the rock. He faced the great roaring river, tilted his head to the sky and bellowed, “Why do I not know?”
The world, it seemed, was spinning around him. He could see what felt like the passage of time whizzing past his eyes in a whirlwind of images speeding toward him, random snippets of moments and places long ago buried. Inside his head, synapses fired a hundred times their normal rate causing his entire conscious mind to overload in an overwhelming flood of forgotten thoughts he was helpless to hold back.
And as if landing with a thud, he was there, in a dark place his mind hadn’t gone to in over a hundred years. His hand ran along the side of a tree. He could feel the rough surface of its bark against his touch though he dared not look beyond it.
“No, no…” he gasped and in one big whoosh it all vanished, the darkness around him, the tree, the woods and immediately he was back at the waterfront, freezing in the cold morning air.
You are an abomination. He heard the crone’s voice in his head.
And as he sat back on the rock, Galen let his face fall into his hands and he wept.
He stood in the cold for hours watching the front of the bank, waiting. In his pocket he held the Derringer in his grip. His mind had been made up. He would go through with it.
At half past five, darkness began to fall as the sun set into the winter night. From his spot on the street, Galen could watch the fiery ball descend below the horizon. Shortly thereafter, Dunburton locked up the bank for the evening, and trundled home on his wobbly legs, fully unaware of the man shadowing him down the street.
As Dunburton turned toward the waterfront, Galen saw his chance. Picking up his pace he caught up to the banker’s stride and pushed close to the old man.
“Do as I say and you’ll live,” Galen told him, jamming the Derringer’s barrel into Dunburton’s ribs.
“Sir, what is the meaning of this?”
Galen thumbed back the hammer. It was the only answer he needed to give.
At Dunburton’s house the banker seemed shaken as his hand reached for the front door.
“Be very careful,” Galen said in a low voice. “Because I will kill you if I have to.”
They entered the foyer and Galen put a finger to his lips. Matty was rattling around the kitchen loud enough for both of them to hear.
“Anyone else in the house?” Galen asked.
Dunburton shook his head. His pallor seemed to be turning grey. Galen motioned for them to go directly to the study.
Inside, Galen closed the door behind them.
“Please, I beg of you,” Dunburton said in a shaky voice. “Don’t do this.”
“Give me the key,” he told the banker, motioning to the pocket where he knew Dunburton kept it.
Dunburton’s fingers trembled as he fished it out and handed it over. Galen went directly to the side table and unlocked the drawer.
Inside was the ebony box. Galen picked it up and couldn’t take his eyes off it. Finally he could make out the design he’d noticed before from afar. The box’s black exterior was inlaid with intricately carved snakes.
Dunburton broke his silence. “Why did you bother giving me the box if you were planning on stealing it?”
Galen snapped out of his trancelike state, whipping the gun around and pointing it right at the banker’s stunned face.
“Be quiet or be dead,” Galen hissed.
Dunburton ignored him, staring right down the barrel of the Derringer into Galen’s eyes. “Sir, I knew I had seen you before and how you managed to escape death that first time is beyond me. But trust me when I say that it will certainly come looking for you again.”
With the back of his hand, Galen smashed the banker in the face, sending the old man crashing to the floor. Galen slipped the box into his pocket.
“You come after me or yell for help, and I will kill you. That I promise you is not a lie,” Galen said.
And as he was about to exit the study, Dunburton spoke.
“You didn’t plan on stealing that box until you saw it,” he said. “You didn’t even know what it was until yesterday. Perhaps you still don’t even know.”
Galen paused and looked back at the banker, momentarily making Dunburton think he was about to be on the receiving end of a Derringer bullet.
And without a sound, Galen exited the study and slipped quietly from the house.
“You have done well,” the crone told him as she let him into her parlor. Galen brushed past her and shook off the winter chill.
“You have it, no?”
Galen reached into his duster and withdrew the carved ebony box and placed it down on her table. In the flickering lamplight of the parlor, the engraved snakes seemed to dance and slither in their own shadow. The gypsy’s stare was transfixed on the fabulous object sitting there, her eyes opened wide and her mouth pulled taut with delight.
“I have waited for you for so long,” she said, opening the box.
Suddenly her expression changed. Her jaw was slack. Her face, crestfallen.
“What did you do with it?” she screeched, dropping the empty box to the floor. “Tell me!”
Galen stood there, stone-faced. Unmoved by her dire pleas.
“You don’t understand. You do not possess what you think you have. You do not understand its power!” she cried.
“I think I’ll manage,” Galen told her. “You used me. You played me like a fiddle.”
“It is your destiny to be used. Why do you think you were delivered to my door?”
Galen stepped back as if slapped.
“You are not from this world, Galen Altos. You do not belong here.”
Galen grabbed the crone by the shoulders and shook her like a rag doll. “How do you know my name?” he bellowed.
“I can see your past as clear as I see your true face,” the gypsy said, making the sign of the cross. “And I know that Galen Altos isn’t even your true name.”
Roughly, he shoved her backwards against the wall and turned toward the door but as he took his first step to leave, the crone snatched a heavy pewter candlestick from the table, raising it high above her head with both hands. And as she labored to bring it down upon the back of Galen’s head, he spun, Derringer in hand and fired a single shot—the bullet shattering her teeth before going into her open mouth and exiting though the carotid artery in her neck.
She fell to the floor, convulsing, her hands clutching at the wound pumping away her life’s blood.
“You search for that which you will never receive,” she hissed with her last breath before dying.
*****
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SHADOW FALLS: ANGEL OF DEATH



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