Donners of the Dead

Chapter Five

The silence stretched out until it was shattered by Meeks’ scream. Avery and Jake jumped to attention, rushing over to him, trying to calm him as he launched into hysterics. I couldn’t move, couldn’t take my eyes off of him. My brain filtered through the last five minutes and brought up the image of a bloody mouth inches from mine.

My Lord. That person, that pale thing, had bitten off Meeks’ finger. He must have been in shock when it happened. How on earth could something like that even happen in the first place? It was unheard of.

“Savages,” Jake snarled, holding up the hand and inspecting it while Avery and Tim were now trying to hold him down. He eyed me with hate. “Your kind of savages.”

I was too dumbstruck to care what he said about me or my kind. As savage as some Indians could be—believe me, I’d been exposed to all the stories—I also knew that none of them would do such a horrible, inhuman thing. Indians would never consume part of another human being. I couldn’t imagine anyone doing so, no matter what color they were or what they believed. They were people, not animals.

Donna finally snapped out of her religious daze and started helping them tend to Meeks’ hand. Tim had poured a lot of moonshine down his throat, so the thrashing calmed, and soon he was passed out. I sat on my bed with my knees drawn to my chest and watched until I noticed Isaac and Hank get up and head outside, blankets wrapped around their shoulders, rifles in tow.

Curiously I got up, slipped on my boots, and followed them out the door. Everyone else was so preoccupied with the disfigured Meeks that they didn’t even notice.

Outside it was crisp and cold, and I wasn’t surprised to see a few flakes of snow starting to fall from the sky. It wasn’t very heavy—just sprinkles—but I knew come morning there would at least be an inch or two on the ground. I was grateful for the ramshackle lean-to on the other side of the cabin where the horses were being kept, sheltered from the elements. I should have gone over and checked on them, but on this moonless night, I stayed by the dim glow of the cabin.

Isaac and Hank were nowhere in sight, but I had a feeling they were trying to track the way the person went. I could smell the person’s boots rising up from the scuffled footprints on the ground along with the scent of Meeks’ attacker, a mixture of blood and rot.

I went as far as I could into the forest without losing sight of the cabin and then stopped. I was better off with the horses than with Isaac and Hank in these dark, unending trees. As much as I wanted to find out what happened, why the pale man had attacked Meeks (and why he hadn’t done the same thing to me), my curiosity needed to be reined in before I did something idiotic.

“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” Jake said from behind me, his feet crunching on the fallen twigs, the air around me becoming more earthy and pleasant as he came closer. “It’s dangerous.”

I turned around to see him a few paces back, still in his long johns, and with a cigar in his hand. I quickly turned my head away—he was not leaving anything to the imagination. His body was massive, broad lines and hard muscle that seemed like it was going to burst out of the red wool.

“Aren’t you cold?” I asked, wishing I felt less embarrassed.

“Naw. You ain’t ever seen a man in his drawers, have ya?”

“A proper lady shouldn’t see that until she’s good and married,” I replied, wondering what wanton, caveman town he was from where folks were seeing each other in their undergarments. Texans were something else.

“You’ve said many times you aren’t a lady.”

He started walking toward me until I shot him a warning look to stay right where he was.

“I only said that once,” I retorted indignantly.

He puffed on his cigar, a few sprinkles of snow coming through the boughs of the trees and settling in his dark, lush hair. “True, but you’ve demonstrated your word many times before. No proper lady comes running out into the forest after she’s been nearly attacked by a savage.”

I glared at him, keeping my focus on his craggy face that looked strangely handsome in the burning glow of his cigar. “The man wasn’t a savage.”

“If that’s the case, then who was he?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted stupidly. “I only saw him for a second and there was barely any light. He was pale though, white as a sheet, with eyes bluer than a robin’s egg. But the same smell that I’ve been picking up the last few days,” I gestured ahead into the forest, “it’s coming from him.”

He frowned, eyes glittering with thought. “Interesting.”

“I thought so.”

“You know what the smell is?”

I shook my head. “Something rotten. But familiar.” I don’t know why I kept on talking, divulging information to him. “The other day, I smelled it on our neighbor’s horse that went rabid and tried to kill us.”

He coughed, his eyes bugging out. “I beg your pardon, Pine Nut?”

I sighed and quickly told him what happened with Nero, knowing it would be met with disbelief.

I turned to face him and was surprised by his silence. In fact, his mouth was set in a rather grim line. “Rabies is Latin for madness.”

I raised my brow. “I didn’t know that. Is it possible that whatever infected the horse had infected this man? He did look rather mad.”

He snorted. “You have to be more than ‘rather mad’ to bite someone’s finger clean off.”

I cringed and looked back at the cabins. “How is Meeks?”

He took in a large drag of his cigar and let the smoke slowly trail out from his full lips. “He’s alive. Unconscious. I don’t know what else we can do for him.”

“Surely one of us will be going back to River Bend tomorrow with him.”

“Won’t be you. Won’t be me.” A smirk tugged at his lips. “Mayhaps it’ll be Avery. I’d hate to see you cry though.”

“Oh, you’d love to see me cry,” I countered. “And I wouldn’t cry over Avery.”

“You two seem awful close for being just a couple of pals.”

“I don’t see how this is any of your business, nor how it could possibly interest you,” I told him. I lowered my voice. “Besides, he is my only friend in this world.”

“I see. That explains it then,” he said, another puff of smoke rising up to the trees.

“Explains what?” I asked defensively. “And why are we always out here sparring in the middle of the night?”

He shrugged casually. “Last night you came out to spar with me, Pine Nut.”

Before I could say anything to that, the faint crackle of crushed ground came from the woods. Isaac and Hank appeared first as shadowy dark forms before I could see them clearly.

“Find anything?” Jake asked them.

Isaac shook his head while Hank’s cold eyes fixed on me.

“Perhaps we need to take the tracker with us,” Hank said, reaching for my arm. I took a step back into a tree, trying to escape his grasp.

“Think it’s a bit late for that,” Jake said to him, his voice taking on an edge. “We’ll have a look around in the morning.”

Hank scowled at him but dropped his hand. “You really think you’re in charge of this, don’t you?”

He shrugged. “I don’t, but I do know better than you. Technically Merv’s in charge cuz Merv has the money.”

“Too bad Merv is in there dying,” Hank said without a hint of remorse.

Jake took in one last puff before he flicked the cigar at the ground between Hank and I. “Tomorrow will figure itself out. Merv may have lost his finger but he hasn’t lost his life. If he seems worse by morning, we’ll get someone to take him down to River Bend.”

“Well it ain’t going to be me,” Isaac snapped at him. “This is my uncle out there.”

“So you keep saying,” Jake said, stroking at his rough beard. “I reckon you must be the most loyal nephew on earth to keep going after him so…passionately.”

The two of them stared at each other in a silent showdown, Jake not breaking his gaze for a second. Finally Isaac muttered, “Get out of my way,” and tried to push past Jake before he realized that Jake was solid and immovable as a tree. He ended up going around him.

Hank stared at me with his leering eyes and licked his cracked lips before he followed after him. I shivered with revulsion.

“Best get you inside too,” Jake said as he eyed me. Little did he know I wasn’t shivering because I was cold.

Once we were back inside the cabin, I saw that Merv was propped up in his bed and still unconscious. His hand was fully-wrapped in muslin with only a small amount of blood soaking through, and his body was piled high with blankets.

Donna was washing her hands in a bowl of hot water beside Avery who smiled at me with relief.

“How is he?” I asked.

“I managed to stop most of the bleeding,” she said, her voice shaking. She pushed her blonde curls out of her eyes with her forearm, her hands still soapy. “The challenge is keeping the wound clean. We’ll need to keep changing the bandages.”

“Will we have to take him back to River Bend?” Jake asked, appearing beside me, still in those long johns.

She kept her God-fearing eyes averted and looked down at Meeks’ body instead. “Not if we keep him here for the next day or two. He shouldn’t be on the move, either back to River Bend or continuing north.”

“Ah, what the hell does she know?” Hank’s voice came from the other side of the cabin.

Donna’s cheeks burned with anger. “I know enough,” she said, lowering her voice. She looked at Jake, keeping her eyes above his neck. “He’ll be too weak to ride. For goodness sake, I feel too weak to ride. That was a horrible thing that just happened. Wicked and evil, like Satan crawled right here in this cabin with us.”

Jake exhaled loudly. “Don’t you think it makes sense then that we move on?”

“We could split up,” Tim mused from the corner of the cabin where he was sitting on a stool, appearing deep in thought. “Some of us can stay here, some of us can keep going.”

“Splitting up didn’t exactly worked for the Donner party, did it?” Jake pointed out.

I looked at Avery in fear, not wanting us to separate. He came over to me and put his hand on my shoulder, his head lowered toward mine. “Don’t worry, Eve, whatever we end up doing, I’m not leaving you. Not until I teach you how to fire a gun, anyway.”

Jake snorted loudly.

Avery lifted his head and gave him a dirty look. “Do you think that’s funny? Eve needs to know how to protect herself.”

His smile twisted. “A woman with a gun is a bad idea, boy. You’d be putting all our lives at risk.”

“Only your life,” I muttered under my breath. From the way his lips twitched further, I knew he had heard me.

He walked over into the center of the room by the roaring fire and addressed everyone. “I know we’re all worried about old Merv here pulling through. I know we’re all worried about finding what we’ve come out here to find. And I know we’re all worried that something or someone has already found us. But there just ain’t no use in worrying tonight. I’ll keep watch until sunup in case the finger-biting bastard comes back. Then we’ll start figuring out what to do.”

With the phrase “finger-biting bastard” rolling around in my head, it was a wonder I got any sleep at all.

Overnight, five inches of snow had fallen and more kept coming by morning, prompting Jake to nail boards to the broken window. Meeks was in a delirious state, more so than I would have thought. In the end, it was only his pinky finger that was missing, not a leg or anything so crucial as that, and yet he kept moaning about being ruined for the rest of his life. After everything, I would have thought he’d be more concerned with how his finger was taken but he wasn’t.

However, he was the only one who seemed unconcerned about that. As much as Isaac had been chomping at the bit to go forth to the next site, this morning he was hell-bent on finding the culprit. By now, theories about what it was were rampant, especially after they heard my testimony of what I saw. For whatever reason, Isaac and Hank seemed to want to track down this monster, even though the two of them seemed to have little regard for how Meeks was doing.

Naturally, I had to come along. I didn’t mind, especially when Tim said he’d stay behind to watch over Donna and Meeks. The rest of us set out on a long expedition, everyone relying on me to lead the way. The smell of rotting meat only got me so far though. Whatever or whoever that was, they were long gone.

When we paused for food—some leftover stew—Avery took the time to try and teach me how to load and shoot a rifle. I couldn’t say it was a success. Loading the gun itself was a long and complicated process, with having to put the right amount of gunpowder down the muzzle, then placing the ball in there and shoving it down as far as it could go, then adding cloth to the end, plus checking something called the firing cap. It was all way over my head, and even though we were doing this far away from the party, Jake would occasionally watch us and yell at Avery that he should be using a flintlock rifle, that his wasn’t a real man’s gun, that he was teaching me all wrong.

The curious thing for me was that Avery was in very close contact with me the whole time, closer than he’d ever been, and extremely attentive. When he first showed me how to hold the rifle, he put his arms around me, embracing my back. He smelled so good, clean and familiar, despite the fact we were camping and surrounded by light snow. And yet…I felt nothing. I’d always imagined Avery and I getting closer in this sort of way, of course on the more romantic side of things, but my heart never skipped a beat; I never felt all shivery and new. I just felt like he was my good friend Avery teaching me how to shoot a gun. It was comfortable. Nothing more and nothing less.

But by the time I was finally ready to fire at a tree for target practice, Jake shouted for us to get going. As if God waved his hand across the sky, it began snowing harder and growing colder, enough so that my bonnet was crusted with ice and my fingers began to go numb. Isaac wanted to go on and keep looking for the monstrosity, but Jake wasn’t having any of it, and even Hank seemed to agree.

The ride back to the cabin seemed longer, perhaps because we were all growing more miserable by the minute. When we finally arrived, Isaac and Hank abandoned their horses, even though they were steaming with sweat, and rushed on inside to get warm. Avery volunteered to rub them down and I followed suit. It wasn’t really volunteering since we were being paid, and I wouldn’t let a horse be put away without taking care of them first. We even took Trouble and told Jake to go inside and relax, though he seemed a bit hesitant about it. Once again, he hated taking orders from someone like me.

While we worked, taking off the saddles and gear, and rubbing them down with rags warmed by the fire until their coats were dry, I felt like I had a million things to ask Avery—we hadn’t really been alone yet this whole time, and the words had been building up inside of me.

I cleared my throat, ready to talk in privacy about how I felt about Isaac, Hank and this “monster,” but for some reason I was bringing up something completely irrelevant.

“Avery,” I started, unable to keep my lips from being still, “are you in love with Rose?”

He froze just as my heart did. He was shocked as I thought he would be, and I prepared myself for the possible answer.

“Eve…” he began, running his hand through his golden hair. “What a thing to ask.”

“I’m your friend and I can ask such things if I want,” I said.

He frowned at me. “You always were bold but you’ve gotten bolder. I’m afraid these cowboys are rubbing off on you.”

I just stared at him, wanting an honest answer so I could be done wondering about it.

He sighed and leaned his head back, the skin on his neck exposed and pale compared to his tanned face. “Am I in love with Rose? I don’t know. I reckon I don’t know what love is. You know it when you feel it, don’t you? Isn’t that what they say?”

I nodded, though now I had my doubts too. I had started to think I was in love with Avery, but now I couldn’t quite be sure. I would do anything for him…he was as beautiful as anything. He was warm. And most of all, he was safe.

Love was safe, wasn’t it?

“I don’t know,” I whispered to him. I’d thought about telling him how I felt, but it always started with his proclamations first, if there were any. “Do you like her? More than…more than you like me?”

A wash of pity came across his blue eyes, as if he just got the clue. “Oh, Eve. You’re my best friend. The way I feel about your cousin…”

“Is different,” I supplied in a dull voice.

“It is different,” he implored. He slapped the rag on Trouble’s hindquarters and came around to see me.

“It’s because I’m not like you,” I said, looking him in the eye. “White.”

“It’s because you’re not Rose,” he said.

I bit my lip as a million reasons flashed through my head. I wasn’t pretty enough, voluptuous enough, pale enough, well-dressed enough, or smart enough. I wasn’t privileged. Avery wanted a lady and I for sure wasn’t one.

I breathed in deeply through my nose, feeling a queer sense of warmth build inside. I loved Avery. I wanted him to be happy. He was a good man, a handsome man, and my best friend. He deserved a lady above all else. I couldn’t be mad at him because I wasn’t what he deserved, what he wanted.

“Do you know if she feels the same way?” I asked.

He rubbed at his chin and looked away. “I don’t know. And even if she does…feel something, it’s not as if your uncle is going to let her run off with the ranch hand.”

“Unless you had a great deal of money,” I pointed out. “Which this trip will surely give you.”

“I’d give it all to Rose, if she’d have it. I’d buy her anything she wanted.”

“And what if what she wants is to leave River Bend?” I asked softly.

He looked me in the eye, a sad smile on his thin lips. “Then I’ll take her away. As far as she wants.”

“I won’t be there.”

“You could come too, Eve. In fact, I’d want you to come.”

“That would be more than uncomfortable, Avery.”

“It wouldn’t…I promise. Don’t you want to see the world? See more than River Bend and these trees and these mountains? There’s a great big country out there, just waiting for us.”

I did want to see the world. I did want to lay my eyes on new lands and new promises. I wanted to find my place, a place where I could be me and be free from prejudice. Free to live my life and be free from fear. But I’d always imagined it being with someone who wanted me there—and only me. Someone who wanted to start their lives over again with me by their side.

And now I knew for sure that a new life wasn’t in the cards.

After that sobering thought, we ran back to the cabin through the mounting snow to have supper and settle down for the night. Meeks had calmed down a bit, maybe because he was constantly plied with moonshine, and everyone else seemed in relatively good spirits considering. Donna was happy with Meeks’ progress, saying he might be well enough to travel onwards tomorrow if the snow let up.

Unfortunately, the snow didn’t let up. It only got worse. By the time we woke up the next morning, we were in the middle of a blizzard and Jake had to nail the boards across the window shut again. Frost had covered the inside of the walls and the wind was whistling through, angry and bitingly cold, and everyone had to huddle around the fire to keep warm. Even going to the outhouse was a risky excursion for you were snow blind in the endless white. Twice, I bumped into trees thinking I was heading in the direction of the cabin.

The next day wasn’t any better.

Or the next.

The blizzard raged on for five straight days, five full, long days where we were all trapped in the cabin, our tempers starting to flare and our patience greatly diminished. While Meeks was healing, Hank, Isaac, and now Jake were miserable and agitated by the slightest thing. Tim worked extra hard keeping the peace, and even Avery became a bit whiny at the situation. It was almost like talking about Rose made him realize why he was doing this, and that he needed to get back to her as soon as he could. The only upside to the whole thing—as far as I was concerned—was that I didn’t fear the creature would come back. It was impossible for any man or animal to traverse the woods during such a storm.

On the last day of the blizzard, just as dusk was falling, I went out to the outhouse, hoping that the snow would let up a little. The drifts were huge, so tall that the way to the outhouse was now a tunnel with ice walls up both sides and the route wasn’t a straight shot, either. When you were near the trees and the outhouse, the tunnel would bend and you couldn’t see anything in front of you but the blue glow of packed snow.

I made it into the outhouse, holding my breath so I wouldn’t breathe in the overwhelmingly foul smell, and lifted up my ice packed skirts, sitting down on the cold wood. The wind blasted at the sides of the shanty, snow blowing in through the narrow cracks in the wood and tar paper.

When I was finished, I was about to get up, eager to breathe again and return to the warmth of the cabin, when the most peculiar feeling came across me. The skin on my scalp prickled and my instincts were telling me that something was so very wrong.

I breathed in deep to get a trail, but the smell of human waste was too overpowering. I coughed into my shoulder and through my watering eyes saw a shadow pass outside of the door.

I froze, trying to keep my teeth from chattering. I strained to hear if there was someone out there, but was only picking up the tireless wind and blowing snow.

Suddenly, the outhouse shook violently, as if something was shaking it and I feared that something was beneath me, trying to crawl up and out of the sewage. My heart danced with panic even after the shaking stopped.

After a few heavy moments passed and nothing else had happened, I took a step towards the door and put my eye to a small crack and peeked out.

A pale blue eye stared right back.