Skin Medicine

1

Whisper Lake by daylight.

It was afternoon by the time Tyler Cabe rolled out of bed and even later by the time he stepped out onto the streets, his brain still reeling with the sight of the murdered prostitute. He stood before the St. James Hostelry, breathing in the air which, although not cold as the night before, was kissed by a chill blowing down from the mountains.

He hadn’t even been in Whisper Lake a full twenty-four hours yet. It was hard to believe. He thought of the crazy hillbilly Orville DuChien. Jackson Dirker. The crazy tales that bartender-Carny-at the Oasis had told him about the local animal attacks. The Texas Ranger, Henry Freeman. Sir Tom English. Virgil Clay laying dead in a pool of his own blood. The jail and Charles Graybrow. And, yes, Mizzy Modine.

It all came together in his brain and made his head ache.

He lit a cigarette and wondered what would come next.

Licking his lips then, he made his way down the muddy, rutted street, taking in the town an inch at a time. It was his first real look at it. Whisper Lake was like other mining camps he had ridden through: a congested, dirty mess of humanity.

High above town, clinging to the rises and mist-cloaked slopes were the looming steel headframes and drum hoists of the mines themselves, the outcroppings of assorted buildings and sheds that rose up around them. There was a constant thundering and booming and clanking from up there, as the earth was gutted of silver. Ore wagons made the run continually from the chutes to the looming refineries down by the lake itself… you could see the gray, toxic smoke that belched from the stacks and fell back to earth, dusting everything in filth.

It looked oddly as if the town itself had once been part of the mine systems above and had slowly slid down the muddy inclines to its present position.

It was laid out with no plan or pattern, just a haphazard collection of log buildings and false-corniced stores, tents and shanties, brush huts and wooden shacks cut through by a maze of intersecting dirt roads that dipped into little hollows and climbed up low hills. There were a few brick buildings and an elaborate system of board sidewalks. Just a crazy-quilt of hotels and boarding houses, assay offices and saloons, brothels and churches, liveries and lumber yards with a Union Pacific railroad spur winding around the northern end.

Everything from privy to meat market was darkened with soot from the mines and refineries.

The roads were filled with horses and wagons, prospectors and business-owners, immigrants pushing carts and dirty children chasing balls with sticks. Cabe saw ladies with parasols clustered in whispering groups and whores in their petticoats emptying chamber pots into the streets. The ground rumbled from the industry of the mines above and voices chattered and people shouted and bodies threaded in every which direction. Unlike other frontier towns, you saw very few people lounging about. Everything was business and money and there was no time for loafing.

Cabe, his boots plastered with mud up to the shafts, stepped up onto the boardwalk, then stepped back down again as a trio of elderly ladies passed. He touched the brim of his hat to them. A freight wagon and team roared past him, nearly running down a group of black-faced miners, and splashed dirty water over his pants. A group of men fought to push a buckboard that was buried to the axle in a muddy hole. The batwings of a saloon flew open and a drunken man stumbled out, leaned over the hitching rail and vomited out coils of foam. Dark-clad foreigners gesticulated and mumbled in a dozen different dialects. Indians in blanket robes stood around, watching the ruin of their land.

Cabe kept walking, weaving through groups of miners and laborers, trying to find a place where he could get away from all the noise and activity. But everywhere he turned, every alleyway and street, was crowded with more people and more wagons and more industry.

Dear Christ, he thought, maybe Dirker was right… there’s just too many people here, I’ll never find the Strangler in this piss-pot.

But he wasn’t about to give up.

He would crawl into every crack and alcove of this seething, pulsing hive if he had to.

But he was going to run the Sin City Strangler to ground.

2

Jackson Dirker, looking decidedly pale, said, “I’ve seen atrocities, Doc, I’ve seen true horrors… but this, something like this, I can’t begin to even understand it.”

Dr. Benjamin West, a Whisper Lake surgeon and the Beaver County coroner, just nodded. He was a tall, reed-thin man in a charcoal suit with a gold watch chain that flashed in the sunlight like a winking eye. He clutched his derby hat to his chest and ran long, delicate fingers through his sparse white hair. A cord jumped in his throat.

“Although I’m a man of science,” he finally said. “I would think the Devil rode through here in a black mood.”

Dirker did not disagree with that.

They were standing outside the general store that had served as not only the market, but saloon and gambling house in the placer camp of Sunrise. They stood outside the double doors, looking and looking, and seeing and wishing they were blind. Because what they saw in Sunrise was permanently burned into their vision like a sudden, hurting arc of light.

Dirker was studying what was on the door.

A man with an eagle tattooed on his back had been skinned completely, his hide nailed there in one piece. No less than three heads hung over the entrance like ghastly lanterns. Copper wire had been jabbed into their ears and looped to nails above. The faces were splattered with dried blood, blanched eyes staring dumbly. The head on the left looked like it was about to say something.

Doc West waved a few flies from it. Though the wind had a bite to it, the sunshine was heating things up. Bringing the bugs and the ever-present reek of bacterial decay. “I’m guessing that these heads,” he said, “were not cut off as with a hatchet or knife, but actually ripped from their bodies.”

Dirker had already figured that.

At the stump of the necks there was a great deal of tissue and vertebrae hanging out like party confetti. No clean slice was evident. Someone… or something… had the strength to actually pull a man’s head from his body. Dirker didn’t like to jump to fantastic conclusions like that, but what else was he to think? The evidence spoke volumes.

Sighing, as used to the carnage now as he would ever get, he looked over the shacks and weathered buildings that had made up Sunrise in its heyday before the veins of gold had played out. It looked like a cemetery to him… the gray, windowless structures very much like tombstones in some lonesome, windy graveyard. The mountains brooding above looked down silently like mourners.

A miner named Jim Tomlinson had ridden down from the high country to provision at the store and found the massacre. He was so overwrought by the time he made it to Whisper Lake, Doc West had to shoot some morphine into him to get anything sensible out of him. An hour later, Dirker, West, and two deputies-Henry Wilcox and Pete Slade-made it up to Sunrise.

Henry Wilcox-a man who’d seen his fair share of blood and guts-took one look at what was in the store and promptly ran outside to vomit. The other three were inclined to do the same, but held their own.

Massacre was what Tomlinson had called it and massacre is what it was. Period. There was no way to tell just yet how many had been killed. Corpses and parts thereof where littered about like bison carcasses at a buffalo camp. The bar was heaped with dismembered limbs… legs, arms, hands, feet. Some hands still gripped pistols and some legs still wore their boots. There was blood everywhere, oceans of it dried in sticky pools on the floor and splashed on the walls and spattered up onto the ceiling. Tables had been overturned, chairs shattered to firewood. Sacks of salt and flour had ripped open, their contents powdered over everything like a down of snow. Poker chips and playing cards scattered in every which direction.

Slaughter, plain and simple.

The store had sold everything from picks and shovels to Rochester lamps and sluice boxes. One of the picks had been put to good use-it had been used to impale a man to the wall, his feet a good six inches off the floor. Dirker couldn’t even begin to imagine the strength it would take to do something like that.

And if all of that was bad enough down here, upstairs… Jesus, even worse.

Like a slaughterhouse. The corridor was actually painted red like a child’s fingerpainting, filled with bodies and limbs and viscera. Dirker didn’t do much exploring up there-the sight and smell of all that spilled blood and raw human meat was simply too much for any man-but what he had seen was enough to haunt his dreams forever. Whoever or whatever had been at work up there, had taken their time. Unlike downstairs which was, save a few grisly examples, like a free-for-all just this side of Hell, in the upstairs corridor, the fiends had been in no hurry whatsoever.

Five bodies had been ritually pulled apart-limbs and heads cut from torsos-and then reassembled on the walls where they had been nailed in place. Dirker suppose that was evidence of a sick, grim sense of humor. When he first saw it, he thought he was looking at bloody manikins, but the truth found him soon enough. He hadn’t bothered with the other rooms up there. No doubt they hid more horrors, but he simply wasn’t up to it.

Downstairs with Doc West, Dirker watched the medical man examine the bodies. He probed punctures and gashes with instruments, measured wounds and abrasions. Dirker was thinking about the others. About the miners that had disappeared up in the hills these past months. And the ones that had been mauled by animals… at least what he had thought were animals.

Now, well, he knew better.

But if it wasn’t animals, then what? Lunatics with dogs?

There were bullet holes everywhere-in the walls, the ceiling. Slugs had ripped through barrels of salt pork and jerky, had shattered the liquor bottles behind the bar. Shotgun blasts had blown holes in tabletops and pellets were peppered in the plank flooring.

Doc West sighed. Examined an obvious bite mark in a woman’s buttocks. “Some sort of animal did this… but the spacing of the teeth, I just don’t know. Like the others before.” He stood up slowly, a immense weight bearing down on him. “These people were killed in a number of ways. Some were shot. Others stabbed. Still others had their throats torn out or were eviscerated. But, ultimately, they were all partially eaten. Killed for sport and for food. And as a bonus, most of them were scalped.”

That was a new wrinkle, Dirker knew. The other bodies they had found in weeks previous had not been scalped.

Dirker cleared his throat. “So we’ve got ourselves a pack of animals that carry weapons and scalp folks like Indians?”

“That would be correct, yes.”

Dirker licked his lips with a tongue dry as sandpaper. “The scalping… we’d better keep that to ourselves. People hear that and they’ll be running Indians again.”

Doc West nodded. “We had better keep most of this to ourselves.”

Dirker walked back outside, to get that abattoir stink out of his face. Outside the wind blew and howled amongst the leaning, ramshackle structures. In his mind, it was the wail of ghosts demanding justice. He thought of the bounty he had put out. The one on the animals he had hoped were responsible. So far, hunters brought in three pathetic black bear, two slat-thin wolves, and a badger of all things.

It would have been mildly humorous, if it weren’t so terrible.

Henry Wilcox was leaning against the shack across the road. The door was open and there was another body sprawled in there. This one had taken a load of double-ought at point-blank range. Probably the only truly normal death in Sunrise.

Wilcox and Dirker avoided looking at each other.

Dirker, his belly filled with something like wet sand, followed the muddy, overgrown road up amongst the empty buildings. The killers had impaled a series of heads on waist-high stakes to mark the path. Considerate of them. They had found three other bodies in one of the shacks-an old assay office. They had been hung by the feet and disemboweled. Dirker tried to suck in fresh air, but all he could smell was decomposed, maggoty death.

There was a gray false-fronted building at the very end with boarded-over windows. Dirker hadn’t checked that one yet. He supposed he had to, like it or not.

He had to kick the door free of its hinges to get in.

And right away he smelled it-a wet and rancid stink. Feeble sunlight filtered in through gaping rents in the walls where boards had peeled loose. Motes of dust danced in the beams. The building had been something of a hotel once, but the furnishings had long ago been stripped away. Even the staircase leading above had been purloined, probably for firewood. It was dirty in there, shadowy and dank like a crypt. There was a bloody handprint on the faded wallpaper, a single bootprint pressed into the settled dust.

Dirker, sucking in a lungful of stale air, walked over to a door that was open maybe an inch. He could hear the wind whistling through holes in the roof, making the building groan and creak and tremble. There were another noises, too… the buzzing of insects. Meatflies, no doubt.

Dirker grasped the door, yanked it open.

A man stood there before him.

Stood stock still for a split second, then fell straight forward like a post and almost knocked Dirker on his ass. Dirker let out a little strangled cry, but the man was dead. A bubble of hysterical laughter slid up the sheriff’s throat, but he would not set it free.

Just another corpse, that’s all. The insides hollowed out, the face covered in flies. In the room behind him, there was dried blood everywhere. Bloody bootprints led to a window where planks had been knocked free.

Dirker left the corpse there and made for the door.

He heard the sound of hooves hammering up the road.

He knew it was Pete Slade riding back in, but for moment, one moment he thought that maybe it was-

Outside, Slade was speaking with Wilcox. Dirker made his way over to them.

“Anything?” he said.

Slade just shook his head, stroking his mustache. “I followed the tracks up pretty high. I’m figuring seven horses, but no sign of animal with ’em, dogs or otherwise. About three miles from here, the riders cut into a stream. I followed it for a mile or so… but I saw nothing that made me think they ever cut up the bank.” He pulled a cigar butt from the pocket of his leather vest, stuck it in his mouth. He did not light it, just chewed on it. “That stream winds through the mountains for miles and miles. Maybe if we had some dogs, we could cast for scent.”

Dirker swallowed. “That’s fine. I don’t want you to go up against… these people on your own. Our time will come, just not yet.”

Slade said, “I think these boys… I think they know what they’re doing. They been tracked before, I’m guessing, and their smart.”

Dirker told him and Wilcox to bury the heads on the poles, what bodies they could find. Then he went back to the general store. He didn’t bother trying to drag the bodies out. When Doc West was done, he spilled kerosene around and lit the place on fire.

A cleansing then, of a sort.

3

Although Dirker very much wanted only a sanitized version of events of what had occurred up at Sunrise to circulate through Whisper Lake, the miner who had discovered the slaughter beat him to it. By the time Dirker and the others made it back to town, the story was out. It was out and people were crawling up the sheriff’s ass like mites.

Over at the Callister Brother’s Mortuary, Caleb Callister and three other men-James Horner, Philip Caslow, and Luke Windows-were gathered in the upstairs rooms, speaking in soft, careful tones. The rooms had once been used by Hiram Callister, but were now a sort of meeting place for Caleb and his friends.

“It’s worse than anything thus far,” Caleb said to them. “An out and out slaughter and I think we all know who’s responsible.”

“Scalped, too, you say?” Caslow asked.

“Yes.”

Horner looked angry. “I’m not surprised. Them goddamn Mormons think this is their place, that the whole of Utah Territory belongs to them. They’ll do anything to push real Christians out.”

Windows lit a cigarette. He was a blacksmith and his hands were huge, callused. “See? What they got in mind is for us to blame injuns. That’s what they want. But we ain’t rising to that bait. We got us a pack of them Danites, them Destroying Angels hiding over in Redemption or maybe Deliverance.”

“Exactly,” Caslow said. “It’s only a matter of deciding which snake pit we root out first.”

“Redemption,” Caleb said to them.

He knew if he suggested Deliverance, he’d get no takers. No man in his right mind wanted to ride up to Deliverance, not with what was said about that place. Maybe all of it wasn’t true, but if some of it was, then it was enough. Besides, even the Mormons shunned the place.

“Tonight then,” he said. “Tonight we sack that heathen nest and burn it to the ground.”

No one disagreed with that.

4

Sitting atop packing crates in the alley behind the Red Top Saloon, Jack Goode was saying, “I’ll tell you something, Charlie Graybrow. Just between you and me and that heap of dogshit over there, this town has the curse all it over it. Yes sir, right from its bones to the roofs above, cursed, that’s what. Lookit me for instance. Just take a look at me and tell me what you see.” Goode paused, pulling from a bottle of whiskey, wiping a few drops from his white beard with the back of his hand. “No comment? That’s fair. Sure enough. Well, I’ll answer it for you. You’re looking at a man what won’t see sixty again. Hell, won’t see sixty-five, I reckon. A man that’s been here and there and everywhere. I fought in the army, I trapped in the mountains. I whipped a mail coach down the Overland trail and I was even a Pony Express rider until some Cheyenne bucks in Wyoming Territory filled me so full of arrows they could’ve used my ass to water flowerbeds. What I’m saying, my red brother, is that I ain’t afraid of shit. Never have been.”

Charles Graybrow took the bottle, had a taste. “But now?”

“Now things is surely different, ain’t they?”

Charles Graybrow agreed with that silently. He knew bad things were happening and would continue to happen. All those disappearances and killings out in the hills. And now this latest massacre. Bad medicine. That’s what it was. Then the vigilantes out tormenting the Mormon squatters and now that prostitute getting slit from kitty to chin.

Not good, not good at all.

Even a fool (or a white man) had to sense the bad aura in and around Whisper Lake these days. It was so thick you could hold it in your hand. Almost as if that particular corner of Beaver County was a gathering point for noxious forces. Made a fellow think. Even made an injun think.

“Things keep up,” Graybrow said, “well have the army in here.”

Goode pulled from the bottle. “Yes sir, you probably got a point there, my friend. Damned and dandy if you don’t. Because I’ll admit before God and the Democrats and gladly so that I’m shit-scared over this place and what’s happening here. You ask me, there’s a poison here and old Whisper Lake is just rotten to the roots. And it’s getting worse by the day. This town, my friend, is as surely fucked as a three-dollar whore.” He sighed, looked skyward as if he expected the hand of the Lord to smite him from above. “And you know the worse thing of all, Charlie?”

Graybrow shook his head.

“I think I’m to blame,” Goode admitted. “Somehow, some way… I brought hell down upon this here burg.”

Graybrow took the bottle from him. “How do you figure that?”

Goode sighed. “It’s a long story, but I’ll make it quick for you, I reckon.”

“Yeah, I’m an injun and all, so don’t go confusing me. I’m real simple.”

“Now, don’t be like that, Charlie. That’s not what I meant. You know I got nothing but respect for your people.”

Graybrow nodded. “Surely. Amongst my tribe we consider you to be something of a holy figure. Many is the day we pray for your guidance.”

“No shit? Goddammit… you’re tugging my cord again.”

“I’m funny like that,” Graybrow said. “Maybe it’s because I’m an injun.”

Goode told him that might be the reason, yes sir. “Anyway, about seven months ago I landed me this job. I was hired by this injun, a Goshute, from the Skull Valley Band. He wanted me to transport this body from up there down here to Whisper Lake. A hundred U.S. Treasury greenbacks he promised me. I jumped on it. Figured I’d come down here, maybe do a little panning up in the hills. Now, this body we were talking about belonged to a fellow name of James Lee Cobb. You hear of him?”

Graybrow washed whiskey around in his mouth. “Some sort of killer, I think. Outlaw. Pistol fighter. Something like that.”

Goode clapped him on the shoulder. “And then some. A cold-blooded killer is what we’re talking, Charlie. Cobb came out of Missouri and his trail was red and hurting. Fought in the Mex war. Robbed. Killed. Raped. Got trapped up in the high Sierras with a few saddle tramps, ate the sumbitches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Well, you get the idea. Old Cobb… why he was just as low as the belly of a squashed rattlesnake in a wagon wheel rut.”

“Why’d that Goshute have you bring him here?”

Goode shrugged, shook his head. “Hell if I know really. Said something about it being Cobb’s last wish. Had some sort of half-brother living in these parts. About all I could figure is that Cobb was wanted for just everything just about everywhere, so he was on the dodge in injun country.”

“So you brought the body here?”

“Yes, damn if I didn’t. Me and this little squirt of piss name of Hyden brought the box clear from Skull Valley and right across the San Fran mountains…”

Goode went on to tell him what that had been like. And as he told it, his eyes got wide and staring, his face rubbery and discolored. A tic jumped at the corner of his lips as he told his story, gazing fearfully into the distance as if he saw the Devil riding in on horseback. When he finished… he was shaking and breathing hard.

“Sounds like what?” he finally said. “About thirty pounds of prime manure? Maybe. But I swear it’s true. That body in that box… it weren’t dead. Least not in the way we understand dead, you and me. It was crawling and scratching and nails were popping free… and Jesus, Charlie, I coulda pissed myself. Whatever was in that box, well, it weren’t right at all. Like its spirit had just gone sour like bad milk.”

Graybrow listened and kept his sarcasm to himself, because he knew Goode. And Goode was about as superstitious as most atheists. He wasn’t above telling a few tall ones, but Graybrow knew this was not one of them.

Goode pulled hard off the bottle. “I never told a living soul about this, Charlie. And I’m telling you only because I trust you and we killed a few bottles together and you’re an injun. You people know about shit like this. White folk? Hell, we’re black and white from toe to skull. Something don’t fit in our worldview, we pave it over with bullshit so’s we can sleep at night. But Indians… yeah, you people ain’t afraid to look the dark things in the face, ain’t afraid of admitting that there’s black, evil things that can drive a man mad to look upon.”

Graybrow appreciated that, even though he didn’t say so. “You think that Cobb wasn’t human as such any longer?”

“I don’t know what to think,” he said, “but what was in that box… well, I’m not above admitting that if it had gotten out, I wouldn’t be here right now.”

“And you think that Cobb brought hell to this place?”

Goode licked his lips, thought it over real carefully. “Well, I keep my ear to the ground and I hear things. We brought the body to Callister’s Mortuary. And that night, they say, Callister was found dead. And it weren’t suicide. Rumor has it Cobb’s body was nowhere to be found, but the other Callister-Caleb-he shushed it up. Now, I don’t think I have to tell you what’s happened over in Deliverance since then. Even the Mormons themselves won’t go within a mile of that place.”

“And you think Cobb went there? That he’s the… focus of this?”

But Goode would only shrug. “Those are the facts way I know ’em. First chance I get, Charlie, I’m gonna fill my poke and ride out of this graveyard Hell-for-Leather. The idea that old James Lee Cobb might come knocking at my door one night keeps me awake until the wee hours.”

Graybrow thought it over for a long time as they finished the bottle. Either Goode was crazy or maybe he had something. But even if he was right, there wasn’t a man in Whisper Lake that would ride out to Deliverance to check it out.

“Well, dammit, enough confessing, Charlie. I ever tell you about the time I sold my wife for a dollar? Truth. She was a mean outfit from back east used to gargle with scrap iron and piss tacks. One time we was in this saloon at a mining camp up in the Big Horn range, Wyome Territory. This big dirt-mean sumbitch named Johnny Houle says to me, ‘How much fer ye wife, son?’ And, hoo! Me and Thedora, we had been going at it for hours. So I say, a dollar. He pays me, drags her off. She shows later, dress torn and face bruised, just a-ready to skin and scalp me. Next day, old Johnny finds me. He’s walking funny like there’s a boot and spur up his ass sideways. You know what? He wanted his dollar back…”

But Graybrow was not listening.

He was thinking of Deliverance and James Lee Cobb. Wondering just what it was he could do about it. And right then, he thought of Orville DuChien. His second sight. Orv would probably know if Cobb was up there. And if he did?

Graybrow started thinking about Tyler Cabe then.

5

Tyler Cabe thought about it real hard and decided there was only one way to hunt the Sin City Strangler: He had to make friends with the whores in town. These women would be the Strangler’s targets and if he haunted their establishments, well, just maybe, he might catch sight of the bastard. If nothing else, Cabe could put the word out about who he was and what he was doing and that might make the Strangler nervous. And that would either make him bolt… or do something careless.

And if it was the latter, Cabe planned on being there to capitalize on his mistake.

Although Whisper Lake was like any other wild mining town and had its fair share of sin and vice, its red light district was restricted to a seedy run down near the refineries ubiquitously known as Horizontal Hill. Caught between mill and lake, but hidden from the rest of Whisper Lake by a high, juniper-covered bluff? Piney Hill? this run of brothels, sporting houses, tents, and cribs was no less busy than the rest of the town.

And at night, a sight busier.

It was allowed to operate by Jackson Dirker for two reasons. The first being that if he tried to close it down, the miners and railroad men would no doubt jump him and stretch his neck within an hour. And the second… because each and every establishment had to be licensed by the county. And that meant that the senior county official did the licensing-the county sheriff.

Dirker licensed not only whorehouses, but gambling halls and saloons as well. And pocketed an easy 10% of not only the licensing fees, but the taxes themselves.

Anyway, the whores plied their trade and kept it (for the most part) in and around Horizontal Hill and the genteel folk of Whisper Lake didn’t have to look upon it, so it kept right on rolling and swelling week after week.

Tyler Cabe strolled right into that den of vipers and fit like a hand in a glove. Just another prospector or gunman or hunter with iron in his pants and cash in hand. He worked the circuit and talked with dozens and dozens of madams, their prostitutes, and assorted freelancers. He made it known to everyone within earshot who and what he was.

His spiel generally went something like this: “Afternoon, ma’am, name’s Tyler Cabe and I’m here on business.”

The average response was: “Well, I’m in business, Mr. Tyler Cabe, so you surely came to the right place.”

At which point, Cabe would have to be a little more specific about what his “business” was. The whores listened to his tales of the Strangler with great interest and considered Cabe to be something of a saint for wanting to protect them. They fed him and gave him drinks, offered him free lodging. Shanghai Marny Loo, the Chinese madam of the Orient Bathhouse, tried to hire him strictly to protect her girls. She was something of a legend in her own right in that she carried no less than six short-bladed knives on her person at any one time and could throw them with frightening accuracy. Cabe told her he’d keep the offer in mind.

It was, all in all, an interesting and enjoyable way to spend the afternoon and evening.

But there were hazards, of course.

More than one whore wished to show her appreciation in a more intimate way, and Cabe found himself in bed twice that day with grateful ladies-one a handsome high yellow girl and the other a flame-haired vixen from Alabama. But every job, of course, had its waters that had to be waded through.

He visited cribs that were no more than wooden shacks to sporting houses where expensive French girls ran the gaming tables and would take you straight to heaven for several hundred greenbacks. There were high dollar joyhouses like the Red August Social Club that featured deep-pile carpeting, cut chandeliers, gold leaf mirrors and tables, and imported European tapestries and Greek sculpture. A man could drop thousands in such a place, enjoying exotic delights beneath stained glass ceilings… but was assured of satisfaction and refined sin. Then there were mid-range bordellos like the San Francisco Common House where the girls were no less attractive, but they were all trained thieves who specialized in picking pockets and rolling drunken men. And if your poke wasn’t full enough for those places, there were cheap brothels like the Russian Cafe where you could get drunk and fucked for the price of a grubsteak… long as you weren’t too picky about the cleanliness of your lady.

Cabe hit them all and heard all the stories.

He found that while most of the girls were just your average poke-and-tickle painted ladies, many went the extra mile. One particular high-priced Asian girl named Songbird could do amazing things with oils and hot candle wax. Abilene Sue, a buxom free-living Texan, generally employed a double-cinch saddle and riding crop into her act. And Fannie the Fortune Teller liked to start her sessions by diving your future. A future which always ended the same way-with her riding on top of you, trying to break you like an ornery bronc.

Somewhere along the way, Cabe met Mama Adelade, the proprietor of Mother French’s Old Time Theater. What it was, was basically a steakhouse with vaudeville acts and imported French girls-or just girls who could affect a convincing French accent-and a booming business upstairs. Place smelled of fine French perfume and offered Parisian wine and cuisine.

Mama Adelade? a slight black woman who could not have weighed much more than ninety pounds? dressed in a yellow silk dress with embroidered purple roses sprouting at the bosom.

“Honey,” she told Cabe after he introduced himself, “I surely appreciate what it is you’re doing. My girls are getting more than a little skittish. And I can’t have that, no sir. For here we offer only one real thing and we offer it three different ways. And that would be love-the fine, the mighty fine, and the very fine. Now, I’m thinking what you need is the mighty fine. The very fine… no, boy, you ain’t up to it.”

“What’s the ‘very fine’?”

“Hee, hee,” Mama Adelade tittered. “The very fine is just about dying and going straight on to heaven. It involves two girls and sometimes three, hot oil and busy hands.”

Cabe admitted he surely wasn’t up to it.

Mama Adelade told him that she had been a slave on a Baton Rouge plantation. When she got her freedom and, Lord, how she’d wanted that, it wasn’t as easy as she’d thought it would be. “Boy, the massah, you know, he might of owned us, but least he fed us and put a roof over our heads. I think maybe some of us forgot about that. For when we was freed… hell, we had to fend for ourselves. No easy bit, that.”

Mama told him that it wasn’t long before she realized that there was only one way a black woman was going to make any money in a white man’s world. So she started small and built up her stable year by year.

“Had me a son, too, Mr. Cabe. But as he grew to manhood, he found religion and didn’t care much for how his mama made her living. Last I heard of him, he went out to Indian Territory to preach. Hee! You imagine that? A black man slinging the white man’s gospel to a bunch of red heathens! Something funny about that, you think?”

It was a long day, but by the time Cabe retired from Horizontal Hill, he was no closer to the Sin City Strangler than he had been before. But something had to give. Sooner or later, it was going to.

While he was at a teahouse, he bumped into Henry Freeman, the Texas Ranger, who claimed he was out “inspecting the stock.” And that made Cabe remember he had to wire the Rangers in Texas, see if old Henry was who and what he claimed to be.

Because, honestly, Cabe had his doubts.

6

The riders thundered into Redemption like demons loosed from the lower regions of Hell.

The vigilantes had arrived.

They came pounding up the dirt street on black mounts, seven men wearing long blue army overcoats and white hoods set with eye slits pulled over their heads. They carried repeating rifles and shotguns and Colt pistols. They charged down the streets and down alleyways with an almost military precision.

What they brought to the little Mormon enclave of Redemption was death.

And with it they brought every intolerance and prejudice that had been boiling in the black kettles of their hearts for weeks and months and even years.

Without haste then, they started shooting.

The Mormons knew they would show, but had hoped it would not be for some time for they were ill-prepared to fend off such a bold attack. Men carrying muskets and bolt-action rifles ran out to oppose the riders and were cut down in lethal rains of well-directed gunfire. Women screamed and children cried and shotguns boomed and pistols barked. Lead was flying like hail, peppering doors and shattering windows and killing livestock that had not been carefully stabled.

One of the town elders stomped out onto the porch of his house, his three sons at his heels. A rider passed by, giving the elder both barrels at close range. The buckshot blew a hole the size of a dinner plate in his chest and splattered gore over his sons. And the sons had little more time than to shriek as gunfire from Winchester and Sharps rifles raked them, killing them on the spot. An old woman ran out amongst the vigilantes, waving a prayerbook at them and they rode her down, crushing her beneath the hooves of their horses. The same fate met three young children who’d seen their mother and father put down by pistol fire.

The wise townsfolk stayed behind locked doors or returned fire from gunports cut into shutters. But they were not seasoned fighters, and very few of their rounds came within spitting distance of the vigilantes. Though a single bullet-whether directed or ricocheted? ripped through the throat of a vigilante and he collapsed in his saddle.

But that didn’t even slow the killers down.

They reigned and fired, tossing flaming kerosene torches into bales of hay and piles of lumber and very often right through the windows of stores and homes. And in the midst of that, they kept riding and shooting and killing and scattering horses and mules, using cattle and sheep for target practice.

Within twenty minutes of their arrival, Redemption was blazing like the nether regions of Hell. Flames engulfed barns and livery stables. Licked up the walls of houses. Vomited from exploded windows. The town became an inferno of fire and smoke and screaming. Bucket brigades worked to douse the conflagration even as the vigilantes shot them dead.

In the noise and confusion and shouting, a lone figure clutching the Book of Mormon stumbled into the streets, already bleeding from a stray bullet that had creased his temple. He made quite a sight out there on foot, shouting prayers and oaths, trails of blood streaking down his face.

“…the Antichrist will come among the people, commanding his legions… and ye shall know him by his name! Nation shall make war, horrendous and godless war upon nation, man will kill his brothers in a rapture of evil! Evil! And… and… the unclean shall make unclean laws to enslave the righteous and the fornicator will be smitten by the hand of the Almighty…”

He never got much farther than that, for a lasso of horsehair rope swung down and over him, locking his arms tight against his body. The rope was tied off to the saddlehorn of a vigilante’s horse and then lastly, finally, the riders rode out of the purgatory they had created.

Rode out, dragging the preacher behind them.

They dragged him for maybe a mile.

Over rocks and stones and stumps, through dry ravines and up craggy hillsides. When the vigilantes did finally stop, atop a low flat-topped hill fringed by rabbit brush, the preacher was barely alive. He looked, if anything, like a threadbare scarecrow. His rag and straw stuffing was hanging out and sticks were protruding from his legs and arms… except it wasn’t rags and straw and what stuck out weren’t sticks. The flesh had been worn from his face and the backs of his hands. He had numerous compound fractures and broken bones. His jaw was dislocated and still he tried to speak, a bloody gurgling sound bubbling forth.

One of the vigilantes pulled off his hood. It was Caleb Callister. Squinting his eyes in the darkness, he watched the glowing, flickering bonfire in the distance. Redemption.

“If your people are smart, preacher-man,” he said, slipping a thin cigar between his lips, “they’ll heed our warning this time. Because next time, next time—”

“Next time there won’t be anybody left when we ride out,” another vigilante finished for him.

This got a few chuckles from the others.

The preacher, though broken and peeled, tried to crawl, straining at his leash like a fool dog testing his boundaries. The vigilantes watched him, just expecting him to curl up and expire… but it wasn’t happening. He coughed out loops of blood, legs pistoning him forward, arms still fixed to his sides. Slinking and inching along like some human worm. And just as freedom, maybe, seemed to beckon… the rope snapped taut.

“Best accept the fix you’re in, preacher,” one the vigilantes said to him. “It ain’t like rain… it won’t go away.”

“Much as you might like that,” said another.

They sat on their mounts, smoked, passed a bottle of whiskey, and watched Redemption burn like a torch in the distance. Gradually, slowly, the blaze became separate fires that were brought under control one after the other.

Then they drew straws on who got the preacher.

Luke Windows was the lucky man. He decided to drag the preacher around for awhile. And he did. After another twenty minutes or so, he got tired of it and the preacher still wasn’t dead, so he emptied his Colt Navy .44 into the man.

Then he joined the others to celebrate.

7

After a somewhat exhausting day spent making the rounds of Horizontal Hill’s varied brothels, Tyler Cabe walked back to the St. James Hostelry. His belly was empty and his temples were pounding like jungle drums from all the free liquor he’d swallowed. He walked into the dining room and Jackson Dirker was there, along with his wife and five or six other guests. Dinner consisted of roast chicken and potatoes with an apple crumb for dessert. It was damn good and Cabe’s respect for Janice Dirker went up a notch.

Jackson Dirker was surely a lucky man.

Cabe and Dirker made small talk, but mostly just listened. One of the tenants was a medical supply drummer from Wichita named Stewart. He spoke at some length-and in unsavory clinical detail-about his products which ranged from liver pills to trusses, hygienic whiskey to colonics. Particularly the latter… which, of course, didn’t do much for the digestion of the apple crumb.

After he excused himself and the other tenants slipped off, it was just Cabe and Dirker together, with Janice flitting back and forth collecting dishes.

“Mr. Cabe tells me that the two of you are acquainted,” she said to her husband.

He barely looked up from his newspaper. “In a manner of speaking.”

Same old Dirker, Cabe found himself thinking. Cool as ice. If he had any emotions buried in that thick hide, it would have taken twenty men with shovels to unearth them. Maybe if Dirker had simply said, yes, yes, we know each other. We fought against each other… but that was years ago. Maybe had he said something like that, Cabe would have been satisfied to let it go. But now he felt surly.

“Yes,” he said, “once upon a time, your husband and I were brothers in arms. We fought on opposite sides, but spiritually we were one. Ain’t that so, Jack?”

The newspaper lowered an inch. A set of crystal blue eyes found Cabe, did not blink. The newspaper slid back up. “I wouldn’t go that far,” was all he would say.

“Nonsense. Maybe your recollections of me are vague, Jack, and rightly so… but mine of you? Hell, sharp as a whip. How I remember you at Pea Ridge! What a fine and striking figure you were!”

“That’s enough, Cabe.”

Cabe smiled now, fingers brushing the webbing of scars that ran across the bridge of his nose, cut into the cheeks. “Your husband is modest, Madam. I would say that Jackson Dirker was an officer and a gentleman. Fair and sympathetic in all matters.”

Dirker was staring holes through him now.

Cabe was staring right back.

Janice, sensing something was terribly amiss here, just cleared her throat and picked at imaginary lint on her velveteen dress. “If I may be so rude and impertinent, Mr. Cabe… did you, did you get those scars in the war?”

But if she was rude or impertinent, it only made Cabe’s grin widen. His fingers explored the familiar slash-and burn-geography of those old scars. “Yes, I received them in the war. I carry them with a certain amount of honor. Battle wounds. You remember when I got these, Jack?”

Dirker set the newspaper down. “Yes, I do. But, tell me, Cabe, how did you find our brothels? Word has it you spent most of the day there. Did you find our red light district to your liking?”

Whatever Cabe was going to say evaporated on his tongue. Dirker. That wily sonofabitch. “I… um…”

Janice smiled thinly. “Our Mr. Cabe certainly is a saucy one.”

“Isn’t he, though?” Dirker said, enjoying himself now.

Cabe swallowed and swallowed again. “It was purely business, Madam. The man I’m hunting preys upon prostitutes, so what choice do I have but to befriend them? To know them and the places they work.”

“The things a man must do to make a living,” she said, shaking her head. “Tsk. Tsk. And all day you spent among them? How tired you must be… after such an exhausting enterprise.”

“Madam—”

Dirker was smiling now. “You are a most determined man, Cabe. If any man can root out this killer it will be you.”

Now here Dirker thought he was being funny and it made Cabe smile, too. If the man was more like that on a regular basis and not so damnably stiff and formal… he almost would have liked him. Cabe figured he was being baited, so he did what came natural to him: he rose up and bit down. “Yes, Madam, it was tiring, but I kept at it until most men would have been spent with fatigue.”

Janice blushed… blushed, but did not turn away. There was something smoldering behind her eyes and she made sure Cabe saw it.

Dirker raised an eyebrow. “Did you now? Gave them the what-for?”

“Oh yes.”

“I’ll leave you gentlemen to it,” Janice said, leaving the room.

Cabe figured he’d either offended her… or excited her. In his experience, Southern women could be like that. Excited at what they found most offensive. It was the breeding, that’s what. Antebellum society said a lady had to repress her basal instincts. That such things as lust and desire had no place in the higher scheme of things… but like any beast, the more you starved it the hungrier it became.

And there was hunger in that girl. A barely-concealed need to cast-off her upbringing and get down and dirty.

Dirker said, “Is it going to be this way every time we meet, Cabe?”

Cabe looked away from him. So many things he wanted to say, but to what end? What true end? He’d already violated two rules of his upbringing-that a man did not bring his business or personal affairs to the dinner table and that he did not hash out problems with another man in the presence of a lady. Maybe now was the time… if he wanted a fight, then it was high time to quit beating around the bush.

But he did not want that, not anymore. “No,” he said, surprising even himself, “I would prefer we could put all that aside. I reckon it would be the proper thing to do. At least for the time.”

“Agreed. But just so you understand, Cabe. What happened at Pea Ridge is not something I am proud of. A day does not go by that I don’t think about it, wish things had been different.”

“You willing to admit that all we were doing was scavenging some essentials off them dead boys?”

Dirker nodded. “I know that, yes. Maybe I knew it then, too, but I lost my head. What I did was wrong.”

Damn. Now if that didn’t suck the wind right out of a man. Dirker admitting he was wrong. Cabe felt suddenly very loose, boneless. He almost felt embarrassed that he’d even brought it up. “All right, all right. Fair enough. We were all young and hot-headed, I guess.”

“What did you do after the war, Cabe?”

Cabe told him about his years riding steer and nightherding, being a railroad detective and shotgunner on the bullion stages. How it all led to bounty hunting. “Yourself?”

Dirker sighed. “I stayed in the army. Was sent west to fight Indians.” His eyes narrowed. “I thought what I had seen in the Civil War was bad. But it didn’t prepare me for what I saw out there. The atrocities, the wanton murder of innocents.”

Cabe didn’t press it. He knew plenty of what had happened out there, the indignities and cruelties pressed upon the tribes. And generally, unwarranted. Treaties were made between whites and Indians. And the ink was barely dry before the whites had again violated them.

“But you left the army?”

Dirker was smiling now. “No, I was relieved of my command. A band of Arapahos had raided a settlement and I was told to hunt them down and massacre them. Well, we couldn’t find the perpetrators, so my commander decided that any Arapahos would do. There was a village of maybe fifty on Cripple Creek. They had nothing to do with the raid and that fact was well known… yet I was ordered to go in there with my men. And when we came out, I was instructed, there was to be nothing left alive.”

“You refused?”

“Yes, I did. And I am proud of that fact. I was a soldier, not a hired killer.” Dirker sighed, licked his lips. “I was relieved of my command, court-martialed and discharged. Honorably, much to the dismay of some.”

“And after that?”

“I was a lawman. One town after another. Eventually Janice and I bought this hotel. Of course, there was trouble between the miners and the Mormons, the Indians and the settlers… I was approached and given the job of county sheriff on the spot.”

Cabe took it all in. His story was no different from that of many a veteran-trained as a soldier, they invariably became either lawmen or outlaws, sometimes both. Cabe rolled a cigarette, lit it up. “Tell me something, Sheriff. This business I’ve been hearing about a little camp called Sunrise… anything to it?”

Dirker nodded after a time. “Horrible, horrible.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to hunt down who’s responsible, of course.”

“Of course. And while you’re at it… there’s this fellow named Freeman. Says he’s a Texas Ranger. Think you could look into that for me? Maybe wire the Rangers?”

“You think he’s lying?”

Cabe told him he wasn’t sure what he was thinking. “All I know, Dirker, is that he’s giving me a real bad feeling in my guts. And I can’t figure out exactly why…”

8

Later, at the Oasis Saloon, a knot of men gathered around Cabe as he tried to drink his beer. Tried to relax a bit and put all this business with Dirker into some sort of perspective. Were they friends now or enemies? And what about his wife? Cabe had been around, he knew very well the way she was looking at him and what such a look entailed. She had gotten down right excited as he joked about the whores and what he’d done with them. He had not imagined it.

“So, this killer, this Sin City Strangler,” one of the men said, a miner with a shaggy gray beard and no upper teeth. “They say he slits ’em clean open. That true?”

“It is,” Cabe told him.

He had been casually discussing a few particulars of that business with Carny, the bartender, and it had drawn the others like a rope. They wanted to know everything, everything.

Another said, “Why in Christ he rape ’em? Whores? You don’t have to rape ’em… they give it up for two bits, some of ’em.”

“Yeah, why did he rape ’em?” another wanted to know.

“He never says.”

A tall man in a gray wool suit and polished black boots was shaking his head. “Seems to me, sir, that this is no fit conversation in the presence of ladies.”

The miners were looking around, trying to find the ladies. All they saw were a few whores mulling about. They didn’t figure that sort counted as being ladies.

“They ain’t no ladies here, chief,” a miner said. “In case you haven’t noticed.”

“I find it objectionable all the same.”

The miners laughed at that to a man. Looked like maybe they were going to start trouble over it… but then they saw the pistols hanging from the man’s belt. Fine and sleek they were, Colt Peacemakers with ivory handles. The weapons of a shootist.

The miners filtered away, figuring today wasn’t the day to die.

“And you, sir,” the tall man said to Cabe. “If you are a bounty hunter as you claim, if you are indeed hunting this man, then I seriously doubt you will find him in the bottom of a glass of beer.”

Cabe looked at Carny, just shook his head. “Listen, mister. I came in for a drink, not to listen you run that silver-plated mouth of yours.”

The tall man took a step forward. “All the manners of a rutting hog. How wonderful that is.”

“Like I said, I just want to drink my beer. So will you kindly go fuck yourself?”

The tall man’s face drained of color. “That, sir, is no way for a gentleman to talk. Profanity is the product of a weak mind.”

“Well, that’s me-weak-minded Arkansas trash. I claim to be nothing else.”

An easterner. A dandy. That’s what this fellow was. These days, didn’t seem you could spit without hitting one. Cabe generally just left them alone, regardless of how he felt about that sort. Most of ’em didn’t bother no one. Then there were this kind.

“No, sir, you are certainly no gentleman, surely. You are rude, coarse, and obnoxious.”

“Yes, sir, as you said.” Cabe set his glass on the bar, put his hat on. “Now please kindly step out of my sight before the doc has to pull my spurs out of your fine white ass.”

But he wasn’t moving and Cabe was starting to wonder if he’d have to bury this sumbitch, too.

“If your mother had any sense, bounty hunter, she would’ve drowned you in a sack before you grew to stink up this country.”

Cabe felt the hairs along the back of his neck bristle. No, no, he wasn’t going to let this bastard push him into something he would regret. Just wasn’t going to happen. He was walking away from this one.

The tall man had positioned himself between Cabe and the door now.

Which meant that Cabe had two choices: go around him or right through. It wasn’t much of a decision for Cabe, being that he went around no man. It wasn’t his way. It had cost him in blood and bruises through the years, but he backed down from no one.

He thought: I will not pull my pistol, not if there’s any other way.

The dandy stood his ground and Cabe came right at him, not slowing, not so much as breaking stride. When he was precious feet away, the tall man pulled his Colts. Pulled ’em pretty fast, too. But not fast enough. By the time he cleared leather, Cabe was close enough to smell. A few quick steps and he had hammered the dandy in the face with two quick, straight jabs that put him to his knees. Cabe kicked him in the belly to keep him down. Somewhere during the process, the tall man lost his pistols. Cabe saw them and kicked them away.

“Now,” he said, just plain sick of bullshit like this, “y’all go home to Boston or Charlottesville or where ever in the fuck you came from. You go back home to daddy’s money and his title. Because out here, you’re gonna get your fool self killed.”

Cabe went right past him, left him coughing and gasping, blood bubbling from his dislocated nose. He had almost made the front door when the dandy screamed out obscenities and pulled a little five-shot Remington Elliot .32.

Cabe just stood there, knowing he couldn’t move quick enough.

The gun was on him.

The tall man was filled with rage and hate.

Just then two men carrying shotguns burst through the door. They were dressed in dusty trail clothes and plainsman-style hats.

“You there,” the first said. “Drop that pistol or I’ll cut you in half.”

The dandy lowered it, let it slide from his fingers.

The second one turned to Cabe, looked him up and down. “You Cabe? Tyler Cabe? The Arkansas bounty hunter?”

“I would be.”

The shotguns came around in his direction now. “Then you better come with us.”

9

For some time after Tyler Cabe left, Janice Dirker found herself thinking about him. About how he carried himself, the way he spoke, that unflappable honesty that was the earmark, it seemed, of who and what he was. She found herself thinking about these things and knowing that he excited her. Excited some part of her that had lain long dormant like a volcano just biding its time until it would erupt.

Tyler Cabe was a free-spirit.

He seemed to be entirely unconventional. Had no true respect for money or position, for authority or cultural values. He lived as he chose, said what he pleased to whom he pleased. He was a rogue element. Seemed to have more in common with the red man than the white. Maybe this is what excited her. He was so different than the other men she’d known. Now, her husband Jackson, was completely the opposite. He had bearing, had station, had unshakable confidence. But he was stiff and unyielding and emotions seemed to be a foreign thing to him. Mere malfunctions of character, rather than compliments to it. For though Jackson was a good man who invariably did the right thing at the right time, he was cold. Terribly cold and methodical.

And Tyler Cabe?

Anything but. He was tough and trail-weary, had ridden the backside of society for far too long. He was surely lacking in refinement or social graces, but what he lacked there he surely made up in warmth and humanity. He was warm and friendly and wore his emotions proudly. He had depth and sincerity and compassion. He was everything Jackson wasn’t and was not afraid to be so. Her father would have despised him. And although Jackson was a Yankee, he was exactly the sort of man her father would have paired her with-a man of dignity, resolve, and bearing. His idea of what a man should be. And Cabe? Her father would have instantly dismissed him as “hill-trash”.

Cabe, however, was not the most outwardly handsome of men.

He was tall and lanky, powerful without being manifestly muscular. His face was weathered from hard-living and hard riding, set with draws and hollows, lined by experience. Then there were those scars across his face. He would have been a menacing character had it not been for those beautifully sad green eyes that offset the rest and gave him a pained, melancholy look.

There was no doubt in Janice’s mind that she was attracted to him.

Maybe it was the hotel and the staff and daily drudgery of keeping things running. Jackson was part of that, she supposed. Just another reminder of toil and unhappiness… and perhaps all these things combined is what made Tyler Cabe seem so fresh, so exciting. For he was, if anything, the image of a pirate from her teenage fantasies-a scoundrel, a libertine, a wolf in a world of sheep and dogs.

These were the things Janice mulled over that windy evening when the giant came through the door.

Maybe giant wasn’t entirely applicable, but there was no getting around the fact that her visitor was closer to seven-feet than six. He was dressed in a shaggy buffalo coat that was just as ragged and worn as the hide of a mangy grizzly. Crossed bandoleers of brass cartridges were belted over his chest. A big Colt Dragoon pistol hung at the crotch of his fringed deerskin pants. His face was hard, his eyes like unblinking iron, a steel gray beard hung down to his chest.

Janice felt her insides go to jelly. She begin to quiver at the sight of him. “May… may I help you?” she managed.

He stepped forward, casting a shadow over her. His belts were set with knives and pistols. He took off his hat and his head was just as bald as wind-polished stone. He tapped the ledger with the barrel of a shotgun.

“Surely,” he said. “And evenin’ to ye, ma’am. Name’s Clay, Elijah Clay. I’m a lookin’ fer the squeeze of shit what killed m’ boy.”

Janice just stared dumbly.

He looked around, nodded. “Ye happen to know the whereabouts of some Arkansas trash name of Tyler Cabe? I’m gunnin’ fer this yellow-livered, dog-rapin’, greasy squirt of hogfuck and I don’t plan on leavin’ till I get him.”

Janice wanted to lie, but deception was not among her natural rhythms. And this man… well, you didn’t dare lie to him. “He’s not in, I’m afraid. He… he just left about a half-hour ago. Didn’t say when he’d be back.”

“Didn’t, eh?” Clay sighed and shook his head. “That’s probably fer the best, I reckon. Ye got yerself a fine place here, ma’am. Just fine. And with all due respects to ye and yer fine establishment, I wouldn’t want to a-dirty it up none with the likes of Tyler Cabe and spill that goatpiss he calls blood here, there, and everywheres. When I git him and I surely will git him, I’ll take that drip of shit outside and carve him like a rutting buck. Use his goddamn ball sack fer a tobaccy pouch. Yes, sir.”

Janice was speechless.

“Ye figure ye can tell him I stopped by, ma’am?” Clay said, oddly cordial for a monster. “Tell him I been here and I’ll be back and have no earthly intention of leaving until his scalp’s a-dangling from m’ belt.” Clay slapped the sodbuster hat back on his head, turned and made for the door. Hand on the brass knob, he paused and touched the brim of his hat. “Ma’am.”

And then he was gone.

10

The finest hotel in Whisper Lake was undoubtedly the Stanley Arms which catered to mining officials, rich cattlemen, and wealthy investors from back east. It was owned by a two-fisted Scotch highlander by the name of McConahee who came to this country to fight for the North in the Civil War and later made millions as a cattle broker. The Stanley boasted furnishings from European castles, imported Italian tile, and not one, but three French chefs.

And it was here that the two men with shotguns took Tyler Cabe.

Once outside, the guns were lowered. The men made it clear that he was not their prisoner, but equally clear that he was going to go where they said. Cabe was ushered through the great carved oaken doors, up the marble steps to the third floor where he was deposited in a suite of rooms carpeted in oriental rugs and told to wait.

And he did… drinking it all in.

There was a rosewood etagere set against one wall with a crystal mirror and ornamented shelves. Turkish armchairs, rose-carved side chairs, and a medallion sofa all upholstered in plush red velvet. There was a swan coffee table, high mahogany bookcases, and a gleaming eight-arm brass chandelier above.

A British manservant decked out in spats and tails told Cabe to make himself comfortable. Which wasn’t too difficult on a camel-backed loveseat that nearly swallowed him alive in plush comfort. So Cabe sat there, a snifter of Napoleon brandy in his hand, amongst the lush accoutrements, pretending he was some high-born lord.

But all the while he was thinking: Okay, Cabe, you must’ve really pissed-off somebody important this time. So enjoy your brandy, because it might be your last.

Cabe was smelling his buckskins and armpits when someone entered the room. It was a white-haired man with a hawkish nose, just as thin as a porcupine quill.

“Mr. Cabe, I presume?” he said, sounding more than a little amused.

“You… ah, presume correctly, sir,” Cabe said. “And don’t get the wrong idea, Mister, I don’t go around smelling myself like an ape in the zoo all the time. I was just concerned about stinking up your nice couch.”

“Sofa, Mr. Cabe,” the man said.

“Sofa?”

“Sofa.” The man was high and mighty and something about him seemed to demand that. He poured himself some brandy and turned to his visitor, his eyes simply cold as ice chips. He cleared his throat. “I apologize for the somewhat unconventional invitation, but it was important I speak to you immediately.”

“And you are?” Cabe said, knowing that to this guy not introducing himself was a grave social error.

“Yes, of course. Excuse me. Forbes, Conniver Forbes. I’m the chairman of the board and controlling stockholder of the Arcadian Mine, which is a merely a holding of the National Mining Cooperative. Perhaps, you’ve heard of us?”

Cabe had. They had more money than any three countries and more pull than a dozen state senators. “Sure. You people own lots of people. Folks just like me.”

Forbes arched his left eyebrow. “I have some business I would like to discuss with you… perhaps over dinner?”

But Cabe shook his head. “I just had me some pickled eggs. Besides, that French food gives me the gas something awful.”

“Yes.” Forbes sat down. “I’ll make it simple then and lay my cards out for you. I’m here as not only a representative of National Mining and the Arcadian, but of the Southview and Horn Silver mines as well. You see, we have a problem. A problem you may be able to help us with.”

“Such as?”

“I understand you’re hunting this deviant known as the Sin City Strangler?”

“That would be true, yes.”

“And the compiled bounty on this individual is…?”

Cabe rolled himself a cigarette, amused as always how rich folk could never say what was on their minds. “About five-thousand, I reckon. Seems to go up every month.”

Forbes nodded, stroked his chin. “I would like to hire you, Mr. Cabe. Hire you to address a problem which is much more severe than this Strangler. You see, there has been some problems in this town of late…”

He explained in some detail about the murders and disappearances up in the hills. Those which were originally thought to be the work of some large predators, but after the slaughter at Sunrise… well, other avenues of thought were being considered.

“See, Mr. Cabe, this Strangler business is bad, yes, but our problem here is tad bit worse. The Strangler has killed… what? Seven, eight women? Horrible to be sure, but minor in comparison to dozens and dozens that have disappeared or been slaughtered outside this town. And when you levy on top of that the massacre at Sunrise, well, you can no doubt see the time has come for action.”

Cabe lit his cigarette, told Forbes it was not his problem. That such things were being handled by the county sheriff. He had put bounties on the animals thought to be responsible. And if they weren’t animals, then just what in hell were they? He was not much of an investigator. Not given to wild leaps of speculation in general. He usually went after a man or an animal that had been identified in some way. But this, this was-

“Out of your realm?” Forbes said. “Maybe, maybe not. The fact is you’re a bounty hunter, Mr. Cabe. You hunt for a living, men or beasts. As far as being an investigator goes, I think you’re being modest. Your record is impressive. I want you to turn your complete attention over to our problem here.”

“Why should I?”

Forbes, not a man used to having to beg, told him that there was a bigger issue at hand here than lives. There was money to be considered. If the killings and disappearances continued, the mines would be in trouble. People were already running scared. More than a few had already left and what they-the mining people-did not need was a mass exodus which would put a stranglehold on profits.

“A mine does not exist without men to work it,” Forbes pointed out.

“Well, shit, you’re right,” Cabe said. “Men dying is one thing, but when all them bodies piling up starts to cut into the profit… well, damn, something had better be done.”

Forbes just stared. “Whether you agree with our motives or not, Mr. Cabe, is beside the point. We’ll pay you and pay you well to handle this matter.”

“Why don’t you bring in hunters from outside?”

“The time factor. This has to be moved on and contained immediately.”

Cabe thought it over. Decided he did not like this manipulative sumbitch who stank and stank bad of boardrooms and privilege. “Sorry, but I got me other matters to attend to.” He butted his cigarette and stood. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

“We’ll pay you fifty-thousand dollars, Mr. Cabe.”

Cabe felt light-headed. He sank back down on the loveseat. He cleared his throat. “Course, first thing you need in something like this is facts. So, tell me what you know…”

11

Like vultures gathered around a fresh, meaty kill, the vigilantes (sans hoods) gathered around the body of James Horner. He was laid out on a slab in the mortuary, just as dead as 150 pounds of trail-killed steer. His eyes were glazed over, but wide and staring.

One of the vigilantes, a mine captain named McCrutchen kept pressing them closed, but the lids just popped back open. He crossed himself. “Don’t like that,” he said. “Don’t like that at all.”

A few others laughed.

“Nothing supernatural about it,” Caleb Callister explained. He took a brown glass bottle of liquid and brushed the inner eyelids, gumming them shut. He held them closed for a moment and when he released them, they didn’t open back up.

Horner was covered in dried blood. It had soaked into his blue overcoat and spattered across his face. The side of his throat was a great blackened chasm.

“Slug must’ve ripped out most of his neck,” Luke Windows said.

“And his carotid artery with it,” Callister said.

He pulled a sheet up over the body, the dead face making the others uneasy. They were down to six now without Horner-Callister, Windows, Caslow, McCrutchen, Cheevers, and Retting. They had been harassing the Mormons for better than three months now. Mostly they preyed on small groups caught away from the villages. The raid on Redemption tonight had been the first action of its kind. But now with Horner’s death, it would not be their last.

Windows said, “I grew up with Horner, I grew up with him.”

“He died bravely for the cause,” Callister said, although it had a decidedly hollow ring to it. But what else could he say?

McCrutchen had been uneasy since they got Horner’s body back to town. “I wonder if this is some sort of omen,” he said.

Caslow just shook his head. “Since when is a shot man an omen?”

“I’m just wondering is all.”

“Crazy,” Retting said. “Crazy talk.”

But Cheevers wasn’t so sure. “Maybe we offended God with this business and we’re being punished.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Windows told him.

Callister knew he had to get control of them or this in-fighting would be the end of their little society. “All right,” he said, stepping between Windows and Cheevers. “Enough of this horseshit. We’re all part of the same thing here, we’re brothers. We all took the oath, did we not? As far as Horner goes, his death had nothing to do with God or the saints or the Devil himself. It was an accident. We rode in there shooting and burning. With all that lead flying about, we can count ourselves lucky no one else took a round. Maybe the Mormons hit Horner or… maybe one of us did. Ricochet. It’s possible, very possible.”

That shut them up, gave them something to chew on for a time.

“So enough of this nonsense,” Callister said to them. “Those bastards’ll pay for this, just not tonight is all.”

“And what about Horner?” Windows wanted to know.

Callister sighed. “We have to get rid of the body.”

“Now wait one goddamn minute,” Windows said angrily. “He was my friend. I grew up with him, I—”

“We have to get rid of him,” Callister cut in. “You mark my words, the Mormons are going to come screaming to Dirker first light. If they saw him get shot, they’ll tell Dirker as much. If Dirker gets a look at Horner’s wound, well, that wily sonofabitch’ll put two and two together. He knows who Horner’s friends are, he’ll know who to roust.”

There was silence after that. A great deal of it. All you could hear was the wind outside and the ticking of a mantle clock inside. Callister told Windows and the others to take the body out into the hills, plant it in a shallow grave where it would never be found.

“Horner will have his day of reckoning… through us,” Callister promised them. “Maybe tomorrow night, maybe the night after, but he will certainly have it. The next time we ride on Redemption, we’ll be carrying more than guns and kerosene.”

“Like what?” Caslow asked.

“I was thinking about all that dynamite up at the mines,” Callister said.

The others began to grin.

12

The next morning dawned cool and overcast, a light rain drizzling over the San Francisco mountains and the towns and mining camps that had sprung up around them like weeds.

In Redemption, a group of men dressed entirely in black stood in a large barn. They stood staring down at the bodies laid over an expanse of hay bales. They were the bodies of men, women, and children killed by the vigilantes. They numbered nearly two dozen.

Though the men followed the teachings of Brigham Young and the path of righteousness set forth by the prophet Joseph Smith, they were not like other Mormons. These men carried Colt pistols and Greener shotguns, repeating rifles and army carbines. In a religion that espoused the gentle way of the lamb, these men were wolves, hunters and predators.

They were called Danites, though gentiles knew them as the “Destroying Angels”.

They were the ultra-secret, ultra-clannish enforcement wing of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints. Since before the days of the Mountain Meadows Massacre when as many as a 150 California-bound gentiles were slaughtered by Mormon militias and Indians under the direction of the Danites, they had been actively righting wrongs and settling scores for the Mormon populations of Utah Territory. And this under orders of Brigham Young, though he had denied the same again and again.

And now they were in Redemption.

A village elder was pacing before the bodies, openly weeping. “Only through the Holy Scriptures may we know of God’s plan, the beauty of God’s mind and will,” he was saying. “For we are all God’s children, are we not? Man, woman, and child? And are we not promised salvation for our toil and trouble and earthly torment?”

There was a chorus of “Amens”.

“Yes, brothers and sisters, we have been charged by the Lord Almighty to go amongst the nations and spread His word. We are empowered by Him to baptize the heathen into His Church. And this, oh yes, this is our task, nay, our divine right! Yet, there are those who would visit foul deeds upon us! Foul deeds perpetrated by foul minds and foul hearts! They spurn the word and the teachings of the Lord God of Hosts! Not only do they refuse to be saved, but they refuse the way of salvation and eternal life! They spit in the face of His Son Jesus Christ! And worse, yea, possibly worse, brothers, they would burn and murder us from the very lands promised to us by the Prophet Joseph Smith! And when they molest our children, are we not angered? When they spill the blood of our kin, are we not enraged? And when they murder our brethren, are we not moved to revenge?”

The “Amens” of those gathered in the barn were loud and resounding now. The elder was openly plagiarizing both the Book of Mormon and the works of William Shakespeare, but no one seemed to notice. The elder was known for his fiery sermons and no one was disappointed this morning as they looked upon the burned and bullet-ridden corpses before them.

“The Lord has told us to love Him, to love all His Children… but what of they who do not love us? That do not chose the way of salvation and peace? What then, you may well ask? Well, brothers, I will tell you! For as the Lord has said that vengeance is mine, so is it ours! Our blood-right to avenge the murder of our kin! And, brothers, so shall it be…”

The Danites stood there, neither smiling nor frowning, but knowing that a task had been handed them and that they would accomplish that task even at the cost of their own lives.

So it was.

13

Charles Graybrow tracked Orville DuChien down to a shack on the edge of the lake itself. It sat on a little hill crowded by trees that were all dead from the filth pouring down from the nearby refinery stacks. The air stank sharply of chemicals and industrial waste. The water washed in a slick of black foam. Orv was sitting on a rock, staring over the misty waters, mumbling something.

Graybrow came up behind him, making sure he made a lot of noise so Orv would know he was coming.

“They told me about it, yes sir, all about it,” Orv was saying. “Said this injun’s gonna come and gonna want to know things. Gonna have questions for you, they say, and when they say… sure, they’s always right, ain’t they? Well, ain’t they?” Orv rubbed his temples. “Sometimes… sometimes I talk crazy on account m’ head, it hurts, just plain hurts, what with them voices, blah, blah, blah!”

Graybrow nodded, figured it probably wasn’t easy. “Mind if I sit here by you?”

Orv scratched at his beard. “Injun, ain’t you? Don’t matter you being an injun, just saying it is all. I knew injuns back home, yessum, lots of injuns. Cherokee. Cherokee Nation, sure. Yes, you sit down there, Charlie… see, I remember you from way back.”

Graybrow had brought a bottle of whiskey with him. He took a slug and passed it to Orv.

“Right neighborly of you, Charlie. Yessum.” Orv took his drink and passed it back. “I try… I try to keep m’ head, but it don’t always work. I start talkin’ in circles and what not. But you… you understand me, don’t you? Some don’t, but you do…”

“Yes, I think I understand.”

Orv was gnashing his teeth. “Deliverance… the town the Devil built. Oh, think about it, Charlie! Them that don’t like the light, but the dark places! Them that lives in cellars and attics, them that don’t come out by daylight! Them that likes the meat and blood of men! Them with the Skin Medicine… oh, yessum, tattooed on their flesh!”

“Who are they?”

But Orv refused to answer. He just held himself until whatever it was drained out of him. “You… you remember Johnny Hollix?” Orv wanted to know. “He… he was the Indian Agent back home, gave them Cherokees a real bad time. Course, some of m’ kin did, too. Like Cousin Stookey… but he weren’t never worth a shit to no one. But I recall Johnny Hollix… he used to fish river cats with Grandpappy Jeremiah down on the south fork of the Suck River. Sometimes I went with ’em and sometimes that Cherokee medicine man… you recall his name, Charlie?”

Graybrow just pulled off the bottle. “Afraid it escapes me.”

Orv began slapping his hands against his legs, shaking his head. “Yes, yes, yes, I remember! You don’t have to shout! Charlie! Tell ’em not to shout!”

Graybrow went up behind him, feeling a great deal of pity for the man. He laid his hands on his shoulders, massaged the bunched muscles there the way his mother had once done for him. Gradually, gradually, Orv stopped trembling.

“You got them hands, good hands,” Orv said. His head tipped forward until his chin touched his chest. “Yessum, I hear, I hear. That Cherokee medicine man, Charlie, his name was Spoonfeather or something like that, but everyone called him King Paint. King Paint. Him and Grandpappy Jeremiah had a love of the roots and herbs, power doctors, eh? King Paint’s wife-that pretty young one that was all legs and tits and big eyes, yessum, that one-she got herself mixed up with Johnny Hollix. One day, old Johnny just disappeared and that squaw? Hee, hee, hee! The most horrible thing, the most horrible!”

Though Graybrow had come there to learn certain specific things, he knew he would have to let Orv talk in circles. Let him do his bit and, sooner or later, he would get to more pressing matters. So Orv told him about King Paint’s squaw and the awful punishment visited upon her for laying with Johnny Hollix on a regular basis. There was a horse that was lying in a ditch, ridden to death. Using ropes, they strung it up six feet in the air between two trees and sewed-up the squaw alive in the hide so only her head was poking out its flanks. The carcass was full of flies and ants and beetles. Pretty soon, it was full of maggots, too. That carcass was all soft and putrid and wormy. Orv said after a week, it was so filled with maggots that it looked like it was dancing up there, rolling and pulsating. And the squaw, of course, sewn up in that putrescence with millions of worms crawling on her, went insane. Laughing and cackling, spitting and screaming. She bit her tongue off, shredded her lips. The crows and vultures were picking at her face and inside that hide… well, you just didn’t want to think of what that was like, just boiling away with grave worms.

“Terrible, Charlie, that’s what it was,” Orv said, shivering now. “And it was two weeks, two weeks before that horse rotted and fell to ground. And the squaw? Dead, eyes picked out and skin stripped clean off her face… oh, and you don’t want to mention the rest, do you? No, sir! No, sir!”

Graybrow had to admit that he’d heard of some positively obscene punishments for adultery, but this one surely took the cake. The icing, too. Orv went quiet, alternately giggling and whimpering, whispering to his brothers Roy and Jesse who were apparently both dead.

“Orv?” Graybrow finally said. “Tell me about Deliverance.”

Orv actually let out a scream and began to cross himself. “I cain’t! I cain’t! Oh, that’s him, that’s that devil James Lee Cobb! He… he… he was born out of darkness, yessum, I know it. Something that crawls and slithers in them dark places where folks ain’t got no bodies, that was his father! Oh, oh, oh… his mother! Jesus help her! Help her! And Cobb, Charlie, hee, hee, Cobb he went up into those mountains and found that other one what had been waiting for him all them years! That which waited in them caves for the Macabro… oh, don’t ask me no more, no more! Because it was in Cobb and then Cobb came down… he ate ’em, ate them men… came down and wasn’t long, wasn’t long before he heard tell of Spirit Moon…”

Orv went into hysterics after that. Crying and shrieking. Graybrow had to keep feeding him whiskey until the man was beyond pain and then he brought him into the shack so he could rest.

He wasn’t sure what it was all about, but there was no doubt anymore that James Lee Cobb was the catalyst for something. If Orv could be believed, then something sinister had taken control of Cobb up in the mountains, something that had touched him at birth.

And that something had brought him to Spirit Moon, who was a very powerful Snake medicine man.

Things were beginning to come together and Graybrow didn’t care for what they hinted at.

14

It was the next morning that Janice Dirker told Tyler Cabe about the giant who had come gunning for him the night before. As she spoke, she practically went white with fear. And Cabe had a pretty good idea that she was no shrinking violet.

“Elijah Clay,” was all Cabe could say, shaking his head. His breakfast of cakes and fried taters suddenly forgotten. “Jesus H. Christ, that sumbitch is really hunting me down. I’ll be goddamned.”

Janice looked more than a little concerned. “Who is he, Mr. Cabe?”

So he told her, told her everything about shooting down Virgil Clay and Charles Graybrow telling him about the animal old Virgil’s father was… half-grizzly bear and half-ogre and one-hundred percent ass-kicking, life-taking, intolerant hellbilly. Those dark, wonderful eyes of hers were on him the whole time and there was real concern in them, real fear.

And Cabe thought: I’ll be damned, this lady actually cares about me.

“I don’t like one bit of this. Mr. Cabe,” she said and her voice was deep and sensual and it made the bounty hunter’s insides bubble like sweet molasses. “I fully realize this is none of my affair, but I think it would be wise for you to hide out for a time. Let my husband deal with this human pig. He’ll know what to do.”

Cabe found himself smiling like a little boy.

Smiling, mind you.

Here he had just about the meanest bastard imaginable wanting to make a tobacco pouch out of his privates and he was grinning like a little boy with a peppermint stick all his own. And it was because of Janice Dirker. Though he wasn’t much prettier than your average wild boar (and would be the first to admit the same), Cabe had had his fill of women over the years. He had been desired and lusted after. But no one had ever really cared if he lived or died… and now someone did. He felt a lot of things right then: confusion, bewilderment, and, yes, even fear.

But he liked it all, God yes.

“Ma’am, y’all very kind to me. Very caring to some worn-out saddletramp like me and I can’t tell you how I appreciate it,” he told her, feeling his voice squeak with emotion. “But, really, I can take care of my own affairs. Always have, always will. And Jackson… the Sheriff, that is… well, I think he’s got enough problems without worryin’ over me.”

Janice was breathing hard and Cabe was, too.

What was it all about? Lust? Passion? Yes, surely those things were evident, but something more too. Something that went deeper. Something that he could feel burning deep inside of him like hot coals and blue ice. There was a word for it, but he didn’t dare think it.

“Please, Mr. Cabe. You are, without a doubt, a man who can handle his own affairs, but…”

“But what?”

She averted her eyes. Cabe reached out and pressed his hand over hers. It was like an electric shock passed through him. She started as well. She made to pull her hand away as color touched her cheeks, but didn’t. And under his rough, callused paw, her hand was petal-soft and fine-boned. It felt so very good.

She licked her lips. “I don’t… oh what in God’s name am I doing?”

“Say it,” he told her.

She sighed. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“If that’s what you want, then I’ll make sure nothing will.”

They stared into each other’s eyes for a time and then Janice pulled away, rushing from the dining room as fast as she could. And Cabe just sat there a time, feeling like a man flattened by some tremendous wave.

It was some time before he could so much as stand.

15

“Well, I see you’re still alive,” Charles Graybrow greeted Cabe later that morning. “I was planning on buying a nice whiteman’s sort of suit for your funeral. Maybe I was rushing things.”

Cabe dragged off his cigarette. “Maybe just a bit.”

After his talk with Janice Dirker, he finally found his guts again, tucked ’em back in, and took to the streets. Started walking. Checking Whisper Lake out saloon by saloon. And not for drinks, but for Elijah Clay. At the far end, near the Union Pacific railroad depot, he spotted Charles Graybrow having a taste at a lumber yard, chatting it up with another Indian who was cutting barrel staves.

Graybrow stood there, studying the sky which was leaden and turbulent. A chill breeze ruffled his long iron-gray hair which was tucked under a campaign hat. One eye was squinting, the other open in that solemn brown face.

“Hey, Tyler Cabe,” he suddenly said. “You figure I wear a fancy whiteman’s suit and hang around the depot, folks might think I’m some rich banker from back east?”

“Doubt it.”

“Because I’m an injun?”

Cabe shrugged. “That might tip ’em off.”

“Damn, it’s hell to be an injun some days. Maybe I’ll get the suit, though. Way I hear it, Elijah Clay’s in town. They say he’s looking for you.” Graybrow just shook his head. “So I might get some use out of the suit after all.”

Cabe just chuckled. He crushed his cigarette in the dirt and pulled off his hat. Not looking up, he fumbled with the rattlesnake band above the brim. “Already got me dead and buried, have you?”

Graybrow nodded. “Me and a bunch of my red brothers are taking bets. I’m saying your dead before tomorrow morning. But maybe I’m just a pessimist. Folks say that about me. Go figure.”

Cabe put his hat back on. “You’re gonna lose some money, I think.”

“Maybe.” Graybrow looked over to his Indian friend. “Hey, Raymond? You think you can fix up my amigo here?” Then he turned to Cabe. “I call him Raymond because his name is Raymond Proud.”

“No shit?”

Raymond Proud stood up and he was a big man dressed in wool pants, suspenders, and a lumberjack shirt. “Is this the Arkansas bounty hunter?”

“Yes. Calls himself Tyler Cabe.”

Proud nodded, scratched at his chin. “Yeah, I’m thinking I could fit him. I got some spare scrap lumber out back.”

“Yeah, that would work. He don’t want no fancy nameplate. Just the box.”

“Well, I’d need a little money up front.”

“That could be arranged.”

Cabe just stood there, not getting it at all. “What the hell are you two talking about?”

Graybrow patted him on the shoulder. “Just stay out of this, okay?” he said in a whisper. “I’m getting you a good deal.”

“On what?”

“A casket. You’ll need one soon enough.”

Cabe felt his mouth drop open. “Well, you two just got all sorts of faith in me, don’t you?”

“Nothing personal, is it, Raymond? We just know Elijah Clay is all.”

Cabe let out a sigh and walked away, deciding to take a look around the depot. Somewhere, that hellbilly was hiding out and he planned on getting the draw on the sonofabitch come hell or high water. Because, honestly, for the first time in a long while he felt that he had a damn good reason to go on living.

“Hey, Tyler Cabe,” Graybrow said. “Slow down, I need to talk to you.”

But Cabe didn’t slow down. “If you found me a nice plot of earth, I ain’t interested.”

Graybrow caught up with him, put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. “No, nothing like that. Just stop now.” He was panting. “It’s not that I’m old, but I don’t want to show off and run you down.”

“Course not. Wouldn’t be your way.”

Graybrow smiled thinly. “You didn’t like my little joke back there?”

“Not much.”

“It’s my injun sense of humor, it’s kind of strange, I reckon. White folks never seem to get it.” He followed Cabe to a bench by the telegraph office. “All us injuns got it. Take Custer at the Big Horn, for instance. He would’ve just waited for the punchline, things would have turned out different.”

“You’re crazy, that’s what.”

Graybrow offered him a drink. “It’ll settle your nerves.”

“My nerves are fine. Besides, it’s a little early.”

“You white folks… boy, I’ll never understand you. You bring the whiskey out here, get my people hooked, then you act like it’s not good enough for you.”

Cabe smiled. “That’s our little joke.”

Graybrow took a good pull off his bottle. “Since you already know about Clay being in town, I won’t warn you about that. But I hear them miners hired you to sort out all these killings. That true?”

“Word travels fast, don’t it?” Cabe said. “But, sure, it’s true enough.”

“Good. Because you’re gonna need my help. I know lots about those killings. If you wanna stop them, then you’re gonna have to stop James Lee Cobb.”

“Who in Christ is that?”

“You don’t know?” Graybrow said. “Well, sit back, because I have a story to tell you. And before you ask, yes, it does have to do with coffins and graves and the like. Just not in the way you think…”

16

The day turned progressively colder as Cabe and Graybrow rode out to Deliverance. They followed the dirt road up out of Whisper Lake and past the Southview Mine, taking the road where it forked at the blasted oak.

Cabe found himself studying that oak.

It was tall and craggy and black, looked something like a huge trapdoor spider climbing from the ditch alongside the road. Cabe could not put a finger on it, but that tree bothered him immensely. He was not one given to omens and portents… but somehow, somehow that tree was a signpost warning him off.

He found himself studying the landscape as it swept past him-the exposed vermilion rock bursting from the heavy bracken and scrub, the clumps of saltbush and horsebrush giving away to grassy meadow and dense stands of aspen. Streams flanked by drooping dogwood trees and leafless willows.

He took it all in, making a mental note of the barren cliffs and thick forests, as if he might never see them again.

But as he rode his sleek-muscled strawberry roan up that narrow, winding road that was carpeted in autumn leaves and pine needles, he knew it was just the wild stories getting to him. Superstitious bullshit that had no place in his line of work. All that business about James Lee Cobb. His life and his culinary habits. Then that bit about him being shipped to Whisper Lake in a casket… except maybe he wasn’t dead. Seemed likely what with that Callister fellow being killed (for no one really bought the suicide theory) and the body vanishing. But there was more to it than that. Because Goode-the old saddletramp Graybrow said had brought the casket in-was pretty firmly convinced that what was in that box was not exactly human. You added that to the fact that Deliverance had gone bad shortly afterwards, had sold its soul to the Devil (as the locals claimed) and, well, even the sanest of men started thinking things.

Beside him on his calico gelding, Graybrow said, “Ever tell you, Tyler Cabe, about the two fools that rode into the town of devils?”

“Nope. What happened?”

“They got killed. Way I heard it, anyway.”

Cabe licked his lips, felt the cool wind at his mouth. “You scared, Charles? Scared of what we might find?”

Graybrow said, “Hell no. I’m an injun, we don’t know fear.” He rode in silence a moment, navigated a dip. “Still… I was thinking there might be something I’m supposed to be doing right now, somewhere I have to be. I told the Widow Lucas that I’d stop by and fix that barn of hers. It leaks. Maybe I should be doing that.”

“When does she need it done?”

“Oh, about two years past,” Graybrow admitted. “But still I think of it. Wonder at times like these if I should get over there. Think so?”

“Nope. Not unless you need my help.”

“Figured on doing it alone.”

They rode higher and the air was fresher, frigid, so crisp it seemed it might snap. A few snow flurries danced in the air. You could hear the crunching of the horses’ hooves through the leaves and loam, the jingling of equipment and creak of saddles, but nothing else. The aspen forests gave way to juniper and pinyon pine as the road climbed and snaked. Above were slopes blanketed in Douglas-fir and spruce, ancient bristlecone pines dotting the ragged peaks just below the snowline.

Cabe had ridden through many mountains. Had spent countless days and nights prowling their wastes… but never was he so struck by their absolute silence as he was here. Tree limbs brushed together and wind hissed through the high boughs, but other than that it was silent. Oddly silent. Deathly silent. The sort of heavy, brooding silence one acquainted with burial grounds and crypts.

And Cabe did not like it one bit.

“Should be just around that bend,” Graybrow said, sounding like something was lodged in his throat.

Cabe felt himself tensing. There was no real, palpable threat here. No men waiting for them with guns. Yet, his muscles had drawn up tight and his heart was beating fast. Something was crawling up his spine and he had a mad desire to have a pistol in each hand.

The road squeezed between high timbered banks where the wind rattled stands of dead pines and then they saw Deliverance. But, as Cabe learned, you didn’t just see the place these days, you felt it. And feel it he did. If something had been crawling up his spine before, it was running up it now. The air was much colder, like a blast of wind from an icehouse. Something in him trembled and curled-up. His balls went hard and his chest was wrapped in iron bands.

“Hell and damnation,” Graybrow muttered.

The village sat before them in a little hollow, forest pressing in from one side and rolling fields to the other. Tall stones like monuments rose from those fields, leaning and gray. All the trees were stripped and dead. Nothing moved, nothing stirred. Only the wind howled and whistled and from its timbre, Cabe was certain there was nothing alive in Deliverance.

The town gave him an immediate, unpleasant sense of claustrophobia. The buildings and houses were pressed together too tightly, rising up over the streets and overhanging each other. Wherever there was an open courtyard or lot, rows of shacks and tent-roofed log structures were inserted. The roads were impossibly narrow and congested. There was not a vertical line to be found anywhere, everything was a crazy sprawl of leaning walls, sloping roofs, angled doorways, and clustered shanties. Even the streets and alleyways were zigzagging and haphazard. Most towns were built to accentuate sunlight and space, Deliverance was built to accentuate shadow and repression. It looked, if anything, like some decaying slum back east.

There was a wooden sign set at the town’s perimeter.

DELIVERANCE, it read in faded block letters.

Someone had etched a pair of simple crosses to either side of the name. They stood out like hex signs. Cabe felt his throat go tight, he could barely pull a breath down into his rasping lungs.

As they rode down and into the sinister heart of the village, it seemed the entire place was decaying, rotting like the carcass of some cursed animal. There were great gaping rents in the walls and the roofs were falling into themselves. Windows were shuttered, planks flapping in the wind. Everything was weathered a uniform gray like graveyard marble. Huge, macabre shadows spilled from warped doorways and collapsing stairwells, laying in the muddy streets in black pools.

Cabe and Graybrow tethered their horses to a hitching post and just stood there, feeling the aura of Deliverance fill them like a seeping poison. Weeds grew up in the streets and sprouted from boardwalks which were contorted and frost-heaved, if not completely rotted right out.

Carefully, then, Cabe slid his Evans .44-40 repeating rifle from the saddle boot, sucked in a blast of frosty air, and said, “Well, Charles, what you say we have a look around?”

Graybrow stood by his horse, his long gray hair whipping in the wind. He had a Whitney 12-gauge in his arms. “If you figure it’s the right thing to do, white man.”

Cabe didn’t suppose it was at all. Just the feel of the place was enough to make a man jump on his horse and ride until there was no trail left. The air was oppressive, physically heavy as if it were not air, but something slimy and moist. The overpowering, almost vaporous sense of malignancy made Cabe want to wretch. He was afraid to go any farther, to touch anything. Like maybe the contagion would find him, make him part of whatever had ripped the guts… and the soul… out of this place.

He stood on the boardwalk before what might have been a saloon once. A splintered sign creaked on its hinges overhead, but was entirely unreadable, the letters erased by winds and weather. Only a vague shape was still visible. Possibly the head of a horse.

“You telling me this place went to shit only since this Cobb fellow showed up?” Cabe wanted to know. “Looks like it’s been abandoned for years.”

“It has,” Graybrow said.

He told Cabe that the town had originally been called Shawkesville, after its founding father, Shawkes Tewbury, a New England Yankee. Tewbury had discovered the lead in the hills and had built the town, probably to resemble some crumbling seaport town out east. He had owned everything. Upwards of five, six-hundred people had been living in the town and working the mines as recently as 1865, but then the ore had played out and the railroad passed it by… and it had died out.

“Tewbury was the last to leave back in ’70, so I hear. Whole place here, it sat empty until two years back when Mormon squatters moved in, decided to rebuild it. Don’t look like they ever got very far.”

Cabe didn’t think so either. He looked up and down the angular streets. “We’re wasting our time, Charles. Can’t be nobody left living here.”

“That’s what we came to find out, isn’t it?”

Damn Indian logic. It was always so blasted black and white. And just when Cabe figured he had a good reason to get them out of here. He walked up to the door on the old saloon. It was water-damaged, warped in its frame. He had to put his shoulder against it to pop it open. And then it nearly fell off its hinges. Inside, dusty tables and a mildewed bar. Leaves had blown in through the cracks.

Cabe stepped in there, over the mummified body of a rat, very aware of the sound of his boots and spurs on that crooked flooring. There were empty bottles and glasses behind the bar. A few dirty paintings of whores festooned with cobwebs and covered in filth. Cabe just stood there, listening, listening. Though he heard nothing, he sensed everything. The town was not empty. Not in the ordinary sense. There was an overpowering sense of… occupancy. As if the villagers were hiding, playing out some macabre version of blind man’s bluff. Just waiting, waiting to come pouring out from doorways and cellars and shuttered attics, to show the two intruders just what sort of game they were up to.

And this more than anything, chilled Cabe right to the marrow.

He pulled a rolled cigarette from the pocket of his broadcloth coat and lit it with a match. He didn’t honestly want to smoke, but he needed to smell something other than the stink of the town. Because in here, in this vacant bar the stink was electric. A deep, pervasive odor of depravity and degeneration that told him that this town was blighted, polluted right to its core.

He could not put his finger on the source, but it was there. A loathsome, invidious atmosphere of charnel pits and violated graves. Cabe was not given to superstition, but right then… he would not have wanted to be caught in Deliverance after dark. He would sooner have slit his own wrists.

“C’mon,” he said to Graybrow.

Rifles in their hands, they checked out an old assay office, a boarded-up dance hall, the remains of a hotel. It was the same in each and every place. Lots of dust motes drifting in the air, lots of dirt and rotting furniture, but not a lot else. They found buildings where there were trails broken through the dust, but never the people who made them.

They took their horses with them as they walked the streets because the animals were nervous and skittish. There was no doubt they felt it, too, felt it and wanted out in the worst possible way.

Cabe and Graybrow did not look in every house or building. There were certain places they just couldn’t bring themselves to enter. And numerous cul-de-sacs where the roofs overhung to such a degree that they created oceans of shivering shadow so impenetrable, nothing could have forced the two men to investigate. But wherever they went, they could feel that sense of spiritual contamination, that deranged aura of pestilence. In more than one building, they heard footsteps in empty rooms or scratching sounds within the walls. And once, a whispering from a dank, stygian cellar.

But there was never anything to be found when they investigated.

Other than that, the only sounds were the wind moaning and their own boots stepping over groaning timbers. But that did not satisfy Cabe that he was imagining any of it. Because, someone or something was there. Behind them, in front of them, maybe on the rooftops or down in the cellars. More than once he had caught movement out of the corner of his eye. And there was no mistaking one thing: they were being watched. Eyes were peering at them from shadowy tangles, leering from behind shuttered windows and staring from dark, damp places.

At the edge of town, they found a few log houses that showed signs of recent occupancy. Beds were made and tables set, firewood stocked and barns hayed. There was dust over everything, but it made Cabe think that whoever had lived in those places had left in one hell of a hurry. In that part of the country times were always harsh and you didn’t abandon your belongings and wares without a real damn good reason.

In one of the houses they found a single yellowed bone.

It was sitting in the center of the floor, a human femur. Both he and Graybrow examined it and came to the same conclusion: the marks punched into it were from teeth.

“What do you make of all this?” Cabe finally asked.

But Graybrow just shook his head, saying, “I think it’s much worse than what folks are saying. Whatever happened here… maybe I don’t want to know.”

Cabe just looked him dead in the eye. “You scared?”

“Damn yes, I am.”

And Cabe was, too. He had never experienced such a total sense of terror before. And what made it all the worse, all that much harder to handle was that he did not even know what he was afraid of. Only that if it found him, if it reached out and touched him, he feared he’d lose his sanity.

They found a livery in which a dozen horses were stabled. They were very much alive and had plenty of feed and water. There were saddles and rigs, bits and reigns. Even shoes and nails stacked on a bench.

“Somebody’s here, all right,” Cabe said.

They checked out the old jail and then the only church in town. Its spire was high and leaning, the cross missing. If there was one place the Mormons would have set to right, it would have been the church. It stood at the end of a weedy road, surrounded by a rusty wrought-iron fence with spiked corner posts that rose up five, six feet. It was frightful and uninviting, looked like it might fall right over at any moment. The windows had been planked-over and a weird, gassy smell emanated from it.

Cabe climbed the rickety steps and tried the iron door-puller.

“Locked,” he said, sounding relieved.

Graybrow stood just outside the fence with the horses. “You see what’s carved into that door?”

Cabe did.

He was not an educated man, but he could read. And had read widely in his lonely occupation to pass the time. What he saw carved in the face of the door were signs and symbols generally associated with witchcraft and black magic-pentagrams and pentacles, stylized inverted crosses.

Regardless, he had seen enough.

They both mounted and rode through those streets one last time, each with their weapons in hand. The shadows were elongating and they heard sounds, murmuring voices, distant movement… as if whatever lived in Deliverance was real anxious for the sun to go down.

When they got outside town, Cabe and Graybrow rode like hell was opening behind them and that wasn’t too far from the truth.

17

It was well after dark when Cabe finally tracked Dirker down to a sordid rooming house called Ma Heller’s Place just this side of Horizontal Hill, the red-light district. He had been all over town looking for the sheriff ever since returning from Deliverance and this is where he found him, staring up at the house astride his gray mare.

Cabe brought him into a tent-roofed saloon called the Mother Lode and laid it out for him over warm beer.

“Empty?” Dirker said.

Cabe just shrugged. “It is and it isn’t. There’s something there, but I’m not just sure what.”

Dirker just gave him those ice-blue eyes full blast. “Maybe you better explain yourself.”

So Cabe did. He took his time, telling the sheriff everything he had learned about Deliverance and James Lee Cobb and how he figured the degeneration of the place was definitely connected with the man. At least, it seemed likely. Because something was wrong there, the place had gone from a God-fearing Mormon enclave to a vile pest-hole and there had to be a reason.

Dirker didn’t laugh at him or dismiss it outright. He gave it all pause while he sipped his beer. “I’ll grant you that something strange has happened there… but witchcraft? Satanism? Christ, Cabe, I just can’t swallow that sort of business.”

“Don’t blame you, Dirker. Not in the least. I wouldn’t have swallowed it myself unless it was rammed down my throat,” Cabe said. “I think… I think what ought to be done here is a posse organized and taken in there. Hell, maybe the army. But something ought to be done.”

“Then why don’t you do it? I told Forbes that you were the man for the job.”

Cabe just stared at him. “I guess… I guess I appreciate that. But this whole thing is bigger than me. Even all that money he promised me, it ain’t enough to get me up to Deliverance by myself. That place has to be torn apart and rooted out.”

But Dirker wasn’t so sure. “When the time comes, I think that’ll be my decision.”

Cabe just sighed. “Goddammit, Sheriff… listen now, this ain’t a matter of who’s in charge. It’s a matter of something being real fucking wrong up at that place and something having to be done about it.”

But Dirker would only tell him he’d think it over, maybe do a little more intensive research on his own. What you don’t understand, Dirker told him, was that there was more than just that crazy town to deal with here. There was the vigilantes and last night they had raided Redemption. And word had it the Mormons had brought in the Danites now and things were about to get seriously ugly.

“Way things stand, Cabe, I can’t afford to have all my men sniffing around that deserted village, not with what’s going on.”

Cabe understood that, said, “Sooner or later, Sheriff, this is going to have to be dealt with. And I hope it’s before more people are dead or missing.”

Dirker agreed with him on that. “But right now,” he said grimly, “how about we discuss why I’m out here instead of at my office? How about that?”

Cabe finished his beer. “Why are you out here?”

“It’s about your friend Freeman.”

And it was more than that. It was also about the Sin City Strangler. Dirker told him that not less than two hours before… just about sunset, in fact… the killer had struck yet again, carving up another prostitute. This one was named Carolyn Reese and she worked at the Old Silver Gin House. But the law had gotten lucky this time, for another whore had seen a man with her shortly before it happened.

Cabe was paying attention now. “And?”

“And the description was of a tall man, narrow face, dead-looking eyes. Worn a Stetson and a canvas duster. He also wore the star of a Texas Ranger.”

Cabe felt his head go dizzy, felt a rushing sound in his ears. “Freeman… Jesus H. Christ. I figured there was something wrong there, but, dammit, I didn’t want to think this.”

Dirker nodded. “Well, it just so happens that I wired the Rangers in Abilene. They had a fellow named Freeman working for them. But he disappeared about six months ago back up in Wyoming. He was a short, rotund fellow with an eye patch.”

“So Freeman… or whoever we got here… he just borrowed this man’s identity?”

“That’s how I’m figuring it,” Dirker said. “Just so happens, Freeman has a room over at Ma Heller’s.”

Cabe stood up. “Well, let’s bag that cocksucker.”

Dirker smiled thinly. “Figured you’d see it my way.”

It was Cabe who kicked the door in to Freeman’s room.

He kicked it in and Dirker went through low with a sawed-off shotgun. But the theatrics were unnecessary for Freeman was not there. In fact, nothing was there. The closet was cleaned out and the bureau was empty. The sonofabitch had made his run again.

But he left a parting gift to the men he probably knew would hunt him: a human heart in a mason jar of alcohol.

Cabe and Dirker just stared at the thing swimming in that brine. It was pale and bloated, obscenely fleshly. It seemed to move with a gentle, unknown motion.

“I guess there’s no doubt that he’s the Sin City Strangler,” Dirker managed, his throat tight.

Cabe just nodded, knowing there was little else to say.

The bastard had slipped away yet again. The only good thing was that Cabe had seen him, would recognize him if the chance came again. But he still didn’t know who he was or where he came from. And things like that, he’d found in his line of work, made hunting someone down far more troublesome.

As it stood, “Freeman” could show up just about anywhere.

And probably would.

18

In Redemption, the bullets were flying.

The vigilantes had rode in again in force, but this time the Mormons were ready for them. Or so they thought. The Danites instructed the townsfolk to stay in their homes and cabins, to lock themselves down tight. To wait it out. The Danites wanted them to adhere to the teachings of Brigham Young which meant to avoid violence at any costs. If there was killing to be done, the Danites would do it.

So the Mormons waited it out.

And outside, it was a shooting gallery.

Within the first ten minutes three vigilantes were dead and a fourth seriously wounded. Likewise, two Danites had been shot from their hiding places by expertly placed bullets.

And it became something of a standoff.

Caleb Callister did everything he could to reign in his forces and mount the attack in a precise military fashion, but his boys would have none of it. They wanted to shoot. To burn. To kill and pillage. They saw in the Mormons everything that had ever gone wrong in their lives. And this is why Caslow, McCrutchen, and Retting were now dead and Cheevers was moaning in the street, his guts shot out.

He wouldn’t last and Callister knew it.

It was just him and Windows now.

The bad thing was they were outgunned about twenty to one, if not worse. The good thing was they were still in possession of the dynamite that McCrutchen had gotten from the mine. Callister’s idea had been to ride into Redemption and start throwing the stuff immediately, but the others wanted to do some shooting and things had simply gone to hell.

Windows and he were hiding behind a barricade of cordwood with their backs against the outside wall of a livery barn. Escape was not in the cards, at least not yet… but on the other hand, the Danites were in no position to overrun their position.

Stalemate.

But it was night and it was dark and just about anything could happen. A few fires were burning, most of them set by the vigilantes, and the illumination they threw was enough to see and shoot by.

A couple townspeople rushed out with buckets of sand and water to extinguish a blaze that had started in bales of hay and was quickly working its way up the walls of a stable.

Windows brought up his Winchester 1866 carbine. Scarcely aiming, he sighted and fired, levered quickly, and fired again. The bucket brigade-both of them-lay dead in the streets.

“Two more dead nits,” Windows said.

A flurry of rifle fire grazed the log embankment they hid behind as the Danites tried to flush them out. Callister and Windows returned the fire which came from no less than four different locations.

Callister had no doubt that the Destroying Angels were trying to flank them. Probably crawling over rooftops in order to draw a bead on them. But it wouldn’t be easy in the murk.

More bullets ripped into their rampart, chips of wood flying like shrapnel. At that moment, two Danites charged in on horseback. Windows shot one of them through the throat as bullets whizzed all around him. Callister didn’t bother with his gun: He lit a stick of dynamite, let the fuse burn down some and tossed it at the other rider as Windows felled his comrade. It was a perfect throw, for the dynamite landed right in the Danite’s lap. He saw what it was, made to toss it aside, but somehow managed to get the burning stick caught between himself and his horse.

Then there was a booming explosion and both he and his horse were sprayed over the streets like bloody mucilage. Blood and smoldering bits of anatomy were everywhere.

The Danites had not expected this.

Callister lit another stick and tossed it onto the steps of a log house across the way from which they’d been receiving gunfire. The entire front of the place went up like kindling and what was left behind, collapsed into itself, burying alive anyone who’d survived the initial explosion. Flaming bits of wood rained over the town. The razed log house began to blaze.

“We got ’em,” Windows was saying. “Sure as shit, we got ’em.”

“Now they’re gonna have to make their move,” Callister said.

And they did.

A half-dozen men on horseback charged their position. They were spread out with an almost military efficiency. Callister watched them come on and had to admit, even to himself, that those Danites were a courageous, devil-may-care bunch. Tough as any men he’d ever fought with. In the their flapping black coats and wide-brimmed preacher’s hats, they were truly something to see, riding hard with smoking pistols.

But their strategy was all-too apparent.

The riders were trying to force the vigilantes out of their holes. Using themselves as bait, the Danites were riding right into the mouth of hell itself so the others could get a clean shot.

But it didn’t work that way.

More sticks of dynamite were tossed over the rampart. Not just two or three, but five or six that landed one after the other and resulted in a chain of resounding explosions that not only atomized horses and riders, but blew out the windows of houses and threw riders from their mounts. The shock waves actually knocked men from rooftops.

Whatever the Danites were planning, they gave it up.

They had lost no less than ten men now and had easily that number injured. There were only four or five left in any sort of fighting shape. For the next hour, there was silence broken only by an occasional gunshot so that both sides would know the other had not slipped away.

But slipping away was exactly what Callister was thinking.

And particularly when a dozen riders came pouring down the street, the lead man waving a white flag tied to the barrel of a rifle. Nobody shot at them. The Mormons called out to them to identify themselves, but the strangers would not. They just kept waving and smiling on those black mounts.

“I don’t like this,” Windows said.

And Callister didn’t either. There was something very wrong about all it all. And what was that high, hot gassy smell in the air like rancid meat? Seven or eight of the riders trotted over to the Mormon positions. The others, led by the man with the white flag galloped over to the vigilantes’ fortification.

The man with the white flag dismounted, said, “I am unarmed.”

Windows told him to keep his fucking distance, but the man waltzed right over and… funny thing, half way there something started to happen to him and he started to walk funny, a real weird odor coming off him. Callister sucked in a sharp gasp of cool air.

For he could see wan moonlight reflected off bone as if the man had no face on the left side. And what he saw confirmed that: a grotesque, inhuman skull knitted with raw quilts of muscle.

“Evening,” the man said and that voice was more animal than human. “Name’s Cobb. And I figure I got business with ye…”

19

An hour after the revelation of Freeman and the heart in the jar, Cabe found himself again at the Cider House Saloon in need of a drink. He put back two whiskeys and a like number of beers, thinking it all over. About Dirker, who might just have been his friend now (of all crazy things) and Freeman and, of course, Janice Dirker. That was one thing that kept circulating through his brain.

But in all the furor he’d forgotten a few things.

He’d actually forgotten that it was here that he’d put down Virgil Clay only a few nights before. His brain was simply too full with everything else. So when the door opened and a blast of wet wind blew through the bar, the last thing he was thinking of was Elijah Clay.

He didn’t even bother turning.

Maybe if he had, he would’ve seen men falling out of their way to get out of the path of the behemoth in the buffalo coat and gray beard.

As it was, he leaned up against the wall, lost in himself, and that’s when the blade of a knife imbedded itself in said wall scant inches from the tip of his nose.

Cabe dropped his drink and whirled around, his hand going for the Starr double-action at his hip. It almost made it, too, but the man he saw moving through the bar room stopped him dead.

Cabe stood there and stared.

He knew who he was; there could not be two men that matched this description in Utah Territory.

All Cabe could do was think: Oh Jesus and Mary, lookit the size of him…

The guy had to be seven feet tall if he was an inch. He was bearded and fierce and built like something that wrestled bears for a living. He carried a double-barrel scattergun in his hand and his chest was crisscrossed with cartridge belts. Lots of them. And that was a necessary thing when you factored in all the pistols hanging from the homemade belts at his waist. He carried more firepower than most cavalry platoons. And that didn’t even take into account the hatchets, skinning blades, and bowie knives that hung off him.

As folks in Whisper Lake wisely said, when Elijah Clay comes, even the Devil his ownself wisely crosses the street.

Cabe grabbed the hilt of the knife in the wall-a Buffalo skinner with an eight-inch blade-and tried to pull it from the wall. He had to use both hands.

“Ya’ll excuse me please,” the giant said, tossing men aside like they were stuffed with feathers. “My apologies, gents, my apologies.”

He had an odd sort of gallantry and charm about him. Those that didn’t get out of his path, he swatted aside like pesky gnats. And some of them were real big men. Big men who found themselves suddenly airborne.

The giant’s right cheek bulged with chew. He spat a stream of it at the faro table, soiling the cards. “Name’s Elijah Clay,” he announced. “And I’m pleased to know ye, one and all.” He came right up to a table about four feet from Cabe, just stood there. “Evenin’, gents. I’m a-here lookin’ fer some worm-brained, sheep-humpin’ slice of Arkansas dogfuck name of Tyler Cabe. Any of ye know this mother-raper?” He looked around, those eyes like boring bits. “Speak up now, hear? Way I’m a-thinkin’, gents, yer either fer me or agin me. And if it be the latter, than God help yer poor grievin’ mothers after I have m’ way with ye.”

And it occurred to Cabe that Clay did not know who he was. Not yet. Now, any sane man would have bolted and run at the very least. Tyler Cabe out of Arkansas? No sir, no sir, you must be mistaken. I’m Joe J. Crow out of Gary, Indiana, so if you’ll excuse me, I got a sick wife to attend to and I think I just pissed myself and all.

Sure, that’s what a sane man would have done.

But Cabe?

Nope. Not Tyler Cabe who rode hard through more shit in a year than most men rode through in a lifetime. Not Tyler Cabe who was just as fast and sure with his pistols as any man in the Territory and was no stranger to knife and fists. And not Tyler Cabe who knew an inbred hellbilly when he saw one because he was one himself and was not about to back down no how, no way from trash like that.

But, of course, Cabe had never waded in against something like Elijah Clay. The sort of lifetaker that could and would use his bones to pick his long yellow teeth with.

Regardless, Cabe said, “I’m Tyler Cabe. I’m the one you’re looking for, mister.”

Clay just nodded, but seemed pleasantly surprised. Maybe he wasn’t used to men admitting who they were when he hunted them. And being from a hill-clan, he put a lot of stock in bravery and courage. Even when it was foolishly placed.

“Well, Mr. Cabe, yer the snake what shot down m’ boy, so lets we two get straight down to it, what say? You fancy shootin’ irons?” Clay considered it, shook his head. “Naw, not yer thing, is it? Too wily. Yer the sort that fancies knives and the like. If’n that’s yer game, I surely can oblige.” He set his shotgun and assorted gunbelts on the table, pulling two hatchets from his belt and stabbing them into the tabletop where they quivered menacingly. “Well, boy, let’s get to it. Got me plans fer yer hide, yessum, figure on making yer life last till well past cockcrow.”

Men were murmuring amongst themselves, maybe mentally recording the entire thing for future yarning. Possibly making note of that impressive set of balls old Tyler Cabe had, but more likely wondering if he had enough money in his poke to bury him with proper.

Cabe grabbed the handle of one of the hatchets, yanked the blade from wood. “All right,” he said. “If it’s gotta be done this way, you big smelly piece of shit, then let’s get to it.”

Clay laughed, pulled up his own hatchet.

Cabe did not waste any time, he lunged in quick, swinging his ax and nearly taking out Clay’s throat, but the big man stepped back, grinning with all those piss-yellow teeth. Here Cabe was, figuring this was a matter of survival, a fight to the death… but to Clay it was just an amusement. Something that beat the shit out of watching the corn grow or violating your own sister.

Clay swung his hatchet and swung it fast, so fast in fact Cabe just barely got out of the way. The blade struck the bar and gouged out a four-inch strip of pine. Cabe swung at the big man and their hatchets met in mid-air in a clanging shower of sparks. The impact threw Cabe back against the bar, his arm thrumming right up to the elbow. He got under Clay’s next blow and swung at his face. Clay dodged it, laughed, and brought his own hatchet at Cabe’s head. It knocked his hat off and before he could react, Clay brought it around backhanded. Cabe brought his up to block the blow which would have been lethal given that the axe was double-edged.

The hatchets met again and the impact ripped Cabe’s from his hand and sent him spinning like a top, putting him easily on his ass.

“That’s that, I reckon,” Clay said and came in for the kill.

Cabe tried to go for his pistol, but his hand was numb right up to the shoulder and the limb reacted like rubber. Clay took hold of his hair, pulled him six-inches up into the air and brought up the hatchet for the deathblow.

And then a voice just as cool and calm as January river ice said, “Drop that hatchet or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”

Clay froze, hatchet up over his head.

Dirker was standing there with his sawed-off shotgun in his hands. Both barrels were leveled at the center of Clay’s back.

“Drop it,” he said.

Clay turned and lowered the hatchet, let it fall from his fingers. Let Cabe fall, too. “Goddammit, Dirker, ye always manage to spoil m’ fun.”

“You all right?” he said to Cabe.

Cabe, with assistance, found his feet.

Dirker marched Clay out the door at gunpoint, Cabe close at his heels. And all Cabe could think of was Dirker and his whip and now Dirker saving his hash and wasn’t it just goddamn funny how things had a way of coming around in the end?

20

After Clay was deposited in a jail cell, Cabe made his way back to the St. James Hostelry where Janice Dirker fawned over him, though nothing was really injured but his pride.

“You’re lucky to be alive, Mr. Cabe,” she kept saying as she drew him a bath. “Just darn lucky.”

“Well, the fact that I am… well, it’s your husband’s doing.”

“Jackson is a very dutiful man,” was all she would say on the matter.

Cabe had his bath and when he went back to his room, planning on taking a nice long nap while he had the chance, Janice was waiting for him there. She had changed his sheets and bedclothes, had built a little fire in the corner stove. It felt nice in there, warm and comfortable.

“Earlier this evening,” she said, “a man came to see you.”

Cabe laid on the bed. “Not another one of the Clays?”

“No. Nothing like that. This one was a very polished gentleman, said his name was Freeman.”

Cabe sat up. “Freeman?”

“Yes. Is that a problem?”

Cabe wanted to lie, but he couldn’t bring himself to. He told her who and what Freeman was, how he and Dirker had almost got him.

Janice looked decidedly pale, but recovered herself nicely as only a Southern lady could. “Well, yes, but I’m no prostitute.”

“He could’ve killed you nonetheless.”

And Cabe was figuring that was exactly what he’d had in mind. Freeman knew Cabe was after him and what better way to rub defeat in Cabe’s face than to not only slip away, but to slaughter the only woman in town he’d truly befriended.

Janice said, “He told me, told me to tell you…”

But it was getting to her now. Even all that breeding couldn’t fight the fear of what could have happened. Of what her death might have become. There was no getting around that. She allowed herself to be held and Cabe held her, liking the feel of her and smelling the wonderful musk of her flesh that no perfume could hope to mask.

“Tell me,” he said after a time.

She breathed deeply. “He said to tell you that he’s off for parts unknown. That you should not follow him… but, but to watch for signs of his work in other places in the years to come.”

“Did he say anywhere particular?”

“London. He said, in the coming years he would be busy in London.”

But then none of it seemed to matter and all those months of hunting seemed trivial. Freeman had spared Janice and Cabe didn’t know why and could never truly guess, but it was enough. Enough then as she flowed into his arms and they melted together into a delicious pool of something seething and moist that was made of flesh and limbs and hot, seeking mouths. And then it was done and they lay naked in one another’s arms, each speechless in the warm afterglow.

And each wondering, wondering, where it could possibly take them.

21

The morning after his wife made love to Tyler Cabe, Jackson Dirker was rooting through the remains of Redemption. The town was nearly destroyed. Even many, many hours after the initial attack that left no less than thirty dead (including Danites and vigilantes), the place was still smoldering. Though some homes were undamaged, most had been blasted or burned and there was stray livestock everywhere.

An icy rain was falling and Dirker stood amongst the wreckage in his yellow slicker, feeling something coil in his belly.

He was standing with a man named Eustice Harmony. Harmony had a farm well outside Redemption like many other Mormons. His family had taken in survivors from Redemption as had many others. But Harmony was more than just another Mormon squatter, he was a former resident of Deliverance.

And the half brother of James Lee Cobb… more or less.

More or less for nobody really knew who (or what) Cobb’s father was. His grandfather, the Minister Hope of Procton village, Connecticut, adopted him, packed him and his lunatic mother off to live with Arlen and Maretta Cobb in Missouri. And he himself left Procton shortly thereafter, for no one wanted anything to do with him or his church. They decided there was an evil taint on both. So the Minster moved to Illinois, remarried and, though he was well into his fifties, sired another family. One night, unable to resist the voices that tormented him, the Minister put a shotgun in his mouth and ended it. Eustice’s distraught mother christened all the children then with her family name, which was Harmony.

In 1853, Eustice Harmony joined the Church of Latter Day Saints in Nauvoo, Illinois, and shortly thereafter set off for the promised land along the Mormon Pioneer Trail which began in Nauvoo and ended far west near the Great Salt Lake.

Dirker was disgusted by what he saw. And truth be told, he was disgusted by just about everything in his job these days. For most of his life he’d been either a soldier or a lawman, had carried the respect and derision those offices inspire. But not once had he thought of being anything else.

Until now.

For, much as it pained him, he figured he’d had his fill.

He took Harmony aside out of the rain and into an old millinery that was still standing, had been dusted out and was being used by the volunteers as a dry-out shack. There was no one in there.

Dirker stood there, water dripping from him. “You know me, Eustice, you know the kind of man I am. I bear no prejudice against any. I’ve been good to you and your people. Have I not?”

Harmony nodded. “Yes, you have been that. We could not have hoped for a finer lawman than you. You have been fair to us.” Harmony took his hat off, studied the brim. “I know… we know… you have tried to break up these vigilantes, but sometimes, sometimes there are far worse things.”

“Such as?”

“The vigilantes raided Redemption the past two nights running. But last night—”

“Last night the Destroying Angels were waiting for them?”

Harmony would not verbally admit to that, but he nodded silently. “But there was more here than just these two groups. From what I have been told, another group of riders came in… and attacked both parties.”

Dirker swallowed. “This would be the same group responsible for what occurred in Sunset?”

“Yes.”

“And,” Dirker said, “would this group just happen to be riding out of Deliverance?”

“Yes,” Harmony sighed.

“Tell me about it, Eustice. I need to know now.”

Harmony nodded. “It began with James Lee Cobb. You have, no doubt, heard rumors concerning him. Well, they are true, God help us all, they are true…”

Harmony had never met his half-brother in person, not before he showed in Deliverance. And what brought that about was a letter. While safely confined in the Wyoming Territorial Prison, Cobb somehow, through some outside agency, discovered he had a half-brother in Utah Territory. Cobb wrote to Harmony and they began to exchange letters.

“I believe, as our Lord Jesus Christ taught, that there is good in all men, Sheriff. I believed the same of James Lee Cobb. I wrote to him, telling him he must now turn from his life of vice and iniquity, that through Jesus Christ there could be forgiveness and salvation if he were to walk the path of righteousness and confess to his sins,” Harmony explained wearily. “And Cobb wrote back that, yes, he now sought only goodness and purity in his life. I wanted to believe this, Sheriff, but I could not. For there was an undercurrent to this man, something black and vile… but as a soldier of Christ, I could not turn away from him.”

“But you wanted to,” Dirker suggested.

“Yes, God, yes, I surely did.” Harmony was lost in thought for a moment. “Sheriff, although I did not personally know Cobb, I knew of him. Even before those letters began to arrive. There were things my father wrote down in a letter before he took his own life… things about his life in Procton, Connecticut and what horrors occurred there. My mother told me of them. Of the taint on our bloodline. Well, it is of no matter, I will not discuss these things. They are skeletons that shall remained locked in the family closet.”

After he was released from prison, Cobb did not visit his half-brother in the newly-reclaimed village of Deliverance. Harmony had written to him that he must do this, must be baptized into the Church. The next he heard of Cobb was a telegram from up in Toole County telling Harmony he had died. No details were given. Only that he had died while in the company of the Goshute and that his casket would be shipped to Whisper Lake. It apparently was his last request to be buried near kin.

“Well, I’m sure you know what transpired. The casket indeed arrived and it was that night, while alone with it, that Hiram Callister died. The coroner ruled it suicide. I’m sure you recall this…”

“I was not in town at the time,” Dirker told him. “Doc West ruled it suicide, though he was not at all convinced it was so. He did this to spare Caleb Callister the unpleasantries of an investigation. For it was widely-known by that point that his brother… well, that he was not exactly a wholesome sort.”

Harmony just shook his head. “I know of Hiram Callister’s peculiarities. The rumors of which, at any rate. But Hiram’s death was not suicide. His throat was crushed and although he did indeed slit his own wrists, there are many who believe he was compelled to do it. Or did so rather than face what was in that casket…”

“What was in there, Eustice? Was it Cobb?”

Harmony told him pretty much what Cabe had. What was in there nearly scared the life from the men who’d brought it down from Skull Valley. Whatever was in there… no man could look upon it and retain his sanity.

Harmony walked to the doorway, opened it a crack and stared out into the cold, misting rain which was rapidly turning Redemption into a sea of mud. “It was, perhaps, a week or two later when Cobb showed in Deliverance on a dark night of blowing wind. He wore a black velvet hood, claimed to be horribly scarred. He wore leather gloves on his hands. He came in the company of a group of, well, despicable characters. They were outlaws, soldiers of fortune, blooded killers-Crow and Hood, Greer and Cook, Bascombe and Wise…”

They set up in a ruined hotel, Harmony said. The Mormons, being a charitable sort, did not run them off. Maybe they didn’t dare to. There was something very wrong about them all. They were invited to service, but declined. They sequestered themselves up in the old hotel, only coming out by night. They brought something with them in a wagon, something they would let no one look upon. Whatever it was, they locked it in a room in the hotel.

“Did you ask what it was?” Dirker inquired.

But Harmony just shook his head. “I did not. But I am certain it was a living thing… or nearly. For at night it howled and screeched and pounded on the walls. In the dead of night you could hear it up there, making the most depraved and blasphemous sounds. Whatever it was… it’s probably still there. I only know that Cobb’s men were overheard saying that it had come from Missouri…”

Harmony’ face had gone bloodless at the memory of it. It took him a moment or two to gather himself. Then he continued.

“There is a draw, a strange seduction to sin, to evil, Sheriff. It is the Devil’s primary tool: people will give themselves to Him in order to experience wicked gluttony.” Through the open door, Harmony watched men loading bodies in a wagon for burial. “Before long, women were spending time in that hotel. There was an unhealthy influence that Cobb and the others possessed. The young were drawn. By the time we realized that they were being taken over, body and soul, it was far too late. Our breathern had given themselves to the Evil One. Cobb had become their messiah. Those of us as yet uncorrupted, came here to Redemption to start again.”

“And Deliverance?”

“No God-fearing man or woman went there after that day,” Harmony explained, his face oddly slack. His lower lip trembled. “And those that did, were never heard from again.”

“And what of that… personage they had locked away up in the hotel? Was it human? Animal?”

“Neither,” was all Harmony would say. “But in my mind, it was the seed of human evil. There were those in Deliverance that said it was the Devil himself that was chained up there.”

Dirker thought about it all. Thought about it long and hard. “And Cobb… he disappeared from the mortuary. If he was dead, how could that be?”

“I don’t think he was dead,” Harmony said. “But surely not alive. His was the living death, Sheriff. No man will ever know what happened to him after he climbed from his casket. Some things are better not known.”

Dirker was not about to argue with him. He was surely not convinced about any of this. Something had happened, yes, and Cobb was no doubt involved, but the supernatural? Dirker had heard stories and wild tales like any other, but he was not ready to accept such a thing.

“I can see, by the look on your face, Sheriff, that you are skeptical. But what I tell you is the truth as the Lord is my witness. What happened in Deliverance is unspeakable… pagan rites, Devil worship, human sacrifice. It has been said that the first born, all the first born of Deliverance were given to Cobb as burnt offerings. To him and that demented thing up in the hotel.” Harmony looked close to tears now. “If God in His infinite wisdom would only smite that serpent’s nest from the land.”

Dirker said, “Well, maybe God’s gonna need some help this time.”

22

Cabe pulled off his cigarette, sent the smoke out through his nostrils. “So, I reckon from what you’ve been saying that you talked to your Indian friends?”

Charles Graybrow nodded. “Yes, I have.”

“And…?”

“Worse than I thought.”

They were sitting in Cabe’s motel room, on the bed, sorting out those things that a week before would have been unthinkable by any sane man. Now, however, there was no choice but to look the devil, as it were, in the face and give him his due.

“First off, you have to know about a Snake medicine man called Spirit Moon,” Graybrow said, his fingers coiling uneasily in his lap, unused to being without a ready bottle. “Now Spirit Moon… oh boy, he’s big mumbo-jumbo heap plenty bad injun witch doctor—”

“Would you quit the dumb injun bit already?” Cabe said impatiently. “It’s funny at times. But now ain’t one of those times.”

Graybrow nodded, smiled. “Sure, sure, understood. Okay, now Spirit Moon, you know something about him?”

“I’ve heard a few things.”

“What you heard is true. That’s one injun with the power, I tell you,” Graybrow said with complete certainty. “I won’t go on about things he’s done, the sick he’s cured and the bad ones he cursed… we’ll let it go by saying Spirit Moon is the genuine article. He refused to go to the reservation with the others, claimed that the Snake Nation would bow before no man, white or otherwise. So him and his followers hid out up in Skull Valley on Goshute land. And old Spirit Moon, he knew things that have long been forgotten, things others might want to know…”

“Like who?” Cabe asked.

“Like James Lee Cobb.”

Ah, that name again. Cabe was beginning to get this picture of that crazy bastard in his mind and he had horns and a tail. Even the sound of that name was starting to leave him cold.

“So Cobb went to Spirit Moon?”

“That’s how the story goes. Cobb and his gang of bad men went to pay Spirit Moon a call.” Graybrow broke off, wanting to get it right as he’d heard it. “Now, understand that Spirit Moon didn’t make Cobb wicked, he already was. They say he was born of darkness. That he lived a life of depravity and the like. That up in the mountains… up there, well, he didn’t eat his friends because he just wanted to, but because something crawled into him. The sort of thing the Ojibwa up north might call a Wendigo. A cannibal devil, a soul-eater…”

Graybrow told him then the story he had heard from an old Goshute named He-Who-Runs-Swift.

Cobb and his boys rode right into Spirit Moon’s camp, a thing many others would have been afraid to do. At first, Cobb was friendly. He made up some bullshit story about needed sanctuary for a time being that the whites were hunting him and his men. It was a lie, but essentially true in that just about all his boys were wanted for something, somewhere.

But you could not fool Sprit Moon.

He had the gift to look into minds, to see truths, things that had not yet even come about. He instructed his people to be kind to Cobb and the others, for even at that point he knew what Cobb was, hoped only that he would ride off given time. But it was not to be so. For what lived in Cobb, the seed planted there at birth and nurtured by what Spirit Moon called “the Old One of the Mountain”, was not in complete control just then. But it had found fertile ground and was blossoming by the day.

Before long, Cobb admitted that he knew of Spirit Moon, knew of his great knowledge and that he had come to learn from him. By that point, everyone in the tribe was afraid of Cobb. Afraid of what was inside him and the hideous smell emanating from him, the voices heard speaking in his tent by night… even when he was alone. Spirit Moon told Cobb he would indeed teach him, but only him. That he must send his men away. Cobb agreed. Spirit Moon had no intention of teaching him; he planned on killing him. There was no other way. For Cobb was evil and he had to be purified and death was the only way. But Spirit Moon knew he had to be careful… for if it was done wrongly, what lived in Cobb would rise up and kill the entire tribe.

“Well, Tyler Cabe,” Graybrow went on, “before Spirit Moon could do what had to be done, a woman disappeared from camp. Her remains were discovered shortly thereafter. Cobb had nearly devoured her…”

“Jesus. They caught him in the act?”

Graybrow shrugged. “Perhaps. I do not know. Only that when he was questioned about the crime by Spirit Moon and the elders, he freely admitted that, yes, he had eaten her. He boasted of it. Of the many people he had eaten. That his strength was absorbed directly from the flesh of those he feasted upon.

“Well, it took no less than five or six strong warriors to hold him down so he could be shackled,” Graybrow said. “So maybe there was some truth to what he said. And next…”

What happened to Cobb next, was not pleasant.

The Snake called it “the Living Death”. It was a sacred, dark ritual reserved only for those who could not die in the normal way and were possessed of something discarnate and malevolent. Spirit Moon decided that it was the only way. For what was in Cobb had to be starved to death. Only this would force it into cold dormancy. So Cobb was cursed with the Living Death. Hung by the wrists, Cobb was bound by the medicine man’s sorcery. He was treated with herbs and roots, secret chemicals and wasting prayers. The skin was literally eaten from one side of his body by ants. He was hung in a medicine lodge, dangled from the roof and smoked over a fire of holy balms for three days while Spirit Moon and the other holy men chanted a ceremony of entombment over him. When it was over, Cobb was neither dead nor alive, but somewhere in-between.

“What happened then?” Cabe wanted to know.

“He was nailed shut in a coffin. He was to be buried alive like that. For what was in him had to be slowly starved to death. It was the only way.”

Spirit Moon learned that Cobb had a half-brother in Deliverance, so the casket was sent to him via Whisper Lake. But Spirit Moon had underestimated the strength of what was inside Cobb. It should not have woken until it was in the grave, but instead it woke up on the trip to Whisper Lake. And when Hiram Callister opened the box…

“Cobb returned to the land of the living,” Graybrow explained. “Returned in probably a foul mood. A week later, maybe, he and his confederates rode on the Snake camp. They killed everyone, including Spirit Moon… Cobb was too strong to fight by then.”

But Cobb’s gang did more than kill the Indians.

They ritually slaughtered them. Women were raped and skinned, men drawn and quartered, children roasted over fires and eaten. Spirit Moon was encouraged to eat the flesh of his own young… when he refused, he was cooked himself. Cobb and the others ate him and absorbed all that he was.

“They became beasts, Tyler Cabe,” Graybrow said, looking very concerned now. “They had tasted that which was taboo. It brought out the beasts within each man. And Cobb, now in possession of Spirit Moon’s secrets or those the man’s soul could not covet into the afterworld, was far worse than before. He was in possession of what the Snake call the ‘Skin Medicine’.”

Cabe’s mouth was dry by this point. “What… what the hell is that?”

“A system of black magic, I suppose. Very ancient and forbidden. Instead of a formula written in a book or scratched on a rock, it is tattooed into the flesh. The Skin Medicine allows the beast that lives in all of us to come to the surface, to make itself known in blood and flesh…”

“And that’s what’s killing people? These Skin Mediciners, these beasts?”

Graybrow nodded.

Back home in Yell County there had been another name for men who changed into beasts. Werewolf. Cabe recalled a story he had heard as a youngster about a village of them that were supposed to live high in the Ozarks. Just a story… or was it?

There was a knock on the door and it swung open.

Jackson Dirker was standing there, looking gallant and handsome in his fur-trimmed overcoat and round buffalo hat. His eyes blazed like blue fire. “Charles,” he said, “I need to have a word with Mr. Cabe.”

The Indian nodded. “Sure, sure. There’s things white men can’t discuss before injuns. I was just here to see if I could be of service. You know, shining shoes or emptying chamber pots.”

If he found himself amusing, it wasn’t working on Dirker. He left the room and Dirker closed the door.

And Cabe was thinking: He looks pissed-off. Looks like he wants to kick the shit outta me. Maybe he knows, maybe-

Dirker sat next to him.

Close like that, he could see that Dirker wasn’t really angry. Something was broiling in him, but it had nothing to do with the man he’d come to see.

“Cabe,” he said, staring down at the floor now. “Tyler. May I call you that?”

“Of course.”

Dirker patted him on the leg. “We’ve surely had our differences, haven’t we? You’ve spent years hating me and I don’t blame you, for I think I’ve spent years hating myself over that business at Pea Ridge. But it is over. The war is long gone and we are one people again. I like to think since you’ve come here, things have changed between us. If we are not friends, then surely we are allies now. Would that be a correct assumption?”

Cabe swallowed. “It would be.”

“Once we fought on opposite sides and I honestly don’t know any longer who was in the right… sometimes, sometimes I can’t remember what it was I was fighting for.” Dirker smiled, then looked embarrassed. “The time has come when we must fight side-by-side. So I’ve come to you with an open heart to ask you, to beg you even, to ride with me on Deliverance…”

“You want me at your side?” Cabe said, overwhelmed by emotions he couldn’t even begin to guess on.

“Yes. I would trust you at my side more than any man now living. I would like to deputize you, have you lead a posse with me on that hellish place. Am I out of order asking this of you?”

Cabe cleared his throat. “No, you are not.” He felt something warm spreading in his chest. He stood and looked out the window at the streets below. He turned back to Dirker. “I would be honored to ride at your side.”

And then they shook hands and everything for them, finally, ultimately came full circle.

23

Two hours later, the posse assembled outside of the Sheriff’s Office.

The freezing rain had become snow now that drifted through the frigid air like ash blown from some huge funeral pyre. And that seemed pretty fitting given where the men were going and what they were going to do.

There were some fifteen men there when Cabe rode in on his strawberry roan. Most of them were miners that Cabe did not know. But Pete Slade and Henry Wilcox were there, the office left to another deputy. Sir Tom Ian, the English-born pistol fighter was there. As was Charles Graybrow and Raymond Proud, the big Indian carpenter. The one that really surprised Cabe was Elijah Clay astride a chestnut mare.

“Afternoon, Mr. Cabe,” he said, quite cordially. “The sheriff here has let me join this huntin’ party. He says I have to behave m’self. As far as ye killin’ Virgil, well, I knowed he weren’t nothin’ but trash. So I don’t hold no grudge no more.”

Cabe relaxed a little at hearing that. He pulled his Stetson with the rattlesnake band off the saddle horn and place it on his head. “I’m ready, then,” he said.

“Okay,” Dirker said. “You know where we’re going and what we’re going to do. So let’s get it done. And we don’t come back until Cobb is put down.”

“Yessum, Sheriff,” Clay said. “I’ll tell ye boys one thing and I’ll tell ye just the once. If’n I get that peckerwood devil in m’ sights, I’ll shoot that trash just deader’n Jesus on the cross. Yes, sir.”

And that, it seemed, was a good parting remark.

They rode.

It was at the fork in the road, at that old lightening-blasted dead oak, that they found more riders waiting for them. Mormons. Eustice Harmony was there. As were four surviving Danites-Crombley, Fitch, Sellers, and Archambeau. All of whom were anxious to destroy what lived in Deliverance once and for all.

So, then, twenty men rode on that town.

Twenty men who were willing to give their lives to stop the killing and what lived in Deliverance was more than happy to take them.

One by one.

By the time they passed through those high banks of withered, dead pines outside of Deliverance, the storm had filled its lungs with ice and had become a full-blown blizzard. Visibility was down to less than thirty feet. But no one suggested turning back. What had to be done would not be easy in any weather.

As they came around the bend, everyone brought up their guns.

They saw what they thought were two men waiting for them on either side of the road. But they were not men, but scarecrows impaled on sticks. As the posse got closer, they saw they were actually corpses and ones long dead by the look of them. Their clothes were shredded rags that flapped in the wind. Hollowed, skullish faces with empty eye sockets appraised the riders as they passed.

Although Cabe had seen countless dead men, he found he could not look upon those frostbitten faces. He was afraid they might smile at him, speak to him in voices of cold dirt.

Well, he found himself thinking, you volunteered for this fucking mess. Got nobody to blame but your ownself. If things get ugly-and they will-y’all just keep that in mind, Tyler Cabe.

“Ye can feel it, cain’t ye?” Clay said.

And Cabe could only nod, wordlessly.

For he could feel it. Feel some ancient, unspeakable terror erupting in his belly, licking at his insides with a cold tongue. Something in him knew the smell of this place, the malefic feel of it, and not from yesterday but from days long gone. It could smell those that haunted Deliverance and it frantically warned him away, filling him with an immense, unreasonable fear that made him physically ill. It settled into every cell and fiber in a black, wasting totality.

And then, as they rode in guarded silence, the town began to appear. It swam up out of the blizzard like a decaying ghost ship out of ocean fog: the masts and prows, decks and rigging. Yes, the ruined buildings and sharp-peaked roofs, false-front stores and boarded high houses all described by churning tempests of snow that shrieked through the streets.

Deliverance was laid-open before them like a sprung sarcophagus, daring, just daring them to look upon the secrets its moldering depths concealed.

Cabe saw it, really saw it, and felt like a little boy lost in a graveyard full of whispering voices and ghastly screams. And he heard these things, too, but only in his head. For that was the sound of the town-a humming, dead neutrality composed of agony and tormented screeching reduced to a single low and morbid thrum.

It made his mouth go dry and his heart pound like a hammer at a forge. His skin was tight and cold, his internals pulling into themselves. Adrenalin rushed through him, making his hands tremble on the reigns and his eyes go wide and unblinking. For everywhere around them, shadows seemed to dip and scamper in the blowing wall of snow.

In the street then, in the very black heart of the town, they dismounted and tethered there horses to a hitch rail.

Harmony stood there in a flapping black coat, a shotgun in his arms and the Book of Mormon in his hip pocket. “What you will see here will look like people,” he said to the posse, the wind turning his voice into a weird, wailing sound. “But they are not people. Not anymore. Not any more than a cadaver in a grave is a person. They may try to talk to you, to get you off alone. But don’t let them, by God. Don’t let them…”

Maybe not everyone in the posse knew what was in Deliverance. But maybe they’d heard stories, chimney-corner whispers, the sort of crazy tales kids tell late at night and around fires… things, of course, they’d dismissed at the time. But now? They did not dismiss them. They remembered them, locked those tales down deep within themselves where they would not be able to feel the teeth. And maybe that was why they did not question what Harmony said. They just accepted.

“It’ll be dark in about three hours,” Dirker said to them, his face pale and wind-pinched, but very determined, “and we want this wrapped up by then. So we’re gonna break into groups and…”

But Cabe was not listening. Not really.

He was watching those shuttered windows and high, sloping roofs, the narrow spaces cut between buildings. The tenebrous shadows that oozed from them. He was watching and noticing how everything seemed to lean out over the men in the street, wishing to crush them or get them close enough to pull them into dark places where business could be handled in private, away from the light. And what he was feeling was the blood of the town-a toxic, miasmic venom seeping into himself.

“Let’s do it,” Dirker said.

And they started off.

As Dirker led Harmony and the Danites through that howling white death, the church bell began to gong. It echoed out through the storm with a hollow, booming sound.

“The bell,” Harmony said, “Dear God…”

Dirker was telling himself that it meant nothing really. That maybe the wind had snagged it, but he knew better. Hands were pulling that rope and he could only imagine why.

The snow was flying thick and fine like powdered glass, dusting the buildings with a sound like blown sand. It whipped and swirled and drifted, lashing at the men in the streets, doing everything it could to drive them back, back. But they refused to be driven. They came on with shotguns in their fists and a ragged, squinting resolve in their eyes.

Suddenly, Fitch stopped dead, his rifle brought to bear. “What… what was that?” he said and the fear was thick in his voice like ice clogging a well-rope. “Over there.”

Dirker looked quick, frigid wind blasting him in the face. He saw a suggestion of a form swallowed by the storm. Could have been something. Maybe.

“It had green eyes,” Fitch said weakly. “Glowing green eyes…”

But Dirker would hear none of it.

They pushed on past sagging houses and a livery barn with a three-foot drift of snow pushed up against the door like a wave. Next to it was a larger, two-story log building. It had been some kind of community house or saloon at one time.

Dirker tried the door.

It was open.

He kicked it in all the way and the five of them came through with their guns held high and ready to spit rounds. But what they saw stopped them dead. It literally froze them in their tracks.

A couple kerosene lamps were blazing away. Seven or eight people were in there, pushed up to the dusty bar or sprawled in chairs at dirty, cobwebbed tables.

“Afternoon, gents,” a fellow behind the bar said. He was a heavy, rotund man with a Quaker-style beard lacking mustache. There were glasses set up on the bar top before him. Using a rag, he was cleaning them out. “Pull up a chair.”

Dirker and Harmony looked at each other while the Danites formed a defensive ring, just ready to draw on anything that so much as breathed. Behind them, wind rattled the door, fingers of snow snaking across the floor.

Besides the bartender, there were three men at the bar, a few others at the tables. There was nothing exceptional about any of them. A little boy with flat, empty eyes was in the corner tossing what looked like a ball into the air and catching it. Except it was no ball, but a skull. A human skull.

“Wanna play?” he said, giggling.

Dirker ignored him. “Where’s Cobb?” he said. “James Lee Cobb.”

The others just looked at each other and started to laugh, as if the sheriff was asking where Jesus was, on account he wanted to buy him a beer. When the laughter died away, Dirker saw a little girl come from the back room. She was no more than seven or eight… and completely naked. She hopped up on the bar in a very childlike, carefree manner. Sat there, her legs swinging. She looked upon Dirker and there was no innocence in those eyes, just a leering, hungry depravity. But what was truly strange was the elaborate tattooing of her belly and chest. Dirker couldn’t be sure what he was looking at in the dim light, but it looked like… intertwined serpents and weird figures, configurations and distorted magical symbols.

As he looked on them, the illustrations seemed to move.

He looked away.

A man at one of the tables with a Confederate hat and an officer’s coat patched with spreading blotches of mildew, said, “Where’s your manners, barkeep? Offer these here fellas a drink…”

“Course,” the bartender said.

His other hand came up from behind the bar… except it was elongated, the fingers spidery and narrow. Where the nails should have been there were long black claws curved like potato hooks. Smiling, the bartender used one of the claws to slit his wrist. Then, most casually, he began filling a glass with his blood.

“Blasphemy,” Harmony finally said, breaking that bleak silence. “A cancer on the face of God…”

That got them laughing again.

About that time, the sound of gunfire rose up from somewhere in the town and Dirker knew the others had made contact, too. That the party was finally underway.

The man in the Confederate hat began to grin and a spidery tangle of shadows spread over his face. When he spoke his voice was low and grating. “Now, you boys don’t really think you’re getting out of here alive, do you?” he said, his teeth suddenly long and sharp.

And there was a weird electricity in the air, an odd sharp stink of something like ozone and fresh blood. There was subtle motion and a wet, sliding sound.

“Honey,” the man said to the little girl, “these men like your pictures, show ’em how the lines meet…”

And as Dirker watched, those weird and diabolic tattoos began to move. Maybe it was the flesh beneath, but suddenly everything was in motion. There was a rending, popping sound as muscles stretched and ligaments relocated to accommodate new and feral anatomies. The girl’s chest thrust out in a cage of bones, her limbs going long and rawboned. Thousands of fine gray hairs began to erupt from her skin until you could no longer see the skin. It looked, if anything, like millions of metal filings drawn to some central magnet. Her jaw pushed out into a snout, her nose flattened and her ears did likewise, pressing against that narrow skull of whipping locks and going high and sharp. Her eyes became green and slitted, her brow heavy, the skull beneath grotesquely exaggerated.

She was suddenly more wolf than girl.

Her lips pulled back in a snarl, her teeth sharp as icepicks.

Dirker heard himself mutter, “Shit.”

All he could think of was a childhood story of how Circe the witch had changed Odysseus’s men into beasts.

And around him… they were all changing.

Flesh became smoke that was blown by secret, cabalistic winds and rivers moved by mystical currents. The girl suddenly leaped into the air, five, six feet until it seemed she would brush the rafters overhead, and then she came right down on Sellers. And this before he could even jerk a trigger or think of doing so. He and the girl-thing went down in a thrashing, writhing heap. Her mouth was wrapped around his face, those teeth sunk right to the bone. You could hear his screams echoing down the shaft of her throat.

But nobody had time to look at that.

For as the girl made her move, so did the others.

The man in the Confederate hat rose up in a flurry of teeth and claws and growling and was almost on Harmony when his shotgun went off, pitching the man backwards. Suddenly, everyone was shooting. Shooting at shapes and forms and monstrosities from some primal nightmare.

Dirker brought his Greener up and blasted the bartender. The impact blew his shoulder to a bloody mist and threw him against dusty glasses and discarded bottles. There was a crashing and shattering and he came right back up again, his face gone lupine and his teeth bared to bisect human flesh.

Dirker gave him another round that knocked him away and then that little boy was hopping in his direction. Dirker gave him the butt of the Greener in the face, driving him to the floor, broke it open and ejected shells, fed two more in, snapped it close. The bartender was up on the bar by then, his shirt split wide open from the pulsing, bestial muscularity beneath.

As he leapt, Dirker gave him both barrels.

The buckshot blew his snarling head into a spray of bone and blood. He flipped back over the bar and stayed down this time. As Dirker whirled around, the boy hit him hard and put him down, those jaws opening like the mouth of a tiger and coming in for the kill. The Greener still in his hands, he jammed the barrel lengthwise into that mouth, claws tearing great ruts through his coat and shirt and into his chest below. With a scream, he pushed the beast away from him, flipping it off him.

The man in the Confederate hat had Harmony.

His huge, clawed hands were pressed to either side of the Mormon’s head… and he was lifted an easy two feet off the floor, rivers of blood running from his ears and eyes as his skull was crushed. Then the teeth darted forward and his face was literally stripped from the bone beneath.

Dirker saw the beast standing there, Harmony’s face hanging from its jaws like a bloody scalp.

And then the boy came back at him, but Dirker was on his feet.

As the boy charged in, Dirker unleathered his .45 Peacemaker in one swift, easy motion. He fired once, punching a hole in the boy’s sloping forehead and blowing skull out the back of his head. The boy shuddered momentarily on all fours, gore oozing down his face. Then he pitched straight over, trembling on the blood-slicked floor.

Two of the beasts were on Crombley.

Fitch dropped another by following Dirker’s lead and shooting it in the head. Dirker put three bullets into the thing that was devouring Harmony. Then the door exploded in with a roaring wall of snow and long, furry arms powdered white took hold of both Fitch and Archambeau and dragged them screaming out into the storm.

Dirker killed one more, reloaded his Greener and ran out into the storm, the world of Deliverance a cacophony of ringing church bells, shooting, and howling.

The storm was reaching its peak out in the streets.

The snow rose up into a whipping, shrieking wall of white that cut visibility down even further now. Cabe and his crew of miners had to squint and lean into the wind to press forward. They could hear the screaming and gunfire, but with the gusting blizzard turning sound around and into itself, it was hard to say where any of it was coming from.

And the miners were panicking.

They saw shapes hobbling through the snow and were shooting randomly, even though Cabe shouted at them to stop, because they might be cutting down their own men.

They were ready to bolt and run.

But where to?

To either side they could see the vague, white-shrouded forms of buildings, but it was hard to say where they were in the town now. Paranoia and confusion had turned them back on their own tracks half a dozen times. And each time, their tracks had been erased by the storm.

“Goddammit,” Cabe cried out at them, “stop this business, we’ve got to have some order here.”

And that’s when he noticed there were only three miners with him, the fourth missing.

“Where’s Hychek? Where the fuck did Hychek go?”

“They got him! Something grabbed him… something with green eyes!” one of the miners shouted. “I’m getting out of here, I’m getting out right goddamn now…”

But before he could, a trio of riders came pounding up the street and the miners, thinking the cavalry had arrived, waltzed right out into the streets to meet them. But it was not a rescue party, but a gang of Hide-Hunters. They thundered through the storm, parting the snows like roiling mists. They wore dusters and flat-brimmed hats pulled low over wolfish, snarling faces.

One of the miners let out a strangled screaming sound as a lasso looped over his head and was pulled tight like a noose around his throat. He was yanked from his feet and pulled away into the storm by one of the Hide-Hunters. Another miner was similarly roped.

Cabe ducked under a lasso meant for him and, quickly levering his Evans .44-40, knocked a Hide-Hunter from leather with three well-placed shots. He hit the ground, his horse racing off.

And Cabe got a good look at him.

He had the rough shape of a man, but was hunched-over and moved with a jumping, hopping side-to-side gait. His eyes blazed like wet emeralds and teeth hung over his narrow black lips like those of a jungle crocodile. With a resounding roar, he came at Cabe, the three bullet holes in him seeming to make little difference.

Cabe couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

That repulsive, shocking face and gnashing teeth, the loops of drool hanging from the crooked slash of a mouth, the furry hands with the ten-inch fingers and claws just as sharp as scalpels.

He put another round in the beast, mainly just to keep it off him.

But it didn’t even slow it down.

It slammed into him, pitching the both of them into a snowdrift. Its claws were at his throat, those fingers encircling his neck. The beast stank of tainted meat and diseased blood, saliva hung from its jaws in vile ropes.

Before it fed on him, it did something that truly sucked the wind from Cabe’s lungs: it spoke.

“Gonna die now, friend,” it said in a slavering, raw voice that was more akin to the growl of a rabid hound than the speech of a man. “Gonna die like an animal like in the old, forgotten days…”

But Cabe had other ideas.

As the beast reared up, letting out a wailing, howling noise that made Cabe’s ears explode with rushing noise, Cabe pulled his bowie knife from its sheath at his hip. And when the beast came down to fill its belly, it came right down on the blade of the knife. Nearly a foot of razored steel slid right into its throat and out the other side.

With a mewling, whining sound, it pulled away, the knife erupting out the side of its throat. Its head hung at a sickening angle, most of its neck slit clean through. It spilled blood to the fresh snow, tried to run and fell, tried to rise up and stumbled, its life’s blood running out in a torrent.

Cabe saw his chance and jumped on its back, knocking it face-first into the snow.

Before the beast could so much as whimper, Cabe drew its head back by handfgul of that filthy, greasy hair and sank the knife deeper in its throat, sawing and slitting. The creature came alive, twisting and fighting and it was its own misguided strength more than anything else that finally severed its head.

Cabe tossed it into the wind.

The body still tried to crawl, but didn’t make it very far.

The head stared up at him with those stark, green eyes and the jaws still worked.

But it was done and Cabe knew it.

Drenched with the reeking blood of the Hide-Hunter, Cabe stumbled out into the storm to find survivors.

The only survivor from Cabe’s group was Lester Brand.

He was a shift boss at the Silver Horn Mine.

And he was also a dead man.

When the Hide-Hunters attacked, he ran. He fought and blundered through the streets, ducking down when he heard a sound or sensed motion. He slipped into a doorway when two more Hide-Hunters rode by, sporting heads speared on poles. He saw the heads… they were the heads of miners, men he’d worked and drank with.

Brand was trembling badly now, wheezing, pained sounds coming from his throat. Though it was bitterly cold and his face just as stiff as leather, he was sweating profusely. Trails of perspiration ran down his spine. He had lost his shotgun and the Colt Army pistols in his gloved hands felt oily like they might jump from his fists at any moment.

He was moving down a street, but he had no true idea where he was.

The town was not that big. Though he had never been to Deliverance before, he remembered Dirker saying it was cut by a central road and that four or five other roads intersected it. So if he just kept walking, he was bound to make his way out sooner or later.

But he thought: Oh Jesus, oh Christ, what, what if I’m the last one left alive?

But he knew that couldn’t be, for now and again he could hear gunfire. So he had to keep his head. He moved forward slowly, the snow wild and flying all around him. It sculpted weird shapes and shadows. The buildings rose up like headstones, leaning out at him. He kept seeing forms moving past him, but he didn’t dare shoot. Not just yet. For there was death everywhere now, screaming white death and what it hid in that whipping white cloak was far, far worse.

He moved past a row of warehouses, then a barn, a boarded-up dry goods store. Then directly ahead he could hear a low, guttural growling sound. And then many. As if a pack of wild dogs were bearing down on him.

Quickly, he darted down an alley that twisted and turned, spilling him into a little courtyard pressed between the hulks of buildings. There was no way out. He would have to break into one of them and take his chances.

Right then, he froze up.

The wind was making a shrill, howling sound and he wasn’t entirely sure that it actually was the wind. He looked up quickly… thought, thought for a moment he saw something up on a roof. Something that faded away into the belly of the storm. He wasn’t sure he had even seen it.

There was a rapping noise off to his left.

A door was swinging open and closed in the wind. It thudded hollowly against the weathered gray wall of a feed mill. Pulling up what strength he had left by that point, Brand moved over there, the door banging and banging.

He went to the door.

It had slammed close again. His throat full of cinders, Brand hooked the barrel of one Colt Army around the latch and threw it open. And saw… saw a figure come drifting out of the darkness like a wraith. A woman. A woman in a white soiled dress. Her hair was long and fire-red, blowing around like meadow grasses in a high, angry wind.

“You,” Brand managed as she neared the doorway, “you… you gotta help me get out of here… I’m lost… I’m…”

But he saw that she was grinning like something from a dark wood that snatched away wayward children, something that gnawed on bones and sucked blood. Her eyes were huge and wet and lustrous like wet jade. They found him and held him, that mouth set with long needle-like teeth.

Brand screamed and then those long fingers speared him and that slobbering, savage mouth thrust forward. And it ended for him there in the snow, in a red-stained heap. And as he died, he could hear the sound of her chewing on him.

In the lobby of the hotel, Graybrow paused.

He listened.

He knew from years spent stalking that he was not alone, but where the others were, he could not say.

Though he had sung his death song before coming on the raid, Graybrow did not want to die. He would never see seventy again, but there was a vitality about him, a spunk, a gleam in his eye that age could not hope to wither.

He did not want to die… yet, he was willing.

It was an honor among the Utes to die in battle. And it would be honor for Graybrow as well. And if he had to die, at least he would die knowing grand secrets, horrible secrets and malign truths, but his soul would be stronger for it. Nourished.

Graybrow had been with Henry Wilcox and Sir Tom Ian, but had abandoned them long ago. He preferred to hunt on his own. And be hunted if that was the case. Because, honestly, he did trust whites with guns. They had a nasty habit of shooting at anything that moved and if he was going to die, it would not be with his guts shot out by some crazy white.

The hotel, he knew, had been called the Shawkesville Arms once upon a time when Deliverance went by its original name and was a lead-mining town.

Since those days, it had been abandoned to the weather, to nature, to whatever chose to call it home. And if what Harmony had said was true, Cobb and his henchmen had called it home for a time.

Slowly then, Graybrow moved towards the old stairway that was covered in filth and curled brown leaves that had drifted in from the innumerable holes in the walls and roof. The handrail was wreathed in cobwebs. The stair carpet was mildewed and black. Though it was dim, it was not dark. Scant illumination-and snow-drifted in.

Outside, the storm was howling like a blood-maddened beast, throwing itself at the ramshackle buildings and making them creak and groan and sway on their rotting foundations.

There was a high, unpleasant stink that had little to do with woodrot or animal droppings. It was a sharp, violent smell that got inside Graybrow’s head and made him think of slaughterhouses and mass graves, insane asylums and death wards… places filled with death, with pain and horror and madness.

He started up the steps, feeling now how fully alone he was.

But you are not a white, he kept telling himself. You are not a white who feels safe in crowds or needs the presence of many. You are an Indian, a Ute, and solitary, lonely places do not frighten you.

And that was great in theory, but it wasn’t working so good in practice today.

For the stink was getting worse and there seemed to be something crackling in the air like some negative charge of potential energy, some static electricity that was building and building. The farther he went up the stairs, the more he felt it. It was all around him, heavy and dark and threatening. He could feel it from the top of his head right down to his balls and it was a foul, reaching hostility like hands poised to strangle him.

Upstairs.

More leaves, more dirt. But you could see now that there had been traffic up here. The hardwood floor of the corridor was thick with collected dust, but a trail had been beaten through it.

Graybrow thought: Okay, old man, okay, just do it.

So he did.

He began going from room to room and finding little more than additional cobwebs and some old crates and moldered furnishings. The covering of dust was disturbed in some of them as if maybe Cobb’s men had tossed their bedrolls onto the floor to sleep.

In the corridor, the garish wallpaper was spotted with fungus. It was faded and disintegrating and peppered with wormholes. In the gloom, Graybrow was beginning to see evidence of claw-marks ripped into the paneling and old, browned blood smears.

That smell was still thick around him, but there was another smell, too. A repellent fetor of putrescent meat and spilled blood. The stink was vaporous and gagging, enough to make him-

Suddenly, without a sound, a shape stepped from a darkened doorway. So very quick and so very silent that Graybrow could barely even register surprise before the Whitney 12-gauge was yanked from his hands and tossed down the hallway.

Feeble light choked with dust motes and a powdery rain of snow illuminated the shape. Graybrow saw it, felt his heart give a jolt of pain. He knew what he was looking at was James Lee Cobb. He knew that, but it took him some time to acclimate himself to the horror.

As it was, he felt faint.

Cobb was tall and cadaverously-thin, a mummy from a sideshow. A sombrero with a short, curled brim was pushed back on his head. The crown was scarved in the skins of desert snakes and set with feathers and the talons of raptors and the teeth of wolves. He wore a poncho of pale hide that was stitched together in a crazy quilt from human pelts. Around his corded throat there were a half-dozen necklaces of human fingers, ears, and teeth. At his waist were a brace of ivory-handled pistols and hatchets. There was a sash from shoulder to gunbelt and it was sewn together from… faces. Faces tanned to death masks with the scalps intact.

And it was all dreadful enough… but Cobb’s own face, it was the very worse thing.

The right side was pale and the skin was tight and seamed, barely covering the skull beneath. A single unblinking green eye with a huge, dilated pupil like a translucent moon stared out at Graybrow. But the left side of his face… just gone. Red tendons and pink muscle were stretched obscenely across an exaggerated skull like starving dogs had eaten the good stuff away. There was no eye there, just a black scarified cavity.

Graybrow managed to start breathing again before he passed dead out. “Suppose… suppose I’m in for it now, eh?” he said.

Cobb nodded that fright mask. Lips pulled back from sharp, yellow teeth. “I reckon ye are, friend,” he said in a hissing voice. “I reckon ye are.”

“Don’t suppose I could—”

“Doubt it,” Cobb said. “But since ye came this far, there’s something I’d like ye to see.”

But Graybrow just shook his head. “Don’t think I want to.”

And when Cobb made to grab him, he brought out his hunting knife and buried it right into the devil’s belly. Not that it did him shit-good. Cobb took hold of him with a strength that was amazing. Those clawed hands-the left one was skeletal and skinless-took him by the shoulders and smashed him against the wall until Graybrow went loose as a rag.

The fight had been pounded out of him.

The knife still hanging from his belly, Cobb took hold of Graybrow’s long, white hair and dragged him up the corridor by it. Graybrow swam in and out of consciousness. He could hear the clomp, clomp, clomp of Cobb’s Spanish boots and then he was dumped unceremoniously before a door at the end of the hall. A door covered with old, bloody handprints.

Cobb fished out a key and unlocked it.

Graybrow found himself looking into an abattoir. He heard the clink of chains and smelled spoiled meat and festering carcasses.

Cobb kicked him in there. “I’d like you to meet my mother,” he said and slammed the door shut behind him.

Deputy Pete Slade, Elijah Clay, and a trio of miners were going from house to house, killing anything that moved. They heard the shooting and the dying, but Slade held fast that they had a job to do and the others would have to watch out for themselves.

They learned quick enough that the only way you could put the Hide-Hunters down was by blowing their heads apart. After no less than four run-ins with the beasts now, they didn’t aim anywhere else.

But now they were trapped in the streets and things were getting ugly.

The beasts were up on the roofs, watching them and diving down at them when they thought they stood a chance. Green, shining eyes watched from the dark depths of barns and from behind shuttered windows.

“We gotta link up with them others,” Clay said, not frightened really, but surely not at ease. “Ye think, Slade? They’s just too many of them and too few of us.”

Slade knew it was true.

But there was no time for that, not now. For the double-doors of a stable flew open behind them and the townspeople began to flood out en masse. They were a slat-boned, pasty group with sunless faces and gleaming green eyes. But what was probably the most disturbing thing was that they were not dressed in clothing, but hides. Human hides. Hides that included flapping limbs and skinned faces, blowing locks of hair.

It was an appalling thing to see.

To watch them vaulting forward like a vicious pack of wolves, green-eyed and merciless, those spiked jaws snapping and great gouts of drool hanging from those lips. Dressed-out in human skins to boot.

“Kill ’em!” Slade shouted. “Kill ’em all!”

They came on in a flurry of sprouting claw and tooth, making yelping and barking sounds like hunting dogs and Slade and his boys began to unload on them with everything they had.

They dropped half a dozen, scattered a dozen more, but the others went right over the top of them, howling and snapping. Two of the miners went down. A third was just gone. Slade sank beneath a throng of four or five biting, chomping children.

Clay knocked them away from him with the butt of his shotgun, gunned down two others, felt claws open up his face and tear into his back, and fought free through his sheer size and bulk. And as he did so, he watched in amazement as the townsfolk rent the bodies of the posse, children stealing away with limbs in their mouths and going straight up the sides of buildings like spiders.

He got out while the getting was good.

One of the miners from Slade’s group ran when the attack came. He saw the sheer numbers and knew a fight was out of the question. His name was Rafe Gerard and he was not a coward. The fact that he had come with Dirker to clean this mess up said that he was anything but.

But he had been through both the Mexican War and the War Between the States, and he was surely a man who knew how to stay alive.

And alive he planned on staying.

He kicked through the door of a little house and slid the bolt in place after he was in. A powdering of snow like spilled flour dusted the floor. There was some blood mixed in with it. A set of tracks led right to the hearth and disappeared, as if one of them had escaped up the chimney.

Something Rafe Gerard decided was entirely possible.

He sat with his back against the wall, tried to think this out. Clay was right: They had to link up with the others. So it was pretty much a matter of finding them or waiting for them to find him.

So Gerard sat there, watching the hearth and the front door, the partially-boarded window, the doorway leading into another room. He rolled himself a cigarette and smoked it calmly. Waiting.

That’s when he heard the crying.

A pathetic, pitiful whimpering is what he was thinking. The sort of sound that was designed to yank at the heartstrings of anyone with warm blood in their veins. It worked its melancholy magic on Gerard. For once he’d had a boy, a tawny-haired wonderful little boy who’d perished of influenza one long hard winter. And although he knew that Deliverance was filled with monsters, he could not help but be moved by that sound.

He stepped through the kitchen and into a plain little bedroom at the rear of the house. A bureau. A frame bed. A wash basin. There were droplets of blood spattered up one wall. Above was an attic hatch, more blood smeared on it.

From up there, came the sobbing.

Gerard stood there, not wanting to look, but the human being in him demanding it. He dragged the bed over, stood up on it. The sad little voice was calling for its mother, its mother.

Something cold unfolding in his chest, Gerard slid the hatch aside.

What light spilled in showed him a little boy that was dark with blood. And before Gerard could pull the trigger, memories of his own lost son washing through him, the boy was on him, his teeth in his throat.

And Gerard died as he had lived: violently.

Beaten, bruised, and blood-soaked, Sir Tom Ian and Henry Wilcox were all that was left of their little group. The others had been slaughtered by the beasts. And Graybrow had just vanished. As it was, Deputy Wilcox had been badly gashed in the belly and ribs and had lost a lot of blood.

But he would not give in.

Not while there was strength left in him.

Ian and he were investigating a freight office, having followed a blood trail through the snow before it was covered over. Inside, it was pretty much empty. All the furnishings and office utilities long gone. But there was blood on the floor. The bloody prints of children and something wet they had dragged along with them.

There was a door at the back of the office.

It was closed.

“You up to this, mate?” Ian said.

“As up as I’m ever gonna be,” Wilcox admitted, his large frame seeming to sag now as the blood continued to soak through the makeshift bandages wrapped around his torso.

Ian took hold of the tarnished knob, turned it.

Heard commotion, wet tearing sounds.

He threw the door open and saw a cluster of children kneeling on the floor. Their eyes were green, but their bodies naked and hairless. They grinned up at the two men and their teeth were like icicles jutting from those blackened gums. They were clustered around the body of a Danite… maybe Fitch… though it was really hard to tell, such was the degree of mutilation.

The children were all nude and tattooed-up, their faces smeared with blood.

“Dear Christ,” Wilcox said and kept saying it.

The children rose from their kill quite slowly, advancing on the men. Wilcox began to sob… kids, just goddamn kids. He couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger.

But Sir Tom Ian had no such compunction.

He pulled his .44 Bisley and it had barely cleared leather before the first round jacked into a little girl and another erased the face of a little boy. Making a wild, moaning sound, Wilcox finally followed suit.

For they were not children.

They were more beast than human, those eyes filled with a flat, relentless appetite. They would stalk their kill and take it down without remorse.

And that’s how he was able to kill the children with Ian.

The guns saved their lives, but they also made a hell of a racket in the enclosed room. Like thunder echoing and echoing until each man’s hearing was dulled, numbed.

And that was why they didn’t hear the others coming through the doorway at them.

Didn’t know it until they felt claws and teeth and smelled rancid, hot breath at their necks.

Cabe said, “After you, Sheriff.”

Dirker nodded and pushed through the door of the old hotel. Cabe followed in behind him, a Greener shotgun in his arms. His Evans was slung across his back. The stink hit them right away. Thick, hot, nauseating. It had no place in an abandoned hotel on a freezing day where the wind was driving snow into drifts and licking everything down with ice. Yet, the smell was there… like some breathing, consuming, living thing. A malignant sentience. Both men stood, breathless, waiting for whatever inspired that stink to come slinking down the stairs at them.

But there was nothing but silence.

“If what Harmony said is correct,” Dirker began, carefully re-loading both his .45 Colt Peacemakers, “then Cobb and his crew were living upstairs here.”

“Jesus, that stink,” Cabe said.

“Let’s go,” Dirker said.

There was a pair of oil lamps hanging from a hook near the stairwell. Both were nearly full. Cabe took one, lit it up. A dirty yellow light sprang from it, revealing the ravages of nature-the animal bones and bird’s bests tucked into holes in the walls, the leaves and sticks and pine needles.

They went up the stairway side by side and paused at the top.

Paused, noticing that the atmosphere now was positively mephitic and pestilent like that of a malarial jungle death camp. The air was heavy, moist, and viscous with that putrid, flyblown stench of wormy meat. And hot, dear God, hot and wet and oppressive. It trembled thickly like gelatin, laying on their faces in a rank, slimy humidity.

They moved up the corridor towards that door at the end. The door with the furrows cut into it and the abnormal bloody handprints. Or something like handprints.

“Lookit the floor,” Cabe said.

Dirker did.

Just outside the door, for maybe four feet down the floor… a weird, creeping fungal mass of decay. As they stepped on it, it squished like wet leaves, some reeking black juice oozing from it.

Dirker prodded something with the tip of his boot. “A shotgun,” he said. “Recognize it?”

Cabe nodded slowly, wearily. “A Whitney. That’s Charlie Graybrow’s.”

Outside the door then, Dirker tried the filthy knob and it was locked.

Cabe stood there next to him, a wild and phobic terror threading through him. Whatever was in there… whatever gave off that noxious, eldritch stink… Jesus, it just could not be good, could not be.

Dirker handed his shotgun to Cabe and picked up the Whitney. He placed the barrel against the lock and pulled the trigger. The knob and its housing were blown into the room, leaving a smoking black hole.

Dirker kicked the door open.

And they stepped into hell itself.

As they passed through the doorway, Cabe’s lantern casting bobbing, phantasmal shadows, a black wave of fetid heat actually pushed them back a step or two. And the smell… a nauseous effluvium that was more than just organic decay and dissolution, but a noisome, contaminated stench that made their knees weak and sent their stomachs bubbling into their throats. It reminded Cabe instantly of a field hospital he’d been in during the war. A reconverted barn in Tennessee that stank of putrid battle dressings, amputated limbs, and gangrenous flesh. This was like that, a huge and polluted stink of pain, disease, and vomit.

Steeling themselves, they stepped in farther.

There was no furniture. The flowery cream wallpaper was spattered and stained with whorls and dripping patches of old blood. Even the ceiling was splashed with it… like some insane butcher had been casting buckets of the stuff around. The floor was wet and seething with more of that crawling gray fungus, but here it was matted and webby and seeping with black ichor and bloody mucilage. A gelatinous stew of rot and bones and gnawed limbs, several inches deep. There were bodies and parts of them everywhere, all covered with flies and beetles and creeping worms. A few soiled, peeled and jawless skulls stared up at them.

“Dear Christ in Heaven,” Dirker managed and his voice would barely come.

Because they saw what brooded here, what Cobb had brought back from Missouri.

It might have been a woman once, but now it was a chained ghoul with wet, leprous flesh, flesh that was pitted with gaping holes and hung from the bones beneath like a windblown shroud. That flesh seemed to move and wriggle with pulsing currents, but that was just the action of parasites and vermin nesting within. The skullish head was capped by long, greasy hair latticed with cobwebs and the deathmask face was shriveled and withered, jellied green eyes bleeding tears of slime.

It made a low, bleating sound, holding out hands that were more skeleton that flesh, the skin hanging from them in strips and loops. The fingers were sticks ending in long, curled nails that seemed to coil and convolute in the air. It began to slither in their direction, sending ripples through that pestilential sea of organic profusion. The skin had long ago melted away from the pulsating face, the nose just a hollow and those mottled gums on full display, gums set with gnarled, discolored teeth.

It came forward with a slinking, creeping motion, mewling now like a drowning kitten, a pustulant, writhing worm.

Cabe and Dirker started shooting.

Shells were flying and the air was suddenly filled with smoke and the bitter smell of gunpowder. They fired and fired, reloaded and fired again. And did not stop until that squirming human jellyfish was blown into fragments.

Then they left the room.

They shut the door.

Down the corridor, both trembling, Cabe tossed the lantern against the wall and it shattered, flames licking up over the walls.

Outside, both men fell in the snow, gasping and gagging.

It was ten minutes later when they stood before the church.

The bell had stopped ringing now.

They stood near the high wrought-iron gate that surrounded the church, came right up to the steps. The uprights were rusted and tall and lethally sharp. They rose up like spears.

“Well,” Dirker said, “I guess no one else if left, Tyler. Just you and me.”

Cabe said, “Let’s show these fucks what a pissed-off Yankee and a Johnny Reb lunatic are capable of.”

Dirker laughed. Couldn’t help himself. It just came rolling out of him and soon enough tears were rolling down his face and Cabe was laughing, too, and how damn good it felt to laugh.

“I didn’t even know you could laugh,” Cabe said.

Dirker’s laughing became a coughing and a rasping. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Sure I can,” he managed, “it’s just that I’m usually alone and laughing at myself.”

That got them going again and they reeled like drunken men, slapping each other on the backs until it finally died out and was replaced by a somber silence. The silence of the wind and snow and eternity.

“Sounds like I missed the party,” a voice said. “Next time, ye all invite me, hear?”

Elijah Clay came waltzing out of the storm, a pistol in each hand. “And here I thought I was the last one.”

“I never thought I’d be glad to see you, you goddamn hillbilly,” Cabe said.

Clay grinned. “Now mind yer manners, boy. I’m a-hear to save yer bacon.”

“The others?” Dirker asked.

But Clay just shook his head.

Together then, they went up the steps. The double-doors were locked, but Clay hit them with his massive shoulder and they flew wide open. Then the three of them charged right in, moving low, with shotguns in their hands.

Pews.

They saw the rows of pews, many of which had been busted into kindling. The altar was occupied by an immense scalp rack. There had to be fifty or sixty scalps on display. Scattered around them in carefully arranged piles, skulls and bones. On the cross there was no Jesus, but a mummified body nailed up instead. Dirker recognized it as Caleb Callister… at least he thought so.

But there was no time to find out, for James Lee Cobb and four of his Hide-Hunters stepped out from behind the altar. They carried rifles and wore gray dusters and were caught somewhere between animals and men.

“Looks like a stand-off,” Cobb said, laughing then, his laughter boomed and cackled and echoed.

Cabe got a good look at him, at the architect of this nightmare. The skin on the left side of his face was simply missing; muscle and bone exposed. It was as if some surgeon had slit a line of demarcation down the center of his face with a scalpel, leaving the right side relatively unscathed and peeling the left right to the basal anatomy. He was like some anatomical demonstration that was allowed to walk.

Clay said, “Uglier’n a trail-dead squirrel in a fat fryer.”

And then the lead started flying.

Cabe and the others dropped their shotguns and pulled their repeating rifles-Cabe’s Evans, Dirker’s Winchester, and Clay’s Henry. Bullets zipped around them like angry wasps, biting into pews and sending wood splinters spraying everywhere.

The trio returned fire.

But the Hide-Hunters were possessed of a deranged, primeval rage. They came running off the altar right into a flurry of bullets. The two leading the charge danced momentarily like marionettes as slugs ripped into them, punching holes through them and scattering blood and meat in every which direction. But Cobb was still shooting and one of his slugs caught Clay in the shoulder and another ripped a gash along the side of his head, taking his earlobe with it.

He went down, bleeding and moaning, but sitting back up and shooting a Hide-Hunter at point-blank range right in the face. The bullet cored his nose and the skull behind it came apart as the round bounced through his head like a drill bit, shredding everything in its path. Another Hide-Hunter, one with no less than a dozen holes in him, almost broached their position but Cabe put one through his throat that spun him around and finished him with a slug in his temple.

Dirker rose up and dropped the third Hide-Hunter in a mist of blood and brains and then clutched his chest, and fell over.

And then the final Hide-Hunter leaped.

Cabe put a round in him, but it didn’t even slow him down. He crashed into the bounty hunter and they went rolling in a heap. He was incredibly strong and Cabe fought and cursed and thrashed, trying to keep those teeth away from his throat.

And then Dirker, the entire front of his overcoat wet with blood, was on the beast’s back. Another slug ripped through him from Cobb, but he would not relent. His face drawn in a mask of agony, he yanked the creature’s head back as it made a lunge for Cabe’s throat. Yanked it back and pressed the muzzle of a .45 Peacemaker to its skull. He jerked the trigger of the double-action pistol and blew the beast’s head to ribbons.

The beast fell over dead.

And Dirker with it, his hands clutching his chest, dark blood bubbling forth between his fingers.

Clay fired off two more shots at Cobb who took advantage of the confusion and ran along the far wall, firing his pistols and disappearing through a low doorway not twenty feet from the men.

But Cabe was only concerned with Dirker.

He cradled his head in his lap. “Oh, Christ, Jackson, Jesus Christ, look at you…” He felt tears coming down his face and he realized that Dirker had saved his life, but at the price of his own. “Why’d you go and do that, why’d you do that?”

Dirker reached out and found his hand. “Tyler,” he said, blood running from the corners of his lips. He coughed and choked and tried to swallow something back down. “Tyler, I’m… I’m done in, just done in—”

“No, you ain’t, I ain’t lettin’ you get away like that—”

“I am,” he insisted. “Back in town… you… you take care of my wife, take care… of Janice. Swear to me you will…”

Cabe was sobbing now, overcome with just too many damn emotions. “I will, I swear I will. But Jackson, you can’t go and die on me, not now, not now, we’re friends, we’re goddamn friends finally…”

Dirker found a smile and put it on, but it faded soon enough. He stared up into space, breathing real hard. “Pea Ridge… I can see it, Tyler, it’s right before me… the woods… the hills… oh, Tyler, you remember how cold it was… so very cold and snow… in Arkansas yet… in Arkansas yet… you boys, you boys, pull back now, dear God pull back the rebs the rebs is overrunning us… no, no, no… I’m dreaming, Tyler…”

Cabe was holding his hand tight. “I’m gonna get you on a horse and get you back to town. That’s what I’m gonna do…”

He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Clay’s.

“He’s gone, boy,” Clay said softly. “He’s gone.”

His face wet with tears, Cabe lowered Dirker to the floor. He stroked his cheek and sniffed, tried to get a hold of himself. He saw his shotgun and picked it up. “Where,” he said, “where did that fucking prick Cobb go?”

Clay, trying to patch his wounds, said, “Through that door yonder… give ’em hell, boy…”

Cabe, just pumped hard with iron and hate, went through the door like an artillery shell. If Cobb had been waiting there, he would’ve slit him right in half like a sword through cheese.

But he wasn’t there.

Cabe was in a very narrow passage that went straight up to the belfry. A set of cramped, spiral stairs climbed up its throat like a spiral worm. There was blood on them. And blood smeared on the railing.

Cabe thought: He was hit then, that cocksucker was hit…

Sucking in a sharp breath, Cabe went up those steps as quiet as quiet could be, the shotgun in his hands. He crept and inched like a stalking cat. At the very top there was a hatchway.

Steeling himself then, Cabe crouched and threw himself up through it.

He rolled across the plank floor.

Eddies of wind-driven snow lashed at the bell. The bell-room was about ten feet square, open on all four sides with a waist high ledge. The floor was drifted with snow, old leaves… and drops of blood.

James Lee Cobb, his face sculpted into that of a human wolf stepped around the bell. The left side of his face was more skull than flesh and that skull was of some ravenous beast.

“I ate all the souls in Deliverance,” he said, “and now I’m gonna eat yours…”

A hatchet flipped end over end past Cabe’s face and went flying out into the white, whipping streets below.

Cabe let the demon have first one barrel of his Greener right in the belly and then Cobb jumped at him, jumped with an amazing speed and balance for a gut-shot man. In mid-air, Cabe gave him the other barrel which threw him back against the bell. The bell began to swing and gong with a resounding, thundering peal. Cobb left a bloody smear on it and pulled himself up by the ledge, his back to the blizzard.

His torso was blasted clean open in a burning, smoking valley. Flames were licking at his poncho from contact burns and the stink was of cremated flesh and burning hair.

But what froze Cabe up was that Cobb had no internal organs. His body cavity was filled with a chittering and crawling life. Locusts. Thousands upon thousands of locusts. And then Cobb began to laugh with a high, weird cackling that rose up and joined the gonging bell in a hammering wall of noise.

Cabe let out a cry as the locusts fled from Cobb’s torso and filled the air in a buzzing, busy swarm, descending on him like he were a field to be stripped. They heaped over him, biting and scratching and droning and Cabe was half out of his mind, clawing madly at the green, piping carpet of insects. They chewed and nipped, got under his clothes, tried to press into his ears and mouth, nostrils.

They would strip him to bone.

Cabe, knowing it was now or never, threw himself at Cobb with everything he had. He struck the grinning, cackling bastard, struck him real hard. So hard Cobb lost his balance. He fell back over the ledge of the belfry with a manic, pained barking sound. His arms bicycled in the freezing, snowy air… and then he fell, spinning end over end into the blizzard.

He let out an enraged, piercing shriek.

The insects curled-up brown like dead leaves and fell from Cabe. He leaned against the ledge, looking down as the snow let up for a moment and he could see Cobb below.

He was impaled on the fence.

Three blood-slicked uprights were jutting from his chest a good fifteen inches if not more and he was stuck sure as a bug on a pin. He contorted and fought, his arms whipping and his mouth howling. But that just forced him farther down on the uprights.

Iron, Cabe found himself thinking, iron.

The uprights were iron and he had read that the Devil feared iron for it signified earth. That’s why people hung iron horseshoes over their doorways. Iron was a basic element of earth and an enemy of demons and the discarnate.

Cabe felt the entire church shaking beneath him as Cobb screamed in what seemed a dozen different voices… men, women, children.

Cabe half-climbed, half-fell down the stairs. He dragged himself through the door and Clay was still there, still waiting. Together they made it out of the church.

Cobb was no longer moving.

He had withered into something like a brown, emaciated scarecrow that was flaking into motes.

The church began to tremble and shudder, swaying this way and that as if it were trying to pull itself up from its foundation. There was a sudden groaning, crashing noise and it fell into itself in a heap of lumber. The bell came down last with a final etching gong.

Cabe and Clay were out in the streets making for their horses by then.

Cobb’s good eye flickered open, the socket filled with maggots. His blackened, blistered face peeled open in a roaring shriek. The evil blew out of him in a yellow, searching mist, erupting from dozens of holes and slits, kicking up tornados of snow and smelling of bone pits, brackish swamps, and human excrement. There was a flash as if of lightening, a rumbling, a moaning, and the ground shook and the sky went suddenly black as something like a million buzzing flies rocketed upwards… and that was it.

Cobb was done.

Cabe and Clay found their horses, cut the others free.

Then they rode out of Deliverance, neither of them speaking for a time. When they were well away and night was coming on dark and fierce, they stopped.

“Place’ll have to burned to the ground,” Clay said, “come spring. Then the ground’ll need to be salted.”

“Suspect so,” Cabe said.

They rode on.