Donners of the Dead (15 page)

I was too afraid to ask if I’d be okay from the bite. It seemed lately all I’d known was fear.

My eyes went to his face, the firmness of his jaw, the little scar that caused a slash through the dark hair on his chin. “If it’s so dangerous, why did you come after us?” I whispered. “To get your gold?”

“No,” he murmured. “To get you.” He gently ran his hand down my arm and then met my eyes. “You’re worth much more than gold.”

I stared at him, lost in the coffee brown depths of his eyes, clamoring onto the words that just came from his lips. I could have stared at him forever. It pushed my reality behind me in a haze.

But he cleared his throat and gave me a sad smile. “You need to rest, Pine Nut. I’ll take care of Donna here. You just get some shut-eye. In the morning we can head back to River Bend. Find Avery. And leave this mad world behind.”

I didn’t fall asleep feeling invincible, but there was a tiny ember of hope burning somewhere deep inside.

*

“Well, well, well,
lookee here. A right Injun Sleeping Beauty.”

My eyes snapped open to see Hank standing right above me. He looked unharmed but dirtier and a bit more crazed in the eyes.

“Give her some room,” Jake said, appearing at Hank’s side and pushing him away from me.

I snapped upright, bringing the animal fur blanket to my chin. Hank and Isaac were peering down at me with disdain while Tim was standing over Donna and sipping from a steaming cup.

“What time is it?” I asked. I felt like I’d been sleeping all morning.

“Time to answer a few questions,” Tim said, his voice hard. “Mainly, what the heck happened?”

I quickly glanced at Jake. His eyes were imploring me to lie, to tell him that Avery forced me to leave. With only him on my side it seemed I had no choice.

But as Jake once said, I always had a choice.

“Avery wanted to go, get out of here and get back to River Bend. Back to safety. I suggested we take a gold bar each as payment that was owed to us.”

Jake let out a small groan of disappointment. I went on, ignoring him, “I couldn’t leave without Donna though, so we brought her along too. Not too far in I got separated from him. Those same monsters we saw yesterday, they were back, but different ones this time. If it wasn’t for Jake finding me, I’d be dead.”

Tim glared at Jake. “How courteous of him. I suppose you never found Avery and I suppose Avery has the gold.”

I nodded. “We only took three—one for me, for him, and Donna. That was it. We only took it because it was fair.”

“That’s horseshit!” Hank yelled, spittle flying out of his mouth. “You’re an untrustworthy little tramp. We almost got ourselves killed out there trying to find these beasts and meanwhile you’re trying to rob us blind. That gold is my gold.”

“Actually,” Isaac said from his position against the door, “that’s my family’s gold. But I feel just as slighted.” He eyed Tim. “What do you plan on doing with her?”

“Now wait a minute here,” Jake said, raising his palms. “There is nothing
to
do. She won’t do it again.”

Hank spun around, getting in his face. “And you of all people trust this redskin here? I’m starting to think you’ve been compromised by the savage.”

Jake cocked his head, his lip snarling. “She’s just a young girl. She is no threat to us. She helped us find the gold, whether she meant to or not, and it’s only fair we bring her back to her home safe and sound.”

“Nuh-uh,” Hank said, shaking his head back and forth like a dog. “No can do, McGraw.” He pointed at me, his finger shaking. “I suggest we get rid of her right here, right now.”

I gasped, my eyes growing large. Hank looked ready to pounce and Jake grabbed hold of his arm before he could do so.

“You lay a finger on her and I’ll kill you,” he sneered in his face.

“I’d like to see you try,” Hank said right back.

“Fellas,” Tim said in a low voice. “No one is killing anyone yet. Let’s not be irrational. Let’s talk like men. Jake is right. She’s just a girl and she’s injured on top of it. We have bigger fish to fry here. We’ve all seen what’s out there, we’ve all seen what they can do.” Everyone’s eyes flew to Donna, who was looking hours from death. “And we’ve all found what we’re looking for. I say we pack up and go.”

“If we go to River Bend, she’ll tell,” Hank said, sounding as insolent as a little boy.

“Then we go somewhere else,” Tim said. I couldn’t figure out then if he meant to take me with them or not. Lord, I hoped not. I had never wanted to see Uncle Pat and Rose so much in my life. At least I knew where I stood with them.

“Can’t trust a savage,” Hank said, spitting on my bed. “Especially can’t trust one that’s already tried to steal from you.” A vicious smile spread across his face, a smile that struck fear in me like a bolt of lightning. “I’ll just make it impossible for her to leave. She can’t leave without her horse.”

He ripped himself out of Jake’s grasp and headed to the table where he’d hung his holster, clearly intent on putting a bullet through Sadie’s head.

“No!” I screamed and jumped to my feet. I ran straight to him and tried to wrestle the gun out of his hands but I was weak in the shoulder. Hank brought the butt of his gun down on my head and I immediately fell to the floor in a dizzying mess. The cabin spun around, stars of pain bursting in my skull, as Hank ran out of the door with Jake yelling after him and in pursuit.

“Please,” I cried out in pain, a fist where my heart was. He couldn’t kill my horse. That was all I had left of my father. I staggered to my feet, stumbling to the door, the faces of Isaac and Tim blurred and out of focus, a hot sticky fluid running down my head.

A gunshot rang out.

Sadie.

I screamed again and flung myself out the door and barefoot into the snow, the world tipping. Sadie and Isaac’s horse peeled out of the shanty and galloped off into the woods. Sadie was alive. Gone but alive.

But Jake was a different story. He had been standing between me and the cabin, and a red stain began to spread on his arm. He looked at me in surprise as he collapsed to his knees.

Hank stood behind him, smoking revolver in his hand. “I told you to watch your back, Jake.”

“Jake!” I cried out and ran over to him, falling to my knees beside him. Hank had shot him in the back, where the arm met the shoulder.

“Might as well finish her off too,” Hank said from behind us, his boots crunching in the snow as he came closer.

Before Hank could reload his gun, Jake’s eyes flared and he quickly twisted at the waist, barely lining up his sight, and pulled the trigger. The bullet went right into Hank’s stomach.

Hank cried out, dropping the gun as his hands flew to his gut where blood began to leak onto the white snow. “You,” he snarled at Jake before he keeled over face first.

“And I told you I wanted you gone,” Jake said gruffly. “This will just be a slower, more painful way for you to leave.”

I knelt beside him, unsure of what to do. My hand went to his face, caressing it gently, his stubble rough against my skin. “Are you going to be okay?”

“I’ll be right as rain,” he said, giving me a winning grin. Then he winced, eyes shut hard from the pain.

“Tim!” I yelled toward the cabin. “Jake needs help.” I tried to help him to his feet but he was so heavy and unsteady, and it wasn’t like I was feeling one hundred percent.

I looked up to see Isaac standing in the doorway and thought he was coming to help me get Jake to his feet, but he just stood there with an absolutely macabre look on his pinched face. He smiled wide at the sight of Hank’s body then spun around and went back in the cabin.

I exchanged a worried look with Jake.

“Tim!” Jake yelled.

Suddenly there was the sound of a scuffle inside, a chair being knocked over, Tim grunting something, followed by the sharp, metallic smell of poisoned blood. Before we could say anything, Isaac came back outside, holding something red and dripping in his hand.

“You’ve gone mad!” Tim yelled from inside. “You’ve all gone mad!”

Jake and I watched as Isaac walked right past us with a trail of crimson dots behind him. He stopped by Hank and kicked him in the side. He moaned, still alive. Then he crouched down and rolled Hank over onto his back.

“Hey, Hank, buddy,” Isaac said to him with that terrible smile on his face. “I reckon this is the time to see the truth. He put his hand on Hank’s mouth and forced it open.

“What are you doing?” I exclaimed. Jake tensed beside me as we watched Isaac stick a bloody, fleshy object into Hank’s open mouth. I didn’t even want to dwell on what I thought it looked like.

Another gun blast boomed, this time from the cabin. Our heads swiveled to see Tim coming out, a revolver in hand, shaking his head sadly.

“What in damnation is going on?” Jake demanded.

Tim glared at Isaac in disbelief. “Isaac has gone crazy! He just went and sliced off Donna’s nose. I had to put her out of her misery.”

So it was exactly what it looked like. I swallowed down the vomit that was fighting to come up. I never thought the horrors could get any worse, but they were, day by day. I gingerly eyed the gruesome scene again as Isaac moved Hank’s jaw up and down and leaned over him, hands bloody on his face.

“That’s it,” Isaac said. “Swallow the flesh. The flesh will give you life.”

He turned to smile at us. “We’ve had our theories, ever since Dale Thompson showed up at my door, hollering about the living dead and cannibals and bars of lost gold. He said that George and the others had died at the hands of a wild mountain man, then died at the hands of each other. He refused to eat the flesh of another, so he ran. I guess he thought if he told me, I’d do something about it.” He looked at Hank who was now very slowly chewing Donna’s cut-off nose. “And I did. I shot him and made sure no one else knew about the gold or the…side effects. You, Eve, of all people should have known about the Wendigo.”

I eyed him with panic. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I managed to say.

“The Algonquin Indians out east believe in the Wendigo, that you become one if you eat human flesh. You will have power and eternal life.”

“The Wendigo is a myth,” Tim told him, disgust ripe in his voice, “so that people don’t resort to cannibalism, to what you’re doing right now. Damn it, Isaac, this is going too far. You’re acting like a goddamn maniac!”

“The Donner party did it to survive.”

“Then the Donner party turned into raving cannibals. This isn’t survival. Hank got shot fair and square. He pulled on Jake first. Let him die.”

“And what if I’m right?” he asked quietly, smiling once he saw Hank had swallowed.

“If you’re right and it’s not a myth, you didn’t just give Hank life. You gave him an insatiable thirst for human flesh. You saw the bones in the cabin.”

Isaac rocked back on his haunches and stared down at Hank who had finished chewing and was lying still. “Now we wait.”

My grip tightened on Jake’s good shoulder. We may have not had this Wendigo legend in my culture, but I’d seen more than enough already to know that it was more than a myth. We could not afford to dismiss this as one of Isaac’s crazy rants. Maniacs often told the truth.

“Jake,” I whispered. “I think you need to reload.”

“Already on it,” he answered. “Can you grab my powder horn?”

I reached down and pulled up the horn all while keeping my eyes on Isaac and Hank.

“He’s lost his damn mind,” Tim said from behind us, going back into the cabin.

Isaac had lost his mind, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t telling the truth. Jake took the horn then asked me to reach out and grab his rifle from his back holster. I did so, accidently brushing it against his wound. He ground his teeth in pain but didn’t say anything.

Meanwhile, Isaac hadn’t noticed that Jake was loading his rifle. He was in a daze, like a mad scientist, waiting to see if his creature would rise.

“I really oughta show you how to shoot and load the proper way,” Jake said in a low voice, gritting his teeth as he had to reach forward and jam the ball down the muzzle.

“I can use your revolver,” I whispered.

“Pine Nut, a revolver won’t do shit when the time comes. Can you reach into my vest pocket and pull out a piece of flint rock?”

Though he was speaking calmly, there was an urgency to our actions. I felt like a clock was ticking down, the hand moving closer to either Hank’s death or resurrection.

The clock struck quicker than a snake.

I closed my fingers over the sharp piece of flint when Hank gave out an ugly scream and sat straight up. He opened his mouth and went for Isaac’s jugular but Isaac had at least predicted this.

Isaac pistol whipped him across the face and then kicked him right in the stomach where his gunshot appeared to be healing itself before our eyes. Hank flew backward, snow flying up in the air, a savage cry escaping his bloody lips.

Jake swiped the flint out of my hand, and in the most frantic yet controlled manner I’d ever seen, fixed it to the hammer. Before he could aim it properly however, Hank was scrambling to his feet and running in the direction of the woods.

Isaac got to him first. He fired, shooting Hank in the arm. Jake propped himself on one knee and took aim. He got Hank’s calf just as he disappeared into the trees. It did not kill him, it did not slow him down, but at least he was running away from us.