Power in the Blood (104 page)

When he was able, Clay pulled the man and boy aside, then climbed the windmill tower to release the woman. Starting up the rungs, he wondered why it was that no buzzards circled overhead. Could they have been scared off by the slowly spinning vanes, or was there in the region about the house and windmill some smell of evil too brutal, too unfamiliar to allow creatures near. It was an unrealistic notion, he supposed, but there were indeed no buzzards. Reaching the platform, he found both her breasts there, neatly arranged side by side. He pulled the brake and brought the spinning vanes to a stop, then unbound the wires holding her, keeping his mouth closed and his eyes squinted against the humming cloud of flies, but they crawled up his nostrils anyway. She was a small woman, less than five feet, and the natural crease between her legs had been opened all the way to her breastbone. Clay began to cry. He could barely untwist the lengths of wire. When the woman was free, her body fell from the vanes into his arms, almost taking him over the platform edge.

He had to sling her over his shoulder to descend, and when he reached the ground, his clothing was covered in gore. He tore shirt and pants from himself and ran toward the house, to be away from the sight of the slaughtered family and the sound of the flies. Naked, he rolled in dust to smother the stench of death adhering to his skin, then ran three times around the corral, howling. Clay fell to the ground by the front porch, panting, asking himself if he could go on and do what must be done. The deep gashes on the bodies contained no maggots yet, despite the flies; Slade could not be much more than a day’s ride or walk away. He could be caught at last, and by the one man fit to catch him. Clay would not stop to bury the bodies; there was no time. When Slade was dead, there would be time to return and put his last victims under the earth.

The shirt and overalls hanging in the house were a poor fit, but Clay could not bear to put on his own clothing again. He gathered up all the tortilla flour in a sack, took several canteens up to the windmill, where he kept his eyes averted from the bodies, and filled them from the tank. Then he was ready to follow the trail of the monster.

But there was no trail, no wagon tracks or hoofprints, no trickling droplets of blood in the dust to indicate the route Slade had taken. While he pondered, Clay felt the stone begin to descend his urethra, and fetched his bottle of oil and eye-dropper to facilitate its passage. Striding restlessly back and forth along the shaded porch, pausing to inject oil into himself, Clay felt his rage and determination begin to ebb. Vengeance was all very fine, but it could not be had if Slade had vanished as he was rumored to do after every atrocity. Clay required some indication, however small, to set him in the right direction, but despite a second examination of the ground, there was none to be found.

He was administering a final dose of oil (the stone was nearly through) when he saw the girl again. Clay froze, immobilized by embarrassment. She was staring at him without any expression on her mournful face, at least twenty yards distant, along the draw to the west of the house. Clay wished she had shown up earlier or later, anytime but that moment. He felt himself blushing, but would not remove the eyedropper from his penis at the crucial last stage of relief. She would just have to see, and he would just have to be seen. He looked down at his hands, ashamed and annoyed. A guardian angel should not be so thoughtless as to manifest itself at such a time. When he looked up, he saw her pointing along the draw, and was about to ask her if that was where Slade had gone, when she abruptly vanished, simply faded from sight, her arm still outstretched.

“All right, then!” Clay called after her, and the stone came oozing into his hand on a sluggish wave of oil. He took it for a good sign.

The draw opened out a short distance from the ranch house, entering a broad red valley that meandered east and west. Clay saw no hoofprints still, not even a boot mark in the dust. Might his guardian angel girl have misdirected him out of impish spite? He still could not quite accept the presence of so unnatural a figure in his life, even if he had been glimpsing her for years. He decided to seek her advice outright, as a test of her good faith.

“Which way?” he asked the air before his nose. The angel did not appear to inform him, so Clay asked the question again, and again was left without the direction he required. It was confirmation of his doubt concerning the girl. Might she not be some fairy or spirit that had sprung directly from his own head into actuality, the product of a mind slowly becoming crazed? Clay was no expert judge of sanity, but it did seem inevitable that a madman would in all likelihood consider himself completely sane, and accept his own version of the world as the correct one. Had that happened to him? It was a disturbing thought, and it did nothing to assist him in making a choice—east or west.

He headed west for no discernible reason, sure that the valley to the east would have proven equally unrewarding: no tracks, no sign at all that Slade had ever passed by. Was Slade also some unnatural being, truly a demon, as some of the newspapers would have it? That might explain the absence of a trail to follow, and the fiend’s ability to evade capture even when so many were after him for Leo Brannan’s reward and the gratitude of a nation. The killer had wings, maybe, that carried him from place to place, enabling him to descend like a hawk from the skies onto the very backs of his victims. Clay had seen pictures of winged demons from hell, and he had no wish to tangle with one, not even armed with his sawed-off. He wondered, as he admitted his fear, if he was becoming a coward as well as a madman, and was not encouraged by this new train of thought.

The valley became redder as afternoon turned to evening. Clay drank sparingly from his canteens, and wished he had more than tortilla flour to eat. He placed dabs of it onto his tongue and mixed it with saliva to form a kind of paste he called spit dough, and it eased his hunger pangs without convincing him he had eaten. The angel did not appear, and Clay became fairly sure he had been imagining her all this time, which was reassuring in the sense that he could not be altogether mad if he acknowledged a symptom of his madness, but was distressing in that it indicated he had followed the direction along the draw that had been given to him by an entity that was not there, which in turn suggested he was following nothing to nowhere. None of the conflicting awarenesses within him gave Clay the strength he needed, not only to find and capture Slade, but to survive in the place where he now found himself. He had water enough for two days, if he rationed the quenching of his thirst. In that time he hoped to discover if he was indeed mad. He wished, before dying, to be cognizant of his own state of mind. To die while in a state of delusion would be a terrible thing, and a man’s entire life and accomplishments would be thrown into a new and unfavorable light in consequence of such a revelation. Clay desperately wanted his life to have been worthwhile. He had killed a sufficient number of awful individuals, and needed to be sure that his actions, although rewarded with human coin, had pleased some higher authority, whose definition came hard to an atheist. It had all been for something, the advancement of moral good in the world, had it not? He couldn’t say, and his footsteps slowed as the hopelessness of ever understanding the least thing about himself and his place in the vast scheme of things drove itself like a nail into his skull.

Slade was nowhere near. The one thing Clay could finally be sure of was that. He had bungled his chance for immortality, walked away from fame because a blue-faced girl in his head had misdirected him, probably as a means of alerting him to his own seriously impaired brain. There was no guardian angel and there was no Slade; these things had nothing whatsoever to do with Clay Dugan, no matter how hard he might try to link himself with them. He was a fool in the wilderness, and sometime soon he would be a dead fool, buzzard food, the meanest end a man could imagine for himself. It was too bad. Clay genuinely felt his existence should have counted for more than that. Of course, his wishes might be nothing more than the yearnings of a little man, a frightened man, one who finally had seen himself in the mirror of ultimate truth and was unable to accept the pitiful figure shivering there.

Clay sat abruptly in the reddish dust of the valley floor. What was the point of going on, when he hadn’t the least indication that he was accomplishing anything worthwhile, not just wandering without purpose toward an untimely and insignificant end? He wanted to cry. He had cried already that day, when confronted with the wanton ugliness of Slade’s latest marauding. It was not right that he could not find the tears now for himself. Did he deserve less than the nameless family left slaughtered behind him? He would not budge from that spot until answers were given to him, or arrived at via the workings of his own mind. Clay wanted to know what it was that had brought him to this unique time and place, his ass inside a dead man’s pants, set down in the dust of a nameless valley filled with orange light from a setting sun. He had a right to some answers. The fact that he was there, defeated and in full knowledge of his defeat, gave him the right to answers.

In the absence of these, he decided to sleep. The air was still warm, and would remain so for at least another half hour. He lay down and managed to close his eyes for several minutes, but could not rest. Sitting up, he saw a momentary flash several miles away. It lasted less than a second, possibly the result of the lowering sun reflecting off metal or glass. Clay knew it was Slade. It might also have been a chunk of quartz, or an abandoned bottle. But he knew it was not. It was Slade.

Something like a terrible hunger began filling Clay. He felt it rising from the pit of his stomach, an unstoppable need, devouring him. The only thing that could ever cause the feeling to ease would be the sight of Slade lying dead at his feet, and Clay knew also that it would happen. He had been guided there and made to sit in exactly that place, and made to open his eyes at the precise moment the telltale flash was sent to him. All his doubts had been for nothing. Slade was being delivered into his hands in order that the earth might rest easy again. Clay felt himself the agent of those same higher forces he so recently had pondered over. Now he would do what it was they required of him. Charged with purpose, his blistered feet forgotten, Clay began to walk hard and fast toward the darkening land ahead.

Finding Slade was more difficult than he hoped. The man lit no fire, so Clay was obliged to sneak around in the moonlight, watching every step he took to ensure that he made no noise; his prey might be nearer than he thought. The moon hung low and heavy, softly glowing, illuminating the desert with a silvery-blue light. Clay could see as well as hear tiny rodents scuttling across the ground, and once was able to detect a rattlesnake with his eyes before it shook its tail at his approach. He could make out individual twigs on the waist-high brush, the exact lineaments of every rock he passed by, the location of the planet Venus and the silhouette of nearby mountains against the stars, but he could not see Slade.

He stopped and thought what he might do now, given the hopelessness of stumbling across the killer by good luck. Slade was silent. Had he heard Clay moving around, and hidden himself? Could he be stalking Clay, at the same time Clay was stalking him? Clay spun around, ready to fend off the hairy creature that might have been rushing at him, knife in hand, eyes burning with the inner fires of madness. There was nothing. His heartbeat had accelerated over nothing more dangerous than his own imagination. Where was the blue-faced girl when he needed her silently pointing finger most?

Then he heard the voice, a male voice, speaking softly. It came from his left, and Clay began walking carefully in that direction, his breathing suddenly tight with expectation, the blood thundering through him so strongly it seemed he must alert Slade to his presence with its roaring. Now the voice was louder, sometimes pausing, sometimes breaking into a tuneless humming for several minutes before resuming its one-sided conversation.

And there was the speaker, seated in a clearing, addressing himself to some object in his hands. Moonlight reflecting from spectacles on the thing told Clay it was a human head. He had no doubt that sunlight glancing from those same lenses had been what he saw in the late afternoon, nor did he doubt that the head belonged to the man left with his wife and boy at the windmill. Slade wore a hat, and did not appear to be a large man, to Clay’s surprise. He listened to the words dribbling from Slade’s mouth in a childish singsong, but could not make them out. Made bold by his luck, Clay cocked both hammers on his shotgun and stepped forward.

The small man cradling the head in his hands looked up and became silent. Clay waited for a sudden move, any indication that Slade did not intend to surrender peacefully, but there was not the least suggestion in the figure seated before him that he considered himself in any way threatened by the sudden presence of a stranger with an aimed gun.

The silence became too much for Clay. “Put it down,” he croaked, then cleared his throat and said, with greater sternness, “Put it down, the head, put it down right now.”

The head was placed on the ground.

“Take off your hat,” Clay ordered, and was obeyed.

The face bathed in moonlight was familiar to him, despite bearing no resemblance whatever to the depictions of Slade every newspaper had provided.

“Wixson …”

“Dugan? Is that Dugan …?”

“Where’d you get that head, Wixson …? What the hell are you doing here anyway?”

“Dugan … what a small world.”

“I said, where’d you get that head?”

“This head?” Reverend Wixson picked it up again.

“That head.”

“From off somebody’s neck, Dugan, where else would I get it, do you think?”

“Where is he? Are you a team?”

“Team? To whom do you refer, Dugan?”

“Him! Slade! Where is he?”

“Could this be the man?” asked Wixson, proffering the head. Clay felt confusion invading him, causing his arms to shake. He lowered the shotgun.