The Shotgun Arcana
Read The Shotgun Arcana Online
Authors: R. S. Belcher
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Dedication
To my children, Emily, Jonathan, and Stephanie: Write your tales, never allow them to be written for you. Find your voice and make it a strong one. I can’t wait to hear the stories you live. Have fun creating them—that’s the best part! Nothing will ever make me as happy or proud as being your father. I love you.
To my sweet mom, who endured Vulcans, Timelords, and Jedi; Micronauts, superheroes, uncharted dungeons, scary monsters, Alice Cooper, and the KISS Army. Thank you for loving me enough to let me be me, and for the typewriter when I was thirteen. Thank you for being my friend, and my wise council, for letting me find my own truths, my own ways, and for supporting me on whatever path I was walking. I love you, Mom.
To the memories of Ken Witt, Pam Bardoner, Reggie Haney, Jeff Barger, and Jeff Franco. Your lives were full of service to others and you made the world a better, brighter place with your presence. Rest.
To the memory of Torri Lyn Saunders. You touched so many lives in your lifetime, made so many of them more than they would have been without you. I am honored and fortunate beyond the cage of words for our time. You are remembered with smiles and laughter and, most of all, love. Go play now, the moon is waiting.
Contents
Map of the Town of Golgotha and its Environs
The Ten of Pentacles (Reversed)
The Knight of Wands (Reversed)
Temperance (Reversed)
February 18, 1847
California
Bloody footprints in the snow greeted the rescue party from Bear Valley. They approached the camp from the direction of frozen Truckee Lake. The stained tracks veered, looped and crossed themselves—a drunken, demonic scrawl, an artist signing an infernal work in crimson. They ended at a mound of snow and ice roughly the size of a man.
“John, go check out that drift,” Reason Tucker said to one of the Rhoads brothers. Tucker was a big man, broad, with a plain face and kind eyes. He wrapped his exhausted horse’s reins around a low-hanging tree branch, trembling with fresh snow, and patted her shivering neck. “Rest of y’all start making a noise, call out. See if anyone is alive.”
Mr. Eddy had told them where they would find the cabins, but all Tucker could see were misshapen hills of snow. So much snow, like the Almighty had grown tired of creating and had just decided to white it all out.
On the way up the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Ned Coffeemeyer had opined over their puny campfire, likening the snow and the violence of the blizzards to the Great Flood of Noah’s time, swallowing up the wicked.
“That’s a myth,” the dark stranger said as he rolled a cigarette. The stranger had joined the party after they set out from Fort Sutter. Knowing what dire and ugly work was likely afoot once they reached the camp, if they reached the camp, the remaining seven members of the rescue party had taken the stranger up on his offer to join them.
They had lost so many men. Some dead, due to the weather and the treachery of the climb, others deserting due to fear of certain death. The somber-garbed stranger’s appearance, with his black hair, goatee and mustache, his fine ebony horse and his eyes the color of sin, stark against the snow, had seemed like providence. “The flood wasn’t God’s doing,” the stranger said.
“You don’t believe in the holy word of the Lord, sir, the Bible?” Daniel Rhoads said across the campfire, rising slightly in agitation at what he perceived as blasphemy. The stranger narrowed his eyes and regarded Rhoads. The gaze was enough to knock all the righteous anger and the surly irritation of the trail out of Rhoads and freeze him in his tracks. His brother, John, took his arm and pulled him back to his seat on the fallen log.
“Let him be, Danny,” John said softly. “Sumbitch got eyes like a rattler. Nothing good gonna come from riling him.”
“To answer your question, sir,” the stranger said, and then licked his rolling paper. “I do believe in the Almighty, more than most, I’d wager. I just don’t believe everything I read.”
“You have some queer views on the Good Book, Mr.…,” Septimous Moutrey said, sipping his cold, bitter black coffee.
“Bick,” the dark stranger said, lighting his quirley. “Malachi Bick.”
Now, seeing the massive mountains of snow where the cabins should be, Tucker had visions of women and children, still, cold, buried in tombs of ice. Frozen, dried up, like the pharaohs of old, some leaning with blood-caked fingernails against doors sealed by tons of snow and ice. Unmoving in the frozen darkness.
Joseph Sels’s shout, frantic and muffled by the eerie, silent weight of the winter tableau, snapped Tucker back to his senses.
“Captain Tucker! Up here! It’s bodies, sir!”
Tucker and the others shuffled-waddled-ran as best they could to avoid the sudden trap of falling into a thirty-foot snowdrift, which didn’t support their weight. All of the party were shouting now, hollering out greetings and calls for any survivors to come into the washed-out daylight. Sels had climbed a narrow path behind one of the drifts that should have concealed a cabin. Tucker and John and Daniel Rhoads joined him. Daniel was still ill from the rarity of the air this high up in the Sierra, fighting for each breath.
Piled obscenely, like firewood, were human bodies: dozens of bodies, all frozen stiff and partly clothed. They were covered by a few inches of newly fallen snow. Near the bodies was a wide, low tree stump with a rusted axe, its blade buried in the wood. Blood had seeped into the wood grain of the frozen stump
“Children,” Sels said in a whisper. “So many children. They’re so tiny…”
Sels was a coarse man. He had been a sailor; he had lived a harsh life on and off the sea, and was only a few steps ahead of a deserter’s noose. He had seen much ugliness in this world, but the tiny stiff forms, the sunken faces, brought him to his knees. He crossed himself and muttered the Lord’s Prayer to the cold children.
“Most of the adults were lost when Graves’ party tried to make it to Bear Valley,” Tucker said, putting his hand on the former sailor’s shoulder. “Say your peace, but be quick. It’s getting dark, and we need to keep looking.”
There were more shouts from the other men of the party, but Tucker didn’t hear Bick’s powerful, controlled baritone among them. Looking at the bodies, Tucker allowed a grim fantasy to cross his weary mind—that Bick, the stranger, garbed in black and astride a stallion the color of coal, was Death himself, come for an accounting.
“You were right about that drift with the bloody tracks, Captain,” John Rhoads said. “Dead man. Been that way a long time—almost looks like some kind of a ghoul. He didn’t have any shoes, but he was dragging a leg bone; looked the right size to be a man’s too.”
“Lord preserve us, the stories are true; they’ve degraded to man-eaters, cannibals,” Sel said, rising off the snow and fumbling for his pistol under his coats and cloak.
“Steady,” Tucker said. “We have nothing but scandalous rumor, gents. Let’s not fly off the—”
“Captain!” It was the teamster, Sept Moutrey, shouting. “Look, they are coming out of the ground! The dead rising!”
In the feeble, struggling twilight, Tucker and the others began to see sections of the large and small snow mounds shudder and the snow fall away. Figures—skeletal, dirty, and pale—began to crawl, to rise, from the drifts. For a second, even Tucker felt fear clutch his stomach and balls. It was as if the snow itself had given up its corpses and animated them with a cruel mockery of life.
Bick appeared from a tangle of trees off to the left of the cluster of buried cabins. He walked quickly toward a shriveled, dark-haired creature that may have once been a human. She had appeared out of a hole in a drift near the center of the camp, and even in her pathetic state, she moved as if she were in charge. There was a nobility, a scrap of will in her that had not been devoured in the long frozen horror.
She stood and regarded Bick, while the other rescuers struggled to approach her as well. One of her small hands covered her mouth, the other hung limply at her side. She looked at the dark stranger with the last of the tears she could muster from the well of her soul. “Are you men from California, or do you come from Heaven?” the woman asked. Her voice was a dry rasp.
Tucker and the others had arrived now. Tucker noticed the rescue party was looking at the woman with revulsion and more than a little fear. She was like a bleached corpse, still moving, barely. Her face was a skull with pale, blotchy skin pulled too tight over it, like a drum. Tucker was surprised at how Bick regarded the woman, though. It was the first time since Tucker had met him that Bick had compassion in his eyes.
