The Shotgun Arcana (2 page)

“These men are from California,” Bick said. “They have come to help you, take you home.”

“I’m Levianh Murphy,” the woman said. She faltered, her eyes rolling back as she began to fall. Tucker and several of the men rushed forward to catch her, but Mrs. Murphy regained herself and stayed on her feet.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” Mrs. Murphy said. “The Lord God has sent you to us, as providence. I’m sorry we can’t offer you better hospitality.”

Tucker heard Bick mutter under his breath as more of the cadaverous survivors crawled from their holes and gathered around Mrs. Murphy and the rescue party. “Remarkable,” Bick said softly. “You people never cease to amaze me.”

*   *   *

Darkness fell over Truckee Lake and the razor wind howled through the survivor camp, vicious and brazen, ripping into the makeshift shelters and rattling the collapsing cabins the survivors and rescuers huddled in. The full moon, bright and accusing like a vengeful queen, burned cold, silent light onto the camp.

The man out in the snow with the human leg bone was identified by Mrs. Murphy as a Mr. Wolfinger. She implied that he had met his fate at the hands of another member of the party. When Tucker inquired about the leg bone, a queer look crossed Mrs. Murphy’s face.

“It makes my soul sick,” she said. “No one can sit in judgment of us, though, save the Good Lord above. That’s what Leanna told us.”

“Leanna?” Tucker said.

“Leanna Donner,” Murphy said. “George’s little girl.”

“Why in God’s name are you people listening to a child?” Tucker asked.

“Because it talks to her,” Mrs. Murphy said. “She is its High Priestess.”

“The little girl?” Tucker said. “Whose high priestess?”

“The God,” Mrs. Murphy said, her eyes glazing over. “The God in the Pot.”

She would speak no more and went to her bed, turned to face the wall like an errant child, and hummed herself to sleep.

Many of the children, despite their lethargic condition from starvation and the life-sapping cold, were too excited by the prospect of rescue to sleep. A little girl named Naomi, who was about two years old, fidgeted in Tucker’s lap, under the horse blanket he had with him.

“You intendin’ to settle on a spot, Little Miss?” Tucker said. The girl’s face was scabbed with patches of frostbite and dark from soot. Her cracked lips spread into a big smile.

“’Ventually…,” Naomi muttered.

“Well you better hurry that process up, directly,” Tucker said gruffly, although there was a smile in his tired eyes. “The cot you’re jumping on intends to get a spot of shut-eye. You hear me?”

The little girl giggled and hugged Tucker’s arm. Her laugh was the best sound Reason Tucker had ever heard. Children were a mystery to him still. He hoped to have a mess of them someday. Children could endure disasters, madness, and evil far better than grown men. Perhaps, he thought as he was drifting off, it was because the world had not yet fully beaten out of them the notion that anything was possible, that people were good, and that God answered prayers. Tucker was so tired, even with the numbing, painful cold, the stench of death and the constantly squirming, occasionally kicking, little bundle of life on his lap; he fell into a hard, dreamless sleep.

There was noise in the darkness, a blast of sub-zero wind. Tucker awoke with a start, raising his rifle to protect the slumbering charges all around him. It was Ned Coffeemeyer, opening the door to the Murphy cabin and stepping inside.

“Colder than a witch’s tit, Captain,” Ned said as he shook the snow and ice off him. Several of the sleeping forms on the floor groaned. In the darkness, a child coughed.

“Mind your language,” Tucker said. “Got children in here.”

Tucker blinked a few times as Coffeemeyer adjusted the wick and the hood on the lantern the rescue party had brought with them and held his hands near the lamp to warm them. Tucker looked around the room.

“Where’s Bick?” Tucker asked. Coffeemeyer shrugged as he laid his blanket down on the cold, damp, earthen floor of the cabin. He used his pack as a pillow.

“Blazes, far as I’m concerned,” Ned said. “I relieved him couple hours ago.”

Tucker carefully lifted the little girl and covered her under his still-warm blanket as he stood. He buckled on his gun belt and picked his rifle up again.

“He ain’t here,” Tucker said, “and I’ll wager that mudsill is up to no good somewhere.”

“Well,” Coffeemeyer said as he dimmed the lantern and pulled his hat over his eyes. “He’s got to be over in the Breen family cabin, next door, Captain. Nobody’s fool enough to walk miles to get to the cabin the Graves and Reed families are supposed to be holed up in, and Mrs. Murphy said it’s about seven miles down to the Donner family camp.”

Tucker stepped carefully over the sleeping forms to reach the cabin door.

“I’m checking the cabins,” Tucker said. “All of them.”

“Want me to come with you?” Ned asked, sitting up and pushing his hat back.

“Nah,” Tucker said. “You get a few winks. If I’m not back by the time you wake up, come looking. If you can’t find me and Bick shows up, you restrain him or shoot him. Understand?”

“Will do, Captain.” Coffeemeyer said. “Be careful. I don’t trust that sumbitch.”

Tucker picked up one of the torches they had made from oiled cloth and tree branches. Once outside, he turned his back to the screeching wind and used his body to cover the match as he lit it and then the torch. The flame shot up the oiled rags and crackled and fluttered like a banner in the relentless maelstrom. He trudged toward the drift that held the cabin the Breen family had staked claim to when the party of pioneers had been forced to ford here at Truckee Lake for the winter. It took a few minutes of checking with Aquilla Glover, the current sentry on third watch, to ascertain that Bick was not in the Breen cabin.

“Why not wait to morning, Captain?” Glover asked. “Sun will be up, it will be warmer. We were headed out there anyway.”

“Not waiting,” Tucker said. “I’m not sure who or what Malachi Bick is, but he’s up to no good and I can’t wait to see what he’s about. These people are already crazier than a pack of dogs in the sun; can’t blame the poor bastards. Bick might take advantage of them. You gather a crew and follow me out in the morning. You hear a racket tonight, you shake a leg and come on out quick as you can.”

Taking a few extra torches and a spare flask of oil, Tucker set out on the narrow walking path worn into the frozen packed snow. It was a little over a mile to the Graves family’s cabin, and then about six more miles to the tents and shelters the Donners had quickly assembled to hold about twenty people near the bank of Adler Creek.

The torchlight jumped and shifted. Making a feeble, faltering circle of light in the dark, skeletal wood. Tucker’s boots crunched and slid on the packed snow and ice every few steps, making him lurch and stagger like an infant learning to walk. The woods and the snow ate the noise of his passing, his panting breath, making him feel claustrophobic and watched. He clutched his rifle tightly, waiting for shrieking, pallid cannibals to spill from the dead woods to rip and bite his flesh. Tucker was not a religious man, but he quietly began to mutter the Lord’s Prayer as he struggled through the all-devouring darkness.

As he neared the Graves’ buried cabin, he began to imagine knocking on the cabin door, it flying open and dozens of scab-covered, talon-like hands tearing at him and pulling him into the putrid-smelling shadows of the cabin interior. He imagined being forced to participate in alien rituals to ravenous, inhuman gods. He imagined the sensation of teeth sinking into his flesh everywhere, a bloody morsel of impure meat being forced between his lips as obscene chants and prayers drummed into his brain.

Tucker had no desire to knock on that door and no idea what waited on the other side. If it were daylight, with his fellow rescuers at his back, he knew that the buried cabin held starving men women and children. But here and now, alone on the stage of his fears and imagination, he saw only snapping, stained teeth and madness.

A fear settled into him like the cold, turning his bones to frozen stone. And as many men do he began to attempt to rationalize a way to avoid his fear. Near the Graves settlement, he had spotted some horse tracks, which he took for Bick’s black stallion’s. Now, searching as quietly as he could near the cabin, he saw that the tracks went past the cabin and continued toward the Donner campsite, five or six miles distant. He decided to avoid the Graves and whatever waited within. Tucker trudged on, his fear spurring him to put more distance between himself and the cabin door.

He neared the Donner camp after long hours of struggling, of near exhaustion at the efforts to navigate the jagged scar of a trail, to avoid falling asleep in the warm, narcotic slumber of the life-stealing cold.

Dawn was near, a purple bruise across the throat of the east. Somewhere, crows cried out, laughing at his struggle in the ash-colored predawn. Tucker heard the choked gurgle of the creek mostly frozen but still fighting to escape.

He saw a fire jumping, dancing in the smaller of the two tent shelters. He saw shadows moving about the fire, and he saw Bick’s horse waiting patiently outside the shelter. He cocked his rifle and made his way down, trying to shake the weariness, the dizzy fear and the numbing cold out of him.

“I understand, Leanna, this was not your doing,” the voice said as Tucker approached the flaps to the shelter. The fire stood watch outside the roughly constructed tent. It was a fresh fire, newly made and set on a wooden base, like the campfires they had made during their ascent to Truckee Lake. The voice was warm oil, rubbed into leather—Bick.

“But now we have to make this right, and I have come to help you with that,” Bick said. The voice paused. “Please, Captain Tucker, you must be cold from your trek. Come inside.”

Tucker stepped around the campfire, dropping his torch into the fire. He pushed the rotting blanket aside, stepping into the shelter. There were dozens of people in the dirt-floored tent; most were too weak from hunger or exhaustion to stand. Near death, their eyes were already seeing into the lands of shade. They looked at Tucker with glassy, bulging orbs, but they were seeing things he could not. Some of them looked at Bick and mouthed words silently. One feebly crossed herself and smiled at him with rotted, stained teeth. Bick, seemingly untouched by the cold, the ice, the stench or the plight of the survivors, stood next to a little girl, maybe ten, perhaps twelve. It was hard to determine through the starvation and the neglect. She was wearing a filthy, torn nightshirt covered with dirt, shit and blood. Her hair was brown, long and matted. Tiny bones and black feathers were tied in her hair like ribbons. Her brown eyes were wide and sad.

“Leanna, this nice man is Captain Tucker. He’s in charge of the rescue party I was telling you about. Captain Tucker, this is Leanna Donner.”

“Bick,” Tucker said, leveling his rifle at the man in black, “what are you up to out here?”

“Put the gun away, Tucker,” Bick said. “I’m here to help you and them.” Something in the timbre of his voice filled Tucker with an overwhelming desire to kneel, to bow his head to this man. The jumping light from the lantern in the tent cast Bick’s shadow larger, almost inhuman, like some great bird, on the rotting canvas. Tucker lowered the rifle.

“Now, Leanna, please tell Mr. Tucker what you told me about how this all started.”

Leanna looked at the ground, shyly, as if she had been caught in a naughty act. “It sang so pretty to me at first,” she said softly, with a bit of a lisp. “When we stopped at the end of the desert for water, I heard it singing to me, and I walked away from the others to go find where it was coming from. Momma would be very mad at me, but it sounded so pretty and so alone.”

Tucker looked from the girl to Bick in bewilderment. “Bick, what is she talking about?”

“Go on, Leanna,” Bick said, placing a hand on the child’s head.

“I found it in a cave,” she said. “It asked if it could come to our new home with us and I said yes. It hated the cave and it couldn’t leave on its own. The songs of old men and angels kept it there. I hid it in my blankets. It was quiet except at night. It talked to me when I slept and sometimes it was in my dreams.”

Tucker knelt so that he was looking into the girl’s eyes. She was crying a little bit, but her voice remained almost a monotone.

“Did this man put all this fool nonsense into your head, darlin’?” Tucker asked.

“Let her finish, Tucker,” Bick said. “This is important. Go on, Leanna.”

“Everyone was really mad at each other a lot, and after I found it and brought it with us, things got worse,” she said. “Mr. Reed and Mr. Snyder, they fought. Mr. Reed killed Mr. Snyder, but folks said Mr. Snyder tried to kill Mr. Reed first. They made Mr. Reed go away on his own. Everyone kept getting angrier and breaking up into little gangs and groups. And it was whispering to them, in their dreams and behind their eyeballs. Then we were here, and Pa … Pa said we had to stay here until after the snow, and it got worse. It all got worse. We didn’t have much food and we ate shoes and rugs after the horses were all gone. But it told me what we needed to do to make everything better. It talked through me sometimes to everyone, and sometimes it told me the words to say.”

Tucker looked at this small child who spoke so well … too well. It was hard to breathe. He felt like he was a few steps away from dizzy madness in his mind and a tight terror in his chest he would be helpless before, but what choice did he have in any of this? The little girl didn’t appear insane. She didn’t appear to be lying either. The eerie words of Mrs. Murphy came back to him. Murphy had said this sweet, disheveled child was the high priestess of a god.

“Leanna, honey,” Tucker said. “You keep saying ‘it.’ What is it?”

“I’ll show you,” she said with a joyless smile. “Come here. You, too, Mr. Bick, come.”

She shuffled back into the shadows of the tent. The other occupants writhed on the floor, in the dirt, like maggots in a hot skillet. They moved to make a path for their priestess and the two pilgrims. Many of them began to whisper a chant through dried, aching throats. Bick and Tucker followed the little girl. Tucker clutched his rifle and tried to bury his fears from earlier in the night, but he was becoming drunk with terror. The horrible, ridiculous fantasies he had summoned alone in the woods were coming to life now. This was no dream, no nightmare. This was the waking world and nothing seemed sure anymore.