The Angel Butcher of Rio Bravo: An RDR2 Story

xxvi. When he was alone

John.

In the prison, time started to run together. John gave up counting the days since he'd been nabbed by the Pinkertons on the front lawn of Shady Belle, shot in the shoulder; it was easier to let them blur, bleed into one another.

Stupid. The first few nights, curled onto his sleeping cot in a futile attempt to stave off the rats, John turned over his rush toward the battalion of agents in his mind. What had he been trying to accomplish? What was he thinking? It was too painful, reliving the bullet wound; Hosea bleeding out in front of him, a death the man didn't deserve to die.

Painful, too; trying to assess the whereabouts of the gang; Jack, Abigail. Sisika an island, a prison to him in more ways than one. The surrounding water a tomb he was buried alive in. John had blacked out shortly after being shot and had no idea what had happened to the men he'd been riding with, nor the people left at camp. He took small comfort in knowing that he hadn't seen Pearson, or Uncle, or Swanson around; maybe the Pinkertons had ignored them.

By the end of the first week, he turned his mind from it. If the gang were planning some grand rescue, surely they'd have come for him by then. He began to lose grasp on his name - no one called him by it here, just the number on his striped coveralls, 827 - and with it, his hope. He focused on survival; eating what little food they gave him, keeping his head down and away from his fellow prisoners, some of them prone to fighting at a moment's notice. He hadn't given up, he thought to himself, because that implied loss. He was numb, detached; another way his surviving took shape.

He hadn't lost everything of himself. After long days working the surrounding fields and gulping down a small, daily whet against his all-consuming appetite, lying on his cot, his mind gravitated naturally to the other time he was alone.

How Tine appeared like a lifeline, back then; equal parts gore and glimmer in the remote northern town they'd found each other in. How she'd reminded his ailing heart of the parts of himself and his history that he loved; the thrill of a robbery, his prowess with a gun, yes, too, his handsomeness.

They'd swarmed the stagecoach Tine had scouted so quickly it might have seemed to their marks that there was a half dozen of them, and not only two. They moved so fluidly they might have thought they'd worked together for years, instead of only meeting that same day. Of course, the pair were so terrifying, so bloodthirsty and effective in their robbing, that it was most likely the guards thought of nothing at all, save whether or not they were going to keep their lives. And, with a precise flick of Tine's wrist, her knife to their throats; a calculated few shots from John's gun; they soon learned they wouldn't.

John had been floundering on his own, and there he was; returned to himself in the course of an afternoon, the murderous blonde at his elbow to thank for it. He drank that night not to forget, but to reminisce on, embellish, even, their lucrative triumph over the stage.

The hotel they'd booked in a larger, neighbouring town to the one where they'd met was lavish, John and Tine sorely out of place amid its damask curtains and velvet furniture. They weathered the concierge's wrinkled nose until Tine plunked down the cost of their largest suite in cash, John snickering behind her. They'd already drunk themselves stupid in the saloon, but it didn't stop Tine from ordering a bottle of champagne, pulling the cork out with her back teeth and spitting it at the concierge en route to their room, her arm haphazardly thrown around John's shoulders.

They stumbled to the room and Tine launched herself onto the bedspread immediately upon entering, trying to drink straight from the bottle lying down.

"Can't believe all this money," John slurred, holding the wad of cash - his take - before his face and squinting at it. "You do this all the time, Tine? Robbing folks like that?"