Chapter 08: Lightning (Garrison)

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Garrison did not face that first strike. He felt it coming, though, felt something different from the sheet lightning that intermittently lit the sky.

The hairs on his arms, and the wet back of his neck, and in his beard all stood at attention. He smelled a familiar, deadly charge singe the air in a sulphurous burst. He thought, damn -- a word of which he did not approve.

As if in divine retribution, a thunderclap hit him like a train. Something exploded on the prairie behind him, brighter than a barrage of cannon fire.

His panicked mount, a grullo gelding, dropped its head to kick out at the darkness left behind. Garrison sank his heels, gripped his thighs, fought the horse's head around so its nose almost touched his knee. Unable to pitch backward from that position, it spun instead. He counterbalanced, pulled tight, forced the turn and kept his seat. By time his mount submitted, blowing great shuddering breaths but calmer for the exertion, Garrison did not know which direction he faced, but he knew he'd glimpsed fire.

He smelled the outcome, first. The familiar bite of singed hair and charred flesh. Fainter, but far worse -- burnt fabric.

One of his boys.

Targeting upwind, he spotted a scattering of grass fires left by the lightning strike, quickly drowned to nothingness. He heard cattle moaning and milling, but no screams of pain or undue panic. Whatever had burned no longer knew it.

Who?

He scraped his memory, tried to place every man among them, and scorned his inability to do so. More distant lightning flickered and forked. He used that to quickly scan the herd and the crew.

Cooper, riding his way. Juan, afoot and tussling with his mount, whose reins he had not yet lost.

Something billowy on a far hillside.

That last, neither with the herd nor the camp, Garrison only noticed because of a tiny swath of white. One did not see much white on the plains, outside some flowers, snow, or long-abandoned bones.

What the--

Darkness blinded him too soon to know more. But despite insufficient evidence from his eyes, his brain tried to claim he had seen a woman.

In the hills.

Elizabeth?

A second damn filled Garrison's thoughts at his suddenly torn loyalties.

Then a second, fat bolt of fire smote the plains, complete with a boom that scattered cattle and left his horse still and groaning from terror. In that blinding-bright instant, with what bits of his vision still worked, Garrison saw the smoldering extent of his outfit's loss.

Murphy.

Six fallen steers, a once-pretty mare from Dave Murphy's string, and the clear-enough remains of a good man Garrison had ridden with for six summers now.

"Boss?" called someone young. Clayton. "Boss, what—"

"Get down!" he commanded. "Step down and stay low!"

He heard Clayton's "yessir!" Someone else prayed in Latin. And yet, when a sheet of high lightning lit the plains again, Garrison glanced first to the now-empty hills.

Nothing to see. Certainly nothing white.

Back with the herd, Juan crouched low, holding his mare's bridle. Ropes, some ways off, had managed to shelter under his mount, holding a stirrup in each hand. Clayton, his freckled face white as whatever Garrison had glimpsed in the hills, stood amidst milling steers with no horse in sight. The cattle, while disturbed, showed no signs of a run. Yet.

Garrison signaled with a flat hand for the boy to get down.

Clayton dove obediently into the muddy grass. Better trampled than charred, at this point.

The light left them, before either fate could play out.

Garrison urged his gelding closer to the strewn carcasses before stepping down, keeping a firm grip on the gelding's bridle. He would not make himself bow lower than that, not even for God. He could barely breathe through the blowing rain, through the bitter stench of burnt flesh and fur, or through a mounting, directionless temper.

Anger felt a far sight better than guilt. He'd never promised these boys to protect them. Not from weather. Not from bad men. Not from their own foolishness. He could not control everything....

Elizabeth.

He found himself blindly searching that distant hillside once more, glad for the excuse to look away from the void that contained only death. A rumble of thunder and another high chain of lightning illuminated every bush and arroyo in sharp detail.

No woman. Nobody at all.

The only white visible--and only when he turned toward camp--were the wagon cover and the dog tent. But just as that flutter of light wore itself out, Garrison spotted the frail figure of his wife, well between him and camp, staring back at him through yards and yards of rain.

Darkness swallowed her, but he examined that fresh image of her in his mind and it did not ease his concern.

She wore her plaid Ogallala coat, not white. She could not have been off in those hills. Whatever he had first seen was not her, which meant something else was out there.

But what?

His anger turned solid and unyielding in his throat. He abhorred answerless questions. He hated the waste of Murphy's death, and that of those poor, dumb animals. He resented not being able to trust his own eyes when he most needed them. And now his wife...!

Not even enough sense to come in out of the rain.

What Garrison truly loathed, as he turned his back on the distant woman and led his mount closer to the carnage, was the strong urge to ride to her, instead.

On this, the worst night of the drive, her presence tempted him to neglect his duty. His job. He had a herd to boss, men to lead, animals to protect. He had no room for a foolish wife on top of his other responsibilities.

He hated the unmistakable truth that he had her, all the same. If she, like Murphy, died on this drive--even from her own stupidity--the guilt would be his.

Just like his guilt over Lisle.

"Well now," called Cooper from nearby, as unwilling to hide from the storm as his partner. "This must be a relief for poor Murphy, there.

"He always had a powerful fear of drowning." 


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