Welcome To Red Cloud

Chapter Nine - Look Ma, No Hands

"Goddamit Marley, I'm sorry! I didn't mean to... Please just come back to town with us, would you?"

"Little Barrett! You Mama gonna kill you and string you over doorway if you don't get back here sharp, sharp!"

Snake Chu and I had very different styles of trying to coax Marley Barrett out of the woods. We were following the stream for the sake of a reference point, but in all honesty I was pretty damned lost from the moment we'd entered the dark thicket that ran alongside the trail to the ridge. I kept stumbling over hidden rocks amongst the overgrown brush, and the moonlight only came through the leaves with sudden shafts that made strange shadows all around us. Snake Chu marched like a general, holding the lantern ahead for us to spy a better path, and I held up the rear with my gun primed and ready.

"We walk an hour, Alston. She either gone home or gone dead by now."

Snake stopped dead and I ran into the back of her. I caught a scent of laundry soap in her hair, fumbling to steady myself on her shoulders before I broke away. She turned and lit us both with the lantern, our faces close in the weak yellow glow. Tiny beads of sweat coated her furrowed brow. She looked about as rough as I felt, her face contorted in a grimace.

"If I not back before 5a.m. launder start, my father slap me good."

I nodded, hissing out a sigh. "All righty. I'll head back to the inn. Hopefully the little imp doubled back on us and she's there already with her folks." I rubbed the back of my neck with my free hand, meeting Snake's eye. "I'll, uh, I guess I'll make sure I compensate your time when Ryan's up and I can get at my money."

Snake shook her head. "You pay me lumber carry, Alston. Follow you into wood for Little Barrett, my own stupid fault."

She smiled at that. It was a queer moment, lost as we were in the deep, dark thicket. Though her hair had come loose in wild, sweat-slicked strands, they framed her bright face in the amberish light of the flickering lantern. I made to mutter another apology, but as I opened my mouth, I caught a taste of something acrid on the tip of my tongue. I turned away to splutter, and yet more of the terrible taste and scent threw itself at me on the air.

Snake made a retching sound. I covered my nose and mouth with one hand, and when I turned back, she'd done the same. She spoke through her fingers. "You smell that, sucka?"

"Like burning." I spluttered back with a nod. "Where's it coming from?"

We followed the smell a little way further upstream, and it was only a few seconds of stepping before we came upon remnants of the fire. Charred branches fell apart when Snake pushed past them, taking us away from the stream and onto the crackling, soot-coated ground of a small clearing. The space could not have been more than six feet wide in a circle, and everywhere I looked, there were spindly branches and dying, half-burned foliage littering the space. But the real focal point was at its centre, lit fully by the shining moon where the gap in the clearing had made way to illuminate its horror.

I swore, and it was immediately followed by a muttered prayer. A rough-hewn cross made of wide tree branches sat in the centre of the space, tall enough to hang a man upon it. And indeed there was a man, spread like Jesus over the crucifix, or at least something that reminded me of a man. Much of his body had been burned away, his flesh rotting and searing where the last of the embers still glowed red around his corpse. The face was gone entirely, though some shreds of his working-man clothes had fallen off and gathered at the foot of the cross.

"What?"

Snake whispered, and her voice caused movement nearby. I raised my gun and she the lantern, but a soft whinny was all that greeted us in the dead of night. A horse came forward, chewing on a hat in its wide gummy mouth. I looked it over by the light of the moon, and I was certain I had seen it not once, but twice before. The hat too brought a memory back, set down when a man I'd been foolish enough to trust had been pretending to fix a wheel by the lakeside.