CHAPTER 19
Big Nick kept his hand clamped tightly over Annabelle’s mouth as he finished cutting the rope tying her to the tree.
He slid his long, craggy face up to hers again, his eyes two burning, black coals of raw threat. He held the knife up to show her again, then jerked his chin up, silently ordering her to rise.
Meanwhile, the other outlaws snored in their soogans, some curled on their sides. Machado was the only one who lay flat on his back in an almost casual slumbering pose, ankles crossed, his pistol on his chest, hand around the grips even in sleep. Anna wished the outlaw leader would wake up. She suddenly found herself in the improbable position of seeing him for once as her possible knight in shining armor.
Or at least he’d save her from whatever Big Nick had in store for her.
She had a pretty good idea she knew what that was.
She pushed back against the tree to help lever her to her feet. Big Nick kept his hand clamped tightly over her mouth. The skin of that hand was hard and crusty as a clam shell; it reeked of sweat, the leather of his gloves, whiskey, and camp smoke. When she’d gained her feet, Big Nick looked cautiously around the near-dark camp—the fire had burned down to a few orange coals—then stepped around Anna and, keeping his hand on her mouth, shoved her forward and straight out into the brush, away from the camp.
Hand held fast against her mouth, Big Nick shoved her a good ways down a deer path until she could just barely see the glowing coals behind her. He gave her a shove into deep grass. He shoved her again, harder, and she stumbled forward and fell.
“One sound and I cut your throat!” His voice was raspy with menace. More animal than man.
Anna shoved up to a half-sitting position, propped on her hands. “You go to hell!” she raked out through gritted teeth. “If you think you’re gonna savage me, Big Nick, you got another think coming! You’ll have to kill me and ravage a corpse!”
Big Nick gave a mirthless laugh. She saw the off-white line of his teeth in the darkness. He removed his hat, tossed it away, and threw himself down on top of her.
She groaned with the force of his big body on hers.
He nuzzled her neck and pawed her, grunting, pressing himself down hard against her. Anna struggled against him, but he was so much stronger. Her fear and exasperation made her feel small . . . tiny. Insignificant. This man would do to her what he would and there was nothing she could do about it . . . until her right hand strayed to the handle of the big Bowie knife poking up from his shell belt.
As Big Nick pawed her and ground against her, Annabelle unsnapped the keeper thong from over the knife’s hilt, slid it from its scabbard, wrapped her hand tightly around the ridged, horn handle, and raised it until starlight glinted off the long, wide, razor-edged blade.
“Hope you had your fun,” Anna grunted. “Because it cost you big-time . . . Big Nick.”
Big Nick lifted his head and stared down at her, brows ridged. His lips were wet. “Huh?”
Anna smiled at him then gritted her teeth as she rammed the upturned end of the Bowie into the side of Big Nick’s neck. His eyes widened in sudden shock. His mouth opened as though to scream and, still smiling through gritted teeth, Anna closed her left hand over his wet mouth and ground the knife deeper into his neck. He stared at her, imploringly. That made her grind the knife all the deeper into the pig’s neck.
Blood geysered out around the Bowie’s blade, flowed hotly over Annabelle’s hand and wrist.
Big Nick lay stiff as a board on top of her, quivering, groaning into her hand. He clawed at the ground to each side of him with his hands. She knew he was trying to gain the purchase to pull away from her, but that made the moment all the more delightful. He wasn’t going anywhere and deep down inside him, he knew it.
He knew he was already dead.
His expression changed from one of beseeching . . . a silent plea for mercy . . . to one of astonishment and fury.
“Told you, Nick,” Anna said, holding the knife fast in his neck. “It was gonna cost you. Did you have fun? Huh? Was it worth it?”
He coughed into Annabelle’s hand. His head bobbed, shook, his lids closed down over his eyes several times, haltingly, before they stayed shut. His death spasms died with the rest of him and then Anna pulled the knife out of his neck and kicked him off her, struggling out from under the big man’s dead carcass as she did. She tossed the knife into the brush.
The stream they’d camped along was close by. She strode over, stumbling with exhaustion. She dropped to her knees and washed the blood from her hand and wrist. She bathed her face, drank, rose, and returned to Big Nick’s dead body. He lay on his back, his death grimace in place as he stared up at her through half-open eyes.
She glanced toward the camp. No movement there.
Machado had sent two men out on guard duty. Big Nick and one of the others. The other man must be holding his position on the other side of the camp.
Good.
Anna crouched to pull Big Nick’s six-shooter from its holster. She’d lost the drover’s gun in the river. Well, she had another one now. She shoved it down snug inside her belt, glanced once more at the camp, then began walking downstream. She had no idea where she was or where she was going, but something might come to her as she walked. All she wanted was to put as much distance between her and Machado’s camp as she could.
She’d walked maybe a couple of hundred yards before she realized her feet were getting heavy. Very heavy. Stonelike heavy. She was exhausted. She pushed on, weaving through the willows and aspens lining the creek. A thumbnail moon had risen without her realizing it until she found herself staring at what appeared small buildings on a rise on the other side of the creek. The sliver of moon didn’t give much light, but it gave enough to tell her that what she was looking at was no collection of widely scattered boulders but man-made structures of some kind. They were too perfectly formed of square angles to be natural rock.
Annabelle crossed the stream, which was only about a foot deep at its deepest.
She was so exhausted she didn’t even feel the water soaking her boots and the cuffs of her denims. There was no bank to speak of, so she merely stepped out of the water and onto the opposite shore. She moved toward the unnaturally shaped objects, limned slightly by milky moonlight, and soon found herself at a low, adobe brick wall against which tumbleweeds had piled themselves high. There were several breaks in the wall including, a few feet away on her right, a large one where a bottom corner of a wooden gate angled into the dirt.
A rusted steel hinge had broken away from the gatepost. The gate was splintery, moldering, as was the rest of this place, she could tell, even without being able to scrutinize it very carefully in the darkness relieved by only the thumbnail moon and the stars. Some sort of old military outpost, she assumed, that had fallen on bad times. She saw several splintering arrows in the sand and gravel around her boots. A spear was lodged in a wooden casing of a glassless window of the first, square, adobe brick building she came to.
The dwellings—some long and L-shaped and which had likely been barracks—were spaced at regular intervals. As she moved to the far end of the old outpost, she spied a large flat area that likely served as a parade ground. A tall cedar post was all that remained of a flagpole. Beyond, the country looked pale and lumpy even in the darkness, like a city of domed buildings. She walked across the parade ground and across a small cemetery with maybe twenty or so graves in it, all marked by tilted wooden crosses, to find herself standing at what could only be the Dakota Badlands.
That devil’s maze of upturned, eroded, chalky, red earth spread out before her, a vast, forbidding, wild country of sandstone cathedrals and ancient riverbeds she’d only seen photos of until now. She took a deep breath of the breeze blowing up out of it. It smelled like sand and stone, possibly touched by the late-summer gaminess of a distant spring. It smelled like the wildest country she’d ever known. The vastness of it frightened her the way the vastness of the night sky once frightened her as a child.
She stood on the lip of it, overlooking that deep, dinosaur’s mouth of a canyon, and felt as though a firm hand were pushing her forward, threatening to send her plunging into all that wildness, never to be seen or heard from again.
She spread her arms and sent herself stumbling backward.
She dropped to her knees and suddenly found herself bawling. She lowered her head to the sandy ground and let the emotion pour out of her, crossing her arms on her belly and just letting it flow, purging herself of all the raw emotion that had been for a long time licking up and threatening to spill over the top and down the sides of her being.
You can’t give up, she told herself. You owe it to yourself, to Hunter, to Angus, and to Nate.
Don’t give up.
It’s not only you in trouble here. It’s your whole family.
She was so exhausted, however, she didn’t think she could go on. She wasn’t even sure, after she’d vented the last of her sorrow and terror, that she could even stand. She gritted her teeth and pushed off the ground with her hands, heaved herself to her feet. When he found her this time, he’d kill her. Of course, he’d find her again. She didn’t have the strength to run. She stumbled back across the cemetery and the parade ground, entered the first hollow shell of a hovel she came to, sat down against the wall opposite the doorless doorway, and fell asleep.
Fast asleep, she didn’t hear the angry shouts coming from a couple of hundred yards upstream from her.
* * *
A beam of sunshine angling through a near window felt like a brand laid against Annabelle’s right cheek. It was in sharp contrast to the morning chill that made her shiver.
She felt that hot beam for a long time before it finally woke her.
She lifted her head from her knees around which she’d wrapped her arms.
She glanced to her left and a shrill scream erupted from deep in her lungs. She’d spent the night with a skeleton half-clad in tattered cavalry gear including a saber around whose gold handle the skeleton’s skeletal hand was wrapped. Enough of the man’s uniform and dark red longhandles remained that she could see the yellow stripe running down a tattered patch of dark-blue uniform pants clinging to a short stretch of bony thigh. A leather-billed cavalry kepi remained on the bony head, most of the flesh and the eyes weathered away or likely pecked away by birds. The man’s stove-pipe black boots remained on the skeleton’s feet.
A wooden saber with faded ochre and yellow designs painted on it protruded from the man’s skeletal belly, the stone tip lodged deep inside the sun-bleached ribcage.
The soldier was dusty and sooty, and cobwebs filled his mouth and nose, as though the entire head had become the home of web-spinning spiders. Just then a black widow emerged from the man’s mouth, picking its way through the long, crooked, yellow teeth. Annabelle slapped a hand to her mouth to quash another scream.
But the damage had been done.
When she turned her head forward, she gasped yet again. She stared out the glassless window right of the doorless doorway . . . and into the eyes of none other than Saguaro Machado himself, sitting his horse about ten feet from what had probably been a small office building, staring through the window at her with his one, flat, dung-brown eye, his single, gray-brown braid hanging down his back. The morning breeze played with the strings running down the sleeves of his buckskin tunic.
Another sob exploded from between Annabelle’s lips.
Fear and anger were awash inside her.
Heart quickening, she pulled Big Nick’s revolver from behind her belt, extended it straight out before her in both hands, and ratcheted back the hammer. She aimed down the barrel, her vision made watery and uncertain because of the tears filling them. Her hands shook, making the revolver shake violently. She wanted desperately to pull the trigger, but something kept her from doing so. She couldn’t pull her finger back against the trigger.
Machado gave a disgusted chuff. He swung down from the saddle and walked through the empty doorway. He glanced at the skeleton and then strode over to Annabelle. Annabelle kept the cocked pistol aimed at him, sobbing, shaking, unable to squeeze the trigger.
Machado held out his gloved hand, palm out.
His lone eye blazed at Annabelle. He said nothing, just held out his hand for the gun.
Sobbing against her weakness, Annabelle depressed the hammer and, her hands still shaking, set the pistol in the man’s hand. He shoved it down behind his cartridge belt then held out his hand again. Annabelle stared up at him, terrified, befuddled.
She placed her shaking hand in his. He pulled her to her feet . . . almost gently, which astonished her.
He led her out of the little shell of a building and over to his horse.
He helped her up onto the horse’s back, then swung up in front of her, gave the mount the spurs, and galloped off in search of the rest of his gang that must have separated to look for her.