Tinchera Pass, Colorado, 1885

DERLE HAD FOURTEEN slugs in him by the time he made it into the trees. Six of them had splintered bone. His chest whistled when he breathed. They couldn’t stop him from smiling, though.

He pulled himself past one tree, reached ahead for another, and felt the heat of a slug as it passed by his face, leaving a suck in the air that pulled him over just enough that, for an instant, before the splinters exploded, he could see a perfect hole punched in the tree he was reaching for.

Ten paces past that tree, the slug was sizzling into the wet undergrowth, writhing like the air hurt it.

Derle picked it up, turned, threw it as hard he could down his back path, his fingers smoldering, numb.

He was dying. No two ways about it.

His left hand was the only thing holding his intestines in. They looked just like sheep guts. When they’d spread out into Derle’s lap, that was the first thing he’d thought—sheep—and then from there had stepped back into his childhood, the smells, the sounds. The way a lamb can scream, if you want it to. If you know what you’re doing.

Derle fell forward, caught himself on his right hand, stumbled forward.

It wasn’t what he’d been trying to do to the girl named Suzanne that had got everybody on the wagon train reaching for their long rifles. It was what he’d been doing to their livestock for the last two months.

Last week, the heifer had given birth to something the preacher they had along had to turn his face from.

Derle had smiled then too, but covered it with his hand.

That night, as if in answer to the birth, an angel had screamed across the sky, on fire.

Or that’s what the preacher said it was.

Derle didn’t know, had been hiding with a stray, trusting dog, sure that if that light threw his shadow on the ground, it would split him in half.

In trade for getting to live, he’d let that dog go.

It never came back.

In the trees now, bleeding out, Derle wondered what strange litter that bitch was going to throw here in a couple of months. Whether she’d know to bite through their thin skulls or not. If they’d be satisfied with just milk.

Derle didn’t think so. Not if they took after their old man.

Behind him now, the shots were farther and farther apart from each other, just so he could hear them, he knew. Just so he would know not to come back.

Derle laughed and dark, rich blood welled up, seeped down his chin. He burbled his lips in it like a child, caught himself on a tree. Shook his head at how stupid this all was.

They were just animals, right?

Taking everything into account though, it was probably best they’d caught him before he had a chance to take Suzanne any farther than he already had. The designs he had on her involved acts he hadn’t even been able to subject the sheep of his childhood to, just because they weren’t built right. If they’d caught him in the middle of that—of her—then....

Derle collected the blood from his chin, flung it down to the ground. If they’d caught him with Suzanne, it wouldn’t have been enough just to put him down. Instead, they’d have got the preacher man involved, probably. The end result would have been the same, probably—Derle, dead—but it would have taken a sight longer. They’d have stretched him first. Maybe taken the skin off in strips. Done stuff to his eyes.

No, this was better.

This way, he could die without anybody watching.

All he had to do now was find a good place, wait it out.

Derle shook his head again, rubbed his eye with his bloody hand—a mistake—and turned his head as much as he still could, spying for a place to rot, a place to get his bones good and bleached. Because that was what really mattered. He’d thought about it a lot already, going up and down Goodnight’s trail these last four years. He needed some place in the sun, so he’d dry out, and so the birds could find him, deliver him to the sky mouthful by mouthful.

He got hard, thinking about that—the birds, sitting on him with their sharp feet, digging into his chest cavity with their perfect beaks, the muscles on the backs of their necks bunching—but then, when he lowered his hand, there was just blood in his pants, and he didn’t know what he was feeling.

He stumbled on, feeling his way, finally fell out into the clearing he’d always known was waiting for him.

It was the creek bed of the creek everybody’d been counting on two days back, the creek whose absence they were probably blaming Derle for now as well.

This one wasn’t on him, though.

He shook his head no, that this wasn’t on him at all.

This was God’s fault.

Dead center in the creek, buried deep in what had been mud, was the angel. It wasn’t on fire anymore, was the color of ash now. Just a shoulder-high knob of speckled grey rock. The water had cooled it, Derle knew, but had steamed off doing it. He could tell because there were fish and turtles rotting all over the place. Fish and turtles the raccoons hadn’t touched.

It made the rock interesting.

Maybe it was an angel, he told himself, or a demon, just tucked into a ball, its chin between its knees, wings folded all around it.

Derle nodded to himself, licked his lip again—more blood—and took a step towards it, fell face first into the rocky creek bed. What teeth he still had in front cracked off at the gumline, then night sifted down all around him and he dreamed, and in his dream he was risen, standing where he’d just fallen, and, instead of running back the way he’d come, he was watching the rock, unable to look away.

It was trying to catch fire again. There was no water to douse it anymore. Except—it was like at the blacksmith’s shop, if he had the big grindwheel spinning. Sparks. They were popping off the surface of the rock in…in regular patterns. Like writing.

Derle looked all around to be sure nobody was around to see that he couldn’t make these words out. If these marks were even letters.

Soon enough the sparks were gone, and the whole rock was smoking, smoldering, popping, baking the creek bed’s fine silt of sand into a shell.

Derle cocked his head over.

It was an egg, he figured. Had to be. Because this was how it worked after you died, or when you were dying: something had to come collect you, pull you to where you belonged. Like he’d wanted with the birds. Only—he knew this now, should have known all along—Derle was a special case, was the one who’d figured out how to leave his seed inside an animal so that it took.

The preacher man had been right: for him, they’d sent an angel. All it had to do was shake off the rock it had traveled in and stand to its full height, the ram’s horns on its head curving back along its skull, its cloven hooves shiny and hard. It would be the child Derle could have fathered, given enough time, and enough sheep.

It was all a man could hope for, really. To leave a legacy.

Derle spit a long string of blood, and looked past the rock, into a pair of green eyes. It was a doe, watching him.

“Mama,” Derle said to it, blacking out a little on his feet, and thought he was getting hard again but knew too he could never catch this doe, or talk her in. Not smelling of blood like he did. The next time he blinked, she disappeared, then, a moment later, there were twelve eyes, sixteen.

They’d all come to watch.

Derle lowered his head, understood.

It’s not every day a man like him passes over.

Nine lunging steps later, he was at the rock, falling into it. The letters were still hot; one of them burned into his cheek. Derle offered his palms as well, and then his other cheek. It kept him awake, made him breathe faster.

He wasn’t dreaming, he knew that now. Dying maybe, but not dead yet.

The slugs from the rifle had just taken his body.

There was more to him than that, though. There always had been. It was why his grandmother had had to lock him in the basement all those years. Why he could never stay in one place for more than a week or two. Why cats stared at him.

Derle narrowed his eyes, breathed two times, then nodded, reached as high up onto the rock as he could, fixing his fingers into one of the letter marks. His fingertip smoked and sizzled but he held on, started climbing, and then, unable to stand anymore once he was on top, he just held himself up with his palms, started shivering, heard more than felt one of the lead slugs plunk from his chest, clatter onto the rock. It didn’t roll away like it should have but clung at an impossible angle, standing up on its mushroom nose. And then another, and another, until all eight of the slugs still in Derle had been pulled out, some completing the line they’d been trying to push through him, some coming back out the same hole, trailing muscle.

None of them rolled off.

Derle focused on them as best he could, even touched one with the pad of his thumb. It was tacky, the lead giving under his thumb then seeping bit by bit into the pores of the rock.

Derle laughed, fell hard on his stomach, and spit out another part of a tooth. Because it wasn’t metal, it clattered away, rolled into the creek bed. With his tongue he could feel the stumps in his gums, and then the warmth from the rock started blistering its way up through his body, and all at once he knew what he was doing here: instead of being on top of a sheep or a heifer or a stray dog, he was astride an angel, his fluids coating her, seeping into the pores after the lead, so that they were one, him and the angel. They were joined.

This wasn’t his child, but his lover.

Not that it would have mattered, he smiled to himself, and the effort it took to part his lips was the final thing that killed him, and it wasn’t like when he’d fallen at the edge of the clearing and blacked out. Real death was like suffocation; he could hear insects scrabbling after each other in the recesses of his mind, then massing in his throat, welling into his mouth, choking him, so that all he could see anymore was light, light everywhere, so cold.

Derle relaxed into it, gave up finally, ready to surrender himself to whatever was out there.

Except the rock was holding onto him, wasn’t ready to give him up.

Minutes later—hours, maybe—Derle opened his eyes again, was on his back now, as if his front had already cooked enough.

Against the backdrop of stars, he held his hand up, the one he’d fingered the hot slug up with.

It wasn’t burned anymore. The skin was new, sensitive.

Derle smiled, his eyes filling with water, and was able to sit up, breathe, cough out the bit of shiny whiteness that had been lodged in his throat, rub the pad of his thumb over the two flat nobs on either side of his forehead, like someone had set the feet of a draft horse’s shoe against his head and hit the butt of it with a hammer.

The rock below him was cool now, sated. No blood dried on it at all.

Derle nodded to himself, breathed some more just to be sure he could, then turned his head to a sound in the creek bed behind him.

It was Suzanne, in her gingham dress, the one she wore on Sundays.

Derle nodded once to her in acknowledgment, around the rifle she had leveled on him, and then she fired. The slug went in through his right eye, misted the back of his skull out behind him, one long strand of red looping out then coiling back in. The second shot took him in the chest, severing his spine, the third knocked most of his right arm off, and then, when he tried to hold his hands out in front of him, only one of his arms complying, she shot through his left palm as well, the slug burrowing up the hollow bone of his forearm, exploding through his shoulder blade, and by then she had the breech of the rifle pressed right up against her cheekbone and she was screaming and pulling the trigger, and levering another round in, and pushing it into him too, until the rifle exploded in her face.

It threw her back into the grass, her right eye a mess, her right cheekbone showing white, the ragged skin there smoking, bloodied, gone.

Like Derle, she died smiling, all her accounts settled.

The next morning the green-backed flies found the two of them, coated the parts of them that had been open to the night, and, though the birds settled down around the rock, they never drew any closer to the body of the man on it, and the coyotes kept their distance as well, and so the flies ate their fill and deposited their eggs and the blind white maggots swelled up from the corpse on the rock by the thousands, and then the sun drank all the fluids up like Derle had wanted, and the rains came, and the dry creek bed ran enough water to float a small child, and the next summer, two miles downstream, where the creek crossed the twin ruts in the grass, there was a bleached white skull grinning up, half buried in the dirt until the spoked front wheel of a wooden wagon rolled across it, then the back wheel, and it would have ended there, except a boy hanging his bare feet over the back of the wagon dropped down from the gate, collected the thing he thought was going to be a rock, at first, or an Indian grindstone.

Because his family’s wagon was moving, he didn’t have time to look at what he’d found until he’d caught back up, let his sisters pull him in.

They crowded around him, blocking the find from their mother.

“What is it?” the eldest sister said, taking the skull into her lap, her eyes glittering. “Look at his teeth…,” she said, running her finger along the line of top ones. “He must have been rich, a prince or some—”

The boy pulled it back from her, brushed the rest of the dirt from it, and there, unmistakable above the eyes, at what would have been the hairline, were the bony nubs of two horns, too dull to have even pushed through the skin of the scalp, probably.

The boy dropped the skull, and it broke the rest of the way open.

Inside, nested up against the sun, were maggots that shouldn’t have been there, some of them already crawling into green-backed flies, rising sluggishly into the air of the wagon.

Later that night, all twenty-two wagons of the train would burn. This is a recorded thing. What wouldn’t be recorded was the boy, running for the woods, his sister chasing him, running on all fours. What wouldn’t be recorded was that she was growling.