Nat was already scaling the giant rock pile when Keech came sprinting around the bend.
“I heard the commotion,” Nat said, tossing a swift glance down at him. “I have to find Duck.” His face burned bright red with concentration, but he had made reasonable progress up the slope.
“Right behind you,” Keech said. He vaulted to the pile and began to climb. Cutter and John Wesley came stomping up the footpath a moment later. Both boys froze at the weedy base, as if the sight of Nat ascending the mound had shocked their bones out of movement.
“C’mon, fellas, pronto,” Keech said.
“You want us to climb this?” Cutter asked.
“I done told y’all I can’t do that!” John Wesley muttered.
“We climb or die,” Keech said. As far as he could see, there was no other way up the side of the mountain.
“We’ll likely do both!” Cutter spat.
“Just don’t look down. Test each rock before you put your full weight on.”
The young riders fell into a silence as their climb began in earnest. Keech focused on the motion of his hands, the shift of his boots, the feel of the damp stones whenever he grabbed for a handhold. He wasn’t very high yet, but if one finger slipped or one loose rock fell—if his clumsy body betrayed him in the slightest—he would easily break a leg or even his neck. How Duck had managed to travel so quickly up two hundred feet of slippery, razor-sharp rock was a feat that baffled Keech.
Below him, John Wesley cursed at Cutter, as mossy rocks tore free from Cutter’s grasp and tumbled past the larger boy. Keech worried fiercely about John. He was bulky and tiresome, loved to complain, and didn’t seem to understand or appreciate his own strength. If anyone got them into trouble, it would be John Wesley.
Keech had climbed nearly to the big rounded boulder—the massive formation he thought of as the hunchback—when he saw a dark stone the size of a ham fly at his face. He recoiled and the rock skimmed his cheek. He tasted chalky dust and sputtered.
“Sorry!” Nat called down. As soon as he said it, the rancher slipped over the bow of the hunchback, which meant he was halfway to the top. Keech felt a flash of envy for the boy’s progress. He glanced down momentarily to check on Cutter and John Wesley … and saw the thralls.
The quickest of them had reached the mound and were beginning to climb. The rest of Bad Whiskey’s army was shuffling up the critter path, accumulating at the foot of the mound, shoving one another, clawing at their turn to ascend.
“John Wesley, heads up!” Keech shouted.
Properly startled, the large boy looked down. Rotting thralls grinned up at him and raised their revolvers. Keech caught a glimpse of leather. It was Rance, leading the pack.
Floodwood once again came alive with gunfire.
“Go faster, Cut!” John Wesley yelled, as ammunition zinged around them. The boy quickened his pace up the rock face. A riotous grunt issued from Cutter’s throat as he grabbed for boulders and heaved.
They were sitting ducks on the mound, all of them, a feast of targets. Except for Nat. Since climbing over the hunchback, he was no longer visible. If Keech and the others could only make it to that point, they could gain some momentary cover.
Putrid wind pummeled Keech’s face, threatening to rip the hat off his head. He shoved it down tight. He could hear Rance’s voice below: “Get ’em, you worms! Don’t lose ’em again! All of you, climb!” Grimacing, Keech reached up and touched an inviting stone, only to find that the jagged rock tilted under the lightest touch. He shifted his grip. One wrong move could bring the entire slope down on the heads of Cutter and John Wesley.
Which gave Keech an idea.
A slug whizzed by his ear, so close he felt the wind of it flutter his hat brim. The shot demolished a small stone near his face and he tasted more grit. He heard Pa’s faithful voice in his head whisper, Stay calm. If he panicked, he would choose the wrong handhold and go slipping off to death.
Nat’s voice echoed from above. “I’m at the top!”
Clamping his teeth, Keech at last made the hunchback. It was a tricky endeavor to climb over the big boulder’s slippery arch, but he found the holds he needed to lug himself up.
He grabbed a quick breath and rubbed his burning arm. His position didn’t allow him to see the other two boys, so he dropped to his stomach and peeked over the drop. His heart thumped when he saw that Bad Whiskey’s thralls were slinking closer to John Wesley. One dead man dressed in ragged sheepskin risked drawing his pistol. The mere act of bringing his weapon upward shifted his weight enough that the stone beneath his boot slipped loose. The rock tumble snowballed into a miniature cascade and the thrall was gone in an instant, taking with him another decaying cohort.
“You foolish maggots!”
Bad Whiskey’s voice. The one-eyed fiend was now at the mound.
“Mind yer steps!”
A duo of dead men climbed within reach of John Wesley’s legs and clawed at the boy’s trousers. He screamed and struggled to clutch a piece of shale that crumbled in his grasp. Cutter saw what was happening and stretched down a hand. John Wesley’s fingers landed on his wrist and Cutter pulled. The thralls’ grip on John Wesley’s trousers tore free, and the boy hurried up the next rock.
Keech studied the pile from peak to base. By his estimation, five or six large tumbling stones could cause the whole mound to crumble.
He recalled the nuggets of rock and grit that Duck had shaken loose when climbing over the rocky hat brim. The mantel had been strong enough to support her small frame, and Nat hadn’t been heavy enough to collapse the shelf either. But John Wesley was as husky as a horse.
The world below the hunchback was a discord of shouts and curses and thundering revolvers. Soon Keech saw Cutter’s head float into view, and he reached down and grabbed the boy’s hand. Working together, they boosted him onto the boulder. Needles of broken rock had slashed Cutter’s nose, but he grinned anyway, a feral look that both surprised and exhilarated Keech.
“Hey, Lost Cause.”
“Hey yourself. I’ve got a plan. Be ready.”
“It better be a dandy.”
A second later John Wesley appeared, his face pasty with fear.
“I made it,” he moaned.
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Keech said. He and Cutter helped John Wesley over the hump, and Keech pointed up to the top of the pile. Nat was nowhere to be seen—no doubt he was searching for his sister.
“I know you’re dog-tired, John, but keep climbing,” Keech said. “I need you to reach that ledge.” He pointed up to the hat brim.
Below, Bad Whiskey called out, “Yer dead meat, little pilgrims!”
John Wesley nodded as if he already understood Keech’s plan. He began to scale again, humming a nervous tune as he worked.
A thrall’s leathery face appeared like a nightmare over the hunchback. “Found ya!” the dead man muttered. His moldy fingers clawed the stone for purchase.
Before Keech could pull the freezing pendant from his shirt and kill the thing, a dull gleam of steel flashed in Cutter’s grip. Blackened fingers went flying off the thrall’s hands, and shock exploded on the dead man’s face as he dropped away.
“Adios,” Cutter said, and sheathed his knife.
More thralls began to scratch at the underside of the hunchback. They would be over the hump in no time. Keech tapped Cutter on the shoulder. “We have to go now.”
The boys began to climb after John Wesley, who had apparently found one last reserve of energy. He had already made a good distance, and had only a few more feet to go before reaching the top mantel.
“He’s gonna do it!” Cutter said.
“Let’s just make sure—” Keech began, but a fresh eruption of gunfire clipped the rest of his words. Two dead men had clambered over the hunchback and were firing up at them. Invisible pellets pinged and thudded against the granite.
“Go suck an egg!” shouted a high-pitched voice, and before Keech could register what was happening, a storm of rocks battered the pistols right out of the thralls’ hands.
Keech glanced up. Duck was standing on the ledge, side by side with her brother, lobbing stones at Whiskey’s goons. Nat was aiming Sheriff Turner’s Colt, and fired off two measured rounds. The thralls on the hunchback went tumbling backward off the boulder.
Somewhere below, Bad Whiskey roared in frustration.
“Much obliged!” Keech called to the Embrys.
John Wesley reached the mantel, but when he tried to climb over the lip, his last helping of strength seemed to fail. “I can’t make it!” he said, and stretched one hand up to Nat and Duck.
The siblings dropped to their bellies and reached, but the boy was too low even for Nat’s long arms.
“We have to help John,” Keech said to Cutter.
They climbed as fast as they could. Cutter found a route up the rocks that put him nearly neck and neck with Keech. By the time they reached John Wesley, the stones beneath the boy’s feet were clattering, on the verge of tearing out of the mountainside.
Whooshing out a loud breath, John Wesley gripped the edge of the mantel and tried to pull himself up again, but to no avail. The boy was strong, but his own weight worked against him at this angle.
“We’re here,” Keech told the boy, steadying himself beneath him. “We’ll help you up.”
“Th-thanks,” John Wesley stammered.
The terrible noise of the dead infiltrated the cold air. Keech didn’t have to look down to know that Whiskey’s thralls were now swarming the hunchback and the final stretch of mound.
Another hail of stones rained on the dead men. Duck and Nat stood on the precipice and launched rocks together, their perfect aim sending more thralls careening down the pile. They would only get back up, of course, but it was a worthy effort to buy John Wesley more time.
Keech stretched up one hand and pushed on John Wesley’s left boot to give him a platform. At the same time Cutter fumbled to help him from the other side, scrabbling for a hold on John’s right leg.
Steeling himself for one final push, Keech tucked his shoulder under John Wesley’s rump. “Hey, watch it!” the boy muttered, but Keech ignored him and shoved.
Just before Keech had spent the end of his strength, John Wesley mercifully lifted. Keech and Cutter shoved him over the edge of the mantel. A terrible noise rumbled above. The hanging shelf wobbled underneath the large boy’s weight. Just as Keech had hoped.
“It’s coming down on our heads! Move it!” Cutter screamed.
They skittered over the top edge. For one second Keech felt the world go topsy-turvy beneath him, like a tottering tree. He felt the ground slip away and knew that he would tumble along with the heavy stone. He was too slow and would be crushed beneath the slide.
But then John Wesley grabbed his wrist and dragged him over the edge and back to solid ground. Beside him, Nat and Duck were holding on to Cutter.
A devastating crash cracked the air like a thunderbolt.
“Get back,” Keech called. “Away from the edge!”
The young riders hurried on hands and knees over tall weeds and burs, away from the precipice. A second later—as a cluster of thralls peeked over the edge—the splitting overhang tilted. The heavy mantel separated from the rest of the mountainside. A look of shock crossed the decayed faces.
The shelf stones barreled down the slope and shoved the hunchback out of its decades-old cavity, loosening the giant boulder like a bad tooth. And when the hunchback began to roll free, the entire mound collapsed. Every remaining thrall careened down the ruined slope inside a tempest of stone and moss and roots and dirt. It may have been his imagination, but Keech thought he heard Bad Whiskey scream as the rubble buried the critter path.
Sweaty and exhausted, the young riders bellowed in victory.
“Leave it to John Wesley to knock down a whole mountain!” Cutter cackled.
Resting on their hands and knees, both Nat and Duck laughed.
“Shut your mouth,” John Wesley said. But he was also grinning, and before long he broke into his own fit of laughter.
Lying on his back in the weeds, Keech allowed himself to join in the merriment. But only for a moment. A mile of Floodwood rubble had just entombed a small army of Bad Whiskey’s thralls—and most likely Whiskey himself—but their fight was hardly over. And the Reverend’s crows were still prowling the cursed clouds.
“We have to keep moving,” he said. “The door out of here is close, I know it.”
“Can’t we rest up a second?” said John Wesley.
This time it was Duck who answered. “Keech is right. There’s no time,” she said. The girl stood and pointed to a stand of tall brown thistle behind her. A narrow footpath, no wider than a deer trail, led through the weeds and farther up the remaining peak of the mountain, away from the stone mound that had just crumbled.
She smiled. “I think I found our doorway.”
Duck led the gang up the path, which was almost invisible under the wall of thistle. The tall weeds had been swept back in several places, a sign that someone might have traveled through here, and not long ago.
The footpath ventured upward, winding in a rough semicircle around the tallest point of the mountain, till it appeared to stop abruptly at another wall, a craggy barrier that blocked their way.
“Okay, so what now?” asked Cutter.
Duck pointed to a fallen oak trunk as wide as a horse leaning against the stone wall. The wood was near black with rot and slick from Floodwood’s constant rain.
“That log ain’t what it looks like,” she said.
Despite the trunk’s rotting black bark, the dead oak looked as solid as the stone it leaned against. Duck rapped on the trunk with one knuckle. Keech was surprised to hear a dull echo inside.
“How can a log be a door?” Nat asked.
“Not sure, but I think it’s man-made,” said Duck.
John Wesley stepped to the massive trunk and knocked on it. There was no mistaking the hollow clunk that resonated back. “Maybe it’s just a rotted-out tree.”
Keech stepped up and ran a hand along the wet bark. His fingertips dipped into a dark fissure. The indenture was oddly notched, as if it had been cut. As he felt inside the groove, the image of Pa Abner using the silver pendant to open the wooden chest in the study came to mind. He felt a dizzying flood of excitement. He had seen woodwork like this before. Pa Abner frequently used the bark of old trees to finish furniture. This was no rotted log; this was Pa’s handiwork. Only the finest woodworker in Missouri could build a door disguised as a fallen oak trunk. Robby would have been proud.
Duck had apparently been thinking similar thoughts. She pointed to the fissure where Keech had slipped his fingers. “A key,” she said almost breathlessly. “It’s for a key.”
Keech pulled the shard from his coat. “You mean this?”
Holding his breath, he thrust the pendant, jagged edge first, into the deep indent. The match was precise. The quarter moon slid into the furrow with no resistance. There was a click as the charm found a stopping point. Less than an inch of silver jutted from the cavity, but it was enough to give Keech a handhold.
He gazed proudly at Duck. “You were right!”
“Go ahead,” said Nat. “Open ’er up.”
Keech twisted the pendant clockwise. There was a clonking noise as a set of wooden cogs turned with a loud grind behind the hollow wood.
“It’s working!” Duck said.
When the charm stopped, a deep rattling sound reverberated from the other side of the trunk. Keech felt a second of panic when nothing else happened. But then a large section of the log swung inward, receding into the stone wall behind the trunk. A cloud of gray dust flew all around them. As Keech’s vision cleared, he saw a large circle of black.
A long, deep darkness burrowed into the hillside.
“Ain’t that swell,” said John Wesley. “Our door out of Floodwood is a cave.”