From their hiding spot behind the bushes, Keech and Sam witnessed three of the pale-fleshed triggermen scramble for the Home’s front door. They spoke no words and Bad Whiskey issued no orders. The time for talk was done.
The trio of dead men—Bad Whiskey had called his followers thralls—kicked at the door, but found it securely blocked. One of them plucked a stone off the ground and tossed it at the sitting room window. The pane shattered with a terrible crash, but the shards fell outward. Pa Abner had nailed boards inside, across the windows. While Keech and Sam had been away, Pa had been preparing the house for a siege.
Bad Whiskey pointed at Bull.
The massive thrall stepped over to the porch, hunkered down, and hurled his entire weight at the front door. The house shook with the impact, but the door held secure.
Bull shook his head. “It’s barred,” he said to Whiskey.
“Of course it’s barred. Try again.”
Bull stampeded the door a second time. The torchlight in the yard revealed jagged cracks up and down the wood, but the door refused to budge. The thrall slumped on the porch, disappointed.
Bad Whiskey addressed the walking corpse wearing the leather coat. “Rance, get over there. Shoot yer way in.”
The leather-coated man joined Bull on the porch and pulled his revolver. The harsh crack of gunfire exploded. After a few shots, the door began to splinter. Large pieces of timber burst and cracked, clouding the yard with sawdust and smoke.
“They’re gonna murder them!” Sam bawled in Keech’s ear.
The thrall known as Rance stopped to reload.
Bull slammed his boot against the bullet-riddled door. The entry shuddered. A new cloud of dust erupted into the air.
“Nearly there,” the thrall grunted. He kicked again. This time the barricade shattered. The door swung wide, revealing darkness within.
Bad Whiskey pointed to a timid-looking thrall in a tattered brown coat. “You there, Copper.”
The creature looked surprised to see his trail boss call on him. In the torchlight his flesh looked leprous. “N-n-name’s Cooper,” he stammered.
“I don’t give a continental what yer fool name is. Get inside and fetch my prisoner.”
Cooper stepped obediently across the yard. He edged past Bull and Rance and drew a small flintlock pistol. He pointed the weapon straight ahead and took a modest step over the threshold.
Something inside the house flashed bright white. A gunshot rang out.
Cooper grabbed his chest, took a step back, and collapsed on the porch. Keech couldn’t see clearly what had happened, but he believed Pa Abner had just shot the fella straight through the heart.
Bad Whiskey guffawed. “A fine shot, Raines! But you know lead can’t stop the Tsi’noo.”
To answer Whiskey’s remark, Cooper sat straight up. He looked confused, perhaps a little scared, and pushed a finger into the fresh bullet hole, as if hoping to touch his own heart. “That smarted somethin’ awful!” he shouted. Other thralls chuckled in the yard. Cooper climbed back to his feet.
Keech couldn’t form a single clear thought. Their pa had prepared them for so much. They had spent years in the woods, training for any sort of danger, wild animals, savage blizzards. But not for men who stood up after being shot square in the heart.
Cooper stepped again toward the door. This time Pa Abner’s hand flashed into view, the pendant tied across his palm. He slapped the glowing charm across the thrall’s cheek.
A shudder ran down the dead man’s body as if he’d been struck by lightning. Bull and Rance dived off the porch as Cooper collapsed in a heap, almost exactly where he’d landed before. The thrall shrieked an unspeakable noise and his face and neck took on the color of a midnight river. A black dust billowed from the creature’s mouth. There was a final groan, and then Cooper lay still, a lifeless corpse.
Petrifying horror seized Keech’s bones. Then he understood what he had just witnessed, and his dread turned to hope. The pendant! The second Pa Abner had touched Cooper with the silver, the sinister hold upon the animated body had shattered.
“Fill that house with lead!” Bad Whiskey screamed.
The outlaws opened fire. Wood splintered as bullets tore into the Home. The thralls emptied their revolvers, reloaded, then emptied again. Whiskey joined in, firing into the open doorway, screaming obscenities, and stomping his boots with glee.
“We have to help,” Keech said.
“But if we break cover, we’re goners!”
Bad Whiskey’s men charged the house and poured in through the battered entrance, stepping over the still body of Cooper. A second later, more bright gunfire lit the front porch. Men shrieked inside the house. Black powder smoke, made visible only by the torchlight, spilled from the door.
Then there was silence.
A skinny, ghost-white outlaw emerged from the house. The man wore a fancy frock coat, blackened by dirt and ripped along the sleeves. In the crook of one arm he carried a long rifled musket, the end of its barrel seeping a thin fog. Clumps of gray hair hung like spiderwebs off his speckled, hatless head. Upon seeing the man, Keech couldn’t help thinking back to his readings on sailors and pirates and the scurvy sickness they suffered from when they didn’t eat fruit for months at sea.
Scurvy grinned, revealing bloodred gums and broken teeth.
“We got ’im, Master,” the creature said. “That ol’ punchbug put up quite the fuss. Ended five on the stairs before we managed to get this free.”
Keech felt his throat tighten when the thrall held up a glimmering object. It was Pa’s charm, glowing like a firefly, partially wrapped in a scrap of cloth. Scurvy was careful to keep the object off his own flesh. He tossed it across the front yard, where it landed at Bad Whiskey’s feet.
From a distance, Keech could hear the sound of a wounded pup howling. Slowly he worked out that the wailing was coming from the Home. It was not a pup, but his siblings trapped inside, crying.
“They’re gonna kill everybody!” Sam insisted. “We have to help them!”
Keech had no idea what to do. One stubborn thought played in his mind: Destruction cometh; and they shall seek peace, and there shall be none. The passage clouded any attempt to form a plan.
Then he remembered. Pa Abner had tossed Whiskey’s Dragoon onto the workbench in the woodshed. If the revolver was still there, maybe there was some way he could use it to even the odds, or at least slow the dead men down.
He whispered to Sam, “I have a plan. I’ll circle around the property to the south and get the Dragoon Pa took earlier. You head around to the back door; see if there’s some way to slip inside. I’ll start shooting in the air, cause a ruckus, and draw Bad Whiskey’s men toward me. When I do, find Granny Nell and the others and lead them out to safety.”
Sam’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Protect us, Saint Jude, from harm,” he muttered. Without another word, he slipped away on silent feet.
Keech watched him disappear through the dark brush and then shifted his weight, ready to dash back through the trees.
One of the henchmen stepped out of the house. He waved a hand as though shooing a pesky fly. “Dixon’s bringin’ him out,” the thrall said.
“Raines better be alive or I’ll have yer life,” Bad Whiskey said.
“He is, mostly,” the gunman answered. “A bit shot up.”
A bearded leatherneck emerged from the Home, dragging the wounded Pa Abner. The thrall flung him to the ground at Whiskey’s feet. Pa’s beard was wet with blood. He looked as if he should be dead.
Keech knew he couldn’t wait a moment more. He made his way quickly along a well-worn path that skirted the southern perimeter of the property. As he scampered behind the waist-high brush, he heard Bad Whiskey growl at Pa.
“Reverend Rose’ll be happy to see this.”
Glancing back through the bushes, Keech saw the outlaw snatch the pendant’s leather cord and lift the blazing silver from the dirt.
He reached the woodshed and slipped inside. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he fumbled around Pa’s workbench. He ran his hand across the raw wood and drew a painful sliver in his palm, but the revolver was nowhere to be found.
He kept searching. Pa’s lantern could be of use—he could rig a mean explosion with it—but it too was out of sight. A chunk of tree bark lay in the dirt, a leftover from one of Pa’s projects. But that was just plain foolish. There was no way he could make an effective distraction with a piece of dumb bark. He needed something with teeth.
Keech turned his attention to Pa’s toolbox. His fingers fell upon the handle of Pa’s scratching awl. The tip was sharp enough to stab through pure oak. He stuffed the awl into his coat pocket and kept rummaging.
Gunfire ruptured the night again—three distinct shots from an elevated position—but this time the volley wasn’t coming from the dead men and their pistols. This gunfire sounded familiar. Keech paused to listen. A fourth shot rang out, the crack of a Model 39 Carbine. The shots were coming from Pa’s Colt rifle.
Keech guessed that Granny Nell must be firing at the desperadoes. If anyone could defend the Home besides Pa, it was Granny. She was the toughest old woman this side of the Mississippi.
Keech spotted a blunt object resting on Pa’s sanding stool: the claw hammer that Robby had been using earlier that day. He hefted the iron to test its weight. He took a practice swing and turned the tool over so when the hammer swung, the iron claw would lead. If he banged it against the side of the woodshed, the ruckus would surely make Bad Whiskey and his devils come running.
There was no more time for uncertainty. The hammer would have to serve. Sam was waiting on a distraction so he could get into the house and save the others. It was time to act, even if it meant Keech would die.
The Carbine boomed twice more—then fell silent. Granny had used her six shots and was most likely reloading.
The hammer snug in his grip, Keech pushed open the shed door and stepped outside.
What he saw nearly made his heart stop.
Orange fire had erupted inside the Home. Flames devoured the drawn curtains hanging over the back windows. Inside, Keech could see monstrous silhouettes, the shadows of Bad Whiskey’s thralls, stomping around the ground floor with destructive purpose, touching their torches to the furniture, the walls, anything that would take a flame.
“No!” Keech shrieked.
Clenching the hammer, he screamed with raw animal fury and ran.