Here’s a
preview of “The Bloodstained Trail” a new Sebastian Red story I’m working on
for the SEBASTIAN RED anthology I’ve
been promising you guys for a couple of years now. Enjoy and let me know what
you think, okay?
The
mutilated, gory man sitting on the back of the saddleless horse wept tears of
blood as he had no eyes that would cry normal tears. Naked he was and all the hideous tortures he
had suffered were plain for all to see.
As he rode into the town of McBain’s Bluff, women stifled screams as
they turned the fascinated faces of their children away from the horror on
horseback. Men dashed over to take the
ruined man away, shouting at the women and children to get off the street.
The tortured man screamed as
well-meaning hands took him off the horse’s back. Their touch seared his raw nerves with fresh
agony. The men took him to Doc Henry’s
where they laid him on a cool white bed that soon became stained crimson. Doc Henry got the men out of his operating
theater with curses and generous blows of his huge fists. Fists that soon worked at the task of healing
they had been trained for.
The cry went up for the sheriff to be
summoned and the town drunk scurried to the task. He was no longer drunk. One look at the tortured man sobered him up
right quick.
Sheriff Morton reluctantly left his
supper and ambled on over to Doc Henry’s.
He pushed his way through the crowd gathered outside Doc’s office.
“Who do you reckon he is, Sheriff?”
“Y’think he coulda run across Madman
McGee, Sheriff?”
“Mebbe he’s an outlaw, Sheriff?”
“Won’t somebody think of the children, Sheriff?”
Sheriff Morton paused at the door and
turned around, glared at the crowd.
“Soon as I know what’s going on, you’ll know what’s going on! But right now, the best thing y’all c’n do is
go on ‘bout your bidness and let me tend to mine!”
Sheriff Morton went on in the cool
interior of Doc Henry’s office. And past
that into his operating theater. Doc
Henry looked up from his grisly work.
His arms were crimson up to the elbows and his white shirt no longer
white. But Doc’s face was white. Deathly white with fear. “I’m glad you’re here, Will. He ain’t gonna last long and you need to hear
what he got to say.”
Sheriff Morton took off his hat and
bent down to look in the man’s face. Doc
had cleaned up the ravaged features as much as he could and Sheriff Morton
reacted with shock on recognizing the man.
“Holy God! Is that Chuck King?”
“It is.
And what been done to him turns my stomach in ways I never thought it
would be. I done seen my share of outrage
out here, Will…but this..”
Sheriff Morton took a quick minute to
further examine the man. “I have,
Doc. God help us all, I have.” And then he bent to listen to Chuck King’s
final words. It took the ruined man
three minutes to tell what had happened to him and then he died.
Doc Henry stepped away, making the sign
of St. Ford’s Cross. “If any soul
deserved God’s blessing, it was him. Who
did that to him, Will?”
Sheriff Morton slowly replaced his hat
on his head. “You’d best get washed up
and come on outside, Doc. Best if I tell
ev’rybody at one time so’s we all know what we’re up against.”
Sheriff Morton went back through the
office and outside to the street. The
faces of the townspeople were a mosaic of fear, outright terror, resolve, hope
and in a few, something that he hoped like hell was courage. He waved the excited questions down, saying,
“give Doc a chance to come on out so’s he can hear this along with the rest
a’you.”
It didn’t take Doc long to join the
assembly. Sheriff Morton raised his
voice slightly and called out, “Tonnio, Clapper, Little Bill and Jason…y’all
come up here to the front where you can hear me good. Once I’m done I’ll want you to ride out to
the ranches and settlements and tell everybody what I’m ‘bout to say and tell
them they best come into town until this thing is settled.”
“And what thing is this, Sheriff?”
Sheriff Morton took in a deep breath
and said, “It’s The Kreota. They’re riding
The Bloodstained Trail.”
The ripple of astonished horror that
went through the crowd was to be expected.
The fainting of a couple of women was also to be expected. They were women who had been blessed enough
to survive the last time The Kreota rose up.
Some men looked at each other uncertainly. They did not know The Kreota. The men who had the resigned look of
prisoners sentenced to hang the next morning did.
“That man just rode in ‘bout an hour
ago. I know he didn’t look nothing like
him…but that was Chuck King.”
Another ripple of astonishment.
“Chuck’s wife and two kids are
dead. He was tortured by The Kreota for
fun and then they sent him here on that horse.
He said they told him that before they sent him off. Laughing, they were. Chuck said that he was told that the Ocnoi
Black Conai himself had done him the honor of torturing him.”
“Ocnoi?” Somebody asked.
“It’s the Kreota word for ‘leader’ or
‘chief’. And Black Conai is the worst of
‘em. It was him what led the Kreota
clans the last time they rode The Bloodstained Trail. More’n a couple hundred folks got killed in
that one.”
“But why?” a woman wailed. “We don’t bother The Kreota! I’ve never even seen a Kreota! Why do they want to kill us?”
Sheriff Morton took off his hat and
wiped his forehead clean of sweat with an already soaked forearm. “Ma’am, I wish I could tell you. I stick to my kind and that’s that. But I was one’a those at Lancaster Canyon
during the last great Kreota uprising and I can tell you that it don’t make a
difference to them if they seen you or not.”
A calm, strong voice said, “So what can
we do, Will?”
“I want every able man to go on home
and secure his house and make sure his family is okay. Then report to me. I’ll assign reg’lar patrols of the town and
we’ll barricade all ways in and out of town. And as of now, all women and
children are under curfew. We’ll set up
lookouts on the rooftops. If we keep
our heads, don’t go off past th’ town limits, we should be okay. Leastways until we can get some help from
Fort Bronson. Okay, y’all go on and do
what I told ya. But I want all you
family men back here in three hours! All
single men report right now to my office.”
As Sheriff Morton headed for his
office, his way was blocked by two earnest young men with anxious looks on
their faces. He tried to get past them,
saying, “Boys, you’re single men. I
expect you to volunteer for patrol duty.”
“Sheriff, we need to talk to you.”
Sheriff Morton stopped and took stock
of the Horn brothers. John was the older
and looked at Morton with wide brown eyes.
On the short side he had a wiry build and from working out in the field
his skin had tanned almost as dark as a Tonatore. Yancy was the younger with a slighter taller,
more graceful build. One could tell they
were brothers by their shared thick lemon yellow hair, hollow cheeks and full
lips.
“Boys, I got a lot to do so if you-“
“Sheriff, you do know there’s a wagon
train out there, right?” John said.
“Coming in from Fort Bronson. Claudia’s
on that wagon train.”
“Oh.
I see.” And Sheriff Morton did
see. “Look, fellas-“
It was Yancy who spoke now; “if we
could just take three or four men with us-“
“I cain’t spare anybody, boys. And you know that full well. Matter of fact, I cain’t spare the two of
you. But I know better than to try and
hold you back. If you wanna go_”
Yancy spoke again; “Sheriff, you can’t
expect us not to go!”
Sheriff Morton sighed. “No, I can’t.
And I can’t stop you from going either.
I wish you would stay but if you got it in your heads to go-“
“We’d just need two men!”
And now Sheriff Morton’s face turned
hard. “Looky, boys…I ain’t gonna ask the
married men to go. I got a wife to look
after myself. And I need all the single
men here to help defend the town. That
means you two as well.”
“Sherriff, Claudia’s out there,” and
Yancy couldn't have been more solid than a Sequoia when he said that. “Now, me an’m’brother are goin’ out there to
get her and bring her back here safe.
You gonna help or not?”
“You heard what I said and I meant
it. I got a whole town to look after,
boys. If the Kreota decide to attack
McBain’s Bluff I’m going to need every gun right here. An’ not to put the bad mouth on them but you
got to know that the Kreota might have attacked that wagon train and wiped it
out.”
Yancy’s voice wasn't pleasant as he said, “I oughta knock
your teeth down your throat for even thinking that, Sheriff.”
“Never mind, Yance,” John said. “We’ll go ourselves.”
“Now, just wait a minnit, boys. Mayhap I can help, sorta. There’s a fella been in town a couple of days
passing through on his way to Kelly Gap.
You heard a’ Sebastian Red?”
John nodded. “Gunfighter, isn’t he?”
“Done his share. He hunts bounty, done some scoutin’ for the
Army. He’s even supposed to be something of a spellslinger if the stories can
be believed. If you got enough money I
daresay he’ll hire on to keep the two of you alive out there long enough to get
to that wagon train.”
“He know anything about the Kreota?”
“I dunno. You can ask him, though. He’s most likely over to the saloon.”
John swapped looks with his brother,
who nodded. “We’ll go on over right now
and talk to him, Sheriff. And thanks.”
The brothers headed toward the
saloon. All around them, the town of
McBain’s Bluff seemed to have galvanized into a sort of ordered chaos as men
and women dashed to and fro. Many were
lined up outside of the town’s three general stores, buying supplies.
“Now that I put my mind to it, seems to
me I heard tell some stories of this Sebastian Red,” Yancy said. “Wasn’t he the one put down that range war
over to Bickford County? Killed himself
a mess a’folks over there.”
John nodded in agreement. “I heard a’ him some. Heard he don’t come cheap. They paid him a thousand gold sovereigns for
that job. There was some talk of him
huntin’ down and killing all a’ Bloody Neil Singer’s bunch. Don’t know if I’m comfortable with going out
there with a killer.”
“Where the Kreota is concerned, a
killer is ‘zactly what we need, John. In
any case, it won’t hurt to talk to the man.”
“Agreed.”
They reached the saloon and pushed
their way through the batwing doors. Most
of the saloon had emptied out once word had passed. The bartender busied himself with washing
glasses, nodded in greeting at the Horn brothers.
“Lookin’ for a man name’a Red, Harry,”
John said. “He here?”
Harry gestured at a table near a window. A lean bullwhip of a man sat there, dressed
all in buckskin and leather. A
broad-brimmed sombrero hung from its cord on the back of his chair. Sunlight twinkled on the charms woven into
his dreadlocks. He played Liar’s
Solitaire with a deck of oversized hand-painted cards.
The brothers walked over. “Sebastian Red?”
The man looked up, expertly sizing up
the brothers with just a glance.
“Howdy.”
“I’m John Horn and this here’s
m’brother Yancy. Can we sit and talk
with you a minute?”
Sebastian
Red gestured at the nearly empty bottle of tequila. “Talkin’ is thirsty business.”
John raised his voice. “Harry, bring us a bottle of tequila and a
couple of glasses, wouldja?”
“Be right over.”
Sebastian Red indicated that they
should sit down. “What can I do for you
gentlemen?”
Yancy said, “I ‘spect by now you heard
about the Kreota risin’ up again.”
Sebastian nodded. “Some fool idjit come runnin’ in here yelling
that everybody in town best to get ready to get slaughtered by the Kreota so
most that were here went pilin’ out to run home and hide under their beds.”
“You don’t think they got reason?”
“Best thing to do is barricade every
street in an’ outta town, arm every man and put them either on the rooftops or
at the barricades. An’ don’t leave
town.”
“Sheriff Morton is doin’ just that
thing.”
Sebastian nodded in approval. “Smart man.
Sounds like he’s had some experience with the Kreota.”
“He was at Lancaster Pass.”
“Yeah.
He’s got experience then.”
“But how about you, Mr. Red? You know anythin’ ‘bout the Kreota?”
Harry brought over the fresh bottle and
shot glasses for the Horns. Sebastian
poured himself a drink and tossed it back before answering the question. “I’ve dealt some with the Kreota. Got into some scraps with them. They ain’t a people to be taken lightly. They know how to kill and once they got their
blood hot, the best thing to do is stay right where you are until they cool
off.
"The
last time they rode The Bloodstained Trail was four years ago. They rode it for about five days. Time before that they rode it for five
weeks.” Sebastian poured himself another
drink. “Nobody knows why the Kreota take
to The Bloodstained Trail or why they stop or how long it’s gonna last. All anybody knows is that they’re gonna kill
everything in their path until they’re satisfied and then go on back to their
cliffs and mountains.”
“You speak any Kreota, Mr. Red?”
“Depends on the clan. I know Bighand and Wormbone good. I can get by with Eyefire and Shadowyell. What’s all this ‘bout?”
John toyed with his glass. He’d poured himself a drink but he hadn’t
taken it yet. “My brother and I want to
hire you to help us get to a wagon train.
It’s coming here from Fort Bronson.
That’s five days ride west of here.”
“I know where Fort Bronson is. I worked for the Army some a few years back.”
“So you know this region, then?”
Sebastian Red shrugged. “Well, enough, I reckon. But why you gentlemen want to throw away your
lives riding out to catch a wagon train that’s on its way here anyway?”
“Because there’s no way they can know
the Kreota rose up again and they need to be warned.”
Sebastian Red shook his head. “Chances are the Kreota done killed them
already. You’d be wasting your
lives. You’d best hunker down right here
in town.”
“You don’t understand!” Yancy snarled. “Claudia’s with that wagon!”
“You gonna get yourself killed over a
girl, boy?”
John placed a calming hand on his
brother’s shoulder. “Claudia’s not just
a girl, Mr. Red. She’s a woman I’m hoping
will consent to be my wife.”
“Or mine!” Yancy shrugged his brother’s hand off. “Claudia’s coming out here with her pap to
settle. John an’ me, we both courted
Claudia back in Jenning Falls before coming out here to ranch. We got us a pretty good spread outside of
town. Couple hundred acres, some good
cattle, horses. We ain’t big and we
ain’t fancy but we’re doing all right.”
“So what are we talkin’ about
here? You boys are gonna have this young
lady decide between the two of you?”
John nodded. “We’ve agreed to abide by Claudia’s
decision.”
“What if it’s you?” Sebastian gestured at Yancy. “You gonna be able to live with your brother
marryin’ a woman you love?”
“If that happens, I ‘spect I’ll be
leaving for a while to get over it. But
I’ll be just as happy for my brother as I would be for myself.”
Privately, Sebastian wasn’t so sure
about that. He’d know brothers to cut
each other’s throats over a woman but that wasn’t his lookout. He shook his head. “I appreciate what you wanna do, boys. An’ you’re right. Somebody should ride out and warn the wagon
train and push ‘em until they get here safely.
But just the three of us…” again he shook his head. “And you boys are city born and bred. I can tell.
I need men I can count on when we run into trouble.”
“We may not be big shot gunfighters or
bounty hunters but we can carry our own water when we have to,” Yancy said.
Sebastian looked at him with
approval. “I believe you can. But still…”
“If it’s money we can put two thousand
in your hand in an hour.” John
said. “If you want more than that you’ll
have to wait until we can wire Hayes City and our bank there.”
“That’s not it. Not everything is ‘bout money. I just don’t believe in throwing away my life
or that of other folks if’n there ain’t no need.”
“But we’ve just got to go help them,
Mr. Red. There’s a small force of Army
soldiers with the wagon train but-“
That caught Sebastian’s attention. “You know any of the soldiers with that
wagon? Any mention made of a Lt. Finney
with them?”
Yancy shrugged. “Claudia’s last letter only made mention of a
Captain McAllister in charge. That
all. Why?”
“When I worked for the Army I got to be
pards with this Lt. Jim Finney. He saved
my life when we were out on patrol. We
got surprised by a wild minotaur.
Critter would have tore me to pieces if Finney hadn’t got him with the
first shot.” Sebastian Red looked out
the window. “I’d sure hate to think of
Finney out there with no idea the Kreota done rose up. I owe him.”
Sebastian took another drink and sat in silence, still looking out the
window.
“So does this mean you’ll take us?”
“Yeah.
Yeah, I’ll take you. I can pretty
much guess which route the wagon train will take. We’ll ride out to meet them and push ‘em back
here. Hopefully we can do it without
runnin’ into the Kreota but that ain’t much chance at all.” Sebastian looked hard at John. “And looky here…we find ‘em dead, I still
expect to be paid.”
“Two thousand is yours just for
going. That’s agreed.”
Sebastian grunted in satisfaction. “You boys got horses?”
Yancy looked offended by the
question. “Of course we got horses.”
“I mean real animals with strength and
endurance you can depend on, not them nags you use on your ranch to pull
plows. Out there, a good horse may make
the difference between you keeping your liver or not.”
“What do you mean, ‘keeping your liver’” Yancy asked.
“Kreota cut out the livers of their
kills. That’s where they think the soul
is. They take livers, cook ‘em up in a tasty stew and eat ‘em. Believes it gives them
the power and smarts of whoever it belonged to.
We may have to run. An’ more than
once. You want a horse what ain’t gonna
drop dead on you after a mile or two.”
“We’ll get good horses. Ben Rollins raises some fine horses on his
spread. We’ll get a couple from him.”
John said.
“Make sure your guns and rifles are
clean. Bring dried meat, airtights,
bread. We won’t be making a fire out there. We leave at first light.”
“Why can’t we leave today? There’s still five hours of daylight!”
“One, because I been drinkin’ all day
and I ain’t fool enough to go out there without a good night’s sleep to get
sober. Two; you boys need a solid night
of sleep yourselves because once we get on the road, you ain’t gonna get
another one until you get back here to town.
That’s if you get back.”
John frowned. “I’m not sure I like your attitude, Mr.
Red. You’re supposed to be keeping us
alive but you act like you’re expecting us to get killed.”
“What you don’t understand is that once
we leave this town there’s a mighty good chance that we will get killed.”
“Then why are you going?”
“I told you why. There’s a man out there I owe my life to and
he don’t have no idea of what’s going on.
He deserves an even chance.” Sebastian
Red poured himself another drink. “Now
the both of you best be about your business.
Meet me back here at sunup. And
if either one of you are particularly religious, y’might wanna get your prayin’
done now.”
