Page 11

Everett stirred, the effort disproportionate to the resulting movement, like struggling to wake from sleep paralysis.

Some horrible nightmare had him in its grasp, trying to eat him alive.

But now, the waking world was in reach again.

Cool metal touched his forehead, the kiss of a gun, gently drawing across his skin to move his filthy strings of hair from out of his eyes.

When he shifted, the touch abruptly withdrew.

He tried to speak, but he couldn’t unclench his teeth.

His voice came out a weak, strangled groan from between tight jaws.

His name, in Marshall’s voice.

He clung to the sound like the end of a rope, using it to drag himself back to the surface like a rescue from a tar pit.

When Everett managed to open his eyes, his vision was glassy and disoriented.

He looked around blindly, his pupils big and round, unreactive, left hand groping over the ground to orient himself.

His right arm was gone below the elbow, the torn flesh and chewed-up bones left behind somewhere in the monster.

Clumsily, he pushed himself to his knees.

A hand caught his, warm sweat meeting sticky viscera again, and he sharpened, looking around until he could find Marshall’s shape in the smog smothering his sight.

There he was, broad shoulders curled forward as he knelt in the dirt, still holding his revolver in his other hand, the barrel ready to put itself to Everett’s temple at the slightest direction from its master.

Everett stared at him, willing his image to clear, willing the cabin behind him to solidify into something real.

His heart kicked, his breath hitched as his body tried to recalibrate after having been ripped apart and born again.

He had been something else for a while, like there had been some parasite inside him that had sunk roots into his nervous system, into his very thoughts, insidious and all-consuming.

He had been nurturing it for a long time, feeding it morsels of guilt and shame and self-loathing until there was nothing left of him, his whole body turned to rotten fertilizer in the hungry mouth of that monstrous thing.

He had assumed it would only eat him.

His vision cleared — not entirely, just enough to shove those blotchy catfish back to the peripheries — and Marshall solidified from an outline into a living, breathing man.

Even if he looked wrecked, he was alive and whole, more so than Everett.

With a croak of Marshall’s name, Everett crawled into his lap, curling his half-arm around Marshall’s shoulders to bury his face in the man’s chest, breathing him in.

Everett was warm, but not hot, the fever abated, the blood loss slowed.

Marshall went still, Everett’s teeth too close to his throat for trust or comfort.

But Everett didn’t bite. That urge had been exorcised along with the fever. Like Marshall had shot its brain out.

“Don’t let me go,”

Everett said over Marshall’s heart.

Carefully, Marshall raised his other hand to Everett’s back, mindful of his finger on the trigger. Everett shuddered against him, raising his face to meet Marshall’s searching gaze.

He looked hesitant, cautious, still holding that gun without squeezing the trigger. He looked like he had that night when Everett had offered him half of what he wanted but kept the rest in reserve. Part hopeful, part resigned.

As slowly as Marshall had done, Everett put his hand to Marshall’s face, cupping one cheek.

His vision still wasn’t quite right, like the monster had been in the process of taking his eyes for its own.

Maybe his sight would come back as the rest of his body mended; maybe it was permanently damaged alongside his arm.

His gaze held unsteadily on Marshall as Everett shifted closer, carefully leaning in until he could press their lips together, Marshall’s chapped and Everett’s bloody.

Everett’s heart kicked as hard as a mule, as scared of a chaste kiss as he had been when that thing was killing him — more scared, because he knew he was going to survive this and keep going afterwards.

Everett tasted like rust and iron and he smelled like a slaughterhouse, but Marshall held still against him, no withdrawal, no rejection.

When Everett pulled back, what little blood was left in his body burned in his face.

Marshall stared at him a moment, lips parted, words caught in his chest.

“I’m sorry,”

Everett said in a cracked voice.

He was still holding Marshall’s face, palm pressed flat to his cheek, thumb brushing his cheekbone, fingers curled behind his ear.

Marshall was perfectly still under the touch, still as a spooked horse, but his eyes weren’t afraid anymore.

They were round and wondrous, the same grey-blue as the pre-dawn, sparkling with stars.

With that monster ripped out of him, it was easy now for Everett to realize everything in Marshall he had been missing.

“I should have done that from day one,”

he admitted.

Dropping his revolver, Marshall wrapped Everett tight in both arms, hauling him as close as he could get.

For once, Everett went willingly, fully sitting in Marshall’s lap, chest to chest, his knees around Marshall’s waist.

They sat together like that as the sun climbed over the broad, flat plains to the east, turning the tall points of the spruce and pines throughout the western foothills from black to green and painting the sky and the mountains.

Everett pressed his face to Marshall’s throat, where he could feel his pulse thudding strong and steady like he’d once felt it in other places that somehow didn’t feel as intimate as this.

Marshall held him tight like he could put Everett back together, but Everett didn’t want to be the man he used to be.

That man was dead, and for the better.

Dawn washed the sky pink like blood diluted in a basin, and as the night retreated, Everett’s head cleared.

The catfish diminished to fingerlings; he expected them to linger, swimming around the edges of his eyes, until he gave his body permission to start the long recovery from everything he had put it through.

Over Marshall’s shoulder, the cabin lightened, and, though Everett never wanted to see it again, it was still a better sight than the corpses disembowelled by the door.

Two hulking beasts with blood-matted fur, and one man, emaciated to the point of skeletonization.

Everett got to his feet, clutching Marshall’s shoulder for support, and staggered closer for a better look.

Whoever the man had been — and Everett had an awful suspicion that he knew — he was unrecognizable now, features sloughing off the bone to pool into the mud like he’d been dead for months or years already, and the inscrutable process of decay was only now trying to catch up.

Everett crossed his good arm over his chest, holding onto his opposite shoulder like he could keep the remains of his body in one piece.

He couldn’t know whether it was really that Québécois boy.

He hoped his suspicion was just another one of the devil’s tricks.

But he couldn’t know.

From behind, Marshall approached to steady him.

“We’ll burn the bodies,”

Marshall said in a low voice. “All of them. No need to risk anyone coming across this mess in a grave, no matter how deep.”

Wordlessly, Everett nodded his assent.

Marshall tied off the remains of Everett’s arm above the elbow before they did anything else.

It was gone at the joint, the bleeding stopped and the wound sluggishly beginning to scab over, like he had left the infection behind along with the rest.

His back was stiff, the skin knotted and ropy where the beast had broken through; it would heal into layers of scar tissue like he’d been whipped, but it would keep itself in one piece.

As the pain settled into a dull, dreamlike throb, strangely detached from the rest of his body like his ordeal inside the monster was a solid line drawn in between the trauma of the attack and his current body, Everett’s gaze fell on Marshall’s shotgun by the cabin door.

“My Yellowboy?”

he asked hoarsely.

“I left it where you dropped it,”

Marshall said, dragging the corpses into a heap some distance from the cabin. Their blood had killed the grass under them where they had lain. “We’ll go back for it.”

“I won’t be able to shoot it,”

Everett realized.

His rifle was his pride and joy, carried with him from the first time he had left home to make his own way in the world, even if that had only been as far as Marshall’s daddy’s ranch.

It had accompanied him on every cattle drive, every trek he and Marshall made across the plains from the Big Muddy to the Rocky Mountains and back again.

Marshall’s revolver had been passed down to him from his daddy; Everett’s Winchester Yellowboy didn’t have the family history, and it didn’t pack as strong a punch as Marshall’s double-barrel shotgun.

He wasn’t as quick a shot as Marshall, either.

But he was good at a distance; he had the kind of patience and stillness to pick off a target the size of an apple from over a hundred metres.

He hadn’t been fast enough to shoot that beast dead before it was on him, but that wasn’t his rifle’s fault.

He loved that gun, and he knew it like the back of his own hand.

It wasn’t the pain or his newly off-balance body that drove home the fact that he’d lost his arm.

It was the realization that he was now one hand short of being able to wield the rifle he’d learned to shoot with.

It felt like losing a friend.

He had already almost lost Marshall last night; he wasn’t going to let another one go.

Marshall dropped the last corpse in the pile to be cremated, letting go of the lasso he used to pull them into place before fetching the lamp.

He stood over the corpses for a moment before swinging the lamp down to smash over the rigid shoulders of the topmost beast.

Once the fur was good and drenched with oil, he flicked his lighter, then stood back to watch it burn.

The stench of burning hair and something worse filled Everett’s nostrils, but he forced himself not to turn away.

He kept his gaze fixed on the human body as the flames took it.

He hoped, if it really was that Québécois boy, that he hadn’t been responsible for his death.

He hoped, if it had to be him, that he had died of natural causes and the beast had only stolen his body to haunt Everett.

Above all, he hoped he was still alive and well, and this was only a nightmare likeness designed to torment him.

Without being able to remember his name, Everett could never know.

He mouthed a prayer to commend the body’s soul to rest in heaven and watched them all, whatever they were, burn.

He kept praying until the smoke curled thick enough to finally obscure the makeshift crematorium. It felt like being loosened from the grip of a strangling fist. The night was over; they were dead, and he wasn’t.

“Hey,”

Everett said. His voice was rough, throat still raw from screaming, but Marshall looked over immediately like he’d spoken clear as a bell. “Do you think sometime later on, once I’m healed up, you could teach me some left-handed trick shooting?”

Marshall broke into a smile, as much relieved by the fact that Everett was planning for the future as he was to be asked, Everett suspected.

“Sure, of course.”

It would be easy to give up, Everett conceded.

He’d seen other men throw out what was left of their lives after an injury like that.

But he had seen just as many others figure out their new bodies, let wounds heal to scabs, then scar over, and keep going.

He had survived, even when he had been sure of death, even when he had been more than ready for it.

He had survived the whole past month, even when the shame of what he’d done seemed determined to drag him into an early grave and eat him alive like maggots festering in an open wound.

He had left that shame behind in the smothering body of the beast along with his arm.

Under the exhaustion, under the trauma and the blood loss, he felt lighter than he had in years, like he had shed something more substantial than flesh and bone.

He hadn’t died then, so he wasn’t willing to die now.

Not before he had the chance to see what life might be like without his own self-loathing consuming him.

Limping forward, still clutching his opposite shoulder, Everett joined Marshall in front of the grisly cremation.

They stood side by side, watching the flames eat into the pile of corpses, fat crackling, liquid spitting, noxious black smoke curling up before dissipating among the dawn clouds.

They would stand there, shoulder to shoulder, until the whole miserable pile had crumbled to ash.

Marshall would kick through it, scattering the cremains to the breeze until every speck was strewn across the Prairies with no hope of ever reuniting.

Everett watched it like it was his own funeral rites, the man he used to be reduced to char, every fear and guilt ripped out of him and set aflame.

By dusk, he would have his beloved Yellowboy back in his hand.

The next day, they would recover their horses, grazing alongside the herd, which had been unbothered since that calamitous night.

By week’s end, they would reach Bar U Ranch in the Porcupine Hills under guard of the Rocky Mountains, and Everett would see a doctor there to clean up his arm and his back, and ply him with enough laudanum to take the edge off the pain, which by then would have settled into a gut-deep ache that was somehow preferable to the nervous gnawing dread he’d lived with for so long beforehand.

And someday after that, when he and Marshall were riding east again, just the two of them and their horses and their guns heading home to Saskatchewan, Everett would kiss Marshall, as unafraid as any hard-blooded outlaw, in broad daylight under the wide-open skies of the badlands.

The End