A small camp fire burned in the desert night and two red faces hovered over the little flame, floating in the pitch black like red ghosts.
Frank sat on the ground. Middle aged. His face wreathed by a bushy black beard. He slid a stick under his boot, hoping to muffle the sound when he snapped it in two. He threw the bits on the fire. The orange flame hopped from the charred remains of the last stick to the fresh deadwood. The new stick sizzled. Embers brightened. Heat surged. Smoke billowed about his face, itching his eyes. But he didn’t scoot back. Only wondered if the smoke of Hell ever made it all the way up to God.
He thought of sinners cast in the fire. The hellfire jumping from its century old victims, from their blackened, bubbling bodies, to the supple skin of the new arrivals. Sizzling like dried corn husks. Screaming. Did God hear them? Or did God turn his back to them?
Ah, it’s just about scaring folks, Frank scoffed. “Hell ain’t real.”
“What?” Emil asked. He was the other man. Young. More a kid. He was notching the handle of his revolver, but paused. “What did you say?”
Frank had nearly convinced himself that Hell wasn’t real, when he raised his eyes from the fire. He knew it was Emil glaring at him, but the boy’s smooth face shone red, and shadows filled his gaunt cheeks and sunken eyes, making his chin sharp as an arrow. The boy sneered like a demon, a weapon in each hand, the iron of the revolver and the steel of the blade gleamed red.
“This was my last job,” Frank said.
“You said that last time,” Emil spat, going back to carving a notch in the revolver’s handle.
“I’m really done.”
“Yeah, I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“I mean it, Emil.” Frank growled.
“You let that dern preacher on the stagecoach get to you.”
Frank snapped another stick under his boot.
“You’re a dern fool,” Emil said, not looking up from his carving.
“I shot him, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, pretty cold blooded. How many notches does that make?”
“He don’t count. That’s like counting a woman.”
“Fair enough.”
“How many you got?” Frank asked, tossing the sticks into the fire. Smoke wafted in their faces.
“The driver and the Pinkerton feller with the shotgun adds two,” Emil said, blowing the wood dust from the handle. “Nine total.”
“Six more and we’re tied.”
“I got that easy.”
Frank stared at the fire. “You should quit too.”
Emil whistled, “That preacher did a number on you.”
“What if Hell is real?”
“Then we burn,” Emil stared, unblinking.
“You don’t care about your soul?”
“I just said what you dern told the preacher before you plugged a bullet in his brains!” The little camp fire crackled. A blackened stick crumbled into a clumps of glowing ash.
Frank didn’t want to pull that trigger. It was only a preacher, no real threat to the robbery, but the man wouldn’t listen. He had just kept on preaching. Kept on thumping his Bible. Kept on about God’s wrath, the vindication of the righteous, and the everlasting lick of hellfire. And it was working. Frank’s knees were wobbling. His heart beating. Even then he was fixing to drop to his knees and plead for God’s forgiveness, but then he locked eyes with Emil. The boy’s smooth face was lit red by the setting sun, shadows filling his gaunt cheeks. Frank could see it all over the boy’s face. Could see the desire. The malice. The boy’s eyes communicating, If you don’t do it, I will.
Frank had smacked the preacher then, smackedhim right across the jaw with the barrel of his revolver. It was an awful crack. A woman screamed and Emil, like a viper, had spun around and shot her. The preacher stood back up, tears in his eyes, blood dribbling from his busted mouth. He spat and red splattered Frank’s boots.
“You going to let him disrespect you like that?” Emil licked his lips.
“Kneel!” Frank had yelled.
The preacher didn’t move.
Frank cocked the hammer, pressed the barrel into the preacher’s forehead. “Kneel, God damn you!” he growled.
“Do it!” Emil barked.
But, the preacher held his chin high, looking at him, along the belly of the revolver, with cold, defiant eyes. “For me, to die is gain. But for you boys, Hell is waiting.”
Frank cracked a stick and threw it into the dwindling fire. He gazed up at the stars. “My gut’s telling me that Justice is coming, Emil. Something just ain’t sitting right.”
“So you think you can just quit? That you can just hole up and hide somewhere?”
“All I got to do is shave the beard and ride south to Mexico. No one would know who I was.”
“That don’t save your soul, Frank.”
“No, but I wouldn’t be swinging from a rope.”
“What about your cash money?” He motioned to a sack at Frank’s side. “The–what did the preacher say?–‘ill gotten gains’? You going to give that to a poorhouse? Maybe a church?” The shadows twisted Emil’s grin into a devilish sneer.
Frank picked up the sack of cash money. Held it. Studied it. He had killed for the money. Nearly $1000. He could live like a daggum prince with it. Go down to Mexico, hole up in a little town, drink tequila, garner some señoritas. A grin dug into his cheek. He had almost believed that preacher. “You know, Emil, I’m beginning to reckon that it’s best to keep things simple. Hell is just too much for a man to be thinking about.”
The two outlaw’s laughter was cut short by a third man saying, “I couldn’t agree more, sir!”
The voice came from the darkness directly behind Emil, but before he could even react, the knife was snatched out of his hand and when he spun around to shoot, the blade skewered his neck.
He gurgled as the gun went off. Knife impaled his neck. He fell to his knees, then face first into the hard dirt.
Frank stopped midway to standing, catching a glint of two narrow eyes hovering in the darkness over Emil’s body. He pulled iron and fired twice. The night was still. Only the gentle undulations of the small flame. He rose and noticed that Emil’s hands were both empty. Whoever killed Emil with his own knife had his revolver, too.
The horses were tied off to a dead tree there to his left. They whinied. He fired two more shots and one of the horses screamed in pain.
From out of the surrounding darkness, Emil’s revolver barked. Frank hollered, dropped his pistol, and clutched his mangled hand.
“Can’t have you killing both horses, sir.” The stranger fired again. Frank’s kneecap exploded. He collapsed to the ground, wailing, writhing on the ground, but his screams quieted to a whimper as the stranger stepped close to him. Knelt over him. His pale, hairless face shined red, smooth as a tomato in the light of the small fire. There was a little hole right in the middle of his forehead. His rheumatic eyes glistened as he spread a wide and toothy smile. “Forgive me. But I couldn’t help overhearing your theological conversation. Tell you the truth, the subject of Hell and Damnation are quite near and dear to my heart. And I share your sentiments entirely, sir. Hell is… why it’s incomprehensible. Words fail to capture the grandeur. The awe. One must see the unquenchable fire, a sea of rolling flames, dazzling, hotter and brighter than the sun. The clouds of smoke, billowing like fog, full of a potpourri of sulfur and brimstone, carrying the laments of the tormented, the voices of countless souls, more numerous than the sands of a beach, each one taking up the notes of the first murderer, all singing the song of Cain.”
The stranger closed his eyes.
“I can hear them now. Billions of voices. The choir of the damned.” He sighed, smiling down at the squirming, whimpering, bleeding Frank. “As you said, Frank, Hell is too much for a man to think about. You have to see it to believe it.” He snaked the barrel of the revolver into Frank’s mouth and cocked the hammer back. “You can thank me later.”
“Godspeed, gentlemen.”
The stranger waved farewell as the men’s souls were dragged under the veil into the Spirit World by dozens of goblins. A smile stretched across his pallid face as the echoes of Frank and Emil’s screams mixed with the goblins’ cackling laughter trickled around him. Soon the two souls would vanish down a long, serpentine tunnel, one of many, all the way down to the endless sea of fire, where they would forever burn and thirst. Where the worm does not rest. Where there is great weeping and gnashing of teeth.
He shivered as a chill went down his spine, knowing that he would be sharing the same fate. Burning in the fire. He, an everlasting fuel for the ever-starving flames. The heat. The sweat. Parched. Dried out. Forever and always. The smile was gone.
He turned to Frank’s dead body. Brains haloed the head. Arms outstretched to the side like they were nailed on a cross. Fire made the blood all over the body shine. The stranger giggled.
“That’s a nice shirt you got there,” he said, ejecting the empty casings from the revolver’s cylinder. It was only the body, the husk. The soul long gone, dragged to Hell, but still the stranger enjoyed a good chat. Kneeling, he removed bullets from Frank’s belt and reloaded the revolver. “Mine is in need of a bit of repair, but I am afraid there isn’t a seamstress around for miles and miles. It is a nice shirt. You… you wouldn’t mind ? Would you, Frank?”
The stranger’s black shirt was a mess of tattered ribbons, shredded by a shotgun blast. He shed it. His clammy, emaciated body was striped with purple bruises. His skin cleaved to every contour of his ribs. The skin stretched to the extent of its tensile strength, stretched and pulled to near transparency. His belly caved in clear to his spine and his pelvic bones jutted up like two canine teeth, rounded by ages of grinding. They were capped with callouses from the years of wading under the burden of chains.
The desert night was cool and he stood up, pausing to enjoy the night, gazing up at the stars as a breeze wicked the clammy film on his body, as it whistled softly through the nearly healed hole in his forehead. He watched the stars drift. Imperceptible to most, but to him who had been locked away in complete darkness alone with nothing but the shifting of his thoughts, the stars scurried across the sky like sparkling beetles.
“It’s been a long time since I saw the stars, Frank,” he said. “Beautiful. Dazzling. Like little pinpricks of mercury. Like freckles of silver dust. A testament to the wonder of creation. God Almighty, I hate them.” The stranger hocked and spat, returning his attention to Frank, unbuttoning the dead man’s shirt.
“I apologize for being so forward, Frank. I know we only just met, but there’s no reason to be so stiff,” he giggled, flopping a limp arm out of the sleeve. The arm fell, slapping the hard dirt.
The stranger found Frank’s horse. The gelding was trapped in a natural corral of juniper trees, its reins entangled in the thick branches of a scrub bush. Well, at least, the stranger thought it was Frank’s horse. It could be the other fella’s. The one with the knife in his neck. The one whose britches the stranger was wearing now. He took that fella’s gunbelt too. A fine piece of craftsmanship. The leather worker had carved a splendid design of tobacco flowers into the holster. The stranger had two pistols now.
The stranger coaxed the scared horse and unsnared it from the bushes, leading it out of the corral of juniper. He swung up into the saddle. He was light on the horse’s back. Far lighter than a man. Far more different feeling than anything the gelding had ever experienced and he didn’t like it. His ears were tilted back and his eyes were white rimmed. He danced, snorted, and chomped on the bit.
“Easy, boy,” the stranger said, cinching the reins tighter and tighter so the gelding couldn’t swing its head down. “Easy.”
And when the gelding was still, its belly swelling between the stranger’s legs with wild, nervous breaths, the stranger leaned over the horn, petted the massive neck and whispered into its ear.
The words had never been known by men. Never spoken by human tongues. But the words he muttered had been heard by countless souls. They fell sweetly, like drops of honey. And they lulled, words weaving together in a kind of droning cadence. The gelding’s ears drooped and the wildness drained from his eyes, filling now with a creeping drowsiness.
Along with a speck of gray. It appeared in the gelding’s pupil. Like a flake of ash. But, it spread beneath the film and shine. Spreading with each lazy blink, like billowing rain clouds, till the entirety of its eyes were filled with a storming gray, churning like trapped smoke. The gelding snorted and clawed the ground. The stranger giggled as he touched his heels to ribs. Under the starry sky, alone in the desert, horse and rider walked alongside the line of lonely train tracks toward a horizon, where the world was cut, the bleeding of a rising sun.
“This is life,” the stranger pronounced, breathing deeply the dark morning air. “A man and his horse. The meeting of new friends. The thrill of the chase.”
The gelding snorted.
“Of course! She has to die. That’s the contract. Kill her. It wouldn’t bode well for me if I didn’t. Not at all. Think of my reputation. My flawless record. I can’t let her ruin that. Consistency is key in my line of work. Such a small detail. So many of the young bucks don’t understand. They’re all about the flash or the high dollar names, but I tell you, a job is a job. No matter the soul. You do your best work. You take pride in it. Every time. Then that makes you reliable. And reliability, my good beast of burden, if you’re seen as reliable, why, you’ll spend less and less time bound in the chains.”
The gelding held his head lazily, bobbing with the slow steps.
“Yes, I know what you’re pondering. In theory, I’m still bound. Though the metal links aren’t coiled about my body, bruising my flesh, burdening my bones, I still feel their oppressive weight. Because, soon as the job is complete, a hundred goblin hands will drag me back to my prison.”
A fly buzzed around the gelding’s head. He flicked his ears.
“I already explained why she had to die. And besides, the power remains with the Armadillo Shaman. The goblin fiends are at his command. Even now, he could summon them and I would feel their cold grip. The chains. The darkness. The waiting.”
The sun balanced on the line of the desert horizon like a flaming wheel. Bright and red. Its heat permeating the world, evaporating the coolness, steaming the air. The stranger pulled the brim of the hat (Frank’s hat) to shade his weak eyes, still unaccustomed to the brilliant light. He squinted, viewing the sun, not as some heavenly orb bringing the goodness of light and warmth to a sleeping world, but as a portal to Hell, a window to the insatiable flames, a portent of shriveling heat, of the drowning sweat, an omen of the searing light.
He didn’t know when the Judgment would come. It could be tomorrow, it could be a few millennia. But, bound in the chains, just waiting, left with only his anxious imagination, was not how he wanted to go. No. Fist raised. A fist filled with souls, souls that wouldn’t make it to Heaven, souls that would cook alongside him, souls that screamed in the flames next to him. Perhaps their tortured faces would remind him of his glory days, of his past life, when he had power. Frank and Emil’s faces came in his memory. Hundreds of others appeared as well. Perhaps, like trophies, they would bring him comfort on his lowest days.
The gelding whinnied.
“I think there will come a time where we can discuss options,” the stranger spread a toothy smile. “For now, we follow these tracks. I’m sure our lady friend and her white knight have stopped off in the nearest town, thinking, quite innocently, that their purserer is dead and buried.”
As the sun climbed higher, brightening the landscape, a frail column of smoke wafted a few hundred yards in the distance near the line of train tracks. Soon, they saw the dingy canvas of a wagon and heard the clamoring of pots as men cooked breakfast. The stranger petted the horse’s neck, “It’s only polite to say Good Morning.”