Hell, p.8
Hell, page 8
“Alright, ya bastard, we searched your packs, where’d you hide the gold? You have til the count of three before we make you watch your precious daughter bleed to death!” Confident that Yurgis would submit.
“One…”
Her markings began to crawl.
“Two…”
Not now, please, not now…
“Thr…”
“I won’t do it Heinz.” The Innkeeper spoke up, dropping the knife. This caused the other man to take his eyes off his mark. Yurgis took advantage of this momentary distraction. Striking like a cobra, he seized the man’s windpipe, crushing it in one swift movement. Heinz fell to the ground clutching his throat sputtering, struggling to breathe...
In a blinding flash of light, she released with a shuddering convulsion.
The Innkeeper burst into flames, eyes rupturing in their sockets. His overtaxed heart exploded, spraying her with boiling hot blood as his flesh cooked, melting off the bones, showering her in entrails and gore. Fighting to maintain consciousness, the smell of charred and blackened meat caused her to become violently ill; emptying her guts all over the bed, she frantically struggled to extricate herself from the embrace of the flaming revenant..
Yurgis sprang from his cot, lifting the smoldering corpse and throwing it to the floor. Smothering the dying flames with a blanket, leaving it covering what was left of the body like a shroud. He hurriedly began to dress.
“Come Tatiana, that was Innkeeper and Blacksmith. We must escape. Cannot afford to be caught now.”
With no time to wash up, Tat dressed in her old travel clothes, numb with shock, half-drunk and covered in unspeakable offal. Her father pried up a floorboard in the corner and retrieved a gunny sack, heavy with gold, which he stowed away in his shoulder-satchel.
The Blacksmith, still clinging to life, breath gurgling through lungfuls of blood. Yurgis pulled his hunting knife and slit his throat, wiping the blade clean on the man’s woolen sweater before sheathing it.
“No gold for you, it is you who dies tonight, yes?”
They gathered their belongings, fleeing the inn as the unlucky thief bled out.
Under cover of darkness they saddled the horses and galloped away, the memory of the melting man still haunting her. It was easier now to accept that she had indeed killed the troupe. Having witnessed her power firsthand, she no longer wished to master it.
Sweet, innocent Ciara, what would become of her? And the Blacksmith’s daughters, whose names she couldn’t even remember. Two families irrevocably destroyed. She was a monster. If she thought she was depressed before, that was nothing compared to the black cloud that settled upon her in that pre-dawn flight.
Near sunrise they sought shelter at the edge of a forest several hundred meters back from the road. Posting up on a wooded ridge afforded them a good view of any potential threat. After securing the horses deeper within, they hunkered down to wait.
Around noon a posse of horsemen rode by, consisting of several peace officers and a small mob of angry townspeople, clearly looking for them.
“We must remain hidden. If caught, will be hangman’s tree for us. I have no intention of dying here.”
The thought of death held no fear for Tat, but her personal view of redemption dictated she die by her own hand. Any other death was unacceptable. This alone kept her from betraying their position. After several minutes, the posse split up, ostensibly to cover more ground, disappearing from view. As Tat started to rise, Yurgis sharply pulled her again to the ground.
“Stupid girl, this is obvious trick to draw us out. We wait for one hour.” He whispered, pulling out a map and studying it intently.
Time passed with a slow, grinding tension as they both lay perfectly still. In stark contrast to her physical immobility, Tat’s mind practically bubbled with activity; desperately seeking to reconcile how she had always viewed herself, an innocent victim, with the drug addicted murderer she had now become. Part of her sought to maintain her innocence by rationalizing that killing the Innkeeper was done in self-defense, but that was untrue. He’d dropped the knife, he was unarmed. But, she couldn’t control it, couldn’t stop the destructive power that resided within her, it wasn’t her fault. Even as part of her attempted to escape blame, another much larger and vehemently vocal part resolutely condemned her.
I deserve everything that’s happened to me, I deserve to be in hell.
Thus she was trapped in an endless cycle of mental self-destruction, made all the worse by the continuing agony of Soldier’s Disease. How long would this damned pain last?
A sharp crack as a branch snapped behind them, causing Yurgis to leap to his feet.
“Don’t move, or I’ll shoot!”
A uniformed peace officer, barely more than a boy, stood about three meters away, training a rifle on them. Yurgis stopped, knife halfway out of its sheath. He must have located them from their tracks, then circled around to attack their exposed flank.
The officer continued in a fiercely authoritative tone, “You stand accused of the murders of Ronan Devine and Friedrich Heinz, throw down your weapons and yield!”
Tat glanced at her father, wondering what he would do. Always unpredictable, she couldn’t see him submitting; This was going to end badly...
To her surprise, he glibly unfurled his silver tongue, “There has been mistake, officer, they were attempting to rob us, we acted in self-defense.”
He took a single step forward and the officer fired his rifle, striking the earth mere centimeters from his boot, stopping him in his tracks. Working the bolt, he reloaded. Tat knew that the sound of the shot would surely bring the man’s comrades. For better or worse this had to end now.
“That is for the court to decide, though the innocent rarely flee the scene of a crime. Now get on the ground!”
She could tell that Yurgis wasn’t about to comply, “We are simple gypsies, there is no justice in your courts for us…”
Her father then employed one of his most devious tricks. He glanced sharply to the left, as if something startled him. This caused the officer to reflexively look away, a fatal mistake. Faster than the eye could see Yurgis drew his knife and threw…
To his credit, the surprised lawman still managed to get a shot off, striking Yurgis in the thigh, but her father’s aim was true as ever, the knife sinking to the hilt in the man’s right eye, ending him.
Tat froze up inside, dread blossoming in the pit of her stomach. There was no going back now. Before, there was a chance they might have been acquitted of murder, but this was the slaying of an officer of the law in cold blood.
Yurgis retrieved his knife, drawing it out with a sick, chunking sound, then the dead man’s rifle, which he slung over his shoulder. A cursory search of the corpse yielded a cache of ammunition. He also took the man’s handcuffs and key.
“Come, we must go now!” Seizing her hand, he began to pull her through the forest to where they’d left the horses.
“But you’re bleeding.” She protested.
“We worry about that later, I live through much worse.”
They located their mounts, saddling up and kicking them into a gallop, weaving between the trees. Everything was happening so fast she had no time to get her thoughts in order, all she could do was blindly follow her father headlong into destruction.
They reached the edge of the forest undetected. Before them lay open prairie, divided neatly in two by train tracks. Yurgis grabbed her horse’s reins, pulling her closer to him.
“There has been change of plans.” He began…
“That’s an understatement.” Tat interrupted, at the end of her rope in the midst of a massive panic attack.
“Silence, you stupid girl. Now, according to map, these tracks lead straight to our destination. So, we wait here until train passes. Board it.”
“How do we do that? There is no station, it won’t stop for us.”
“We ride horses alongside of train, jump on.”
Tat was aghast, “Are you mad?! That is the stupidest…” Yurgis slapped her hard across the face, ceasing her protestations.
“Be ready when I give signal.”
They heard it long before they saw it, a long, lonely whistle drifting on the breeze. Presently its vibration could be felt through the ground. It crested the horizon, speeding towards them, long and thin and belching black smoke like some demonic snake.
Yurgis tensed up, pointing into the distance, “Just over ridge is river gorge. Have to be on train before it reaches bridge. Get ready!”
Tat was beside herself in fear, having once witnessed the aftermath of a man cut in half attempting to board a train in a similar manner…
“GO!” He shouted.
Simultaneously they whipped their mounts into a headlong gallop, perpendicular to the tracks, timed to rendezvous with the speeding train. About twenty meters out, the massive locomotive tore past them. Banking their horses left, now running parallel, Yurgis on the inside, Tat on his left, they sidled up alongside. The train was going slightly faster than they were so they would have one shot at this. The horses as well were tiring, they couldn’t keep this up for much longer.
Two sealed cars passed them before an open hay-car approached. Yurgis threw their packs aboard and leaned out, grasping one of the steel rungs of the ladder adjacent to the open bay door. Swinging his leg over, he executed a precise leap out of the stirrup, landing square on the platform. His horse, now rider-less, dropped back and Tat moved into position.
The train was now too far ahead for her to use the ladder for an easy boarding, she would have to jump. She swung her leg over and braced it on the saddle, working her way into a crouching position, ready to leap. She remembered performing a trick like this with Poto, standing on the saddle while he trotted in a circle. Here, the stakes were much higher.
Yurgis held out his hands, ready to catch her. Though nearly paralyzed with fear, she gathered her strength and leapt...
At the exact moment she pushed off, her horse veered away sharply to avoid a railway sign marking the edge of the canyon...
She fell short.
Yurgis lunged, barely catching hold of her hand as she swung perilously close to the killing wheels.
The train left solid ground behind, hurtling across the skeletal structure of the railway bridge. She was now suspended above a vast emptiness, the river hundreds of meters below. Her hand, slick with sweat, slipping out of his…
“Help me! She screamed.
“Give me other hand!” Yurgis yelled.
Her other arm was flailing wildly, she extended it towards him…
That was when her hand slipped out of his and she fell.
The feeling of gravity’s pull coupled with extreme vertigo caused her stomach to lurch. Wind rushing by her ears drowned her screams as she plummeted towards the rocks below, the ground rushing up to meet her. After all this time, her recurring nightmare, coming true.
This is it.
In those last seconds, an inexplicable joy infused her, an incomprehensible happiness at her impending demise. Her body clenched in sudden seizure as her vision doubled, clearly seeing herself asleep on the train, but this was no dream… this was reality. The vision intensified, both possibilities achieving equal probability before reality inevitably overthrew fantasy; spreading her arms to embrace her beloved death, violently breaking upon the canyon floor.
Chapter Five:
An Old Friend
She awoke with a gasp, the night landscape flying by accompanied by the clickety-clack of wheels as the train carried them ever closer to their destination. It had been three days since their boarding and she had the same nightmare every time she went to sleep. A variation of the same dream she always had, about Yurgis pushing her off a cliff. Strange that now he was attempting to save her, and she was happy to fall…
In reality, boarding had gone off without a hitch, she’d jumped and Yurgis caught her easily. There hadn’t even been a bridge. Why was she having these dreams? What was it about falling? If she had to guess, it probably had something to do with her constant feelings of helplessness and impending doom...
“What’s wrong?” Yurgis inquired, voice sluggish with sleep. They slept handcuffed together, in case she got any ideas of escape, and the slightest movement would wake him.
“I had another nightmare.”
“Hmmmph.” Yurgis gruntingly scoffed, rolling over and going back to sleep, twisting her arm into an uncomfortable position.
Sleep would come no more this night, her mind was too full of fear. All she could do was wait, wonder and worry what was to become of her…
“Tat!”
She jerked awake to the light of day; seems she’d been able to drop off for a few hours of blessedly dreamless slumber before dawn after all. She yawned and stretched, before realizing that they were still handcuffed together.
“What is it?” She asked groggily.
Yurgis, deathly pale, visibly sweating. “You must help me,” he said, unlocking the cuffs, leaning against a hay bale. “I need you to get bullet out of leg, infection, setting in.” He unsheathed his knife, holding it out to her hilt first. “Dig it out.”
She recoiled in horror, “Can’t you do it yourself?”
He chuckled weakly, “No, I am too fat, I cannot get close enough to see. You must do it.”
Deep down, she’d known this was coming. He hadn’t spoken of his gunshot wound in days, and it was only a matter of time before poison seeped into his blood. Her hands were shaking as she took the knife from him. Yurgis never let anyone touch his knife, the situation must be dire. Laying her hand on his forehead, feeling the heat of fever.
Plunge the blade into his throat.
He wasn’t paying attention, would never expect it; but she was better than that, she wasn’t like him, wasn’t a murderer. Never would she willingly lower herself to his level, no matter how much he deserved it... or how much she wanted to.
Making a hard decision, she retrieved her bag, digging all the way down to the bottom. The canteen containing the last of her laudanum. Hesitating, she gazed at it longingly, knowing that when it was gone, there would be no more. Oh well, she’d be dead soon enough anyway. If Izaak could endure the horrors of leprosy, what was a little temporary discomfort. Each day the pain was becoming slightly more manageable. The real problem was the mental obsession. Even when the pain was entirely gone, that would remain with her for the rest of her life.
She thrust the canteen at Yurgis, “Drink this.”
“What is it?” He asked suspiciously.
“Laudanum, a painkiller made from opium.”
“I know what laudanum is,” he growled. “Where did you get it.”
“Don’t ask, just be glad I have it.” A risky response. To her surprise, he acquiesced, unscrewing the lid and emptying the contents into his mouth.
Two minutes later he was ready. Unbuckling his leather belt, pulling it free of its loops, recalling all the times he’d used it to beat her, especially the last... She folded it in half and put it into his mouth, wondering why she was bothering to help this terrible man at all, then took up the knife.
All the times she’d witnessed field surgery on the road with the troupe, why hadn’t she paid more attention? Angling the blade, she first cut off his pant leg, exposing the wound. The skin around it was a dangerous looking yellowish-red, dried blood crusted over all black. She would have to reopen the hole in his leg.
“Do you have any Vodka in your packs?”
Yurgis nodded, “Is in leather satchel.”
Digging in the satchel, she located the bottle, then in a side pouch she discovered Yurgis’ lighter. There was still remnants of the officer’s blood on the blade, so she wiped it off as best she could, held it in the lighter’s flame for two minutes, then poured a little vodka on it, hoping that was good enough to sterilize it for what she had to do. Before setting down the bottle, she took a long drink to prepare herself for this grisly task; if Yurgis objected, he chose to bide his time.
“Ready?” She asked nervously.
“Get it over with.” He said, biting down on the leather belt once again. His eyes closed, breathing slowed, muscles of his face going totally slack.
The first cut, a foul-smelling mixture of blood and pus oozing out around the blade. No reaction from Yurgis, he remained unchanged, as if sleeping. Another hesitant incision, marking an X. Her breathing, harsh and ragged through her mouth to avoid the smell.
Steeling herself for the next step of this macabre procedure, she pressed down at the edges of the wound, expelling as much of the infected liquid as she could. If Yurgis felt anything, he didn’t show it, his breath slow and steady as ever. Even when she doused the area with Vodka, nothing, not even the slightest betrayal of discomfort. Using scraps of fabric cut from his pant leg, she wiped the area clean.
Now for the hard part. Since the bullet hadn’t exited the back of his thigh, it was obvious that it had struck bone. It should be at the bottom of the hole, next to the femur. Drawing a deep breath, she slid the blade down into the wound, watching all the time for any reaction from Yurgis.
What now? Listen for the sound of the metal blade hitting lead? The din of the train made that impossible. How was she supposed to know when she found it? She poked around for a minute or two, trying to locate the slug by feel alone, presently encountering some resistance. That had to be it, but try as she might, it wouldn’t budge, the blade kept slipping. He was losing a lot of blood, and she was growing frustrated...
Without thinking twice, she abandoned the knife, sticking her long, graceful index finger into the hole. It was slick and wet and disgusting, though she was successful in locating the bullet. It had worked its way around to the side of the bone, the reason she couldn’t pry it out with the knife. Forcing her thumb into the wound as well, she sought to grip the slippery slug. Time after time, failure, unable to find purchase.
She wanted to give up, admit defeat, with any luck he’d bleed out and she’d be done with him. Plunging into the wound one final time, scratching and pinching with all her strength, at last withdrawing her fingers with the bloody lump pinched deftly between thumb and forefinger. Yurgis opened his eyes to see it before she threw it out the open door.
