Craig Johnson - Hell Is Empty

I moved my hand up the length of the lance and could feel the horsehair wrapping around my hands with the wind, almost as if it was gripping me back. The deer hooves clacked together like chimes and the elk teeth mimicked them. In that small darkness with my eyes closed, I thought specifically of the things that I had to do, and the order in which I had to do them. I had to move, dead or alive. I couldn’t allow Virgil to face Raynaud Shade alone. It was his responsibility, but it was my duty.

You have haunting to do.

I decided to put Virgil’s beliefs to the test. My back felt like it was going to snap, but I hoisted the ascent pack onto my shoulder and used the lance to stand, my knees once again doing the vegetable melody.

I stood there in the blowing snow feeling like some mountain sentry, but it helped to stand, not to fall down, not to concede, not to die-not again. I readjusted the balaclava back over my face, pulled the collar of the jacket up, the Gore-Tex encrusted with iced condensation and frozen mucus from my runny nose.

I growled in my throat, just to give my body a warning, and then turned to let my eyes follow Virgil’s footprints as they angled up. I could see only two steps before they vanished into the low-flying clouds and blowing snow.

Two steps.

“Two steps.”

I smiled at my cracking voice sounding back the words of my mind like the echoes from the rock walls below. I knew they were my words because ghosts’ teeth didn’t chatter-or did they?

Just two.

“Just two.”

Swallowing what moisture there was left in my mouth, I turned and looked up the boulder field toward the summit, or where the summit should’ve been-and started up.

My right leg had become weaker than my left, probably because it was my dominant side and I had used it more strenuously. The strain on the tops of my thighs was excruciating, and my ankles moved like nineteenth-century hinges connected to my lead-encased feet. I kept my head down, dragging the snowshoes and concentrating on the rapidly disappearing prints, using the lance as a walking staff the same way the big Crow had.

I remembered that there was still a water bottle in the ascent pack, so I rested the lance against my shoulder and fumbled to get the container out. I found the thing and took no comfort in the fact that it felt like an anvil encased in plastic. I used my teeth to unscrew the top and then stuck the mouth of the bottle into my own. There was no residual water so I put the cap on as best I could and tucked the frozen bottle inside my coat next to the paperback of Inferno. The second the bottle got inside, I realized I’d made a mistake and plunged a hand in to get it away from me. My core body temperature was fighting a battle of its own, and I’d just dropped a thermal bomb on it for its trouble. I yanked the bottle from the neck opening in my coat and watched as it arced through the air like a mortar and disappeared into the darkness.

“Well done.”

I took the spear back in my hands and looked at it. Why had he taken my rifle? It was the one of the two weapons that I would’ve chosen, but not the one I would’ve suspected for Virgil. Even with only one round left, maybe he wanted to make sure.

“Vengeance is mine.”

Maybe so, but maybe it’s only the living that can kill the living.

“And the dead that can kill the dead.”

At least I still had my. 45, and for close work it would do just as well.

“You just have to get to the top.”

I stumbled and almost fell, catching myself with the lance and pressing it against my face, the coyote skull against my own. The decorations on the staff were acting as wind chimes, but I could hear something overlying the rhythm-a pattern that was staccato and sharp. A sound from my past.

I took another couple of deep breaths and listened, but it didn’t repeat itself.

Vertigo slipped my perception just a little, and I almost felt as if I was falling again. I swallowed, but there was nothing there. I tried to remember what it was that I was doing, why I was leaning against a war lance. The top, I had to make it to the top of this mountain-something about Virgil and his grandson, Owen.

“Raynaud Shade.”

I kicked off again, and this time headed straight up the incline. The big Indian’s steps were rapidly disappearing, and if I didn’t get moving and fast, I’d never catch up with him. He had angled his ascent, possibly to lessen the climb, but more likely in order to reach the top in some other direction than the one Shade might anticipate. There wasn’t much room to maneuver with the cliffs on all sides, but Virgil was highly motivated. The only problem was that I’d seen Virgil die by Raynaud Shade’s hands once, if not twice, already.

The rhythm repeated itself, more sharply this time, and it felt as if something flew by me, something small that sparked off of one of the larger boulders to my right, ricocheting deep into my memory. Gunfire. It was the Armalite set on automatic, and then the single, thundering shot of the Sharps.

I pushed off with a great deal more urgency, actually finding the momentum easier to sustain. I switched the war lance to my left hand and dropped my right one down to my holster-and felt nothing.

I panicked and yanked at my jacket with stony fingers, but the holster was most assuredly empty.

My eyes blinked in the safely encased goggles as a fullblown gust traveled from the center of my body. I could not remember holstering the Colt on the Knife’s Edge. I’d been so startled by Virgil’s appearance, the. 45 must have slid from my chest when I stood.

There’s no feeling like the one you have when you realize you are desperately in need of a gun and, in one of the few times in your life, don’t have one. That short-circuited, spasmodic split second shot through me as I tried to think of what else I had in the way of firearms, but there was nothing. I couldn’t go back; I barely had the energy to make it the twenty yards to the top, let alone a round-trip close to two hundred.

Never find it.

“Never make it.”

The spear.

“For heaven’s sake.”

Dropping my head like a buffalo bull, I charged up the hill as if I was in slow motion, and the only thing I was conscious of hearing was my breathing. My lungs felt like they were going to burst from my mouth as I continued to push in a direct line for the top. It took forever, and I was sure I was going to stumble into a firefight, but when I did stumble it was because I had reached a flat spot.

I stopped and looked around, breathing so hard I was afraid I might swallow the balaclava. The wind was even stronger near the summit where there was nothing between the North Pole and me, the blowing snow enough to prove it; streaming diagonally, the flakes looked like meteors.

“Hell, they might as well be meteors for as high as I am.”

I was at the apex of the Bighorn range. There was a downgrade to my right and a large outcropping at the center, but the entire summit was no larger than the size of a basketball court, a basketball court with out-of-bounds lines that plunged in a sheer vertical drop of a mile.

I stepped to the left and could feel the platform of granite rising another three feet against my leg. I didn’t move but listened for something, anything that would give me an indication of where Virgil or Shade might be. I could only see maybe three feet ahead of me. I stretched out an arm and watched as my hand disintegrated and disappeared.

I drew it back, afraid that it might not still be there.

There was movement to my left, and I yanked my head around to see nothing except a few Tibetan prayer flags that someone had placed there. There were capsules lodged in the cracks of the rock as well, some of them evident and others half covered with snow.