Karina Halle - Donners of the Dead

“And your mother? Is she still alive?”

That was debatable. “She is. But…she’s not the same. She’s not really my mother anymore. I was always more of my father’s child than hers. After he died, she withdrew from me even more. She stopped speaking. She stopped looking after me. That’s when we had to move in with my aunt and uncle. They take care of my mother…”

“But they never really take care of you.”

“No. I took care of myself.”

He exhaled though his nose and held me closer to him. “When we get out of here, we can bring your mother along if you want.”

I turned my head to look at him. He had such a magnificent profile. “You mean that?”

He smiled softly. “I told you that I was going where my heart desires. It desires you. We’ve got gold and a reason. We can go anywhere you want, we can take anyone you want.”

I was touched at the sincerity in his voice. I wasn’t quite sure if my mother would ever leave her sister’s side, but it was nice to know that the option was there. As for me, I couldn’t comprehend having the means to leave and not leave River Bend. With Avery gone, I’d be at the mercy of Uncle Pat. He was my last saving grace after my father had left.

I studied Jake’s face, his gruff beard, the hard lines of his jaw and chin contrasted with the kindness in his eyes, the way he appraised me even as I was lying in his arms. Perhaps this funny beast of a man would be my saving grace as well.

“Eve, get up!” Jake’s haggard voice broke through my dreams. I groaned, feeling a sore ache between my legs, and rolled over. I had slept like a log. The light was grey; morning was here.

And all was not well.

“Eve!” he yelled again, and the hides were suddenly thrown off me. I yelped and scrambled for my long stays and quickly covered up my indecency.

I suppose I wasn’t moving fast enough though as Jake tried to get me up. He grabbed my arm and pulled.

“What is it?” I cried out, feeling the panic rolling off of him. When Jake panicked, I knew something was very wrong.

“We have to go. The horses are gone.”

My stomach sank. “What do you mean the horses are gone?”

“I mean they are gone,” he said. He grabbed the pack that was in the corner and shook it. “This is all we have left.” He rummaged through it and pulled out two bars of gold. “Thank the damn Lord we at least have this.”

“Did they take off in the night?” I asked. I had been too involved with him last night to have been paying the horses any attention. “Weren’t they hitched to a tree?”

“They certainly were. I made sure of that. I didn’t want to risk losing them to their free-roaming fancies when we’re all the way out here.” He paused. “There are tracks too.”

“What kind of tracks?” I asked slowly.

“Human tracks,” he answered grimly.

At that, I quickly shoved on my stays and dress—I wouldn’t have bothered with the corset even if he hadn’t destroyed it—and slipped on my boots. “I don’t understand,” I finally said, my heart racing. “If it was…them…why didn’t they take us too?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps they knew we’d put up too much of a fight. They are weak without human meat, least that’s the way I reckon.”

“So they ate the horses instead?” I asked, horrified.

“Either that or they took them to ride them.”

“They couldn’t. You’ve seen them. They’re too much like animals to have that kind of thought.”

“True,” Jake said as he started folding up the hides and threw everything back into the pack. “But Isaac was still fairly human when we found him, probably because he hadn’t eaten all of the stew. Perhaps they go in and out depending on how much meat they’ve had, perhaps they have to resort to other sources of meat to stay alive. They’ve lived in these mountains for long enough, they have to be surviving on something. The animals probably give them another few days to live, just as they would to us.”

“Then they might be around here watching us,” I said, my stomach still sick over the idea of the monsters eating Trouble. Judging from the pained expression on Jake’s face, he felt the same way too. “Do you think the horses can turn? I saw what happened to our neighbor’s horse, Nero.”

“I don’t know what that was. Perhaps just an omen.”

An omen I should have paid attention to.

“What are we going to do?” I asked as I crawled out of the cave and surveyed the scene. Sure enough, the horses were gone. The smell of rotted flesh competed with the smoldering ashes of the fire. The tracks left in the snow were a mix of bare feet and boots. It was wishful thinking to imagine we were victims of ordinary horse thieves. In these bloody mountains, nothing was ordinary.

“We have no choice,” Jake said, placing the pack on his good shoulder. “We’ve got to walk and we have to walk soon.”

He walked over to me and kissed my forehead. The warmth of his lips on my skin gave me a boost of much needed strength.

He placed the rifle in my hands. That gave me strength, too.

We took off away from the cliff face, me with the rifle, him with his revolver and the infamous axe, and headed through the narrow path through the trees. It was obvious from the way the snow here was trodden up that we not only passed through here before but the monsters did too. If they did eat the horses, at least they didn’t do it at the camp. I had the terrible, terrible image of them leading Trouble back to a darkened wood where hundreds of the monsters sat on their haunches like gargoyles, waiting for their next meal.

“Jake,” I said after we’d been walking for a few hours. My legs were stiff and my feet were cold. The snow was lessening as we went down, but there was still enough to make things both difficult and pretty.

“Mhmm” he grunted, his voice strained. He was feeling it too.

“What if there are more?” I asked.

“More?” he repeated without turning around.

“More of them. What if there are too many? What if they discover River Bend and the rest of the country? What happens then?”

“I reckon we should worry about that once we’re done worrying about ourselves.”

I tugged on his jacket sleeve until he stopped and looked at me. He raised up the brim of his hat and I could see sweat gathered at his temples.

“But what if?”

He sighed and looked up at the trees. He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’d like to think they’ll stay here and die here.”

“But this is the only trail over to California. The wagons going westward, they have to go up to Oregon in order to reach the Pacific. More and more people will go through here and more and more people will…turn.”

“Turn?”

“Turn into them. Become addicted to human flesh, to the power it gives.”

He chewed on his lip. “You know, I’d kill someone for a cigar right now. Look, I hear what you are saying. But we can’t do anything about that at this moment. I promised to keep you safe just as you promised to keep yourself safe. If we happen across them, we’ll kill them best we can, even if they wave the white flag and surrender. But for now, we can only worry about each other.”

I nodded. I knew what he was saying, but that didn’t erase the fear. I didn’t think anything could. Every heavy step we took through the forest, surviving on snow water and the last of the raccoon meat, was a step of dread. I feared every shadow, every smell, every sound. We were on foot, and despite our weaponry, we were still at the mercy of God or luck or the mountain or something beyond our control.

We went onwards though, because to stop was to die. We trudged through the snow—step by step by step—and we lived in the constant anxiety that nothing was safe except for each other.