Karina Halle - Donners of the Dead

Please keep in mind, Donners of the Dead is set in 1851 – couples were often thrust into marriage together with short courtships, racism was widespread and not overly frowned upon, and women had little to no rights. What wouldn’t fly in today’s day and age was unfortunately the norm back then and I did my best to represent that.

The tale of the Donner Party is one of the more compelling yet horrifying events in American history. During the winter of 1846-1847, the party, compromised of not only the Donner family but various wagons representing a range of families who decided to head out west, were stranded in the Sierra Nevadas due to a series of unforeseen circumstances. The weary wagon trains had already faced starvation, murder and theft on their journey so far and were oh so close to their final destination in the valleys of California when tragedy struck. Some people resorted to cannibalism to survive, eating the frozen flesh of those that had died and a few individuals even got a taste for it, rumored to have resulted in many cold-blooded murders. Though there was a search party that managed to rescue the remaining survivors and it was widely known that the wagon train got stranded in the snows, the reports of cannibalism – and the horrific scenes they witnessed – were actually not made known until several years later – after the time period set in this book.

With that being said, although I tried to stay true to the original tale with research from such books as Wagons West by Frank McLynn, I have taken a few fictional liberties with the story and as a result Donners of the Dead cannot be held as historically accurate. I mean, hello, zombies. If you want to know more about the actual events that took place during that horrendous winter, I highly recommend reading up on it.

Sometimes the truth is more gruesome than fiction.

This book contains excerpts from Madeline Sheehan’s upcoming The Beginning of the End as well as Experiment in Terror #9, Dust to Dust, making the book appear longer than it is.

Pre-Nevada Statehood, 1851

The dreams never start the same, but they always end the same.

In death.

My father’s death.

Sometimes I am six years old again and playing in the Truckee River, throwing up the cold mountain runoff with my tiny hands and shooting shy glances at him as he watches me, the smile spreading wide on his auburn face. Sometimes we are walking hand-in-hand down the dusty dirt road toward Mrs. Young’s homestead where he’ll leave me for a few hours to learn maths while he enquires at Barker’s General Store whether there are any hunting requests for him. And sometimes we are just sitting on the rickety porch back at our old place, watching the insects gather around the lantern as he tells me the Washoe names for them. They always sounded so poetic coming from his native tongue.

No matter how the dreams start though, how wonderful the memories are, I can never enjoy them. I know they are about to be ripped from my heart. In a matter of seconds, the picture changes. In the river, he jumps into the water to join me, but never surfaces again. On the road, he drops my hand and runs away into a cloud of dirt. The worst one is what happens to him while we spend the evening hours on the porch. A low, guttural growl emerges from the surrounding pines, as if the trees themselves have unfinished business with him. Pa gets to his feet slowly, hesitantly, and walks straight into the forest. He doesn’t even send me a backwards glance. Then the pines shake, their silhouettes frenzied against the moon, and I hear him for the last time.

One final scream.

Like always, I wake up covered in a thin sheen of sweat.

As I poured my bedside water jug onto my rag and wet my face, the reality sinks back in. I’m alive, in my bed, but my father is not. He really is dead, and the irony is that I sometimes wish those nightmares were real. At least then I would know what happened to him. Either he drowned, or ran away from me, or the trees ate him. I’d take any of those to at least have an answer of why he left on that tracking expedition and never came back.

This night though, I had no time to feel the heaviness in my heart. Far away hollering interrupted my sleep and I stood without thinking. I fumbled to light the candle in my stall-sized bedroom then quickly slipped on my cloak and opened the door into the main room. It was dark and no one else in my uncle’s house was stirring.

I paused, feeling slightly foolish at my impulsiveness and listened for a few beats, trying to catch my ragged breath.

The hollering started again, coming closer to us. My uncle’s ranch was on the far outskirts of the settlement. Whoever was out there was in serious trouble.

I gathered my cloak closer to me and made my way to the front door, about to open it, when someone on the other side started pounding on it wildly. I nearly screamed. I waited for a break before I opened it and saw our neighbor, Ned Kincaid, on our porch, looking like he’d seen something worse than a ghost.

“Eve!” he managed to croak out before collapsing into a coughing fit. I put my arm around him and began to lead him inside the house. He shook his head and leaned against the doorframe. “No, it’s still out there.”

“What’s still out there?” I looked past him but only saw darkness cloaking the nearby acres and the pinpricks of stars in the sky. There was a strange pounding noise though, faint but wicked, off in the distance. Like Ned had, it was also coming in our direction.

“Nero!” he yelled and glanced behind him, his eyes glowing white from fear.

Nero was Ned’s horse. A magnificent coal-colored stallion that I’d often see trotting proudly in his pasture.

“Evie, what are you doing, who is that?” my Uncle Pat’s voice boomed from behind me. He was standing at the foot of the stairs, lantern in hand, my frail Aunt June cowering behind him and holding onto his long johns.

Ned stepped clumsily into the house and looked at my uncle imploringly. “It’s Nero. He’s sick, Pat. He tried to kill us!”

The corner of my uncle’s mouth turned up at Ned’s outburst.

“Now, Ned, let’s calm down a bit here before we—”

“I’m serious!” he screamed so sharply that Pat’s mouth was replaced with a hard, thin line. I sucked in my breath and took another look outside.

“Perhaps we should close the door,” I said quietly, reaching over for the handle. Whether Nero was actually trying to kill Ned or not, the late September night brought a chill with it.

“No,” said Ned, turning around and placing a wet hand on mine. I looked down. It was covered in blood. “I need you to see this, I need you to believe me. Martha didn’t, she didn’t, and now I don’t know where she is, my God, I don’t know…”

There was a loud, solid thunk on the porch, followed by another. The house shook slightly. I kept my eyes trained on the outside but couldn’t see anything.

But I could smell it. And knowing my tracking skills, I should have smelled it before. It was blood and sweat and hay and horse and something unfathomable. Nero was here, a few feet away from us, hidden by the black night, halfway onto the porch.

A severe chill threaded down my back. My lungs refused to exhale.

I thought about throwing Ned’s hand off mine and quickly shutting the door, but everything happened so fast.

Nero snorted.