Dennis Yates - Red Mountain

He tried to squirm free from their grasp but it was of no use. The more he struggled, the deeper their long yellow nails sank into his flesh.

Rudy soon spotted the branch they’d readied for him and began to scream.

After they were finished, the two figures picked up their satchels of stolen gold and followed Maynard’s footprints in the deepening snow.

CHAPTER 21

It wasn’t until the following morning that the bounty hunters managed to chase Maynard up into one of the mountain glaciers. Sheriff Longhorn had been close enough by to join the small party of men. They had Maynard backed up next to a crevasse in the sloping field of ice.

By afternoon they’d managed to once again exhaust Maynard’s ammo supply, yet they knew this was the least of their worries. They’d seen the trail of mutilated bodies Maynard had left behind. No ordinary man could have done what they’d witnessed, unless he was the very devil himself.

The stories they’d heard from the few survivors no longer sounded like the talk of men who’d lost their minds. Nearly everyone who’d gotten close to Maynard saw his twin demons, in a variety of forms.

Surrounded by several men with their rifles trained on Maynard, Longhorn shouted at the killer to give himself up. Moving together as one, the men stepped closer until they could see Maynard’s face.

“Give your self up,” shouted Longhorn. “There’s no way out this time.”

Maynard spoke to the two pale men standing next to him. They were unarmed and loaded down with heavy satchels and burlap sacks of gold. Longhorn couldn’t understand how the rail-thin men could possibly have the strength to carry all that weight. The longer he watched the more he became convinced that something wasn’t right. Then Hicks said their necks were slit and handed him a glass and he’d almost dropped it after he looked.

They weren’t ordinary men, that’s for sure. Unless you think a dead man that moves is something ordinary…

After the two corpses tossed the gold next to Maynard’s feet, they turned and charged Longhorn and the others. It took more rounds than the bounty hunters had expected to bring them down and even then they continued to crawl toward them across the snow until their heads had been blown off their necks.

Maynard had watched silently. Then he dumped the horde into the dark fissure behind him and grinned as the bounty hunters scowled in disbelief.

“You cannot kill me,” he shouted. He backed up to the lip of the crevasse with a loaded saddlebag slung over his shoulder, opened his arms wide and fell backwards into the crevasse.

Those who witnessed his fall claimed to have seen shadows rise from the slain men rush to join their master.

A search was conducted afterwards, but neither Maynard nor the gold was ever found. Satisfied the devil must have fallen all the way back to hell, Longhorn and the others returned home to bury their dead.

A peace settled over Wrath Butte for the next several years. Longhorn retired and was replaced by Sheriff Underwood. For Underwood, the relative peace of Wrath Butte didn’t completely unravel again until after Jared Horn began selling his carving pictures. Had the elders in town been aware that Horn was spending time up in the glacier, they might have warned others of the danger.

CHAPTER 22

Although he sometimes freaked even himself out by what he was capable of doing, Walker Marsh was having a hell of a good time. Riding the razor’s edge was the way he always preferred it, and it had been such a long time since he’d experienced the thrill, even with strings attached. As a soldier in Vietnam, he’d had the opportunity to develop a particular taste for things he could only experience with great difficulty back home. The jungle, however, had afforded him much greater cover, until the day when Marsh’s commanding officer discovered what he was doing, leaving Marsh with no choice but to kill the man while he slept.

Unlike his fellow vets, Marsh never had any dreams to pursue when he stepped off the plane in San Francisco on a sunny afternoon and was greeted by a crowd who spat and screamed at him for killing babies. By the mid-seventies he took overseas mercenary work until mental health problems began to interfere with future job prospects. He’d never imagined the day when the shadowy people who hired mercenaries would suddenly become so picky. Afterwards, he found himself taking on the driving and bodyguard duties for a network of very wealthy and paranoid men, and it was during this time in Walker’s life that he wisely chose to shed his mercenary identity like an old skin. Replacing the military jargon that had flowed off his tongue naturally for so many years, he tried his best to sound like the loyal servant his employers expected. The severe mood swings had lessened, and what fear people still had of him actually worked in his favor. Walker lasted at the job for almost seven years, until he discovered one day that his employers were planning to make him take the rap for a double murder one of them had committed during a drunken rage at a hotel in Miami, forcing him to run with nothing more than five hundred dollars cash and the clothes on his back.

With a limited number of places to go, he returned to Wrath Butte. He’d been smart not to tell his employers where he was from, knowing all too well that he might pay for the mistake later. He found what work he could, which usually consisted of kissing tourist ass to some degree or another. For years Walker had lived in a shabby apartment above Wrath Butte Drug and Liquor, where he’d spend hours sitting next to the blinds watching people come and go on the street below unless he was pulling a miserable janitorial shift up at the ski lodge.

He felt like an old wolf who’d been locked up at the pound, counting the days before his adoption period was over, listening for the people who would eventually come to give him his permanent sleep shot.

And then his life shifted into another direction. With adoption papers in hand, Fate had intervened, springing him loose from a prison of inertia.

****

When he inherited the Horn homestead from his aunt, Marsh was not exactly overjoyed. In fact he would have burned it to the ground if there’d been any money in it, for the place was about as worthless as the hardscrabble ground it stood upon. If it were closer to town it might have been considered an eyesore, but you had to drive several miles up an unpleasant washboard road to get to it. The only thing the property had going for it was its privacy, for there wasn’t a single home within miles.

During the years before Marsh took possession of the house, teenagers frequently used it for drinking parties. One summer a cheerleader’s half nude body was found hanging from the giant cottonwood tree that slouched next to it, and despite the efforts of the local police, the mystery surrounding her death was never solved. To further add to Wrath Butte’s tragic news, a teenage boy who’d attended the party the same night later committed suicide.

Bending under pressure from the local authorities, Marsh’s aunt had the house boarded up and put in a barbed wire fence to keep people out. She placed the house up for sale, but received no offers. It stood untouched for almost a decade longer before it fell into Walker’s hands.

Depressed one day after being fired from yet another dead-end job, Walker cashed his final paycheck and bought a bottle of Old Crow and a brand new sledgehammer before driving out to his inheritance. It was a scorching hot afternoon, and by the time he’d finished half the bottle of whiskey he was stripped down to his underwear and running through the house, smashing walls and cursing at the world for screwing him over once more.