Mark Tufo - Alive in a Dead World

“How so?”

“The colonel never went out on a mission, ever. And he was hell-bent on getting out to this little fly shit of an Indian village and destroying it. We barely slept, or hardly ate. Eight horses died from being pushed over the edge of exhaustion. Those were some good horses.”

“To say nothing of the Indians that died,” Tomas added.

“What are you trying to get at, mister?” The soldier said. “I lost four friends out there,” he said as he rose up.

“Nothing, I meant nothing by it. Please sit; have another drink,” Tomas said, smiling.

“I think maybe I’ve had enough,” the soldier said, about to turn and walk away.

“You’ll leave when I say you can,” Tomas said forcibly.

The soldier stopped mid-stride and began to size Tomas up. He quickly sat back down. “One more drink for the road sounds good,” the soldier said as if he had been thinking that all along.

“You were saying?”

The soldier was smiling as Tomas poured him another drink as if the last few seconds had not happened at all.

“I mean not only did the colonel come with us, he led the charge. He looked like a man possessed. Like the devil himself was on his tail.”

“Probably was,” Tomas said seriously.

The soldier paused to reflect on Tomas’ answer. And then nodded his head in agreement.

“The colonel almost left without even burying our dead. I think Staff Sergeant Reddings would have shot him. So we buried our men, said a few short prayers and headed back, almost as fast as we had headed out there. Would have too, if the horses could have taken it.”

“Was the colonel looking for anything?”

“Looking? No. Like I said, the colonel couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there, like he was late for his own death.” The soldier laughed at his own quip. “Which I guess he was, considering he came home to a dead family. Then he killed himself.”

“So he didn’t kill them?”

“Why would he kill them? There were rumors that he had, but I was the one on the burial detail. I had to help get those bodies out of the house. I’ve seen a lot of dead. The colonel’s brains splattered all over his portrait will be something I can never drink away,” he said brandishing his drink. “But the kids and the wife? There was something wrong there; they were all shriveled up like peaches left out in the desert sun. None of them had a drop of blood in them and there wasn’t a drop of any spilled anywhere in the house. And I got the same feeling I did at that damned Indian village, something bad had been there, it was like I could feel the evil still lurking in the shadows.”

“Did the colonel leave a note or anything?”

The soldier merely shook his head from side to side. “I have fourteen months left on my enlistment. I need to get out of this unit before it gets me,” the soldier said desperately.

“Before what gets you?”

“The curse. We’re cursed now.” The soldier sneered as if to say ‘how do you not know?’ “I’ve been hearing that the medicine man of the tribe we killed had cursed the colonel for something and that was why the colonel wanted to kill him, but the curse didn’t die with the medicine man. He was able to do some magic that made the colonel’s family dry up. And he somehow turned friend against friend.”

“How so?” Tomas asked.

“Gentry and Tenson have been friends long before I ever joined the unit. And then one morning, neither one shows for revelry. Of course, it’s me that gets to go and check in on their tent. Tenson’s still in his rack, but I know he ain’t never going anywhere again. His blanket is soaked in his own blood and Gentry is gone. At first, I just can’t believe that Gentry did it. They were as close as brothers. But he was gone and so was his stuff. I need to get out of here,” the soldier said, placing his head between his hands.

“How long ago was that?” Tomas asked.

“Almost a month,” the soldier said, looking up. “You want to see it?”

“See what?”

“The tent, it’s still there. The captain is waiting for a magistrate to come out here to witness the crime scene.”

“Yes, very much so.”

Ten minutes later a swaying, Private Bucks was at the tent flap, looking around for anyone that might catch them, unwillingly to go in where he would be less noticed. Tomas, did as the private asked and did not move or pick up anything. He could sense Eliza’s presence here, but in a much more muted form. He could not explain what he felt, just that in some shape, way or form she had been here.

“My sister was here,” Tomas said more aloud to taste the tangibility of his question in the open air.

“Your sister?” Bucks asked.

Tomas looked over to the private. “Someone you would be better off never meeting.”

“Your sister is the white witch?” Bucks asked as he let go of the tent flap and began to back up.

Tomas moved quickly to halt his retreat. Bucks barely had time to register how strong the boy was.

“What do you know of this ‘white witch’?”

“Nothing. I don’t know nothing. Let me go. I knew there was something wrong with you,” Bucks said, trying his best to release the iron grip around his forearm.

“I will let you go when you tell me what you know,” Tomas said as he dragged the wide-eyed private back into the confines of the tent.

“Fine, anything that makes you go away. The night before we rode out against those Indians, I was in the tavern with Gentry and a couple of other guys. And we saw the colonel over at the far end of the place, talking to one of the prettiest women I had…or any of us had ever seen, but there just wasn’t something right with her. I wanted to get a closer look at her, but she scared the bejesus out of me. I never did get much closer than about fifteen feet. She looked up at me once, I…I felt like she wanted to kill me. And not that she ‘wanted to’, but that she could. All that beauty and she was just so cold, so deadly cold.” Bucks made a show of wrapping an imaginary jacket around his shoulders to shield himself from the memory.

“And you haven’t seen her since that night?”

“No, she’s not a face you would forget; but if I did see her, I’d be heading the other way.”

Tomas had fragments to this puzzle. Eliza had engineered a cavalry raid on the Indian village, but why? Was she looking for something? Was she afraid of someone? Impossible, Tomas thought, answering his own question. He hadn’t seen fear in her eyes since the day she bit him. Some five centuries previous. There was no doubt that something powerful that belonged to Eliza had been in this room. Is that what she was looking for? But why not come back and get it? Why go through all the trouble of setting this thing up and not following through.

“Did Tenson or Gentry say anything about the day of the raid?”

Bucks looked confused.

“Did they talk about finding anything?”

Bucks had not yet shaken the look off his face. And then a thought he might have never have retrieved, popped to the fore. “I don’t think it meant anything, but Tenson was always kind of a glum person. Always the first to bed, griped about everything, even the food, and sometimes that was actually pretty good. But after the raid, even while we were burying our dead, he was smiling from ear to ear. I thought it was strange as hell. But I was tired and we were, like I said, burying our dead. I didn’t much pay attention to him.”

“How long after you got back did Gentry go missing?”

“About a week. Come to think of it, Tenson started talking about places where he wanted to live and what he’d do when he got out of the cavalry. He even started coming to get drinks with us. He was actually turning into a pretty decent guy before Gentry gutted him like a fish.”