Bentley Little - The Burning

over a month ago, kept in captivity in the mayor's basement until someone could decide what to do with them. Williams toured the basement and noted with approval the leg-irons, the tin of drinking water, the filthy straw. The men were animals and had been treated as such. He followed the mayor back upstairs and looked over the emaciated Chinks. He could see collarbones and ribs, joints in the legs and arms. The oversized heads with their sunken cheeks, long teeth and narrow eyes looked positively inhuman.

"String them up," he said.

He watched with satisfaction as the three strangled to death in the air.

His journey was long, and on the way he began taking souvenirs: ears, noses, fingers, toes. The Indians did that, he was told, to frighten their enemies and savor their victories, and some of the veterans of the Indian wars with whom he came into contact had adopted the practice as well. It was in the town of Sycamore that he first took knife to flesh and sliced off an ear, and the exhilaration he felt when he sawed through the gristle was unlike anything he had ever experienced before. Later, traveling, knowing that the ear was wrapped in a leather bag carried with his personal effects, he was filled with a sense of power. He felt better, stronger, more successful than he ever had, than all of his money could make him, and he began to think it was because of this talisman, this ear. He knew the thought was superstitious, but it felt true to him nevertheless, and he decided he needed to collect even more talismans in order to amplify this euphoric sensation.

He returned to Selby, Missouri.

It was here that he'd been headed all along. Although left unspoken, this had always been his ultimate destination, and he'd been savoring the prospect of returning, even going so far as to draw it out, taking side trips to other locales merely for the sake of prolonging the delicious sense of anticipation.

Orren Gifford greeted him like a long-lost brother. The carpenter-cum-preacher had not heard of the events at Promontory Point, but Williams filled him in, and the eyes of the other man gleamed. "We chased out six Chink families from Selby, tarred and feathered five men since you was here. But there's still twenty or so living in the woods, on the outskirts. I count at least fifty head in the other towns in the county: Waterbury, Cottonville and North Newsom." He grinned. "The pits are still waiting."

They rode by night, a posse of nearly a hundred men, bearing torches and weapons, hunting Chinee. Some were burned; some were shot; some were dragged by the horses through rough ground until dead. Those were the ones who had put up a fight, the ones who might have caused trouble. But the rest were captured and brought along, and well over two dozen stood bound, bruised and battered in front of the mud pits the next morning.

In the bright light of day, some of the men were clearly having second thoughts. They were brave under the anonymity of night, but when it came time to stand up and be counted, they did not have the courage of their convictions. It was up to Gifford and himself to set the example, and they threw the first one into the mud pit themselves. With the preacher at his side, Williams grabbed a scrawny young man by his queue and pulled him to the ground; then the two of them picked him up and swung him into the boiling earth. There was a split-second scream of unbearable agony, then silence as the body sank into the thick white mud.

One of the brutally beaten fellows awaiting his fate began chanting something very loudly in Chinese. There was a cadence to it that seemed unlike their normal babble, a rhythm that sounded almost poetic, like a nursery rhyme. Others chimed in at what had to be specific cues, for they spoke in unison, and it occurred to Williams that the heathens believed this was some sort of prayer. Or spell. It was nonsense, though, and he moved forward and grabbed that man and, again with Gifford's help, dragged him to the edge of one of the pits.

The Chink looked at him. There was fear in those slanted eyes, but beneath that was calm and a knowledge, a certainty, that frightened him. Williams turned his head away, looking instead at the bubbling mud. The infidel had been chanting the entire time, the others still chiming in, but now the doomed man stopped. His English was broken and heavily accented but still understandable: "We come back. How long it take. Get your children and their children-"

Williams had heard enough, and he threw the bound man into the pit. Only Gifford didn't know he was going to do so and continued to hold the Chink's feet, so only his head and shoulders dropped to earth and fell into the mud. He should have been screaming, crying out in terrible agony, but in the last few seconds before his face was eaten away, the man said clearly, "Be back."

Then Gifford tossed in his feet and the whole body rolled into the mud and disappeared.

It had been a curse. And though he was a Christian and had no truck with any pagan religions, he believed it. Deep down, where it counted, he thought the curse was real.

They all did.

As cowardly as it might be, he was glad at that second that he did not live in Selby, that he did not live anywhere in Missouri. Once this was over, he would never be back. Gifford, the other townspeople and their kin would remain here and have to deal with this, but he would be long gone.

Everyone was silent.

Williams kept on as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened, as though anyone who believed in the sort of mumbo jumbo spouted by the dying man was a rube and an imbecile. He grabbed another Chinee on his own, a small woman, and pulled her to the edge of another pit, kicking her in. He glanced over at Gifford, who still stood there flummoxed. "What are you waiting for? Get to work!"

The preacher did. They all did, and within the hour all of the Chinese had been fed to the pits, where their flesh burned off and their bones mingled with the mud. By the end of it, the mood was festive, as though everyone had forgotten all about the curse, and Williams smiled as he watched the last heathen exterminated, four burly white men dropping in a thin screaming boy.

This, by God, was America.

Twenty-eight

St. George, Utah

They lost the train's tracks, no pun intended, somewhere around Page, but despite the pleas from Derek's mom and brother, they did not turn back. Instead they continued on into Utah until, sometime after nightfall, they reached St. George. It was a small town in the southwest corner of the state, and the only motel with a vacancy was a small mom-and-pop place that, despite the beautiful flower patch out front and the quaint name of Jacaranda Country Inn, reminded Angela of the Bates Motel.

They were all tired, none of them had any ideas, and for dinner they found a pizza place, eating in silence beneath a too-loud television tuned to ESPN.

Angela felt discouraged, but she was not completely disappointed that they'd lost the train. For beneath her determination was fear, and the truth was that she'd had no idea what they would do if .they successfully trailed the locomotive to its eventual destination.

She felt better out here on the road. The horror was still there, but away from Flagstaff, outside the confines of the city, it did not seem quite so oppressive. Nor quite so bleak. For most of the day they'd been traveling through vast expanses of nothingness, past Lake Powell and the Vermilion Cliffs, past tan sand and tan buttes where no plant grew. She found it hard to believe that the mold could make it through here. Or past here.

If it weren't for that train ...

After dinner, they walked back to the motel. From within the houses they passed, Angela heard the canned laughter of sitcoms, the nursery-rhyme chanting of rap music, the crying of babies, the lecturing of parents, all of the ordinary sounds of everyday life, and she envied those people their ignorance and their bliss. There was nothing she would like more than to be able to go back to a time when her biggest worries were how well her Friday night date would go and whether she would get an A or a B on a test.