October skies

Cooke and his ilk, and the kids they were brainwashing with their flashy TV programmes that peddled explicit sexual content, me-first greed and selfishness, and a fast-food mulch of politically correct propaganda… those fuckers were eating away at America’s Christian heritage. They were destroying the ethos of hard work, loyalty, good old-fashioned love for God and one’s country.

The American Way.

Fuckers like Cooke wouldn’t understand that. He suspected Cooke would sneer and deride that kind of quaint notion. He suspected Cooke didn’t care a flying shit for what was right. Because people like him cared about only one thing: themselves — making money, selling advertising space, hitting the ratings, selling sneakers, nailing a prospect, ID-ing a demographic.

People like Cooke were filthy fucking whores.

Fuck him.

When Shepherd gave him the nod that it was time, he was going to make the bastard understand what it feels like to see everything you value chipped away. He was going to make that bastard squirm before he died.

CHAPTER 66

1 November, 1856

Ben scrambled through the snow, tripping and tumbling into virgin drifts that had fallen since he’d last headed this way, over a week ago. It felt like a lifetime had passed since he and Sam had stumbled upon the place, along with Preston and Vander. He was sure he was heading in the right direction, though — uphill and drifting to the right. He passed the twisted and dying trunk of a leafless cedar, a tree he had unconsciously registered on that day as they’d been foraging for firewood. The greying afternoon pall beyond its splayed black branches and twigs urged him to hurry on: time was running out. The short day had already been showing signs of waning as he’d stumbled out of the camp; there was perhaps just another hour of light to make use of.

Keep your wits about you. Preston’s out here somewhere.

Perhaps he was already at the hunter’s shelter.

Doing what?

He could only guess, but he was certain that was where Preston was headed. His mind played snapshot images of the man preparing to kill once more; donning some crudely made demonic disguise to drive his people into a heightened frenzy of fear and panic.

Ben stopped to check once more that the long barrel of his Kentucky rifle wasn’t plugged with snow, that it was ready to fire immediately should he stumble upon Preston.

‘I need to be ready for him,’ he muttered.

He struggled another fifteen minutes in the direction he hoped the shelter lay and then a recognisable slope in the ground rose out of the gathering gloom. He scaled it as quietly as he could, dropping down to his haunches as he reached the brow and looked down into the dip, towards the shelter. He breathed as quietly as he could, his rifle raised, squinting down the barrel, and fully prepared now to fire at Preston on sight.

But there appeared to be no movement down there. It was silent and still.

He took several cautious steps down the shallow slope towards the shelter, listening intently for movement coming from within it.

Nothing.

He moved across the clearing, his gun trained on the ragged flap over the entrance. Every now and then the slightest innocent stir of movement in the woods — a breeze, the sloughing hiss of snow off a branch — triggered a panic-ridden three-hundred-and-sixty-degree whirl from him.

Stay calm.

There was no sign of Preston here, not outside. And not the slightest sound from within. He was about to concede that his suspicions had been ill conceived, that the Mormon leader might merely have left the camp to seek solitude, perhaps to pray — when his eyes flagged an incongruous detail. It took another second for his mind to understand what they had picked out. He strode towards the shelter.

Along the wall, hanging from lumber nails, was that curious assortment of skulls, cleaned and bleached white by the hunter’s hand long ago. They hung in no particular order, in no particular pattern, the hunter’s trophies, a proud proclamation of his skills as a trapper and a hunter. Close to the wall, he could see what it was that had caught his attention, not so obvious across the clearing but much more so now.

He spotted a faint outline against the weathered wood of the wall, and a single nail protruding. One of the larger skulls had been removed.

When?

He tried to recall whether there had been this gap in the row the last time they had come up here to this desolate spot. But his mind, like everyone else’s that day, had been on the bodies.

He took a step back and felt something brittle crack beneath his feet. In the muted silence the noise startled him. Under several inches of new snow that had drifted against the bottom of the wall, the toe of his boot had found something hard and sharp. Ben knelt down and quickly brushed the powder aside.