Skull Moon

He left them behind in a cloud of dust, laughing to himself.

It was a long, hard ride through the desert at night. Somehow, somewhere, he'd gotten turned around. There was heavy cloud cover so he couldn't see the stars, had no true way of navigating. It was just Longtree and that wagon and the body in the box. The horses started acting funny right away. They moved with starts and jerks, pulled the wagon in circles. Even the bite of the whip could not convince them to do his bidding.

After a time, Longtree just stopped them completely.

The desert had gone cold and lonely and silent as the crypt.

There was something in the air and he felt it then: heavy, ominous, enclosing. It seemed that the very air around him had gone strange. It was thick, suffocating, hard to pull into his lungs. It had the consistency of coagulated grease. He could actually feel it laying over his skin like a motheaten tarp. It smelled funny-like spices and age and things shut up for too long.

He stepped down off the wagon and could not get his bearings.

Longtree had been a scout. And it had once been said of him that he could track a pea through a blizzard…but now he was blind, his senses-always so preternaturally sharp-were completely shut down. Had he been dumped on the desolate plain of some alien world he could have been no more helpless.

He thought: What gives here? What is this about?

It was so black suddenly it was like being sewn-up tight in a bag of black velvet. The horses were snorting and neighing and pawing at the earth. A breeze had picked up, but it carried a horrible stagnant odor on it. Not natural in the least. Longtree had never smelled anything like it before, but it made his skin go cold, wrapped icy fingers around his heart.

He wanted to run.

Something in him was demanding it, screaming it in the blackness of his brain: Run! Run, goddamn you! Take flight while you still can! Before, before-

The wind kept picking up, adding to his disorientation.

His own breathing seemed loud, almost deafening.

The wind was beginning to make a low, moaning noise that dragged fingernails up his spine. Distant, was that sound, but getting closer by the second and sounding like voices mourning in unison and coming from every direction.

Longtree uttered a strangled cry and pulled his Navy six.

The mesa and towers of black rock seemed to rise up higher and higher, reaching into the sky and…and then leaning out, pressing together, drawing over him like fingers trying to clutch and hold him.

The wind became gale force and picked up sand and bits of rock and grit that peppered his teeth and forced his eyes shut. And echoing everywhere, those voices moaning and screeching and whispering what seemed his name. And it became a real, full-blown sandstorm that whipped and howled and blasted everything in its path. It carried an odd half-light about it that created shadows and shapes and forms in a murky, surreal illumination. It forced Longtree to his knees next to the wagon and he pulled his neckerchief over his eyes and that was okay, that was just fine.

Because the sand was peopled now with lurching, angular forms that reached out for him, clutched at him. The wagon rocked and seemed to be pushed gradually by the force of the wind. Longtree held on, figuring it was his only link to the real.

The wind subsided a bit and he could see no forms through his squinted eyes…save for one.

In the maelstrom of raging, spitting sand, there was a shape-tall, skeletal, ragged. Bits of it flapped and shredded in the wind. It seemed to be looking in Longtree's direction and there was something about it that seized up his heart and made him want to wail like a child. It stood so still in that churning sand, impossibly still. Nothing living could withstand this, even the horses had been hammered down now.

Yet, it stood there, perfectly still and Longtree could almost feel its eyes on him, feel that remorseless, glaring hatred that ate through him like acid.

Then it was gone.

Gradually, almost casually it seemed, the shape stalked off into the wind and tornadic sands until it faded away and became part of them. A few minutes later, the storm abated. Longtree lay there, skin raw from the kiss of pulverized rock and sand granules. He pulled himself up, his legs and boots buried in dirt. Shaking himself off and seeing to the horses-they were all right, just frightened and skittish. He soothed them and dragged himself back to the wagon.

The clouds were gone.

The stars were out, the moon. But the crazy thing, the thing that stomped him down hard and would not let him up was the fact that he was miles away from where he last remembered. And not two or three, but twenty or thirty, possibly more. The landscape by moonlight proved it. Flat, empty desert. No mesas or cliffs or towers of sedimentary rock carved by ancient seas.

In the bed of the wagon, the box was open.

The chief was gone.

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