Immortal

31

The late-summer sun was sinking behind the mountains to the west, casting long black tiger-stripe shadows against the glowing desert as Lee Carson rode slowly down the main street of the town, a pair of tumbleweeds rustling as they rolled across the dusty earth, vanishing past the old merchandise store. His horse whinnied softly beneath him and he patted her flanks with a gloved hand, trying to forget the horrific image of what lay within it.

The store was made of bricks, but the long landing and porch were clapperboard, the paint faded beneath the wrath of a thousand suns. Rows of sagging buildings lined the streets, the low sunlight beaming through their long-abandoned interiors, while the crumbling ruins of the old San Francisco church and cemetery basked in lonely shadows nearby. Most people would never have dreamed of coming here at nightfall, but for Lee Carson it was one of the few places where he felt at home.

A ghost town.

Golden had been abandoned for at least a hundred years, its postal service discontinued in 1928. A town constructed far out into the wilderness like many others, its church had been built in the 1830s, but the demise of pioneers and gold rushes had seen the town eventually abandoned to the desert. There were others: La Bajada, Glorietta, San Pedro, Dolores. Carson remembered them all, not as they were now but as thriving towns built around mines and cattle stations, or along the routes of the great western railway lines that crossed the endless wilderness. Now, most of the roofs of the mud-brick buildings were sagging or had caved in completely, leaving skeletal timber frames exposed to the harsh elements. A few faded signs still adorned the awnings of shops, advertising ironmongery, farriers, even a jewelry boutique, distant memories of a once thriving community.

A hot wind moaned down the street, carrying with it the spectral sounds of horses, people and carts, whispers of the past haunting Carson’s ears. He turned in his saddle, looking over his shoulder into the deepening shadows behind him. Nothing moved but for a spiraling dust devil whipping up a vortex of sand.

Carson stopped his horse in the center of the street, listening to the ancient town’s soft noises, creaking timbers and rustling grass. He closed his eyes.

‘State your business!’

Carson’s heart bounced against the inside of his chest as he whirled around in his saddle, drawing a pistol from a holster beneath his jacket and aiming the weapon behind him.

An older man leaned back against the wall of the abandoned merchandise shop, lighting a pipe that flared orange in the shadows and illuminated his wide-brimmed Stetson and tasseled hide jacket. Blue smoke smoldered from the pipe as he extinguished the match, peering out at Carson from beneath the rim of his hat.

‘We need to talk,’ Carson said, lowering his pistol.

‘We ain’t got nothin’ to say, boy,’ came the reply, casual and without interest. ‘You’ll be on y’way now.’

The man turned, his boots striking the clapperboards the only sound echoing through the town’s long shadows. Carson cursed beneath his breath, turning his horse and cantering across the street to cut the man off.

‘I’d say we’ve got plenty to be discussin’,’ Carson snapped, yanking the horse up at the end of the shop’s landing.

The man looked up at him curiously, still sucking on his pipe.

‘You lost that right, Carson,’ he said, a thick moustache rising and falling with each word. ‘’Bout ninety-five years ago, if ma memory serves me, when you decided to spend your days bedding high-falutin’ women and your nights drinking Pop Skull from cheap bottles.’

Carson vaulted out of his saddle, tying the horse to the nearest awning pillar with a loose flourish of the reins before walking up to the man and standing directly in front of him.

‘As opposed to what? Foraging for scraps of hardtack out in the desert for ninety years gone by? That what you calling horse sense now, Ellison?’

Ellison Thorne stood to his full height, a good two inches above Carson’s, and Carson fought the urge not to take a pace back. Carson was young and strong of build, clean of features as they used to say, but Ellison Thorne was a legend amongst men, barrel-chested and well over six feet tall. It was once said that during a fire-fight with the Confederates out Fort Union way, a stray musket ball had started a fire near a barrel of powder on the siege lines. Most men had run away from the impending explosion. Ellison Thorne had run toward it, picking up the hundred-pound barrel and hurling it across the lines toward the enemy. Twenty yards, they said it had flown.

‘You turned your back on us,’ Ellison boomed, ‘right after you joined the Jesse Evans Gang.’

Carson sighed. ‘Jesus, Ellison, that was a hundred thirty years o’more ago. Can’t you let it lie?’

Ellison Thorne had fallen in with cattle farmer John Tunstall during the Lincoln County War of 1878, a bitter county-wide dispute over the control of the monopoly on the dry-goods trade. Thorne, along with his comrades from the Civil War, had served in the deputized posse of the Lincoln County Regulators alongside Doc Scurlock, Charlie Bowdre and Henry McCarty, aka William H. Bonney, aka Billy the Kid. Together, they’d killed a number of Evans Gang gunfighters, including Buckshot Roberts, at the gunfight of Blazer’s Mills. Carson, resenting Thorne, had gone across to the regulators’ arch enemies under Jesse Evans and Lawrence Murphy. The battles between the gangs had gone down into Wild West legend, although Billy the Kid had been pinned for far more killings than he’d been responsible for, and had never led the regulators. Ever since, Carson had ridden alone, rarely meeting Ellison Thorne.

‘I got somethin’ that’ll interest you now, Ellison,’ Carson insisted, ‘whether you like it or not.’

Ellison Thorne loomed over him, the glow from his pipe demonically illuminating his drooping moustache and craggy features.

‘What could you possibly have that would interest me, boy?’

Carson stood his ground and ripped off his gloves, holding his hands up.

Ellison Thorne looked at those ruined hands for a long few seconds, reaching up slowly for his pipe and puffing thoughtfully before nodding once.

‘Interesting.’

Carson stared at him for a moment.

‘That’s all you can goddamn say? Interesting? Jesus Christ, my hands are falling off and you’re more interested in your pipe than…’

Ellison Thorne stood back a pace and slipped off his jacket. Carson’s voice trailed off like the summer winds into the night as he stared. Thorne’s shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and in the golden half-light of the sunset his thick forearms were a tangled, sinewy web of desiccated muscle and sagging gray skin.

‘Gotten your fill?’ Thorne rumbled at him.

Carson nodded blankly as the big man slipped his jacket back on and watched him for a few long seconds.

‘What do we do?’ Carson asked in dismay. ‘This ain’t happened afore now.’

Ellison Thorne took his pipe from beneath his moustache and examined its contents as he spoke.

‘I haven’t heard from the others yet,’ he said ominously. ‘What were you plannin’ on?’

Carson blinked, and shook his head.

‘I ain’t got no plan,’ he admitted helplessly. ‘Old man Conley was trying to get help from some guy up Santa Fe way, afore he got shot. He opined that we might find a cure for this affliction.’

Ellison Thorne nodded.

‘He was a Jonah who went out on his own hook, mixin’ too much with the natives when we needed to keep this amongst ourselves. It ain’t what we agreed.’

‘We weren’t dying when we agreed to anything,’ Carson protested. ‘Besides, I didn’t agree anyways. Why’d I want to be stuck out here on my own, away from civilization? We got nobody out here to help us!’

Ellison Thorne nodded thoughtfully and drew again on his pipe.

‘We’ll meet the day after tomorrow, usual place and time. It’ll give us the cover we need to blend in.’

Carson shook his head.

‘Another meeting. All that jawing hasn’t fixed us up one bit, Ellison. We need something done about this! How well do you think we’ll goddamn blend in if we’ve got bits falling off us all the time?’

Ellison Thorne pushed past Carson with his shoulder and strode slowly out into the darkness.

‘Getting yourself into a conniption fit ain’t gonna help anyone. The day after tomorrow, Lee. Don’t be dawdling.’

‘We’re dying,’ Carson said sadly.

Ellison Thorne slowed and turned to look at him over his shoulder.

‘Only temporarily,’ he rumbled. ‘There are bigger things than just us to consider, Lee. You should have paid heed to that before you started living in the cities, drinking and whoring. Hankerin’ after a quick fix now’s a lost cause. Stay out of sight until we meet.’

With that, Ellison Thorne walked out into the night to where Carson could see a horse tethered in a dense thicket of bushes no more than fifty yards away. How he hadn’t seen it on the way in he didn’t know, but then he had long since lost all the survival skills required out here in the lonely deserts. Ellison Thorne and his men had instead remained here for the past hundred forty years.

For the first time in a century and a half, Lee Carson felt lonely and afraid.