The Ghost of Apache Creek

Chapter 47

By the time the sun began its drop to the horizon and the sky streaked red, two of the Peacock brothers were dead, and the others barely holding on to life.

After cholera strikes, it doesn’t let go. It torments its victims all the way to the grave, and the dying is not quick and never easy.

The dead brothers lay in pools of their own filth that reeked of rotten fish, the distinctive aroma of the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. Swollen tongues stuck out of their stick-dry mouths and even in death fever burned in their eyes, as though the disease was reluctant to give up even the ravaged carcasses of its victims.

The surviving Peacocks sat at a table, naked, stripped of the filthy clothing that had clung, stuck, and cleaved to their stinking bodies.

Their beautiful Colts, tuned like fine violins by a German gunsmith, they’d cast aside on the floor, the need for them gone.

Fire.

Now their weapon was fire.

“Soon,” one of the brothers said. “It must be soon.”

“Come the darkness,” the other said.

“We’ll be too weak by then, maybe dead.”

“No, we’ll find the strength. Sometimes the dead can walk.”

The man waved a hand in the direction of the church. “Over there is one who has done us much harm. We’ll watch him burn and then we’ll hound his soul through the canyons of hell for all eternity.”

“And we’ll be five again.”

“Yes. Five. As we were before the man called Lake came into our lives.”

The brother who’d spoken first rose to his feet and immediately collapsed on the floor. He convulsed as a wave of pain hit him, then lay still for a few moments.

His brother didn’t ask him how he was because there was no point. He already knew. Like himself, his brother was dying one faltering heartbeat at a time.

Finally the man on the floor began to crawl. After an agonizing length of time, he reached the cans of coal oil that the deacon had left against the wall.

He grabbed a can by its handle and dragged it with him to the saloon door. There he stopped and his skull face split in a grotesque grin. He turned and looked at his brother.

“I can do it. When the time comes, I’ll be able.”

The sitting brother’s eyes moved to the door. It was still not dark, but the orange sun hung low in the sky and the shadows were lengthening.

“Not long, brother,” he said. “It will soon be dark.”

“I long to see them burn,” the Peacock at the door said. “We’ve seen it before many times, have we not? How the skin bubbles, the hair blazes, the eyes scorch out of the head as though rammed by red-hot pokers.”

“And they scream, brother. They shriek and wail and gambol about in a dance and it always makes me laugh.”

The man clutched on to the table, clenched his teeth against pain and the sudden, abominable flux that gushed, spluttering, from his body. It was a full five minutes before he could find the strength to talk again.

Finally he said, “Not long now before all the fires of hell descend on this accursed place.”

Above the saloon, a red-tailed hawk quartered the sky and its shrill hunting cry slashed through the evening quiet like a razor.