a posse with me on that hellish place. Am I out of order asking this of you?”
Cabe cleared his throat. “No, you are not.” He felt something warm spreading in his chest. He stood and looked out the window at the streets below. He turned back to Dirker. “I would be honored to ride at your side.”
And then they shook hands and everything for them, finally, ultimately came full circle.
23
Two hours later, the posse assembled outside of the Sheriff’s Office.
The freezing rain had become snow now that drifted through the frigid air like ash blown from some huge funeral pyre. And that seemed pretty fitting given where the men were going and what they were going to do.
There were some fifteen men there when Cabe rode in on his strawberry roan. Most of them were miners that Cabe did not know. But Pete Slade and Henry Wilcox were there, the office left to another deputy. Sir Tom Ian, the English-born pistol fighter was there. As was Charles Graybrow and Raymond Proud, the big Indian carpenter. The one that really surprised Cabe was Elijah Clay astride a chestnut mare.
“Afternoon, Mr. Cabe,” he said, quite cordially. “The sheriff here has let me join this huntin’ party. He says I have to behave m’self. As far as ye killin’ Virgil, well, I knowed he weren’t nothin’ but trash. So I don’t hold no grudge no more.”
Cabe relaxed a little at hearing that. He pulled his Stetson with the rattlesnake band off the saddle horn and place it on his head. “I’m ready, then,” he said.
“Okay,” Dirker said. “You know where we’re going and what we’re going to do. So let’s get it done. And we don’t come back until Cobb is put down.”
“Yessum, Sheriff,” Clay said. “I’ll tell ye boys one thing and I’ll tell ye just the once. If’n I get that peckerwood devil in m’ sights, I’ll shoot that trash just deader’n Jesus on the cross. Yes, sir.”
And that, it seemed, was a good parting remark.
They rode.
It was at the fork in the road, at that old lightening-blasted dead oak, that they found more riders waiting for them. Mormons. Eustice Harmony was there. As were four surviving Danites-Crombley, Fitch, Sellers, and Archambeau. All of whom were anxious to destroy what lived in Deliverance once and for all.
So, then, twenty men rode on that town.
Twenty men who were willing to give their lives to stop the killing and what lived in Deliverance was more than happy to take them.
One by one.
By the time they passed through those high banks of withered, dead pines outside of Deliverance, the storm had filled its lungs with ice and had become a full-blown blizzard. Visibility was down to less than thirty feet. But no one suggested turning back. What had to be done would not be easy in any weather.
As they came around the bend, everyone brought up their guns.
They saw what they thought were two men waiting for them on either side of the road. But they were not men, but scarecrows impaled on sticks. As the posse got closer, they saw they were actually corpses and ones long dead by the look of them. Their clothes were shredded rags that flapped in the wind. Hollowed, skullish faces with empty eye sockets appraised the riders as they passed.
Although Cabe had seen countless dead men, he found he could not look upon those frostbitten faces. He was afraid they might smile at him, speak to him in voices of cold dirt.
Well, he found himself thinking, you volunteered for this fucking mess. Got nobody to blame but your ownself. If things get ugly-and they will-y’all just keep that in mind, Tyler Cabe.
“Ye can feel it, cain’t ye?” Clay said.
And Cabe could only nod, wordlessly.
For he could feel it. Feel some ancient, unspeakable terror erupting in his belly, licking at his insides with a cold tongue. Something in him knew the smell of this place, the malefic feel of it, and not from yesterday but from days long gone. It could smell those that haunted Deliverance and it frantically warned him away, filling him with an immense, unreasonable fear that made him physically ill. It settled into every cell and fiber in a black, wasting totality.
And then, as they rode in guarded silence, the town began to appear. It swam up out of the blizzard like a decaying ghost ship out of ocean fog: the masts and prows, decks and rigging. Yes, the ruined buildings and sharp- peaked roofs, false-front stores and boarded high houses all described by churning tempests of snow that shrieked through the streets.
Deliverance was laid-open before them like a sprung sarcophagus, daring, just daring them to look upon the secrets its moldering depths concealed.
Cabe saw it, really saw it, and felt like a little boy lost in a graveyard full of whispering voices and ghastly screams. And he heard these things, too, but only in his head. For that was the sound of the town-a humming, dead neutrality composed of agony and tormented screeching reduced to a single low and morbid thrum.
It made his mouth go dry and his heart pound like a hammer at a forge. His skin was tight and cold, his internals pulling into themselves. Adrenalin rushed through him, making his hands tremble on the reigns and his eyes go wide and unblinking. For everywhere around them, shadows seemed to dip and scamper in the blowing wall of snow.
In the street then, in the very black heart of the town, they dismounted and tethered there horses to a hitch rail.
Harmony stood there in a flapping black coat, a shotgun in his arms and the Book of Mormon in his hip pocket. “What you will see here will look like people,” he said to the posse, the wind turning his voice into a weird, wailing sound. “But they are not people. Not anymore. Not any more than a cadaver in a grave is a person. They may try to talk to you, to get you off alone. But don’t let them, by God. Don’t let them…”
Maybe not everyone in the posse knew what was in Deliverance. But maybe they’d heard stories, chimney- corner whispers, the sort of crazy tales kids tell late at night and around fires…things, of course, they’d dismissed at the time. But now? They did not dismiss them. They remembered them, locked those tales down deep within themselves where they would not be able to feel the teeth. And maybe that was why they did not question what Harmony said. They just accepted.
“It’ll be dark in about three hours,” Dirker said to them, his face pale and wind-pinched, but very determined, “and we want this wrapped up by then. So we’re gonna break into groups and…”
But Cabe was not listening. Not really.
He was watching those shuttered windows and high, sloping roofs, the narrow spaces cut between buildings. The tenebrous shadows that oozed from them. He was watching and noticing how everything seemed to lean out over the men in the street, wishing to crush them or get them close enough to pull them into dark places where business could be handled in private, away from the light. And what he was feeling was the blood of the town-a toxic, miasmic venom seeping into himself.
“Let’s do it,” Dirker said.
And they started off.
As Dirker led Harmony and the Danites through that howling white death, the church bell began to gong. It echoed out through the storm with a hollow, booming sound.
