He had first thought to climb down and lead the mare in on foot after the long ride from their last camp, but now he wanted to be able to spur away if necessary. Unfortunately, that put him on eye level with the corpses. They swung on ropes that creaked and groaned under their burden. Twenty-three of them he had counted so far, all strung up from the cross stays of the telephone and power poles that ran along the street.
'They were from the south,' Miguel said quietly.
'How can you tell?' Aronson asked in a tight voice. 'They're… pretty far gone.'
He was right. The bodies had turned black and bloated with gases before rupturing and spilling over the refuse-strewn footpath below. Crows and other carrion birds had been at them for some time. Drag marks evidenced the efforts of wild dogs and other ground scavengers to carry off a tasty prize.
'The way they are dressed. And their hair,' said Miguel. 'All of them had black hair. Like mine.'
'And Mama's,' Sofia said in a strangled voice.
He considered sending her back to the edge of town with Adam, but there was an evil air about this place, and he wanted his only blood kin right where he could see her.
A mechanical click had him reaching for his Winchester, but it was just Adam with a camera. After Crockett, Miguel had taken the lad under his wing, and he had seen that Sofia seemed to relax in Adam's company, too, even though he very obviously had eyes for poor Sally Gray. Adam seemed somewhat wary of Sofia after her actions in Crockett, but Miguel thought he detected admiration there, too.
The cowboy shook his head. Even running for their lives, it seemed there would be no avoiding the telenovela of teenage entanglements. Adam's family had Disappeared, a fate he had avoided by virtue of a school trip to Edmonton, sister city to his hometown of Nashville. Miguel had been impressed with the boy during the rescue of the women, not just with his bravery during the fight but with his even greater bravery for speaking up beforehand about his fears. In Miguel's experience, very few men were able to admit they found the idea of doing violence to another completely unnerving. But it was true. He had once heard an old circus boxer say that for normal men, far greater than the fear of being hit was the fear of hitting. It was a secret, shameful thing for most. Young Adam, though, had come right out and confessed it. And then he had proved himself every bit as courageous as any grown man Miguel had ever known by shepherding the ladies away from the heart of the road agents' lair in the thick of the very worst fighting.
That was why Miguel was so angry with him now.
'What are you doing, Adam?' he asked in a low voice as the boy snapped photographs of their grisly discovery as though he were on holiday. As soon as Adam dropped the camera from his eye, however, the cowboy understood. The boy's face was nearly white with strain, and the muscles in his jawline bunched and unbunched with such fierceness that he could have been chewing on bitterroot.
'Evidence,' was all he would say.
'Okay,' Miguel said, a little humbled. It had not occurred to him to bother with such a thing.
They came to the burned-out shell of a coffee shop. A charred sign atop a pile of blackened bricks that might once have been yellow read OLD… GNOLIA… and Miguel wondered why it had burned when so much of the town center remained intact. Perhaps on the day of the Wave a gas burner had been on and caught fire. But why had it not spread? Was it raining here, then? He shrugged off the idle speculation. Every town they had passed through was the same. Some areas were destroyed. Some looked as though they had merely been abandoned. Modern ghost towns.
Adam's camera continued to click and beep.
To Miguel the wide, dusty streets of Palestine evoked images of the 1930s, the Depression. The scattered, sun-faded hulks of late-model cars ruined the illusion, but the overall sense of the place was one of weariness and abandonment.
Except for the bodies of the lynched settlers, of course. They lent the scene a dark and immediate energy.
Even in the thirties, though, with the Klan active in the South, one would never have witnessed something as gruesome as this. A single corpse strung up from a lamppost, maybe, but not almost two dozen of them. Miguel, bored during the long transit from Australia to Texas, had often attended the history lectures provided aboard the USS Wasp. From what he understood, the purpose of lynching one person was to terrorize the rest into submission. This had nothing to do with submission.
This was about extermination.
Aronson dismounted and tied up his horse outside the cafe. One hand fingered the pistol at his hip while with the other he rubbed at the rough golden-red beard he had lately grown. His eyes were haunted, and Miguel could swear his face had a distinctly green tinge.
'Adam, over here,' Aronson called. 'Bring that camera. Sofia, please stay back.'
Miguel's daughter favored her father with a questioning glance, but he shook his head. A warning gesture.
'Mister Aronson is right, Sofia. You do not need to see any more. Adam neither. Give the camera to us.'
'I may want you both to scout around town,' he said quietly. 'Keep an eye out for anyone headed our way. Understood?'
Sofia and Adam nodded.
He took both of his weapons as he dismounted and tied Flossie to the roof rack of a red station wagon.
A cold wind whipped up dust devils and small twisters of rubbish along the street, stinging his eyes with grit. A traffic light, one of the kind that hung from thick black cables across an intersection, swayed in the breeze, and somewhere a crow shrieked at the gathering gray clouds. Packs of feral dogs could be heard barking in the distance.
'I was wondering why there were only men hanging from those ropes,' said Aronson. 'Now I know. Brother Adam, Miguel is correct. You need not see this wickedness. Nor Sofia either.'
Adam hesitated, drawn by the power of whatever lay within the tumble of charred bricks and roofing iron, but Miguel stepped in front of him.
'Do as your elder says, boy. He is trying to spare you.'
Adam bristled and attempted one look over Miguel's shoulder, but he deflated quickly. Sofia looked as though she wanted to climb down off her horse, but she knew her father well enough to be wary of the furious storm clouds that had gathered behind his eyes. Nodding but saying nothing, Adam took himself across the street to drink from his canteen. Sofia wheeled her mount around and followed him. He deliberately avoided walking under or even looking at the hanging corpses, instead investing his attention in the grimy windows of a bookshop. Miguel watched them move all the way across before turning back to the elder Mormon.
'Women?' he asked in a voice as arid as a salt pan.
'And children,' Aronson said. 'Here, pass me the camera. I'll document it for the authorities in Kansas City. Perhaps we should look around for some clue as to their identities. Papers or a camp of sorts.'
The rising tone of his voice was inflected with the thinnest of hopes. Not that Miguel might find such information but that by busying himself with such details, Aronson might pass through the next few minutes without losing too much of himself. Miguel hazarded a quick look inside the collapsed confines of the building and felt his heart hardening with another layer of scar tissue. He was no policeman, but he could tell from the way the bodies were piled up at the back that they had either cowered there or attempted to force an exit through the rear of the building. They had been alive when the coffee shop was set afire.
He cast his eyes down at the road surface and after a few seconds found what he was looking for: shell casings. A weapon or weapons had been used here to force the women and children into the building. Almost certainly to keep them there. He picked up the brass casings and metal clips that had held the casings together. The rounds were larger than those used in the M16, possibly a machine gun. He could not say. He was no expert in these things.
The vaquero shook his head, a banal gesture in the face of such black-hearted malevolence, but since he had nobody on whom he could vent his fury, it was best not to give it free rein.
A crash and a string of muttered oaths drew his attention outward from his cheerless thoughts. Aronson had tripped on a blackened crossbeam. The Mormons were not given to profanity. Even under extreme duress in Crockett the only real cursing Miguel had heard was his own. But Cooper Aronson emerged from the burned-down coffee shop still swearing under his breath. Distant thunder rolled over the town, and Miguel felt a few spots of cold rain on his neck.
Aronson shook his head at the cowboy as if he, too, had nothing else to offer.
'I suppose we had best see to the burial of these poor people,' he said in the tone of a man girding himself for
