Storm's Thunder

by Brandon Boyce

Genres: Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction; Westerns

Synopsis

From the bloody banks of the Rio Grande to the edge of the American frontier comes this truly epic Western from the author of the acclaimed Here by the Bloods. A Twelve Man Massacre Along the Rio Grande, a dozen bodies fester in the sun. Harlan Two-Trees discovers the massacre, but wants nothing to do with it. Mistrusted by the whites who run Caliche Bend and estranged from the Navajo, Harlan heads west to California—to freedom. He will find the Rio Grande’s bloody baptism does not wash off so easily. Death Rides Alongside From his berth aboard the gleaming Santa Fe railway, Harlan brims with the promise of a new life in California. But when a daring robbery maroons him in the desert, he is back in the world he knows—where death is king, and justice comes from the smoking barrel of a gun. Pursued by a murderous, insane, lone lawman who dogs his every move, Harlan has a new goal—to stagger out of the desert alive . . .

Release date: September 27, 2016

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

The young pronghorn breaks from his mother and comes to a stop in a struggling patch of milkweed, just far enough from the others to give me a clean shot, my first in two days. And I am hungry. At the center of the herd, the dominant buck has been keeping his harem on the move and packed tight around him for nearly a hundred miles, while showing less and less regard for the weary juveniles. Soon his patience will end and he will run the yearlings off for good. Few will survive. The young one I have my eye on would be lucky to last a day. I don’t give much thought to taking out the buck; the entire band would perish. And I would need to be stark mad with starvation to consider killing a doe. The expectant females—three by my count—will soon give birth to fawns that, a year from now, the buck will push out, as he will this lot in the coming days.

I float down from the saddle and guide Storm backward a few paces out of view. His gray coat sweated nearly black, the stallion folds his hind legs without protest and goes all the way down to the hard-packed ground, breathing heavy, welcoming a rest after the back-breaking pursuit. For all his stubbornness, Storm has always shown the sense to keep quiet when the moment calls and now is no exception. Any noise would mean more running. And while I suspect a faster and more sure-footed horse the Territory has never known, staying both downwind and within reach of the fleetest animals on the continent has proved all the challenge we care to handle. I let the Spencer fall from my shoulder and melt in behind a low outcropping of rock on a bluff overlooking the mesa where the pronghorn have finally taken a moment to graze.

The juvenile, with his nubby excuse for antlers, has not looked up once—too ravaged with hunger—and has strayed beyond his mother’s realm of comfort. The doe lifts her head, throwing her large, rear-arching rack—every bit as impressive as the buck’s—high in the air. Even through the cool breeze I hear her chirping at her offspring. But his head stays down, greedily devouring the tender young shoots that had tried to get a jump on spring.

I bring up the rifle and slide it down the glove of my left hand to keep it from chinking against the boulder. My bare right palm silently throws the bolt and finds the trigger. Peering down the barrel, I settle my pulse to near stillness with every breath. The yearling takes a cursory step toward his mother, but still has not looked up. I know your hunger, friend. My belly tightens at the reminder of it. Only when I have him sighted to the heart do I close my eyes and say a prayer to the Great Spirit, thanking him for this young brother who will sustain me. And for good measure I throw in a prayer to the White God too, but my eyes snap open to a faint buzzing behind me. I pray it is only a mosquito, but I know it is not, not in this cold.

The yearling has shifted now, turned three-quarter so his rump faces me. I need him profile for a clean kill. What I do not need is any ruckus out of Storm. The buzzing grows louder, and I know I am in trouble. Settle down, Storm. Just a horsefly. The words are more thought than sound, but he gets the message, and by the second snort, I know he does not care.

All at once, the yearling lifts his small head. It is not much to work with, but will have to do. Storm hates horseflies and cannot be trusted to ignore one now. I let out half a breath and then hold, the gentle action of the trigger succumbing to the pressure beneath my finger. And then in one bursting moment—the trigger in mid-journey—everything splinters. Storm uncorks a wallop of a squeal. The rifle cracks. And a dozen startled pronghorn find full-speed in a single bound. I see the yearling’s knees buckle, but then recover, and he is off with the others, gobbling up ten yards of sagebrush with every leap and doing his best to keep up.

I scramble up from the rock. Storm is on his back, kicking wildly at a pesky, minuscule adversary that has probably not even bitten him yet. At the sight of me, the stallion rolls over and springs to his feet. I sling up and heel him straight toward a steep embankment better suited for mountain goats. And just like that, we are off chasing antelope again. This time I make sure he hears me. “You got no one to blame but yourself, on this one!”

Against the beige floor of the mesa, the entire band of pronghorn is little more than bobbing flashes of white, rapidly vanishing in the opposite direction. Hardly a spray of dust betrays the retreat. But then a flutter of movement, unexpected, fractures from the herd. The yearling. His mother is there too, compelled to encourage her offspring through his injury and if not, at least away from the band. Emboldened by their scent, Storm makes quick work of the embankment and, stunned to find pronghorn growing larger in his vision for a change, needs no urging as the ground levels out.

The yearling picks up the sound of Storm’s thunder and scrambles to mount an escape. But his movements have lost their precision, his strides now guided only by panic. With nothing but open country to one side, the doe nudges her charge toward a rising formation of sandstone, hoping to lose us among the towering spires that jut abruptly from the mesa floor. The remainder of the herd is but a speck on the horizon. I veer the stallion right, cutting off any sudden jailbreak.

The doe, desperate for alternatives, starts up the slope—into the jagged outcrops—but such unsure footing is bighorn domain, not antelope. The yearling wants no part of the rocks or of me or Storm—bouncing a stride or two in one direction and then back the other—deeply distressed by all options. The doe lowers her head and chirps. Only then does the yearling turn for the rocks. He takes one uncertain leap and then falters, his neck and head grazing the stone surface before he rights himself and bounds up to his mother. A dark, wet smear colors the rock where his head touched, and when he turns back, I see the red-soaked fur down the side of his neck. He might even be blind in that eye. I am surprised he made it this far. But bounding over the sagebrush comes as natural to an antelope as telling lies to a White Man; it is what they do, even when they don’t know they are doing it.

The yearling vanishes up into the rocks, yet his mother remains. She stands there, defiant, willing us to move along, but there is resignation in her breath—as if she knows nothing can be done to save the yearling. All at once, Storm rears up and unleashes a mighty blow. I squeeze my thighs tight against his flanks and toss my weight forward to keep from being thrown. Something about this place has him all twisted up.

The doe has seen enough. She scampers down the slope, giving the fuming stallion a wide birth as she reaches the flat ground and in no time is striding off after the herd.

“Since when you spook at a few drops of blood?” I say to Storm. “Ain’t like he’s bleeding out.” True that no horse rushes toward the scent of fresh blood by its own accord, but Storm’s sudden refusal to take another step is bullheaded even for him. “You been pampered too long. Lost your taste for battle.” I swing down and drop the ground hitch. “You stay put.”

Storm nickers a brief response and I give his ear a scratch before returning my thoughts to the pronghorn. He is up there, hiding somewhere, and I do not want him to suffer more than he already has. I draw my knife and palm the blade against my forearm as I start up the slope. I follow the droplets along the red rock, but my mind falls back to Storm. I have charged that stallion headlong into horrors a hundred times worse, up in the Sangres, where fresh blood coated everything and squirted from the necks of dying White Men. So his behavior now sits funny, for certain. Cresting the rise, I stop and sniff the air. Death lurks here—a faint, unmistakable whisper of decaying flesh.

“Dang it,” glancing back at Storm. “Burns me to no end when your nose is better than mine.” I start to think the doe’s course up to the rocks was more than coincidence. Humans have graveyards. Animals have theirs. Sometimes the only thing we can give ourselves is a quiet place to die. The pronghorn has found his against the base of a striated point of rock, out of view to all but the most determined follower. He lies on the ground, his head lolling sideways to find me with his one good eye. But there is no protest anymore, only exhaustion. His thin legs twitch as I kneel beside him and stroke his flank. “Easy, friend.” I keep my voice soft and slide my left hand gently up his neck to the prongs, making sure I get a strong grip. The prongs may be stubs, but could still cause plenty damage. And when I have his head firmly in my hand I ask his forgiveness—for choosing him—for the sloppy kill that I now promise to finish clean. I whisper the words, a secret between the two of us. Then his eyes flutter and with a quick, sure thrust, I let the knife do its work. It is over in an instant. Even the steady breeze takes pause to mourn. And in the stillness, the stench of death finds sturdier footing.

It radiates from the cracks and hidden recesses of the rocks. I cast a look skyward, expecting to find the slow, circling glide of condors crisscrossing the bright sun, but there is nothing, not even a cloud, to interrupt the blue vastness. To this day—writing about a time so many years gone—I do not know what compelled me to keep walking. I could have thrown the pronghorn over my shoulder, field-dressed him a mile from here along the bank of the Great River and—if we rode all night—been in Santa Fe by breakfast. The property-agent fellow told me to call on him in a week, and that he might have a little money for me, not that I care much either way if he don’t. That was nine days ago, maybe ten. Our goal is California—all the way to San Francisco. I aim to get Storm and myself there in one piece even if we have to walk, or book his passage on a steamer around the Horn—with him in the hold and me toiling in the bowels of the engine room to pay for it.

But instead, I step over the yearling and follow the scent around a corner of sandstone to a row of shadowy openings in the rocks. The hard sunlight cuts through the recesses as I slide along a narrowing ledge, revealing the dusty, inner depths of the hollows. The ledge dwindles to half a boot-length, and I have to shuck off my gloves and feel along the rock face for the tiniest handhold. After several yards, the ledge widens out into a small landing, made smaller on the left side by a pile of stones laid against the sheer cliff face. The right side falls off in a steep, unbroken drop down to the mesa floor. I look back at the pile of stones, their blacked hue in stark contrast to the orangey colors of the sandstone. These rocks were placed deliberately, in the style of the Apache. When the Inde bury their dead—under a stump or in the hollow of a tree—they lay small boulders around the grave to ward off coyotes. I see no sign of coyote up here, but peering over the edge of the landing, directly below, I spot a frustrated patchwork of coyote tracks, where they tried to solve the riddle of the sheer cliff before eventually giving up. Whoever took the effort to haul these stones along the edge did so at great peril. I kneel down and pluck a greasy condor feather from among the stones. Looks like the carrion birds took their shot as well, but came up as empty as the four-legged scavengers.

The stone pile comes up to my knee. Above it, wedged into a wide crack in the cliff surface, is a caked confection of dried mud and grass. I pinch off a bit, rolling the stuff between my fingers until the dirt crumbles away, leaving only the browned fragments of once-green river grass. We are miles from where it grows, which means this displaced mixture—the kind used as mortar in the hogans of the Navajo—was also hauled here and slapped into the rock by hand. And there is plenty of it. I follow the trail of muddy concrete up the crevasse to where it turns horizontal and then extends another few feet before descending back toward the landing. Just above the rock pile, the crack expands to the width of a man’s fist, every inch of it packed with the homemade mortar. I give it a firm shove and my fist goes straight through, into an empty space behind. When I withdraw my hand I uncork a hellish gust of such putrid stink and decay that I am retching over the side before I can catch myself, my empty belly coughing forth nothing but bile. Turning my head, spitting out the taste of my own insides, I gulp down precious breaths of clean air before pulling my mascada up over my nose and mouth. I suck the dust from the coarse fabric into my lungs, but it is better than ingesting the unspeakable foulness of what lies dead beyond this improvised tomb.

My heartbeat quickening in my ears, I claw away at what is left of the mortar, chunks at a time, until the shape of the crevice becomes clear. A door. A stone door, well matched in color to the surrounding sandstone. I kick away the small boulders piled against it, shuttling rocks the size of melons across the landing. Sweated through, my blood pounding, I put my back into the work, as the boulders get larger closer to the door. At the bottom, wedged against the sandstone, lays a sturdy rock twice as heavy as the others. It takes all my strength, but with a final push, I feel the squat boulder start to budge. All at once there is a low scraping sound. I look up. Dirt—the mortar from above—rains down, blinding me as the noise builds to a solid rumble. I steady myself against the stone door and feel the great slab falling toward me.

Nearly blind, I hurl myself sideways—into the air—toward what I hope is the ledge that brought me here. My aim is only half right. I crash hard into the lip of the ledge, my hip and forearm taking the brunt of it. I bounce off the ledge and feel gravity sucking me downward. I throw my arm up—flailing for anything more than a fistful of air. Somehow my fingers find the lip and I brace for impact against the side of the rock. The falling slab booms like a shotgun as it slams into the landing—its momentum kicking it end-over-end as it flips upward and slides twenty feet to the ground, where it cleaves in two and spews forth a canon shot of dust and caliche. Hanging midair, my arm and hip stinging with hot knives, I can only marvel at how a mule-headed stallion is longer for this world than a curious fool. But I am alive and—pulling myself back up to the ledge—rest fairly certain that none of my bones have broke.

When the dust clears, I hear Storm whinny and I call out to him that I am all right. Rising slow to my feet, I steady myself against the rock wall and turn back toward where the door had been. My heart sinks. The sweat that soaks my shirt, in an instant, goes cold. The face of a white man, what is left of it, stares back at me. And where his eyes once were, pits of dried blood buzz with flies. His mouth sits frozen open, revealing the viciousness that saw his tongue get hacked out and most likely eaten. The naked body leans against the inside of the cave, supported by a steel-tipped lance that juts upward out of his chest. It was the weapon that killed him before someone snapped it in half to make room for the body next to him. I want to turn and run far away from this place, but somehow my feet defy my brain and propel me forward.

The second man, taller than the first, suffered a similar—but not identical—slate of horrors. His ears and nose have been chopped off, along with his arms below the elbow. The fatal blow came from a sharp knife that carved out his heart. My mouth goes bone dry as I move closer, the afternoon sun cutting through the cavern to display the carnage in all its stark harshness. A third man appears shorter, but only because his head lies at his twisted feet. His ribs, nearly all of them, extend outward where the shotgun tore him through from behind. Stepping to the entrance of the cave, though, the full scope of the carnage registers with unfathomable clarity. The dryness in my throat gives way to a knot that sinks to the pit of my stomach. My legs grow weak as twigs and I drop to my knees.

The butchered bodies of eleven White Men fill the small cave. I count the torsos because it is the only way to be sure. Some of the heads are missing, or discarded about the ground, or smashed into pieces among the limbs and organs that litter the floor. Staring dumbfounded at the tableau in its grisly totality, there appears no conceivable torture or bodily desecration left unaccounted for among its victims. So complete the extermination that its perpetrators must surely have luxuriated in an overwhelming advantage of force, and an orgiastic abundance of time, in which to leave unturned no stone of sadistic creativity. One wretched young man, no older than myself, looks like he was roasted below the waist while his arms and shoulders played pincushion to an awl or ice pick. Yet others among his kindred became canvases for intricate blade-work. Each of the eleven seems to have suffered a unique death, but before his suffering had ended, shared one or two communal hardships with his brethren. Not one of them died with his private parts attached and more than a few took their last, miserable breaths with their manhood stuffed into their mouths. The entire lot—probably early in the proceedings—was stripped completely naked, their clothing nowhere in sight, not a single thread of it. Scanning the chamber, in fact, I cannot observe a single personal possession of any kind—no tool or weapon or artifact—which may have aided even the most meager defense. What insurmountable imbalance of power must have been in play to render nearly a dozen able-bodied White Men into such docile submission? The final commonality is the marked absence of each and every scalp.

I cannot say how long I set there on my knees, but before I could will my eyes to look away, I was certain this vile vista has seared itself into an inescapable cage of memory.

As I find my feet again, a dot of shadow crawls across the landing. I look up. The first of the vultures circles overhead, the full stench of this discovery now extending miles downwind. I have seen enough and marshal my thoughts toward leaving, but in the shifting light, something polished and gold reflects a ray of sunlight from an inner nook of the cave. Before giving myself a chance to reconsider, I push forth—holding my breath—and tiptoe into the foulness. I pluck the overlooked object from its hiding place and shove it in my pocket. Turning back toward the ledge, I am greeted by an arriving condor. The colossal bird stands at the edge of the landing, folding in her enormous wings in anticipation of the feast laid out before her. I move to shoo her off and then stop myself. Let the scavengers have at it, I say, so that the sight of this altar of evil may never poison the vision of another living soul. I blow past the condor without looking back.

By the time I reach Storm, the sky swirls black with the great birds. I drape the pronghorn over the stallion’s haunches and swing myself up. “Don’t ask,” and he obliges by starting his walk. The sun hangs low over the mountains to the west. I glance at the ridge and see a lone rider atop a piebald lineback, watching me with great intent. And I know right away from her knee-high moccasins and the way she sits on her horse that she is Apache. Farther south, or west into Arizona, she would be among her own. But we are deep in Navajoland. And for her to be out here alone tells me she has been watching me, or this place, with vested interest. I refrain from any sudden gestures, offering only a small nod to acknowledge that I see her. She provides no response, other than turning her mount and disappearing over the ridge.

An hour later, as Storm lopes southeast toward Santa Fe, I find the courage to pull the metal object from my pocket and take a look. It is a buckle—from a belt no doubt—a polished brass oval surrounding two stout letters, U and S.

U.S.

A cavalryman’s property. That some band of marauding killers could so thoroughly destroy nearly a dozen settlers, or unarmed missionaries, figures hard enough to believe, but that their victims were none other than the Indian-slayers of the United States Army resides beyond my comprehension. All at once, what I know, and what I thought I know, fall apart. The only certainty is that no good can ever come from speaking of this to anyone. Now more than ever, the Territory of New Mexico: the only place I have ever known—the Dinétah, the sacred homeland of my Navajo ancestors—pushes me to leave, toward a great unknown in the West. And so I will go.

I hitch Storm to the post and step through the low picket gate that buffers the small, white house from the dusty commotion of Palace Street. My worn riding satchel hangs low on the shoulder, counterbalancing the weight of the short-barrel thirty-two in my left coat pocket—the one I carry when my usual rig, a pair of pearl-handle Colts, would impose the wrong impression. A path of slate paving stones divides a little garden where tiny purple flowers take in the morning sunlight from terra cotta urns that flank my procession to the porch. Potted flowers—a luxury far removed from the rocky, overworked patches of the Bend, where a few scrawny beans and waist-high corn had folks dropping to their knees to thank their creator.

In the haste of my previous visit to the home of Milton J. Garber, convened well past sundown, I had not noticed what an oasis the land agent—or more likely, some woman—had fashioned among the drab adobes a short block from the main plaza of Santa Fe. A burning desire to see my business conducted that night had been too consuming. Yet now, with that mausoleum of butchery clouding the mind, my motivation finds even greater urgency. The wood creaks as I climb the freshly painted steps, reverberating with hollow echoes as I cross to the door.

I remove my glove and rap three times under bare knuckle. From deep within the house—the second floor by the sound of it—a man’s voice calls out.

“Just a moment.” Footsteps clomp down an inner staircase and sighs as he approaches the door, as if put upon by the interruption. The house casts a long, cool shadow across the garden. I make it just past nine, early enough to be a businessman’s first call of the day, but hardly an hour to catch him indisposed. A key lock turn, followed by a deadbolt and then the fall of a chain. The door opens and Milton Garber stand there, dressed, but there is something undone about him. His ditto jacket hangs open and a missed button on the waistcoat betrays a careless donning. “Can I help you?” Garber peering at me through his wire-rim spectacles without a hint of remembrance.

“Morning, Mister Garber,” removing my hat. All at once his eyes burst with recognition.

“Why Mister Two-Trees.” He pulls the door open wide and, stepping aside, extends his arm toward a chair in his front-room office. “Why, you must forgive me. I did not recognize you with your whiskers. Please, come in. Can I offer you some coffee?”

“Obliged.” I step past him into the office and move toward the chair, but cannot bring myself to sit.

“Xenia!” He says, shouting toward the top of the stairs. “Some fresh coffee, straight away. Do sit, Mister Two-Trees. Make yourself at home.”

“Best I stand, sir. I ought not foul up your sitting chair.”

“Nonsense,” Garber says. When I glance back, the missed button of his waistcoat seems to have found its proper hole. Then his fingers make quick work of the ditto buttons, and just like that, he is soberly attired. “Please, sit.”

“I took a splash through the Grande about an hour ago. It cut the stink, but my clothes still a mite dusty.”

“You bathed in the Rio Grande?” he says, crinkling his nose. “This morning? What on earth were you doing all the way out there?”

“I amble out that way after last we talked.”

Milton J. Garber, land agent, stares at me like I had switched to a foreign tongue. “Mister Two-Trees, you were here . . .” He turns his head, squinting in disbelief at a bank calendar hanging on the wall, “fifteen days ago.” He gawks at me, expecting me to speak, so I just go on letting him have a right long look. Then I nod and ease down into the chair. Garber sinks slow in the leather chair behind a desk cluttered with paper and doodads. “You mean you’ve just . . . been out there, at the Rio Grande, for over two weeks?”

“I fell in behind a band of pronghorn for a couple days. That swung me northwest a fair piece, but I followed the river back.” Some cups rattle on a tray at the top of the stairs, followed by the careful footsteps of a woman. “You said to give you a week or so. I reckon I lost track of the rest. Pronghorn is pretty quick.”

“I’ll take your word. Never seen one myself,” he says. “Ah, Xenia, my dear.”

A pretty negro girl, about my age, maybe nineteen, reaches the bottom step and lets out a breath, relieved at descending with only minimal spillage. Sweat beads along her brow and neck, and I can smell the sex on her before the aroma of coffee fills the air. She catches my gaze and darts her eyes away quick. She does not look at Garber at all. Rather, she sets the tray down on his desk, curtsies—embarrassed—as if I had caught her in the state of nakedness she had been in five minutes prior. As she turns for the stairs, I see that Garber is not the only one who missed a button.

“I am not much of an outdoorsman,” Garber says, handing me a thin china cup overfilled with hot coffee. I hold it with both hands, unsure how any grown man’s fingers fit thou. . .