“The Ballad of Jakob Grey”

The morning was cold and vacuous. Sunrise came apologetically and carved its way through the thick milky clouds about and created dark streaks of purple and blue across the yawning early sky. Dawn rose strangely. And its rays seemed to cast queer shadows all about the landscape and the town and the shadows of the cacti on its perimeter seemed sickly or demented. Somewhere near the stables, a cockerel sounded off.

The Moss gang had found a disused barn on the edge of town to bed down in. Each man had suited themselves in one of the opened stalls in the small hours and had collapsed down into the hay from the night before in a drunken slumber. They all slept and dreamt of whirlpools. All but Jakob. He sat on one of the eve brackets in the loft, kicking his legs giddily, like a child, as he watched them all snooze in the soiled hay.

He could already see what he was going to do to them all. Out of everyone he’d met, these few deserved it more than what was quantifiable. But how best to order it? Would it be favourable to dispatch the leader first? Or maybe last? A painter often toys with which stroke to take first upon the canvas. A sculpture is always hesitant about which corner of marble to strike initially. Perhaps it is better to let the rhythm take over and go with the flow. The only question he’d needed to ask himself was who deserved it the most.

A few minutes later, they all awoke to the sound of horrific shrieking. A banshee-like cry emanated from outside the barn. The wife of the murdered man from down the back of the saloon had found him. She’d let out this ghastly anguished wailing that—coupled with the cockerel’s cawing— seemed to rouse the whole town.

One by one they’d come shuffling out of their faded wooden houses, all half-dressed and tattered, towards the barn, and one by one, the gang rose and tried to shake the whiskey from their brains.

“Goddamn. Where am I?” Luke said, coughing out wads of phlegm.

“In a barn, you stupid fool,” Jesse replied.

“I can see that. I mean, where in the world?”

“New Mexico,” Moss grumbled. “You not remember last night?”

“What’s all that hollerin’?” Jesse then said.

“There’s somethin’ goin’ on out there, Moss,” Eli said as he spat into the hay and looked out through the cracks in the door. “Seems the whole town ain’t too happy with us.”

“What’d ya mean, boy?” Moss said. His head was heavy and his gaze couldn’t seem to focus on anything.

Eli stood watch and his eyes widened at the situation. “Ain’t sure at this present junction. There sure is a lot of them. And they’re coming straight for us.”

Eli shuddered and looked down at his groggy gang all laying in the hay like pregnant cows. He then peered back through the slat in the dried wood and saw that the townsfolk were dragging something behind them in a kind of funeral procession. Something black and wrapped in faded tarps. It was being dragged along through the dried mud on wooden skids and it rocked as if the thing under the tarps was trembling.

Ceremoniously, as if the last rites of a funeral dirge, the cortege conducted a semi-circle and then came to a stop in front of the barn doors. Everyone outside the barn then stood as motionless as the cacti that surrounded the town. The silence widened and Eli watched on curiously. Swells of dust blew across the thoroughfare in seemingly random directions around the unmoving townsfolk. Then, through the middle of the ranks of men came a lone woman dressed in a faded and ripped floral dress. She marched out in front of the people and stood facing the barn.

“You, in there! You! You murdered my husband!” She bellowed. “You killed us all! Who’s gonna farm now?”

Eli watched through the crack as the woman in the tattered dress broke down and started crying and wailing in the dust. Her dead husband lay next to her like a cart full of kindling.

“Dammit. That’s right. Someone was killed last night,” Luke said.

“Who done it?”

“Cain’t remember, Moss…”

“You’ll be glad to know the wagon has been loaded and is ready for transportation,” Jakob said giddily as he seemingly appeared in the middle of them all. The gang yelped and each bolted around to face him.

“Goddammit! Where have you been?” Luke asked, almost panting.

“Same as you. Right here.”

“We’ve got a problem. Looks like we’re about to get run outta town.”

“Relax.”

“Where is the wagon?” Moss asked as he tried to rattle his thoughts into motion.

“The same place it’s always been,” Jakob replied.

“Come out here now! Look at what you did!” The woman outside shrieked.

“I do believe that is our cue to leave,” Luke said.

“Seconded,” Eli said.

The men gathered their things and put on their hats.

“Yep,” Amos said lowly and went for the back door first as if embarrassed by something.

But, as he did, Jakob came and stood in front of him like some obscene block of stone in his waxed green coat. Jakob’s long arm barred across it like a brace and it stopped his escape. Jakob looked down at him with a vague smile. Amos couldn’t see behind his sunglasses, but he could feel that Jakob was looking straight at him, straight into his eyes.

“T’was ye who murdered the man, was it not? Don’t ye think ye oughta take the achievement? Go and parley with them, man,” Jakob said and grinned. “See if you can negotiate us out of this affair.”

Amos frowned. “Why you speaking’ like that?”

“Like what, my dear boy?” Jakob smiled deeper.

“Like, that, ‘Ye olde English type ways O’ speakin’. I don’t much care for it.”

“What manner of way I exchange dialogue is irrelevant. You earned the scalp, did ye not? If we are to depart this town on good terms, I believe it is your moral duty to stand by the kill and take that dead man’s scalp for your own.”

“I ain’t scalping no dead man.”

“Then why make him dead in the first place? If you do not have the compunction to see the task through then why start it to begin with?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Your ability to comprehend the situation is trivial and predictable. You killed him last night with your empty bottle. You know you did. Why, the blood is still wet on your collar! And now your first instinct—as the dawn sun rises and your head is clear—is to turn tail and run? I find that reprehensible. To not even acknowledge the kill? What hunter worth his salt would dare slay a dear and then turn and leave the carcass for the bugs and the earth?”

“So what are you asking?”

“I want you to go out there and apologise.”

“I cain’t do that!”

“Then you are a coward and a fraud, and I will not ride with you through the canyons. Your man gave me his solemn word that your rabble is the best in the area. Judging by this performance of cowardice, I’d say you are not. If you’re not up to the task, then I’ll assume that the deal is in fact off. And I shall find another.”

“I cain’t! I was drunk. It was an accident,” Amos pleaded.

The comment seemed to aggravate Jakob. He sighed and tensed up for just a beat as he looked down at Amos. The silence fell heavy in the barn and each man stood there, not knowing what to do next, not knowing whether to draw their guns and fight the town, each other, or Jakob.

Amos quaked as he stood in the shadow of Jakob. Finally, Moss interjected.

“He’s right, Amos,” he said. “You need to do it. You need to go out there and either apologize—try talk your fuckin’ way out of it—or fight ‘em.”

“If I go out there now, they’re gone kill me!”

“So be it,” Jakob growled. “You earned it.”

When no protest came from any of the gang, Amos realised he had no choice. The gang watched him with cold flat eyes as he stood there before them like a scorned child.

He turned, and he walked towards the creaking barn doors like a man being led up the steps towards the noose. He allowed himself a small whimper and shut his eyes for a second before he resigned himself to the task.

Amos reluctantly kicked the barn doors opened and strutted out towards the mob. He came to the edge of the sledge and saw hanging lifelessly from underneath the tarp, the cold grey hand of the dead man. The dress shirt was covered in dried black blood and his palm faced upward to the sky as if attempting to catch something.  All the townsfolk, with their rifles trained upon him, watched sharply. Amos decided he was not about to apologize. Instead, he reached for his knife and unsheathed it.

Goddamit, they call me a coward, but I’m anything but! I’ll show them!

But, before he could make it to the corpse and take his prize, a lone bullet from an anonymous rifle hit him square in the chest and he stood stunned for a pause. The silence that followed the shot was deafening. He looked down and saw that his shirt was wet now. He dipped his hands into the wound and saw that there was blood on his fingers. He looked back up at the town in startled amazement.

Who the hell shot me?

And then the shooting started.

The deafening crack of their repeaters echoed across the ashen landscape. Amos managed to take ten rounds before he fell into the dirt silently. He sunk down in a hail of bullets and—afterwards—the townsfolk soon came about his desecrated corpse and started hacking at his dead limbs with their farming tools. His gun and his clothing was divided amongst the rabble and his body was splintered and hewed alike amongst the people.

Before long, Amos was nothing more than a pile of cutlets that the residents soon dragged away and then threw to the pigs for feeding.

Jakob watched the whole thing from the edge of town. In the interim, he and the rest of the gang had crept out of the back doors of the barn and had stole away to the wagon. The gang looked on appalled as their friend was hacked to pieces in front of them. But not Jakob. He sat with his arms crossed in the driver’s box of the wagon and smoked a thin black cigarette, watching them all slash away at the corpse laying in the dust.

And when it was done, he tossed the butt and snarled with joy and cracked the whips of the wagon, as if the show was indeed over. As if the metaphorical theatre curtains had dropped over the whole thing. The horses neighed and bucked into motion and the wagon went on past the smouldering bodies and the blood-stained thoroughfare and the dilapidated saloon and the ghoulish townsfolk all holding their rifles absently as they looked down at the blood and the body parts of the dead man who killed one of their own.

And, soon, the wagon left it all behind. The town disappeared behind them in a shimmering haze of heat and the desert before them took over. They rode on. Jakob sat at the helm and grinned to himself the whole time. Eli rode shotgun and noticed. The rest of the gang followed on horseback.

“Why do ye smile all the time?” Eli clamoured.

“… It’s all just a big pantomime, isn’t it,” Jakob replied without looking across at him. His grin became even more prominent.

“He was my friend, ye know?”

They rode on across the plateau in a long file and no one spoke for a while. The dry wood wagon in the middle was already moaning under the heat and the terrain. Everything was bare and absent of life. Only the constant lazy thumping of hooves and clanking of pots and gear gave any definition to the emptiness. There was a series of stunted mountains to the south. Westward, flat like the ocean, lay the horizon, and that was where they were riding to.

Those first two days no one spoke beyond agreeing towards setting up camp and what direction was best to take. The tension of Amos’ death hung over the convoy like a suffocating cloud and Moss wondered whether it was a good move to go with Jakob after all. No one wanted to address it directly, but they all wanted to kill Jakob more than ever previously. The prospect of stealing the gold became a bonus to the mission instead of its focus now.

That night, they set up camp around the wagon and each man took sentry throughout the night and in the morning they dispatched without breakfast. The ride across the plateau was long and uneventful and they saw nothing but buzzards following their convoy.

In the afternoon, they saw the rugged edges of the canyon looming up from the flat white horizon in dust-shrouded benediction. As if the shelter of which would provide salvation for the rogue men from the burning heat of their sins. The wagon creaked and rocked gently from side to side as it made its way over across the gastine and then into those canyons. The immense yellow orb in the cloudless sky glowed and the shine of it desiccated everything underneath it.

“Why’d you send him out to die?” Eli finally asked Jakob. It was the first time anyone had spoken all day.

“Why do you think I did?” Jakob retorted.

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”

“If there’s one thing I despise the most about humanity it’s unaccountability. If your man back there choose to acknowledge his faults and sought to make reparations, then I would have gladly helped him when the time came. But instead, he chose irresponsibility. His actions were reprehensible. He deserved to suffer…”

Eli didn’t reply. Instead, he sagged down and looked forward absently at the unending tunnel of the canyon before them. In a peculiar way, he knew Jakob was right.

Jesse rode alongside the wagon and had heard the whole exchange. For an answer, he spat aggressively off the side of his horse and then rode on past the wagon to meet Moss at the front of the cavalcade. He came alongside and looked across at Moss as the pair of horses trotted slowly across the craggy road.

“You gonna allow this, Moss?” Jesse challenged. “He done got Amos killed.”

“No, I ain’t. When the time is right and we’re clear of New Mexico, we’ll take him then.”

“I could’a put an end to it last night, Moss!”

“Keep your fuckin’ voice down,” Moss growled.

“I could’a stuck him with the knife in his sleep and we’d be on our way with that there wagon by now! Instead, we’re ridin’ through this dustbowl! Why don’t we just turn ‘round and shoot him now?”

“Have you seen the gold yet?”

“… No,” Jesse said.

“Neither have I. We don’t know if he’s bluffing yet or not. He may still have to pick up the coins. Or they could be locked in safes.”

“What about them rings he’s wearing? That’ll be enough, surely?”

“You ain’t thinkin’ right, boy. Don’t do anything until we know he’s got the gold about his person!”

“If you won’t, then I will,” Jesse snarled and rode ahead of the posse.

“You won’t!” Moss called after him.

They rode on and Moss had instructed his men to keep their rifles at the ready and scan the tops of the canyons. If there was to be an ambush on the convey, then it would be here.

But, bizarrely, nothing happened. The day was slow and hard and they bedded down at dusk in a small crevasse in the canyon. The meagre fire flickered in the middle of them all and they shared a bottle of whiskey as a form of memorial for Amos. Moss poured three fingers’ worth of the stuff into the dented tin cups that each man held out before him.

“To Amos,” Moss said and lifted his cup. The gang did also.

“To Amos,” they all sounded off lowly like a miserable choir. All but Jakob. Instead, he drank his drink while they were eulogising the dead man and guffawed, but the gang ignored it.

Later in the night, when they climbed into their sleeping rolls and drifted off each, Jakob stood above them all and watched inquisitively as they snored, like an ornithologist studying the habits of birds. Several times he had to push his hand to his mouth to stop himself from giggling like a big child and awakening them.

The moon was full and its alabaster shine illuminated the dried and dead canyon in a strange shade of blue. Things that were ordinarily red or green in the day were now all a luminescent azure. He toyed with the idea of doing it now. He produced his giant Bowie knife and slid it gently across each man’s sleeping throat. But, the notion of doing it now seemed ignominious and anti-climactic. He wanted them to suffer first. Only then would he carve out their hearts and grant them passage to the next plain. He only required one or two. The rest he could do what he wished with.

Instead of butchering the men, he turned and went and sat on a large boulder in the canyon and carved strange runes into its rock face with his knife. He smiled and whispered strange passages and stroked the carvings once it was done. Affirmed that his markings would be studied and pondered over for the next millennium, along with all the other works he’d installed across the lands, he then went back to the wagon and pretended to have woken up first in front of the men. As they all rolled out of their beds—blissfully unaware of what could have been—they turned and found Jakob in the middle of them all, perfectly dressed and clean, percolating coffee over a small fire. He sat crosslegged and barely moving, smiling at Moss.

Moss raised up from his mat, rubbed his eyes, and just looked back at Jakob strangely. What is that bastard thinking now?

“Long road ahead, boys,” Jakob grinned. “Have some coffee before we dispatch. It’s nice and hot.”

“How much further?” Luke asked.

“It’s a long road. You can be sure of that,” Jakob said as he went to each man and poured coffee into their awaiting cups like it was an augury. “You’ll need all the fortitude you can muster. Drink,” he laughed. “I heard strange rustlings near our camp last night. I believe we are being followed after all.”

The men looked across at each other queerly and then drank the steaming coffee.

They rode on and the next day, they descended rocky switchbacks, and they found themselves shut of the canyon and into arid brush lands that stretched off boundless and bare in every direction save for that same jagged canyon behind. The islands of bone-white clouds drifted listlessly across the blue sky to the east. The surface of the road ahead rippled in the heat mirages and each man knew it would be an ordeal like no other to cross such’a plane. The horses groaned and snorted as Jakob cracked the whips and forced them to trot on across the searing earth.

The air was dry and abrasive against their exposed faces and each man felt his skin slowly cracking until it almost resembled the parched earth they were riding over.

“This damn heat,” Jesse moaned after a while. “Moss, we should go back Montana way. Least then I can put a damn coat on when it’s cold!”

“You best acquaint yourself with the heat, young man. For there is plenty more heat to come!” Jakob chuckled.

Jesse frowned and took it as a threat. “What you mean?” He hissed.

“You’ll see soon enough…”

Jesse fell back from the wagon and wondered what Jakob meant by such a statement. The more he’d thought about it the more he reckoned he should just shoot Jakob in the back of the head as soon as the opportunity would allow. He laid his hand over his revolver grip and quietly waited for such an opening.

“So how much gold you reckon you got in the back there?” Moss asked Jakob, doing his best to appear amicable.

“I do not know the exact figure, but it is a substantial amount.”

“Show me.”

Jakob turned his head slowly like a hawk. “Why?”

“So I know we’re not going to end up with a 5% cut of pottery instead of gold.”

“You’re a cynical man, Moss. Why would I be tasked with the transportation of such meaningless antiquities?”

“So you’ll have no problem showing me then?”

“They’re in lock boxes, my good man. None of which I have the keys for, so you’re just going to have to take my word. But if it’ll settle your apprehension, I shall show you the bill of ladings when we make camp,” Jakob chided.

“Fine. But, it’s dangerous lands out here, so you’re gonna want us on your side. Otherwise, who knows what could happen,” Moss replied and tried to make it sound like a threat, but Jakob seemed not to care.

“Whatever can happen, will happen. Only the vicious survive…”

After they’d made camp, Moss went and took Jakob to one side and demanded to see the inventory of the wagon. Jakob gladly obliged and produced a small piece of expensive paper neatly folded in his duster. He smiled as he handed it to Moss. Moss read it and when he saw the amount of gold listed at the bottom, his mouth dropped and he almost gasped with laughter. It was even more than he’d previously imagined.

“I’m sorry I doubted you,” Moss said and handed the letter back graciously.

Jakob nodded. “You’d have had to have been a fool not to want confirmation of such wealth. No matter.”

Jakob slapped Moss on the shoulder and dipped his head in reverence.

“I shall be unavailable for sentry duty tonight, my good man,” he said. “I aim to paint tonight.”

Moss frowned. “Paint?”

“Indeed. What better use of one’s intermission?”

“I didn’t know you painted. What do you paint with?”

“Everything. Goodnight, and I shall see you in the morning.”

Jakob turned and disappeared into the shroud of night.

Moss turned and watched him pass and thought of how peculiar his statement was. What did he mean by that?

Noon, the next day, and they’d come across a burned-down homestead. In front of the charred skeleton of the wattle and daub mud-house, there was a family. Three men and two women, and several children strewn over the landscape in primitive arrangements. All of them had been scalped and beheaded and their heads had been placed on their torsos and orientated so that they were all looking back towards the burned-down building that was their home. The slack of their dead expressions made them all appear ambivalent to the horror that had taken them.

The wagon didn’t stop. They rode past the massacre and each man simply reviewed this scene with stony ambivalence. The desolate winds howled across the wastes and through the gutted house and over the dead family and the scene disappeared behind them in a shimmering blur.

It was only after another hour did someone finally speak.

“Why would they do that? Put them heads like that?” Luke asked, more to himself than anyone else.

“Must be Rarámuri Indians,” Moss said absently, knowing it wasn’t them.

“… Indians. Goddamn savages,” Jesse replied and spat into the sand with disgust. “If I had it my way, I’d murder the whole broad.”

“But why put the heads like that?” Luke asked again, still not satiated. “That didn’t look like the workings of no Indians to me.”

“Dominance, my good man. Dominance,” Jakob said.

Luke turned to look at him from his horse. “I don’t get you…”

“If you wish to possess something you must first conquer it. This method is applied across all of life,” he averred with portentousness.

Luke shared a glance with Eli and couldn’t find the right words to express his bafflement at Jakob’s callous statement.

“You’re crazy, Jakob. I think the sun has cooked your damn brains!” Eli said instead.

“So it is that life survives through savagery. Those who are weak and weary shall be labelled as prey. And the strong and willing shall feast upon their evanescence and essence. Trees fight for sunlight. Predators kill for rights to the watering holes. And it shall be that only the cold-hearted and the hungry will survive in such an abysmal and unforgiving land. There is no mercy for the incapable. And when there is no more prey to consume they shall turn to each other. The universe shall die eating itself…”

The sentence fell heavy across the gang and each man coiled and retreated in on themselves. They rode on and after a while, all the horses neighed and started looking about wearily as if some unseen force near them was panicking them. The horses pulling the wagon darted their heads about skittishly and kept on trying to break free from the reins.

“What the fuck is wrong with these horses?” Luke exclaimed.

“They’re spooked by something,” Moss answered.

“By what?” There ain’t nothin’ out here!”

“Could be them Muertos Vivientes…” Jakob offered.

Moss grimaced and squinted as he ran his gaze across the landscape. “We ain’t seen no signs of them yet. It’s something else that’s bothering them. Just keep your rifles cocked for now.”

But something was clearly very wrong. Every so often the horses would buck and attempt to rid themselves of their riders and make off alone into the stark and lurid plains that was the interminable desert.

“I’m just relieved I commissioned your services, gentlemen,” Jakob winked.

They rode on.

By nightfall, as they made their way across the plateau, something seemed to answer the horse’s portent. Seemingly rising from the heat, a great churning storm began to swell unnaturally on the horizon ahead of them. Thick black clouds accrued and soon smothered the skyline in inky dark, as if somewhere ahead a great ancient factory was pumping out soot into the iron-grey backdrop. Before long, it was all around them. And then it was over them and the clouds mutated, became gravid with rain, and began to fall. Thick earthy-smelling rains hammered down unnaturally in the desert and the skies cried out with jolts of blue lightning and cracks of unseen thunder, as if the sky itself was wailing or protesting.

They rode and rode through it all as best as they could, but the skies were dark and no one knew which direction they were heading in anymore.

The horses became inconsolable and soon resigned themselves to sprinting manically as one towards an unseen point. No amount of whipping nor reining could contain their terror. They rode through the tremendous downpour as one body. They grouped around the wagon as if trying to extract warmth from its bulk and sprinted desperately through the wall. The storm front loomed large ahead of them and only seemed to grow the more that rode on through it. By midnight, the gales lashed at their exposed skins and the protests of the horses and the shouting of the men were drowned out in the impenetrable wall of rain surrounding them.

They’d tried to make camp but the downpour was tremendous and no fire could be lit. The gang soon resigned themselves to huddling in a pile underneath the wagon and waiting eagerly for the clearing of the brooding skies. They hitched their horses on each wheel and climbed under the vehicle’s shield. All, but Jakob. He sat on top of it, having offered to take watch through the night. The men, too weary and enervated of strength simply agreed.

“I’ll not put up with this much longer, Moss,” Jesse moaned. “This ain’t why I chose to ride with you boys!”

“Like it or not, you’re here.”

“Why don’t we just get him now and be shut of it? He’s up there right now. Let’s do it,” Jesse whispered and the gang shared a concerned glance.

“Keep it down. He might hear you,” Luke muttered.

“Shut it, Jesse. Try get some sleep,” Moss barked.

“How the fuck I’m supposed to do that? We don’t even know where we are!”

Eventually, they did sleep and the storm continued on above them all and they each suffered strange dreams.

Moss imagined himself decomposing into the sands, down a long and narrow well of earth brick. When his essence settled at the bottom of that black well, he found himself in a stone room with no doors. It was cavernous and wooden staves burned and flickered in the corners of the chamber. He was laying in the middle of the space, looking up absently at a vaulted masonry ceiling. Palls of sickly-smelling smoke drifted languidly around the torch flames like ancient diseases. Misshapen and shambling mutants stood over him, all peering down and examining his paralysed form. Their waxy featureless and croaked faces all leaned over him on the primordial altar. In the corner of the room was an immense grey shroud, enshadowing them all, watching over the whole operation. Although it had no features, Moss could see that it was smiling. The shadow moved closer until it was over him. It appeared to be bartering with the faceless ghouls as they all examined him.

One of them placed its disgusting clawed bat-like hand over Moss’s eyes and shut them for him.

Moss tossed and wailed in his bedroll as the visions took complete hold of him and he thought of death and decomposition and the finality of it all.

In the morning, the men rose, all haggard and beaten down. The rains and the thunder persisted still and no man could tell dawn from night.

“I just had a very bad dream…” Moss croaked as he sat up. Death in the staggering particular. He looked around blearily and considered the dream. Was it a dream? More like premonitions in the half-life of awakening.

“Me too,” Eli muttered.

Death was only the beginning.

Eli rose from under the wagon and looked about from his roll mat and saw that Jesse was no longer next to him.

“Where’s Jesse?” He grumbled.

The gang paused and surveyed the area and saw that the space which he’d taken up the night before was now vacant and all his possibles had been packed away. Luke pointed out to the gang that Jesse’s horse was no longer hitched.

“Must’ve rode on ahead to scout out the land,” Luke said.

“I reckon so,” Moss retorted.

“So, he took off?”

“Maybe…”

Jakob was already sitting in the box of the wagon, as if excited to ride on through the rain.

“We’ll find him soon enough,” Jakob said casually. “Let’s get a move on.”

They did. The tired men stuffed away their equipment in their saddle bags and mounted up reluctantly.

By noon the following day, the rains had mercifully ceased. As they came to the edge of the storm and broke free of it, they instinctively stopped where they were and sighed. They slumped down each, all glassy-eyed in their saddles each and they looked at one another with that same haunting greyness across their faces that only dead men seemed to wear. Everyone knew the horses would not last much longer, and when they did go, the gang would perish with them.

The pause was not an attempt to regain their stamina, but instead a silent acknowledgement that they may not make it across the waste after all.

The sun resumed its natural position and the heat returned also. It didn’t take long for everything to dry out once more and the men rode on.

Out across the sun-blanched wastes that lay ahead of them baking and barren, the men recognised nothing of the environment and could see no signs of life anywhere. The only sounds were that of the horrible squeaking wagon and the creaking of leather and the clinking of old metal. The ordeal was endless. Jakob began whistling a nameless and joyful tune to himself and the others sat in their saddles and carved their gaze across the horizon.

“Where are we? I don’t recognise any of this land,” Eli mumbled.

“Ain’t on no map neither,” Luke added.

“Where are we, Jakob?” Moss asked.

“We’re riding in the correct direction. That’s all you need concern yourself with…”

The men shared a glance but did not challenge Jakob.

That evening, the gang made camp in a small pit like a mass grave. They laid down across the rocks within and huddled tight to each other. The nature of their existence had degenerated to such extreme lengths that they now resembled the battered remnants of some neolithic tribe long forgotten. No fire could be made and no food was available. Only the yearning for dawn and the promise of food and water remained.

How did we get here? Eli thought. He remembered once more Jakob’s monologue back at the saloon. ‘At which point does life become existent? Is it presence? Is it the marks left behind? Look at that man there. Behold him. Is he alive? Or, is he merely acting out the pantomime of life? Just because things exist, does not mean they are alive…’

That was how Eli felt. He may have been laying there in rocks, but he did not feel alive. Eli trembled in his bed roll and leaned across to meet Moss.

“Moss, he’s taking us down to Mexico. We ain’t heading east,” he said.

Moss snorted and spat a pitiful amount of spit out at his feet. “How you figure?”

“We’re heading south. If we were heading east, then that there sun would’ve risen in front of us and set behind us today. Instead, it rose to our left and set to our right… South.”

“Yep. And yesterday, it rose behind us but set on our left. So how you figure that?”

“He’s leading us in goddamn circles, Moss.”

“Why would he do that? He’s as just as good as dead as us.”

“I don’t know where we heading for, but it sure ain’t Bartlesville.”

Later the next day, Jesse was found tied to a large boulder in the shape of an X. He had been flayed and the pile of his skin laid in the dust next to his dried body like discarded laundry. His senses had been removed in a primitive fashion. His severed nose, ears, tongue, and eyes had all been placed in a small pile at the boulder’s peak and positioned to vaguely resemble the deceased man’s face when he was alive. Jesse now looked like a long strip of blackened beef jerky curing under the unforgiving sun. His hollow eye sockets faced upward to its rays, and his jaw was opened in aghast as if pleading for mercy.

But no mercy had been given.

The men gasped as their surbated horses came to a stop in front of the scene.

“Is that… is that Jesse?” Luke asked the gang, not entirely sure if he wanted an answer.

“I believe it is…” Jakob replied from the box.

They all looked on stunned at the sheer horror before them and none could think of the right words.

Carved into the boulder around the exhibition in a semi-circular fashion were strange hieroglyphs and markings that looked like they could have been made aeons ago. Primordial symbols that none of the gang seemed to recognise.

“Good God, what in the hell are all those?”

“That weren’t no goddamn Rarámuri Indians! That ain’t no Indian’s work! That’s the Devil! There are Demons out here!” Luke cried hysterically. “I knew broader things were about!”

“Goddammit, shut him up!” Moss commanded.

“The Devil is in these lands. This is wider than we know!”

“Shut up!” Moss snapped.

“We’re in Hell,” Luke then whimpered as he looked upon Jesse’s dried-out husk laying prostrate before them.

“I believe it was indeed these Muertos Vivientes you speak of,” Jakob said calmly.

“How the fuck you figure that?” Luke shouted.

“Your man rode on ahead… alone. He was prey. Muertos Vivientes means ‘The Walking Dead’, in Spanish. These mysterious spectres of the wastes are perhaps just that…”

Jakob turned and faced Moss, “It appears your escort services are required after all,”  he said. “We must stick close if we are to make it across these plains. They hunt like hyenas. We must work together like a pride of lions.”

“Goddamn! I’ll have no part of this,” Luke said. “I’ll sooner take my damn chances and ride back to the scarlet town. There’s something very wrong here and I’ll have no damn part of it!”

“Luke, we need to ride on.”

“Dig your own graves, dammit!” Luke said and spat into the sand and it evaporated before the mark could be made.

With that, he turned and rode off back in the direction they’d all came from.

“Luke! Get back here!” Moss howled after him, but Luke ignored it and continued riding until his form vanished over the horizon of that pulsing white light of the desert.

“Let him go,” Jakob said. “He’ll not make the ride.”

What remained of the party watched him leave and then turned and trotted on in the opposite direction. The cacti forest and the brush lands then flattened and slowly transitioned into vast salt wastes and lakes of gypsum. The white sands all around—as white and glowing as the sun above—had no definition and seemingly stretched on infinitely. The parched broken skulls of coyotes lay discarded at various intervals along the track and the colour of them was as phosphorus as the sun. As if each being staggered on as long as they could before collapsing.

They rode on for days and each day seemed to be longer and longer.

One night, they camped in the ruins of an old Pueblo adobe house. It was full of burnished pots and rotten wooden ladders not yet collapsed. The roof had either caved in or been peeled away by the desolate winds. Now there was just the hollow skeleton of the jack rafters and the infinite tar-coloured sky above, littered with small white star-shaped holes that appeared like piercings in the facade of the night sky, and beyond them must’ve laid everlasting nothingness.

In the blackened fireplace of the house were the charred remains of a small skeleton.

They laid in their bedrolls in front of it and finished the last of the whiskey and tried to light a fire and dreamed of home. Jakob had disappeared soon after dusk. He’d instructed them to keep watch over the wagon in his absence and that he would be back before dawn. Both men had watched him vanish into the twilight haze of the burned-out doorway and then no more noises were heard.

“We ain’t getting out of here alive are we, Moss?” Eli sighed.

“Don’t look like it does it… Horses won’t go much farther. I don’t even know which territory we’re in anymore.”

“I’m telling you this ain’t on no fuckin’ map. This is somewhere else,” Eli whispered, as if too scared to speak the words out loud.

“… We’ll find out in the morning.”

Then neither spoke for a while. The moon rose full above them and there was an alarming silence to the wilderness. Not a single sound save for the pair’s own quiet breathing could be heard. Moss stared up at the swollen alabaster circle up there through the broken roof and thought of his dead men. He thought of death and eternity. Did Luke make it back? I should’ve gone with him, dammit.

Moss slid off into an uncomfortable and dream-filled sleep. He awoke back in the stone room once more, and he saw only the grey shadow above him now. The mutilated and faceless beings were gone. Only the darkness remained. It hovered over him like wet smoke before turning and extinguishing the only candle in the room. Then there was only blackness once more.

Eli heard Moss cry out in his sleep as if being molested by some unseen force. He turned and buried his head in his hands and tried to remember the faces of his parents once more.

Dawn crawled around and the morning air was cold and vacuous. Both men rose. The weary horses by their sides nudged at them desperately, trying to parley water from their owners. But there was none to be had and both men pushed their horses away. Their faces were gaunt and withered and Moss noticed how Eli’s usually pert and fat cheeks had now sagged and appeared wrinkled like the cheeks of an emaciated dog. Soon after the dregs of coffee were made, Jakob appeared from behind the wagon—as if he’d been behind it the entirety of the night—and asked the men to hitch up.

“First, we need words. We need to know where the hell we are,” Eli said.

“Arizona, dear boy…” Jakob replied, passing him by.

“Arizona? But I thought we were makin’ for Oklahoma?” Moss interjected as he followed Jakob to the wagon.

“The storm had ruined that for us, unfortunately. We had to change direction. There is a transit station for Archibald Titus in Tucson,” Jakob said as he climbed up to the box of the wagon. “We may deposit the gold there and be rid of this task.”

“And what about our cut? I’ve lost my men out here—”

“Easily replaced.”

Moss’s face tightened. “What did you fuckin’ say?” He snarled. “They’re not easily replaced. They were—”

“—$500 each, plus an additional $50 for replacement of your horses,” Jakob interrupted with a loud booming voice. “Tucson is a mere fifty miles away. Can you stomach it until then?”

Moss looked across at Eli and Eli nodded solemnly. Both men knew it was their best chance of escaping the desert.

“The end is near, friends! The end is near.”

They set out from the ruins and the heat rose to unbearable heights and the horses and men alike swayed drunkenly as they scrabbled over the parched and cracked landscape. The sun’s rays cast their doomed shadows over the land like elongated silhouettes of skeletons shuffling along in single file across the blade’s edge of the horizon. To the east, far off in the distance, a great rolling wall of sand and dust made its way across the flat plateau.

They rode on.