The Black Oasis (Part 1)

1

Five miles outside of Candles Rest, the dead body strapped to the back of my horse started to flail around and mumble as if life had jumped back into him faster than the bullet that had taken it away. The body was one Elias Boone and he was worth five thousand alive, half that for a corpse. You can imagine my excitement at having the full amount of the bounty restored despite Mr. Boone's head wound. My rifle had delivered the fatal shot just a few hours prior and that burst noggin of his was practically still smoking. Made a red mess all over the backside of my horse. 

Sitting by the fire, sipping on the sludge I called coffee, Mr. Boone turned his shattered face towards me and we made something that could be called eye contact under ordinary circumstances. I had stopped and made camp for a quick bite before riding into town, as the saloon in Candles Rest had criminal prices, so it was rather kind of Mr. Boone to decide he was still alive on the side of the road instead of at full gallop. 

“Now don’t you move, Mr. Boone,” I said to my hogtied quarry, loading him onto Roci. I pulled myself into the saddle after decamping and made for Candles Rest before Mr. Boone died again.

I had been tracking Boone for about a week, and his track led me out into the desert. I spent a week out there in the scrub, sniffing his scent. I caught up to him and his gang in a dead little town the railroad had decided to go clean past twenty years ago. The town dried up overnight and ever since it had become something of a hideout for running killers and other fine gentlemen. The name of the town was not something I knew or cared to find out. 

A rocky plateau overlooked the whole of the town and with my binoculars I spied a well with a low rock wall placed outside the Baptist church. Four horses had been tied at the old saloon so I figured that’s where they were staying. A horse for each man. Three dark silhouettes huddled around the well.

I had decided none of them were Elias and I could go about shooting them down without having to worry about the final total. Boone was holed up in the saloon, I figured. I had switched from my binoculars to my rifle, belly to the desert, scoping the boys below. I put one in my sights. The first gunshot broke the silence of the town like a man jolting up from a nightmare.  My arm was a greased piston as I levered a new shell into the tube after each gunshot. Two bodies flopped to the ground and I missed the third man that was full sprinting to his horse. I held my breath, said a small prayer, opened my eyes and sighted him as he was pulling himself into the saddle. I pulled the trigger and half his head disappeared in a shower of red and white.. 

I jumped onto Roci and put her at full gallop, realizing I had opened fire without having Mr. Boone’s. As I turned her onto the street of the dead town, I noticed one of the four horses didn’t have a saddle on her. She looked rangy, like they had plucked her out of the wilderness with the hopes of selling her to a rancher that didn’t know any better. My heart sank into my ass. I pulled up to the third man, who was currently pooling a large black puddle into the dirt, and looked into the half face of Mr. Boone. Well, shit. Elias had always worn something like a ranchers hat, the artist even drew it in his wanted poster. I guess he had switched to a wide brimmed sombrero at some point. I guess I should have looked at their faces instead of their hats but the shadows had been too deep. Twenty-five hundred it was then. I hogtied the body and stowed it on my horse.

We camped on the plateau and watched the moon rise. It was full and strangely colored. Mr. Boone laid dead some yards away from camp in case he started to stink. The next morning I packed everything up in the early dark and made my way to Candles Rest.

2

The sun was low and hot. Looked fat and red like a welt itching to burst and drip its fluids down your back. I’ve been told my speech is offensive to the ears just as my scent is to the nose. My whole existence felt like an offense to something, because of all the luck there is in the world, it never found me. People scowled in my direction despite never trading words. Even if they could look inside my head, their opinions would be justified.

About five miles before we reached Bone Meadow is when Mr. Boone started screaming. I just about soiled my pants when he started gurgling like he was gagging on his own blood.. After we got back on the road it occurred to me that we had camped not far from a graveyard. It belonged to no community, Candles Rest having their own, and was mainly used as a dumping ground for hermits gone itchy in the desert heat. No one else would take them and a few good samaritans started burying them out here.

The small yard had been fenced off with a low barrier made of bones scavenged from the Meadow. My guts went cold as we passed.  Every grave had been disturbed. Dug up. Neat rectangular holes in front of every headstone. I didn’t have the stomach to go check if they were empty so I put Roci to a faster trot. About an hour later we reached Bone Meadow.

At the crest of a hill it stretched below me, a brown sea speckled with dollops of white. A herd of cattle numbering in the hundreds died here a few years ago. No one's sure as to the why of it. They had been driven from Donovan's Ranch about thirty miles east of here, bound for the coast for sale. They never made it. The Sheriff of Candles Rest found the herd about a month later. Dead, every last heifer. Cattle drivers were nowhere to be found. The animals had been hollowed out like a great spoon had been taken to their insides. Old Donovan hadn’t even inquired about his missing herd. Died not too long after. No one ever made any connection between the two events. Now it was called Bone Meadow and it meant I only had a few miles to go until I could drop off this screaming bastard. Mr. Boone had been more agreeable in death. His screams were beginning to weigh on my dusty soul.

I rode through. The bones looked strange, warped like they had been thrown into a kiln for a few hours. Discolored. Patches of sickly green clung to a rib here, a skull there. The whole place smelled vile despite the rot being long over. Flesh doesn’t last long under this sun.

An hour later I found myself on the main street of Candles Rest. It was quiet. Strange for that time of day. It wasn’t a big camp, about a dozen families in hovels radiating out from the main drag, but as I passed the closed mercantile store and drew up to the saloon, I couldn’t help but feel that this was a dying town.

Sheriff Wilson Bender’s office was at the end of the street in a little cul de sac that was home to the Sheriff's office, the town stables, and the Church. Of that third structure, ruin had come down on it. It was blackened from fire and the roof looked like a mighty fist had smashed through. The first sign of life I saw was a dirty child digging through the rubble with soot stained hands. When he heard us approaching his head jerked up and gave me a look that would wilt the devil himself. Strange children are common in this country now.

I tied my horse up outside Bender's office with my wailing quarry still on its flanks. He could stay there for now. I took a look around at the landscape. The sky was almost red with the failing sun and the stores and homes black splotches on a flat canvas. It gave me the willies. The thought of spending the night in this town had been a hopeful prospect out in Bone Meadow but now I couldn’t wait to get out of this town. Sleeping out in the desert seemed like a safer way.

Bender had heard me approaching and met me on the porch of his office, a pump gun cradled in the crook of his arms like a baby.

“Evening Cole. Who you got there?”

“Elias Boone. He’s worth exactly five thousand, as you can see here,” I said, pulling the wanted poster from my satchel and unrolling it in the red light so Bender could see.

“Five thousand alive,” he said, meeting my gaze with eyes like stones.

“He’s alive. Can’t you hear him?”

“Where’s the rest of his head gone?”

“The belly of a coyote I reckon. He’s no worse for it.”

The sheriff gave me a look to split the sky. He sighed deeply and motioned for me to follow him into his office. 

It was cooler in here by about five degrees and I was thankful for the small relief from the sun. Red suns were supposed to be cooling but ours seemed to be getting more fiery the longer it hangs up there. Procuring a lock box from a loose floorboard, he opened it on his desk and started counting out my money.

“Five thousand,” he said, smacking the last bill down on the stack.

“I didn’t think I would actually get the full amount,” I said.

“Yeah well, the second half is an advanced payment for a job.”

“I ain’t a deputy.”

“I don’t need you to be one. I just need an extra gun.”

He reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a bottle and two glasses and went to pouring.
“What do you need?” I asked, reaching for the whiskey he had pushed towards me as I sat down in the rickety chair that faced his desk.

“Have you heard from your family back east?” he asked, ignoring my question.

“I don’t have family,” I said to him, shooting the whiskey down. 

“Well I do, and they're back east. Kansas mostly. Things are looking bleak out there. Practically all of the east coast has gone quiet. No word makes its way west and anybody who rides for the coastal states never comes back. My cousin had a sweetheart in New York. She told him in letters that something like a plague had started in the city. He hasn’t returned any of his letters since. That was about six months ago.”

“I ain't a doctor either,” I told him as I poured another.

“We stopped getting news papers, supplies. Sawyer down at the general store gets his stock from an outfit from Philadelphia. They’ve stopped running him his monthly stock and they don’t reply to his letters either. Shelves are getting barren and the townsfolk are getting worried.”

“Get to the point, Sheriff.” I like Bender, truely, but I wasn’t in the mood to converse. I had been out in the desert for too long and I needed to sleep on a bed soon.

“I just want to know what you’ve seen. Out there,” he said, gesturing vaguely beyond the clapboard walls.

“Business been slow?” I asked. Both cells at the back of the office were empty, something I had never encountered in all my visits to the town. Candles Rest was a lively place.

“C’mon Cole. What you seen?”

I sighed and put my glass back on the desk. “It’s been barren out there. Towns drying up. I haven’t seen any wagon trains going back east though. I hadn't seen a train in a while either.”

"A lot of the lines have been destroyed. Follow the track out west, see what you find. Out in the canyon it's like some colossal hand just reached down and tore the tracks up. We’re the last outpost of civilization until you reach the coast as far as I can tell.”

“The sun's like an open wound up there.”

“That started overnight. One day, the sun was shining like normal and set for the night. The next day, when it rose, it was like it was a whole new sun. Got robbed and replaced on the other side of the earth, I reckon.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah that’s right. Is it the same out there?”

“Yeah. Made Bone Meadow look like a true Hell on earth.” I thought about telling him about the missing hermit graves but decided against it. I needed sleep.

“I never got to the bottom of that. Not one stitch of those cattle drivers was found.”

“Probably didn’t want to be found after they fucked that herd so badly.”

“I don’t think it was that, Cole.”

“What’ve you boys been up to around here?”

“Was Mr. Boone out there lively the whole time you rode with him?” he asked, ignoring my question. Boone had kept up his hollering and we could hear his muffled screams beyond the walls.

“No, he woke up about the time I got to the Meadow.”

The sheriff nodded and sipped his whiskey. Bender was a calm man. Measured. He was born a slave and shot his way to freedom when the plantation hand that had been watching him left his pistol on his horse. He was thirteen at the time and I think the man has been a serious bastard ever since. He was slowly growing gray and cracked with age but there was a vitality to him still. Never told me how he became sheriff of Candles Rest but he’s the only lawman I can get along with.

“I need you to ride with me Cole. All my deputies are dead or quit. I need to ride out to Cardinal Ranch, about fifteen miles west. Something is going on out there.”

“Like what?”

“We found Gerald Cardinal hanging from the old willow in his front yard about three weeks ago. Family all gone. He had three children, two boys and a girl. The wife, Margery, died some years ago. An illness. He wouldn’t clarify when I asked. He’d been tortured before they hung him. Flayed off his skin and then through salt on him. He was hanging up there like a Christmas pig ready for the oven. The house was decrepit, like it hadn’t been lived in. But I know for a fact that place was well cared for. Paint was peeling off the shutters like they hadn’t seen a fresh coat in fifty-years but Gerald had been in the process of painting the whole house when I inquired about his wife. It’s like somebody wanted it to appear abandoned.”

“How the hell would they have made the paint peel?”

“I don’t know. I’d wager the kids had something to do with it. They're hiding in the hills behind the house, I can feel it.”

“What happened to your people?”

“People just keep turning up dead around here. Torn apart or just vanished like ghosts. Church burnt down, arson by the looks of it. I stopped asking questions. It seems to be going on all over and nobody has answers. My lead deputy Jeffers, you met him last time you blew through, he just sat up from that desk,” he said tilting he’s glass to the only other table in the office, “and walked out into the desert. Never saw that boy again.”

Listening to the sheriff and hearing it spoken out loud, it go me to thinking on things I’d seen. Noises in the night that sounded like tearing meat. Just a coyote, I told myself. Whole towns gone, dusted up and blown away, the wooden structures going to dust under the desert sun. Times are tough out here, I would tell myself, people can’t hack it and go back east. If there was anything to go back to. I had been ignoring the plains emptied of wildlife, eating canned food and jerky without thought. My stores were running low and I had been hoping to resupply while in town. From what Donovan had been saying, I don’t think I’ll find much of anything down at the General Store.

Eventually, after Bender promised me another thousand, I agreed to be his hired gun and go wrangle the Cardinal kids. He walked me out of the office. I led my horse down the street. There were a couple people walking about but they mainly kept their eyes to the ground and hustled along, eager to get back home to relative safety. It's like Candles Rest was under siege or something.

 I took Roci down to the livery and stabled her myself since there was no attendant. The saloon was barren. A couple drunks, no women. The floorboards were filthy. Cleaning had taken a backseat. The only thing the barkeep had in stock was sherry. I downed it and figured that the Sheriff probably had the last bottle of bourbon in this desert. 

I bunked with Bender. I had planned on getting a room for the night at the hotel but It was locked up and the windows black. Boone howled all night long. In the morning we mounted up and rode out just as that fat red sun started creeping over the horizon. Its early rays look like red hands laying claim to land below.