Chapter Nineteen.

Kathleen woke up to the smell of venison and onions. She started drooling as she sat up in her blankets.

“Is it time to move?”

“I let you sleeping a little longer, but the raining is over now. We eat now and I have some jerky softened so we can eat on the move. The sky looks like the rain will leaving now. We can travel all night, I think.”

Damn, he was an excellent cook. It baffled Kathleen. When she cooked, she used the same damned things he did, and it didn’t turn out nearly as nice.

“Eat fastly then prepare for the crossing the river. I will packing up the camp while you do that.”

Kathleen wolfed her food down then helped Alejandro saddle Henry up. She put all the items that shouldn't get wet and a change of pants into a buckskin sack. She slung it over her shoulder to keep it out of the river. She saddled Margarita up and did the same with the contents of her saddlebags. Then took her blankets and rolled them up and tied them to the sack over her shoulder. The whole arrangement looked ridiculous.

They rode down to the dock and studied the river. It was about fifty yards across, but it didn’t look too deep. A ford certainly existed in that location. Alejandro went first. If the bottom was a treacherous, he and Manchado would have an easier time than Margarita with Henry in tow.

The crossing was uncomplicated. He didn’t even get water in his boots.

Kathleen and her friend Henry followed him across.

Safely on the western bank, he looked at her and said, “See? Told you there wasn't naught to be worried about.”

She just shook her head and smiled. They turned north and sped up to a canter. They kept up the pace for five miles, then stopped to water the horses. “You think we can make lake Caballo before dark?”

He shrugged. He climbed onto Manchado’s saddle and stood up, once again giving Kathleen a mild heart attack. With his telescope to his eye, he remarked, “I am thinking so. Being on this side of the river, there is a good thing. Food is easy to find from the fields of the attacked farms.”

He lowered the telescope. “Meirda.”

He repeated, “Meirda. I see walls in the distance. The gates are open. I see no people in the area or in the fields and there are carrion birds circling. Fóllame.”

He sat still in the saddle. He glanced at her.

“Vamanos.”

***

They set a fast pace. They found the fort with open gates and bodies littering the grounds. The smell was terrible. The human bodies were burned, but recognizable. But the horses. The bodies were bloated and torn. Black vultures, turkey vultures, ravens, and crows were crawling on the bodies and fighting over the bits. A seething mass of black feathers covered the bodies.

Alejandro turned away, his stomach heaving. He barely managed to keep from vomiting. Kathleen wasn’t quite able to maintain that level of control. She started gagging, then threw up. They turned around and fled. They rode into a field. Seeing nothing but the horror of what they had witnessed. They came to a stop. It took a minute, but he noticed his surroundings. Onions. They were in an onion field. Tears in his eyes, he dismounted, then he searched his saddle bag. He pulled out his small hoe, dropped to his knees, and harvested the young onions.

Kathleen dismounted and did the same. She found some small carrots and sweet potatoes. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she pulled the food from the ground. It felt like stealing. They harvested as much as they could carry, then mounted up and headed north.

With no discussion, they moved as fast as Henry would allow them to. For five miles. They headed to the river to water the animals. They hobbled the animals and let them wander around to feed. Neither one was the slightest bit hungry, nor interested in talking.

They sat back to back on a hill, silently keeping watch. They waited until the animals were no longer hungry. They set off again.

After an hour, Alejandro spoke. “With this rain messing up the trail we follow, now our tracks will be obvious. I am hoping your Josiaha will be trapped on the other side of the river. That will slowing him down.”

He fell silent. Kathleen said nothing.

***

Kathleen tired of the silence after a mile. “Where did you live before you started traveling north?”

“We lived in Ciudad Guerrero. A walled town in Mexico, eighty miles west of chihuahua near the Papigochic river. The people who traveled with us, there were four families and ten men and we all lived together in the walled town. My father was the head of the farming workers for the don. Señor Montoya was a decent man. He was fair with all of his workers and he was well liked. But my papa always wanted to move and start his own farm. Señor Montoya knew this.”

Alejandro had trouble getting his water skin because its strap got tangled with the rifle and ammo case straps. Kathleen watched him out of the corner of her eye as he struggle with the straps. He started muttering curses in Español. Kathleen chuckled and reached over and lifted the strap off of his shoulder, allowing him to remove the water skin from his body. He glanced over and muttered, “Gracias.”

He continued. “For years, there were rumors of a powerful nation in the south moving their borders northward. Papa gathered the four families and convinced them to pool their wealth. They bought the wagons, the supplies and equipment. The last thing that was paid for was the rifle and the tools to make the ammunition.”

“The town was not owned by the Montoyas. Papa owned our hacienda and the land it sat on. We had a small herd of goats. Mi madre and I made cheese from the goat’s milk. Papa sold our hacienda to a family who needed a bigger place to raise their two children.”

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He smiled wistfully. “I tended the goat herd and worked in the fields with papa. An hombre named Ignacio taught me how to hunt with a bow. Later, he taught me how to shoot a rifle. I am very good with a rifle. Papa boasted that I could shoot a fly's wings from 100 yards away, even in the dark. I spent two or three days a week outside the walls with the hunting party, bringing home deer and the antílope berrendo.”

He paused to take a drink of water. He offered her the water skin. Kathleen accepted and took a few drinks. She held it out to him without making eye contact. She kept her mouth shut and smiled inwardly. Alejandro was so focused on telling her the story of his family and their travels that he had completely forgotten to fuck up his English. She resisted the urge to smile and gave her full attention to listening.

“When we prepared to leave.” Alejandro stopped talking. He cleared his throat then started again, “I was in love with a girl. She lived across the boulevard. Her name was Leaha Mendoza. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. I asked her to marry me and come with us. Her parents forbade her from leaving. They said we were all fools, and we’d die in the night. Outside the walls.”

Kathleen felt her inner smile fade.

They walked in silence for a few minutes.

Alejandro continued, “They were right. I was ready to defy my parents and stay behind to be with her. But I didn’t. So she is alive right now and I am dead inside. Now look at me. I am here with my new friend Kathleen Maclusky. And the two of us are going to kill some bastardos.”

Kathleen looked at his face and felt frightened. Alejandro had a snarl on his face. He looked like he was about to fucking murder someone.

Well, she was going to do it too. Murdering. When the time came. But actually seeing murder living in a man’s face was a terrible thing to behold. Again, Kathleen didn’t know what to say. So rather than say something stupid, she kept her stupid mouth shut.

Her mother had always told her how important that skill was to cultivate. Vida Maclusky had taught Kathleen that forethought, prudence, and silence were the secrets to managing a husband. Or any man, really. Some women would just babble away and actually make things worse.

The pair had reached the point they had agreed on to change their pace, so they jogged, leading the horses.

When they slowed back to a walk and had caught their breath, Alejandro continued with his story, “When we left the walls behind, it was very scary. Within twelve days, we were completely out of our known territory. We learned to make a camp we could defend from the Ghouls. Travel was slow. The hunters always went north to scout out the best path for the wagons.”

“Whenever we met new people, we were cautious. We would stay outside of their walls. Papa and Ignacio would meet with the townsfolk and trade for food and information. They would draw maps and get the names of people in towns further away. Papa said that if you had the name of someone, a person who could vouch for you, people would treat you better.”

He fell silent again. They rode a quarter of a mile with neither of them saying a word.

Finally he said, “As we traveled, sometimes we could go two or three weeks without meeting anyone or finding a town or farm. It was scary. One of our hunters, Gary Rivera, disappeared in one of those lonely places. We searched for him for four days. We found not a single sign of him or his horse. No tracks, hoof prints, horse shit, nothing. He just vanished.“

Sadness filled his voice. “He had a day’s rations and a horse bow with a full quiver. And a pistol. Three shots into the air means that you are too injured to mount your horse. If we had heard that, we would have torn the forest apart. But he was just gone. His wife was traveling with us. He would never abandon her, they were very much in love. He was the first to die.”

He fell silent again. Half a mile passed. “That was when papa declared that from then on hunters would go out in pairs. Always two. That was the rule. I followed the rule until the day I sent Stephen back to the wagons, with his small deer.”

Kathleen couldn’t look at him. It was awful. She didn’t know what to say. He just kept walking, staring straight ahead.

“Monica Fuentes was the next to die. She was only eight years old. We had two nanny goats and a billy. She was in charge of the goats when we stopped. One morning, she wouldn’t wake up. Her mother woke us with her screaming. We examined her body. Trying to find a reason for her death, maybe a snake bite. We found small berries in her hand and in her handkerchief. The goats had found some plant and started eating the berries. Monica thought they might be food. The goats were fine. The poison only affected people, it seemed.” His voice was toneless.

Kathleen felt the nausea return.

Alejandro started again. “It devastated her parents. They would fight all the time. Monica’s father hung himself from a tree one night, about a week after Monica died. The morning we discovered him missing, we sent out searchers. What we found was a ghoul hanging in a tree. It was trying to get the noose off of its neck.”

Kathleen shivered. Unable and unwilling to look over at him, she stared at the ground in front of her feet.

“The next town we found, we met a doctor and two couples that wanted to join us on our journey. My father warned them how dangerous it would be, but they didn’t care. The doctor had lost his wife in childbirth and couldn’t stand to stay there anymore. The two couples, they wanted a place they could call their own. We tried to discourage them, but they said they would rather take their chances with us than stay there. The don did not care for their safety or welfare. They brought what riches and equipment they had and joined us. They were very nice.”

Kathleen felt a small bit of hope that the story might get better. That hope was dashed when he started speaking again.

“The two brothers were the next to die. Ángel and Pablo Flores. The two of them were camp guards. They didn’t go out with the rest of us hunters.”

Alejandro shook his head. “They were less than a quarter of a mile from the camp. They startled a pair of bear cubs. Right after that, they met the mother of the bear cubs. Ángel was killed outright, with Pablo dying a day later from blood loss and shock.”

“We spent the middle of winter in a small town called Ojo de San Luis. We lost two people there. Monica’s mother met a man in town and stayed with him. Antonio Moran was one of the camp guards. He had been a close friend of Ángel and Pablo. He met a señorita, and she took a liking to him. They courted the entire time we were there, and it was no surprise to anyone when he didn’t want to leave with us.”

They passed the water skin back and forth, before he continued with his story.

“We had learned many harsh lessons, but we paid heed. We were careful. A month went by before we lost Victor Ruiz. We had found a large beehive, full of honey-comb. The bees stung several people, but Victor's throat swelled shut and he stopped breathing when the bees attacked. We had no way to help him.”

“Señor Valenzuela, the doctor, said he was allergic to the bee sting and died of shock. He left behind a wife and son. The doctor was a well-educated man. He told us stories from history about travelers like us. With his teachings and our own hard-learned lessons, we didn’t lose another soul until the day my family and friends met the murderers.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Kathleen saw the tears on his cheeks. She turned her gaze forward and decided in this case they would both be better off if she kept her stupid mouth shut.

***

Alejandro and Kathleen were covering a lot of ground. They had no way of knowing, but they both imagined they must be catching up with their prey. Even if only a little. They found the bodies of three more abused women and two more destroyed forts. They decided they had no need to even approach the walls. There was nothing they could do for anyone inside the walls, and they needed no more nightmare fodder. They kept up the pace and ate in the saddle. Lake Caballo was soon behind them.

Only the footsteps of the animals broke the silence. Alejandro had obviously been through a tough year, which he hadn’t had time to process.

He would talk more when he was ready. If he was ever ready. That kind of anger, hatred, and sorrow could destroy a person. Kathleen knew this. She sighed, and while scanning ahead, she turned her thoughts on what they were going to do when they finally caught up with the kidnappers.

She still had no idea of a way to rescue Pattie. At the speed they were moving, hopefully, they would catch up with Michael. Maybe he would have an idea. The three of them together would figure things out.