The Hunger(54)
“Let them burn,” Baylis Williams said, his face streaked with soot. “If they’re too shortsighted to see the danger . . .” Tamsen was shocked; he was normally a gentle soul.
Tamsen cleared her throat. She had to warn them of the danger that was stalking them—something far worse than these rabid flames. “I was attacked,” she shouted. “That’s how the fire started. Some men came out of nowhere and went after the children.”
The others stopped their arguing. “What men?” Graves narrowed his eyes. “White men, or Indians?”
“White men, I think.” But not men. Not quite. How could she explain, without playing into the hands of the people who wanted to discredit her?
Keseberg’s laugh was like the hollow echo of metal on bone. “There ain’t no white men besides us around here,” he said.
A murmur rippled through the crowd. Her throat was still raw from smoke, still raw from screaming. She put her hand to her head, trying to think clearly. She hated doubting herself, but suddenly she felt another swerve of dizziness. It wasn’t possible this had all been a kind of hallucination brought on by willow bark—was it? Most of the time, Tamsen kept a clear head, but there were times when she wondered if the strange, twisted, tortured part of her had taken over, occluding everything else.
Now, everyone was staring at her, but their looks were not ones of sympathy.
“Funny how you’re always in the middle of it whenever things go wrong,” Keseberg said loudly. “I think you like the attention, Mrs. Donner.”
The wind shifted, blowing the smoke away from them, and as the smoke lifted, the whole camp seemed to disappear before her eyes, dissolving into the darkness.
She broke out in a cold sweat.
But the impression was over just as quickly.
Now, she looked around at the rest of the gathered group and realized: Even if what she thought had happened had, there was no way she’d ever get them to listen to her.
And in fact, it didn’t matter. Because if what she’d seen had been real, then they were all as good as dead anyway. She saw that now, the memory of the feral men’s eyes still hovering in her mind, hardening into a certainty.
“We’re not going to stop this fire,” Eddy said, turning his back on the flames. “We gotta move the wagons. It’s our only hope.”
Tamsen watched as pandemonium broke out among the group, spouse arguing with spouse, some throwing down buckets and shovels to sprint for the wagons, others pulling on their neighbors’ sleeves, trying to make them stay. “It’s every man for hisself,” Franklin Graves muttered as he trotted past Tamsen, nearly knocking her off her feet.
With a fresh pulse of terror, Tamsen saw that he was right.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Edwin Bryant found the corpse in a cave.
It was the first body he’d come across, man or animal, in the weeks he’d been lost, other than the scattered bones at the prospectors’ camp, which had been around for years.
This one was, ironically, a sign of life, of normalcy. You expected to find half-decomposed animals if you walked in the woods long enough. It was the way things were in the wilderness: knots of flies, the sweet-sick smell of decay. But in the days since Fort Bridger, he’d seen nothing at all. Absolutely nothing.
He’d found the cave by accident, during a sudden sweeping rainstorm that had driven him to look for shelter. The cave was small, one of a handful pocking the side of a rocky rise. He was so weak he almost gave up the climb and bunkered where he was. But although myths of wolf-men and diseases that made vampires and corpses of all stripes he could handle, Bryant had never liked storms. So he’d hauled up through the crags, winded by even this limited exertion, and ducked into the first shelter he found.
He’d brought a bundle of sagebrush with him as fuel for a fire, and he was just looking for the best spot for it when he saw it: a male, probably in his midthirties, though it was hard to tell because of the decomposition. Probably an Indian, most likely a Washoe given where he was, or where he thought he was.
The cause of death was apparent enough. The Indian had a wicked gash in the skull, probably not accidental. The impact was too neat, and likely caused not by a fall but by the impact of some heavy weapon, but he couldn’t tell for sure—he was no expert in wounds or trauma. He had other injuries, too, deep cuts that could’ve been made by a wolf or bear, even a mountain cat. That was a funny thing. Bryant had seen no trace of predators in the area—no scores in the bark of the trees, no droppings, no dens.
The man had nothing with him, no bow and arrow, spear or rifle, not even a blanket. He had not been here long before he died. Bryant considered whether whoever—or whatever—had killed him had attacked the man inside the cave but quickly dismissed the idea. There was no evidence of blood except trace amounts on the stone. Bryant had to double over inside the cave to fit; it seemed unlikely that there had been a struggle inside the enclosure.
Which meant that the man had been injured elsewhere and climbed up, or been carried up, ten feet of rock just to die. Running away from something, most likely. Bryant pieced a story together in his head of a man attacked, mortally wounded but able to flee from his assailant. In a delirium, he had run until he saw the small cave; perhaps he mistook it for salvation.
Perhaps he only wanted to die in peace.