Revenge and the Wild(25)

“Are you hurt?” Alistair asked. He took her by the arm, his lids peeled back around wide, frightened eyes.

Westie clung to the floorboards to hold her weight. She moved her foot around, feeling cold, empty space beneath. “I don’t think so. Just stuck.”

Bena grabbed her other arm and they pulled. Westie closed her eyes and crushed her teeth together as exposed pegs cut into her skin. Blood trickled from several spots on her leg, but they were just flesh wounds, not even deep enough for stitching.

She looked back at the hole where she’d fallen and saw a small speck of white through the gloom and spiderwebs. “There’s something in there,” she said.

Reaching into the dark hole, she moved her hand around. The earth below the floorboards was damp, and she tried not to think about spiders and other things with fangs whose homes she might’ve been destroying. Her fingers swept across something coarse, and she had to fight the urge to pull away. She grabbed the thing and pulled it from its hiding spot.

It was a scarf.





Twelve


All three of them stared down at the wisp of fabric in Westie’s trembling hand.

“This was my momma’s.”

“Are you sure?” Bena said. “We found many clothes in this cabin.”

Bena and some of the Wintu scouts had gone back to the cabin to hunt for the cannibals after Westie was found. The family had fled by then but left the evidence of their carnage behind. The scouts had taken the bones and clothing of the dead and buried them after the ground thawed in a private ceremony nearby, knowing if they took them to the church for a Christian burial, the natives might’ve been blamed for their deaths.

They’d tried to burn the cabin after, but the wood was too wet and the fire had fizzled out. Instead they left woven dolls hanging from trees and painted symbols on the door warning travelers of the haunted cabin. Judging by the trash scattered across the floor, not many had heeded that warning.

Westie nodded. She was sure. The cannibals had used the scarf to tie her mother’s hands together.

“She was wearing it that night. She always wore this scarf. It was a gift from my pa on their anniversary.”

Westie ran her fingers across the intricate pattern. She imagined she could still smell her mother: lilac and honey. The only thing she really remembered was the smell of blood and the faces of those who killed her family.

Tears glittered in the corners of her eyes when she remembered waking up to her mother’s screams. She’d blinked several times, eyes blurry with sleep, and found her mother and father sitting on the floor beside her, their hands and feet bound with items of clothing. She looked around for Tripp but didn’t see him.

“Run!” her mother had cried.

Westie had imagined an attack: vampires, the Undying, werewolves, or ghouls, but saw nothing.

“What? Why?” She looked around. The nice family she’d shared her meal with earlier stood in the room watching her.

“Go!” her mother shouted again.

The other family surged toward her like a machine, different parts of a single structure working together for a single purpose, to tie her up too. She was drunk on fear and confusion. She did what her mother demanded of her and ran. The boy, much bigger than her, moved in front of the door leading to the woods, so she turned and ran toward the only bedroom. The woman moved to block her way. Westie turned again, slipped on a grimy rug, and nearly went down before recovering and rushing toward the kitchen. She heard the heavy boots of the bearded man as he chased after her.

When Westie reached the small kitchenette, she saw bare cupboards, a stove, a pump for water, and a butcher block in the middle of the room, with a bloody stump of a human leg on it. The skin on the leg was smooth and soft, and the foot was small. A child’s leg.

Tripp . . .

Beside the leg was a fresh pot of stew.

A scream stuck to the sides of her throat and burned like medicine. She felt herself start to retch when the fetid smell of decay reached her nose. Despite the cold winter month, flies buzzed around a lake of congealed blood pooled on the floor below the block. Westie bent at the waist, and when she did, she saw a pile of clothes and bones behind the butcher block. She recognized the clothes. They belonged to members of the caravan.

Her family had been warned of cannibals on the wagon trail before they left Kansas. Stories were told of folks who had been ill-prepared for the mountainous terrain and would turn on one another for nourishment when the food ran out. It wasn’t prairie sickness, the illness that turned one into the Undying, but to eat one’s own kind seemed far worse. Westie’s father had said it was a bunch of lies shopkeepers told to prevent money from leaving town. He was wrong.

When Westie heard the floor creak behind her, she spun around to face the bearded man. In his hand was a knife that winked in the candlelight. As he swung down on her, she raised an arm to ward off the blow. The knife sliced clean through her bone at her elbow, leaving her arm attached by skin and tendon.

There was hardly any pain, only pressure and a dull ache. It took her a moment to get her breath. When the man lifted his knife once more, she slipped past him. The wife and son of the bearded man seemed confused when they saw Westie come into the room, as if they hadn’t expected her to make it out alive. She was able to get past them too.

Westie’s mother was screaming. Her father struggled with his ties. “Leave her be,” he growled in a voice that frightened her. “Run,” he said to her. “Run and don’t look back.”