The first-aid kit was in the panniers. In the kit, there was hydrogen peroxide to clean out the wounds and compresses to bind them and stop the bleeding.
He had to stop the flow. But how?
JOE SAT IN THE GRASS with his pants pulled down to his knees. His left leg was bruised and turning purple. There were two holes three inches apart in the top of his right thigh. The holes were rimmed with red and oozing dark blood. They were the diameter of a pencil and Joe was fascinated by the fact that he could move the skin and view the red muscle fiber of his right quadriceps. He’d need to bathe the wounds, kill the growing infection, and close or bind the holes. Quickly. The excruciating pain had receded into the numb solace of shock and the blood had the viscosity of motor oil. He clumsily wrapped his bandana over the holes and made a knot. He stood with the aid of a tree trunk and pulled his pants back up. Buddy watched with his head down and his eyes going gauzy as his blood dripped out.
“I’ll take care of you first, Buddy,” Joe said in a whisper, “then I’ll take care of me.”
Before limping back through the timber toward the meadow and Blue Roanie’s body, Joe emptied most of his canteen over the wound in Buddy’s neck until the water ran clear. He drank the last of the water and tossed the canteen aside, then tied Buddy’s reins to a tree trunk.
“Hang in there and don’t move.”
He was encouraged by the fact that Buddy’s head was down and his ears weren’t as rigid. It might mean the brothers had left the area. Or it might mean his horse was dying.
JOE MOVED SLOWLY. His legs wouldn’t allow him to go any faster. He lurched from tree to tree, holding himself upright by grabbing trunks and branches, anything that would help him take the weight and pressure off his leg wound. He made a point not to look down at his injury for fear he’d pass out again.
It took twenty minutes before he neared the meadow where he’d been bushwhacked. If the brothers had come into the trees after him, he would have run into them by now. He had no doubt they’d have finished him off. Maybe with arrows, maybe with knives, maybe with his own guns. He found his hat and fitted it back on his head.
Joe hated the fact that his only available weapon was his .40 Glock service piece. He was a poor pistol shot. Although his scores on the range for his annual recertification had risen a few points in the past two years, he still barely qualified. He knew if it weren’t for the sympathy of the range officer who’d followed his exploits over the years and graded him on a curve, he could have been working a desk at game and fish headquarters in Cheyenne. Joe’s proficiency was with a shotgun. He could wing-shoot with the best of them. His accuracy and reaction time were excellent as long as he shot instinctively. It was the slow, deliberate aiming he had trouble with.
As he staggered from tree to tree toward the meadow, he vowed that if he got off the mountain alive he’d finally take the time to learn how to hit something with his service weapon.
He felt oddly disengaged, like he was watching a movie of a guy who looked a lot like him, but slower. It was as if it weren’t really him limping through the trees with holes in his leg and his best horse bleeding to death on the side of an unfamiliar mountain. Joe seemed to be floating above the treetops, between the crown of the pines and the sky, looking down at the man in the red shirt moving toward what any rational observer would view as certain death. But he kept going, hoping the numb otherworldliness would continue to cushion him and act as a narcotic, hoping the pain would stay just beyond the unbearable threshold so he could revel in the insentient comfort of shock. And he hoped the combination of both would keep at bay the terror that was rising within him.
Now, though, there were four things of primal importance.
Find Blue Roanie’s body and the panniers. Recover his shotgun. Return to Buddy with the first-aid kit. Get the hell off the mountain.
THE PINE TREES thinned and melded into a stand of aspen. He couldn’t remember riding Buddy into aspen at all, but at the time he’d been addled and in furious pain. He recalled gold spangles in his eyes and realized now that they’d been leaves that slapped against his face as Buddy shot through the trees.
Aspen trees shared a single interconnected root system that produced saplings straight from their ball of roots through the soil. They weren’t a grove of individual trees like pines or cottonwoods, but a single organism relentlessly launching shooters up through the soil to gain territory and acquire domination, to starve out any other trees or brush that dared try to live in the same immediate neighborhood. A mountainside of aspen was enjoyed by tourists for the colors and tone, but it was actually one huge voracious organism as opposed to hundreds or thousands of individual trees. Joe had always been suspicious of aspens for that reason. Additionally, the problem with aspen for a hunter or stalker or a crippled game warden was their leaves, which dried like brittle parchment commas and dropped to the ground. Walking on aspen leaves was akin to walking on kettle-fried potato chips: noisy. Joe crunched along, left hand on a tree trunk or branch and right hand on the polymer grip of his Glock, when he realized how loud he was, how obvious. And how silent it was, which meant the brothers were still there.
ON HIS HANDS AND KNEES, Joe shinnied over downed logs to the meadow. With each yard, the lighting got brighter. His wounded leg alternated between heat and cold, pain and deadness. When his leg was hot, he knew he was bleeding. He could smell the metallic odor. When it was cold, his leg felt better. But it scared him, because dragging his leg felt like pulling thirty pounds of cold meat through the leaves. If it was cold, it was gone. So in a way, he welcomed the waves of heat.
Trees thinned. The meadow pulsed green and bright in the sunlight. Joe heard one of the brothers laugh like a hyena: Cack-cack-cack-cack-cack . The sound made the hairs on the back of Joe’s neck prick up, as if he were a dog.
And he thought: This is as basic as it can be. I’m a dog. They’re animals as well. Or something like animals.
What he saw through the tumbled pick-up sticks of untrammeled timber made his skin crawl.
The brothers were on either side of Blue Roanie. They were laughing in the way they laughed, which was blunt and brutal, the laugh of men who were comfortable with themselves and had no desire to please anyone else.
Cack-cack-cack-cack-cack.
One of them held his bow with one hand and a bundle of arrows in the other.
The other brother dropped a knotty pine war club so he could admire Joe’s shotgun. The .308 carbine was in the grass near his feet.
Blue Roanie didn’t move. He was dead. The arrow that had pierced his neck had severed an artery and he’d bled out, and the black blood formed a large pool like liquid tar in the grass. Joe was grateful his end had come quickly.
The Grim Brothers stripped the body of Blue Roanie, taking his saddle and bridle and tossing them to the side. Caleb ducked under his front leg and lifted it on his shoulder with a grunt. Camish produced his bowie knife and used it to pry Roanie’s horseshoe off. When he was through, he moved on to the other three. As the horseshoes came off, they were tossed into a pile near the saddle. They landed with a metallic clink.
The dead horse was now scavenged of anything valuable, he thought. But they weren’t done. With brutal efficiency, they skinned the horse and pulled the hide away from the carcass as if it were a new living room rug. Then, with the skill of a butcher, Camish severed the front quarter, barely touching a bone or joint with his blade.