Fully Loaded - Blake Crouch [19]
“There ain’t no level a hunger make me eat the flesh of another man.”
“I understand,” Nathan said, sliding shells into the chambers, snapping closed the breech.
Oatha started back for the shelter, his boots sinking two feet in the slushy snow with every step.
He heard the report before he registered the blood running down his back, colder than iron as it flowed under his waistband, a rush of pure animal panic flooding through him.
By the time he reached the shelter, Oatha’s shoulder was aflame and he could barely move his arm to break through the wall of snow, though with the adrenalized bolster of sudden strength, the accompanying pain was a slight distraction.
He fell through under the canvas as the crunch of Nathan’s footfalls approached, scrabbling through the dirt and snow for Marion’s revolver.
The Colt lay under a threadbare Navajo blanket, and as Oatha got his hands around the steel, he realized the vulnerability of his position, urging himself to settle down even as his hands trembled.
Nathan’s footsteps had gone silent.
Oatha sat in the dirt floor, straining to listen, no sound but the trees creaking in the wind, his pulse vibrating his ear drums.
“They’s still time,” Nathan said. He was close, his voice passing muffled through the snowbank, Oatha unable to pinpoint his exact location.
“For what?” Oatha asked.
“You to come to your senses, see there ain’t no way out a this pinch except you help yourself to a little Marion. You wanna live, don’t you?”
“Not to the detriment a my conscience.”
“Tell you what…the one time in your pathetic life you decide not to be a coward, and it’s gonna get you dead.”
“I ain’t always been like this, Nathan. War does things to a man. Makes some heroes, turns others killers, some the other way entire.”
“Guess we know which way you went, tramping through country like this without so much as a revolver.”
Whether loosed by the stress of these harsh conditions or some other agitation, Oatha felt a pool of rage that had been fermenting most of his adult life, welling up inside him, a force so potent and for so long contained, he realized in that moment, it could not be put back ever, his voice shaking as he said, “Well, you ain’t but thirty or so, and I know you kilt and think you seen killin, but you ain’t seen nothin like what the Federals did to us at Malvern Hill, the ground saturated with blood like it had rained from the sky, so what the fuck would you know about any of it?”
“I know I like the edge I ain’t heard ‘till now in your voice.”
Oatha thumbed back the Colt’s hammer.
“What now?” Nathan asked. “Wanna call ourselves a truce, get to the business a livin?”
“Moment you throw down that shotgun, I’ll know you ain’t full a shit on that proposition.”
Through the wall of snow Oatha had broken through, he saw the shotgun sail through the air and disappear into a snowbank.
Nathan called out, “Anytime you wanna do the same with Marion’s Colt, feel free.”
“Wish we had some spice,” Nathan said.
The steaks they’d carved out of Marion’s rump sizzled, marbled with fat, Oatha thinking the odor couldn’t even be called unpleasant. His right shoulder seemed to have a heartbeat of its own, and he wondered how many pellets of buckshot some sawbones was going to have to dig out of his back when he reached Abandon.
“I’ve smelt this before,” he said. “Or somethin like it.”
“You’ve et man?”
“No, in a San Francisco nosebag.” He thought on it for a moment, said finally, “Veal. Smells like veal.”
“Don’t it feel peculiar settin here about to—”
“If I weren’t starvin to death, maybe. But I think we’d be advised to steer away from any sort a philosophical conversation about what we’re about to do.”
They stood on the cusp of night, cloudless and moonless, the brightest planets and stars fading in against the black velvet sky like grains of incandescent salt.
Nathan flipped the ribcage. “I believe this is ready.”
The saloon was Abandon’s last—thin walls of knotty aspen,