McCutchen awoke to several sensations at once. Scattered drops of rain chilled his exposed skin and hissed among the burning embers of rubble. Numbness alternated with electricity throughout his extremities. An orange sun brushed the belly of the clouds on the horizon. Finally a snuffling beside his head jerked him totally awake.
A goat, one of the twins belonging to the old woman, nuzzled at the crusted blood in his hair. Snorting along his shoulder, the animal tugged his duster open and sniffed the tin in his pocket.
“Alright, that’s enough. Shoo.” Lying flat on his back, McCutchen tried to wave the animal off, but even the slightest movement was difficult. He found his hat lying next to his head, brim down and relatively dry. Well that’s a stroke of luck. He propped himself up and discovered his Colt digging into his back. “Hello pretty.”
He checked the cylinder. Three bullets. But no sooner than the blood returned to its normal circuits, his nervous tics began. He could breathe, but his right eye flickered as his neck jerked his whole head to the left worse than as a child. A crackling sensation returned in his shoulder and hand, like his frame had been shoved into skin three sizes too small.
He’d forgotten about the burn. Picking at the charred edges of his duster, he glimpsed the white puss forming in and around the wound. His left hand had swollen and cracked, first degree burns covering the back of it. The flesh trapped under his ring blistered and continued to cook. He tried to spin it, but it stuck fast, his meaty hand much too swollen. He shook his head. Elizabeth, why can’t I let you go?
Finally he remembered the gun shot to his thigh. Cringing, he checked behind the torn flap of bloodied denim. “Hot damn, I’ll live yet.” It had merely scratched him, taking nothing more than a bite of flesh. Coming full circle he remembered what had brought him to Mexico in the first place. Grinding his teeth, the poison of the night’s events flowed through his veins, strengthening him with hatred.
The goat lapped water from the trough, and the need of drink gave McCutchen immediate purpose. “Mind if I join you?” Sweeping flotsam aside, he cupped his hands. After several scoops he steeled himself against the pain and rose to his full 6’3” height. He had some killing to attend to, but first.
He scanned the scene around him—senseless. A warm slice of sun burned the gap between cloud and horizon, blinding him as he peered toward the remains of the old woman’s house. He shaded his eyes and moved closer. Remnants of a pool of blood and drag marks in the dirt indicated where the old croon’s first shot had struck home, most likely a kill.
He refused to think about the woman herself. There could’ve been only one outcome for her, and thinking about it made his eye spasm.
He skirted the edge of the rubble into the clearing between the woman’s house and the wilderness beyond. The first grisly sight he encountered was the companion goat, throat slit from ear to ear, his side half charred. Pattering rain drops dappled the thick dust, disguising the blood trails. But he found one that started in the center of the clearing and worked its way toward the brush.
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