Chapter 1
Sunset was fast approaching. It was dangerous hunting with dim light in this marshy forest. But Theodore Price was unconcerned. He expected to be done, the filthy creature apprehended or, if it came to it, dead before the sun was down completely. The sky was a clear, the setting sun having turned it from blue to hues of orange and red. The moon was a waxing gibbous tonight and Price knew these woods well. He’d have no trouble making the journey back.
Price had been tracking this man, if he could be called that, for the better part of a week. He’d learned much about the man, more than he wanted. Augustus Lukic. From the states, supposedly. Born up near Erie and floated down the Ohio and the Mississippi before he wound up in Texas just in time for the revolution. To Price, that was a familiar story. That war created monsters of all sorts.
Nothing against those who fought nor the cause they fought for. Price had, himself, found himself fighting in that war, but on a far less bloody front. As a soldier in the Republic of Louisiana he’d been placed on the battleship Pierre and set to the blockade of St. Louis. The Pierre wasn’t really a battleship, just a typical riverboat with a couple of cannons thrown aboard and crewed with soldiers. And it wasn’t really a blockade of St. Louis, more like a blockade for St. Louis and its new revolutionary government.
He was young, sixteen when it started, and he saw action twice. Limited engagements with ships of the New Spanish armada just beyond the mouth of the Mississippi, trying to lay their own siege of New Orleans. He’d still seen blood, he’d seen gore, friends ripped apart or turned to pincushions by deck splinters from the last cannonade the Pierre received. He’d seen ships full of young men who’d never swam a day in their lives deciding whether they should burn to death or go out drowning. Those screams still visited him, rarer now, from time to time in his dreams.
But after the war, in taverns in New Orleans and Sabine and especially Galveston, he learned what happened in Texas and Rio Grande and Chihuahua, the real horrors of war. Price was willing to believe, for personal philosophical reasons had to believe, that it was the royalists and soldiers of New Spain that had started it, but he knew, without doubt, that the revolutionaries had returned atrocity for atrocity.
Forced marches of prisoners of war through the desert, quickly turning into death marches, were common. Putting villages to the torch was common; with the villagers trapped inside more frequently as the war dragged on. That had stuck the most viscerally with Price, the screams and smell of burning flesh were something he knew. What followed was far more unreal. Gallows trees with dozens of bodies left hanging from them. Mass graves. Crucified bodies lining el camino real. Exsanguinations. Eviscerations.
One man Price had met on Galveston, Tyler or Taylor or something close to that, had described the things in such detail that Price had lost his lunch on the floor when he’d allowed himself to imagine it. The eagerness with which Tyler or Taylor had spoken had startled Price and Price had suspected the man may have taken part in more than a few acts of wickedness. It had disturbed the bartender as well and he kicked them both out.
No one could say what Augustus Lukic had been doing in Texas in the war. All anyone Price had spoken to had known about him was what Lukic had volunteered himself. Lukic had claimed to have ridden with Carlos Marquez but half the population west of the Mississippi said they rode with Marquez. Marquez was a hero and Marquez was a bloody butcher that even the Republic of Texas disavowed. Last anyone had heard he was settling somewhere in the Republic of Rio Grande. Price was personally certain Lukic had never been within fifty miles of Marquez. He had no facts, not even hearsay to back that up, just a gut feeling, call it intuition.
For the last hundred yards Price and been stepping gingerly, crawling through the underbrush. Lukic hadn’t been too careful covering his tracks. Didn’t suspect anyone to come searching for him in the bayou, not over a few Caddo scalps anyway. Price had seen his bootprints in the mud and the hacked away brambles where Lukic had been collecting wood. There was a smell in the air, a smell Price recognized. Now Price knew why he’d been reflecting on such a grim past. The smell was burning flesh.
There was Lukic’s camp. A small fire sputtered in the center beside a good sized hutch of mud and thatch and sticks. This camp had clearly been here for some time if he was putting that much work into his shelter. Something unsavory sat on a skewer across the softly glowing charcoal. On a rack built of thin sticks held together by too heavy rope were half a dozens scalps. Some still dripped blood which congealed into a stinking red and black pool of mud and gore on the ground below. It stank of death. Lukic must not have a sense of smell. Price suppressed a gag. For a moment Price considered he may have bitten off more than he could chew. But the metaphor made him gag worse seeing the roasted piece of what in the darkest corner of his mind he allowed himself to accept was human flesh.
Looking around the camp, no sign of Lukic. He might be sleeping in the hutch or he might be off somewhere in the trees. Price waited, he listened. Minutes passed. The fire grew dimmer just as the shadows cast by the setting sun became absolute. The wind shifted and something else shifted with it. Price now felt the strongest sense that he was no longer hunting. He was being hunted. Watched. And deep down he knew he should have listened to his mother and never left Morrow.
Internally, he struggled between two competing baser, instinctual urges which imbued perhaps all creatures, man and beast. There was danger, but had the danger spotted him yet? If it had then he should run. If it hadn’t, he should stay perfectly still. But there was no way to know until it was too late. What processes drove the final decision he could not know. Some sort of biological coin flip that, played out enough times over a species, might, on the whole, give a reasonable chance of survival. Price didn’t think in species terms. He thought in Price terms. Though, he was struck in that moment by some thoughts on the nature of predator and prey and the development of their relationship over long stretches of time, thoughts which were quickly pushed away and forgotten given the pressing need to move or definitely not move.
The coin landed heads up and his brain wired for action. Carefully, noiselessly, he reached for the Cates knife on his waist. He breathed in. He breathed out. Price shot out of the bramble and into the camp. He ducked and rolled, knife raised to the sky. Something, a creature, it could have been Lukic, was on top of him. A flash of metal caught the light. The smell of blood, fresh blood. Someone was bleeding. Price prayed to God it wasn’t him. The weight lifted and Price pulled himself from the ground to a crouch. Knife still in hand, his other arm stretched out defensively toward the unseen threat.
He awaited the next attack but it didn’t come. As his eyes struggled to focus in the dark he could make out a figure; lithe, gangly, with long, scraggly brown hair that looked black in the night, surrounding a gaunt face. This was Lukic.
“Who the hell are you?” it was an accusation, he spat and it looked dark when it hit the ground. Price was on high alert. He had dealt Lukic some blows, that was certain, but how many? Were any of them mortal? Was that blood from his mouth or from deeper inside.
“The name’s Price,” Price breathed heavily, winded from their brief struggle and trying not to breath in the stink of the camp. “Are you Augustus Lukic?” he asked.
This was evidently the wrong thing to say. You see, most strangers don’t know your name, fewer will know your full name. And when someone sneaks into your camp, armed, cuts you, and then asks for you by your whole name in that orderly, verifying the facts, bureaucratic way; you know without a doubt that that person is carrying a scrap of paper with your name, some crude, bastardized likeness, and a number in francs or dollars or pesos. Don’t confirm anything and start fighting like hell. That’s what Lukic did.
Lukic lunged at Price again and Price sliced his Cates through the air. In the darkness distances were difficult to determine. The knife met something Lukic nonetheless and sliced a thick gash into Lukic’s arm. Blood squirted onto Price. But Lukic was not done. He grabbed Price’s arm and smashed it to the ground, the Cates flew out of his hand.
Price felt hands grip his neck. More blood spirted across his face and Price twisted away in disgust. The fingers around his throat would only let him twist so far. The blood kept coming, washing down Lukic’s arms and onto Price’s chin and neck and Price felt the warm wetness spreading down his chest. Price was suffocating. Unable to take it a second longer, he put all his strength into a tremendous heave, throwing Lukic off of him and into the glowing charcoals of the now dead fire. Lukic screamed and rolled off. ’
Great, fresh burning flesh smell. Price suppressed another retch and jumped up to his feet. Lukic, burned and bleeding, recovered just as quickly. Lukic pulled his own knife off his belt, which Price noted was not a Cates knife, and Lukic leaped. It was an incredible leap, almost unbelievable leap. Price would swear that Lukic jumped four feet straight up in the air and now he was falling back, knees up to his chest, those mad, sunken eyes aglow behind his matted tendrils of hair, both hands gripping the knife, ready for the downward plunge that would bury it in Price’s skull (or possibly heart), ending his life.
Time slowed for a moment, there was a deafening bang, a puff of smoke, and suddenly Lukic was pushed backward, knife falling from his hand. Lukic landed in the mud with a squishy thud. It was over. Breathing heavily, Price holstered his pistol which he’d had readily available to him for the duration of the fight.
Price closed his eyes. Hands on his knees, he centered himself. The next moment he was on all fours, losing his lunch.
