Sentinels Page 5

  Like the previous evening, nothing but a chalk-white moon loomed.

  “Should we call off the whole deal?” one asked Robert Culliver, the self-proclaimed Grand Wizard of this patchwork Klan. Toby Jenkins had spied him leading the conversation in the Tavern earlier in the day.

  “No, tonight’s the night. Army’ll be paying attention to what happened at the Jenkins place—not here. Makes sense to do it now,” Culliver said.

  Similar in age to Lyle and his gang, these former Confederates wore their white sheets and held their hoods. Each wore a pistol under their cloaks.

  “Make sure there’s nothing, and I mean not one goddamn speck of evidence that’ll identify us personally,” Culliver said.

  They gathered around the small pit where they made fire for their beans. Knowing the night of attack loomed, they had broken down camp bit by bit. They completed the task that morning by bundling up and ditching their tents in the trash after arriving to work at staggered times. They hid their hats at the station to be retrieved the next day. Now, just the fire pit remained.

  “Look, soldiers ain’t stupid,” Culliver said. “If they come poking around, they’ll know someone was here, but I want it looking like it could’ve been anyone, a young couple that wanted to screw in the woods.”

  Each now carried under his cloak an unlit torch and leather pouch stuffed with essentials: a change of clothes, matches, and a bottle of whisky to drink while whoring it up at the Tavern. It didn’t matter that most of the men were married. Their wives agreed with the plan of attack and that their husbands could get drunk afterward—the men left out the whoring part.

  Culliver led the Klansmen single file by torchlight through the woods, which would open into Elkton’s wheat fields. A wooden fence separated Elkton’s property from the forest, and the plan was to follow the fence toward the road. The only time they’d be exposed to soldiers would be when they trotted the short distance along the road to Elkton’s home. The fence appeared before Culliver’s torch.

  “Remember, attack fast, we run the road, breach the property, four of you burn the slave quarters and the barn, me and the other three go for Elkton’s house,” Culliver said to the men—each knew their grouping. “Kick down the doors and shoot the niggers. Then set the place on fire. Same goes for Elkton’s home. Throw the torches the second we hit the entrance. Do your business, leave your sheets in the fire, and head for the Tavern. Last one in pays for the whores.”

  A murmur of laughter eased the mounting tension felt by each man.

  They hugged the fence line, waiting for the firelight to reveal the opening to the road. Sweat drenched their pants and short-sleeved shirts, staining their white sheets. Crickets chirruped, cicadas buzzed, the occasional firefly zigzagged into view. They kept their steps in time without realizing it and filled the air with soft, repeating thump-thumps.

  Culliver’s torch revealed the fence corner and he looked to his right. They’d found the road. Across from them stood more wheat, similarly partitioned. The road split Elkton’s property and stretched three miles down before forests towered over both sides.

  “Hoods on,” Culliver said.

  They cloaked their heads so the big, wide eyeholes allowed a full view of a dusty barren road. Their hearts beat faster as they jogged, Culliver leading, but stopped when they heard the wheat rustling. Wind didn’t sway the stalks. Each man felt something skimming through the wheat.

  They fumbled under their robes, awkwardly drew their guns and waited for their leader to speak. Culliver had no words as he gazed skyward to see an inexplicable dark mass blot out the full moon.

  “Robert, forget this,” one of them said above a whisper, followed by murmurs of agreement from the majority of men. Culliver then stared down center of the dark road, and after a moment of panting hesitation, he ventured onward.

  “Just critters eating the wheat.”

  “Are you crazy, someone’s out there! Fuck this,” said the rearmost Klansman, who turned to leave.

  Culliver turned and snapped, “We come too far to just abandon—”

  The sky vomited rain on the Klansmen and doused Culliver’s torch. Mud puddles formed along the road with no place to take cover. The forest they navigated stood long behind them and wheat provided no shelter.

  The deluge steadily pounded the men and crops for a few minutes before lightening to a steady rainfall.

  “Of all the times for a storm.” Culliver, realizing the plan was shot, holstered his gun. The rest of the demoralized Klansmen, seeing their clothing through saturated sheets, did likewise. Their once-pointy hoods drooped sideways. The bugs quieted.

  “Anyone have a torch we can use?” Culliver said.

  “I hunched over to keep mine dry,” he heard from the back. A wet ghost of a Klansman hiked up the robe that clung to his underclothes and handed over the torch.

  Culliver first heard the tinny sound in the distance but couldn’t tell from which direction it came. He yanked up his cloak and fumbled with his leather pouch for the matches. He lit the torch on the first try. The Klansmen now heard the sound: steel skimming stalk tops.

  The slither grew louder and was accompanied by footfalls plowing through gloppy puddles.

  The Klansmen kept off the road next to the fencing. Culliver’s torch flickered as a shadowy figure stuck from behind, gliding along the road’s shoulder closest to them, swinging a two-handled scythe. The blade whirred by the men, cutting through cloth and skin. Some barked confused obscenities while others shrieked in pain. The attacker fled into the darkness ahead of them.

  The torchlight caught the shapes of two men collapsing onto the muddy road. Their throats gushed blood below still-hooded heads.

  “Dylan, that you?!” a Klansman called to one of the bodies.

  “Nah, I’m here.”

  “Then who’s down?!”

  Two lights emerged from behind the men, and with it came steady clip-clops. The confused Klansmen flapped aside their wet sheets to draw their guns.

  “Don’t move!” yelled a soldier perched in the passenger’s side of the two-seat Bronson wagon that burst through the darkness. He aimed a short-barreled scatter gun square at the shaken mob. The coachman slowed the two horses and likewise pulled a sawed-off shotgun from the holster strapped to his back. Two lanterns, hanging and swaying on both sides of the wagon’s front, provided the light.

  “I don’t care who moves, I’ll shoot straight ahead if anyone pulls a gun,” the passenger said. “I’ll drop three of you for sure.”

  “You already killed two of us, you sons of bitches!” Culliver raised his arms in surrender. “I thought you boys were all about trying us in the courtroom these days—not cold-blooded murder.”

  “You’re one to talk,” the coachman said. “And what the hell you talking about? We follow this route every night around this time. Finally we get a nibble with you all. Didn’t you boys even scout the road for patrols? No wonder you lost the War. As for your two friends down there, tell them to get up or my partner here shoots.”

  “Didn’t you hear what I fuckin’ said?” Culliver slowly pointed at the two slain Klansmen. “There was no need for that other soldier to cut them down when they weren’t even looking!”

  “Again, what the hell you talking about?” the coachman said.

  “There’s only two of you?” Culliver turned and squinted into the blackness where their attacker vanished. Nothing appeared, but the tinny noise trickled back to life and fast approached the huddle.

  The two horses whinnied and reared, causing the coachman to drop his shotgun and wrestle the reins to calm them. The passenger stood.

  “Nobody move!” he yelled at the Klansmen. “Quiet, all of you!”

  He shouted into the darkness ahead of him, “United States Army, stop or I will shoot!”

  The metallic sound intensified as it rippled ov
er the crop tops.

  “Jesus almighty, what is it?” Culliver disregarded the soldiers, who ignored the six armed men. They all focused on an unseen horde stampeding through the darkness.

  The horses, their eyes wildly bulging in the lanterns’ glow, screamed as they reared and fought the coachman to flee. The passenger hopped atop his seat and fired over the horses and Klansmen into the void but the blast could not stop what was coming. The metallic sizzle mutated into a deafening screech as the force causing it blurred by Culliver, who dropped his torch to seize the horizontal gash yawning from his belly and collapsed.

  The coachman regained his shotgun, aimed it chest-high from his perch, and blasted an oncoming machete-wielding cowboy, laying him flat in the mud. He never lost the machete. More breached the darkness to attack the Klan. The soldiers jumped from their rig, unable to control the horses, which dragged the carriage into darkness toward town. The passenger landed face-first on the ground, writhing, unable to pull out the hand scythe wedged between his ribs.

  Culliver retreated as the shotgunned assailant, who wore a black bandana over his mouth, lithely kicked out his feet and jumped to stand. The nearest Klansman drew his piece and blasted the cowboy’s belly. Unfazed, the cowboy twirled three-hundred-and-sixty degrees while holding an outstretched machete. The Klansman’s cloaked head plopped before his feet as his body fell.

  The cowboy waded into a fray with two more Klansmen. The footfalls grew louder. Culliver, clinging to the ground, reverse crawled under Elkton’s fencing to hide within the wheat when an ax-wielding lunatic shambled into his view. Culliver figured him a Mexican—for he wore a droopy sombrero—who stood over the quivering coachman on his knees. Through the triangle arc made by the Mexican’s legs, Culliver watched the coachman fire his last shotgun shell into the Mexican’s gut. The buckshot disgorged a mangled ball of overalls, guts, and bone into the field, splattering onto Culliver’s face. Culliver froze, aware that to behave normally—by screaming and shaking himself like a dog ridding its body of water—would reveal his hiding spot. Yet the Mexican stood, moving only to raise his ax to cleave the coachman’s head. The last thing Culliver saw before closing his eyes to prevent putrid offal from leaking into his skull was the Mexican—unfazed by the ragged intestinal link dangling from the hole in his back—bringing down the ax.

  Leroy Elkton awoke startled and pushed open his bedroom shutters, grateful to see, hear and smell the rain. But his elation faded upon noticing distant sounds of gunfire and screams.

  Chapter Seven

  “Ever seen it this bad on the battlefield?” Sheriff Cole asked Noah Chandler the next morning as they surveyed the bodies strewn along the road.

  “Yeah, after the docs finished using the bone saws,” Noah said.

  They and three other deputies Noah had first met that morning all hitched their horses to Leroy Elkton’s fencing. Five soldiers, still mounted on their horses, loomed behind the lawmen. Elkton and four freedmen kept their distance from the carnage and lingered near the farm’s entrance. They all thought to a man that their war-weary eyes had seen the worst types of human savagery, until today.

  “Well, the horses were spared,” Cole said of the two stallions that towed the empty carriage into Henderson hours earlier. “I’m glad they knew their way home, otherwise it might’ve been a while until—” The sheriff knew not what to say.

  Arms, legs, heads and torsos littered the road. Swarms of insects hopped and flew to feast. Cole worried a fox might slink in and snatch one of the arms with hands still gripping revolvers.

  “So who kills the Klan and soldiers all at the same time?” Noah stared at the remnants of the two soldiers who’d been shredded no differently than the racists.

  Nobody could conjure a rational answer.

  A blue sky framed a sun that baked blood onto wherever it splattered. Elkton internalized how much wheat he’d have to destroy based on the arterial spurts across the stalks.

  “What a waste of linen,” Deputy Roger Clement, a veteran lawman, said as he used his boot tip to lift a swath of white sheeting stained with crimson mud. “It’s like a tornado made of knives scooped ’em up and spat ’em out. Bullets would’ve done the job much cleaner. Shame to get my boots all dirty like this. Just bought ’em, too.”

  “It’s overkill, for sure.” Noah ignored Clement’s crudeness. “I expect we can make out some of the tracks, though.”

  “Well, see what you can see, boys,” Cole said. “I’ll help you.”

  “Why you give a shit about them?” one of the freedmen called to the sheriff. “Whoever did it saved the government some time and money.”

  Cole turned and spat tobacco away from the scene.

  “I give a shit because I won’t allow vigilante acts by the Klan against you boys,” Cole said. “And in case you haven’t noticed, two men who risked their asses to free yours are now as dead as Abraham Lincoln. I better give a shit about who’s killing the scum of the earth and its salt if the aim’s to be civilized.”

  “Fuck them and anyone who looks like them,” the freedman replied.

  “Sheriff Cole, there’s one over here, alive!” Deputy Eric Harrison, the newest hire, a short and stocky one at that, stood off road, straddling the lip of Elkton’s wheat field closest to his home.

  “He’s stirrin’ a little, moving his arms and legs,” Harrison said.

  The only intact body belonged to Robert Culliver, who pressed his hands to his belly to stem the bleeding while sputtering for breath.

  The men abandoned the road to examine the victim.

  “Hang on, boy, doctor’s on the way,” Cole said, relieved by the sounds of Doctor Richardson’s wagon trundling down the road.

  “Hope the bed’s big enough for all these parts,” said Harrison, scanning the human debris.

  “The parts ain’t going in the doc’s wagon,” Cole said.

  Then it hit Harrison. “Wait a minute, are we supposed to pick up the pieces?”

  Richardson, shabbily dressed in overalls and a white shirt as he’d just woken up, simultaneously stood as he steered the wagon and focused on the twitching body.

  “Because, I mean, I forgot to bring my gloves with me, Sheriff,” Harrison continued, trying to bring the other deputies to his side. “I suppose what I’m saying is that—’lessen you’re a surgeon or a mortician—on your first day of work you’re usually just setting up your desk making sure it’s just so, and not, I don’t know, picking some guy’s decapitated head off the road.”

  “Grow a pair, son.” Cole didn’t look at him. “You must’ve sat behind a just-so desk during the War—otherwise you’d be used to this.”

  Not so, Sheriff, Noah thought. Soldiers didn’t do this, not Northern or Confederate soldiers.

  “Maybe the freedmen did it.” Noah made it sound like a question.

  “Those boys over there?” Cole eyed the freedmen.

  “Nossir, not them. I mean the folks living in town—but even then I can’t see them doing this. Especially because of the two soldiers. Why would they want both the Klan and the Army seeking revenge on them?”

  “Whoa!” Richardson eased his horses, pulled the rig’s brake, hopped off the wagon with his medical bag, and handed the reins to a freedman.

  “Out of my way!” the doc ordered the lawmen and waved his arms. “Stand back!”

  They obliged and formed a disjointed half-circle. The doctor analyzed his patient and made a snap judgment.

  “I can’t do anything to him here, I need you boys to help me pull him out—gently.”

  Noah and Harrison gingerly slid their hands underneath Culliver’s armpits while the doc stood opposite them and lifted the wounded man’s legs. They laid Culliver on his back on a relatively unblemished part of the road and gave the doctor his space.

  “Mother of God, I see intestines,” Richardson said. “If you can hear
me, don’t move. Stay right as you are.”

  Richardson yanked apart the bloody sheet and the shirt underneath it to better access the wound. He nimbly prodded around the body and found no other cuts—just the eight-inch slice along Culliver’s belly. Richardson pulled a pair of scissors from his bag to cut away Culliver’s clothing to face nothing but the gash. He reached into his bag and pulled out a white cloth, a small bottle of chloroform, blood sponges, sutures and a bottle of carbolic acid.

  Richardson commandeered Cole. “Sheriff, I’m gonna suture and dress it just enough to get him back to my office without his guts spilling out.”

  The doctor, unlike a vast majority of battlefield medics who amputated and stitched wounded soldiers, had surgical experience prior to the War. He dabbed some chloroform on the cloth and put his patient to sleep, and used the small sponges to sop up whatever fresh blood pooled around the cut.

  “I’m amazed he hasn’t bled out.” Richardson spoke as intensely as he worked. “Had whatever cut him gone an inch or two deeper—” He trailed off.

  He hastily poured the carbolic acid on the sutures before stitching.

  “The hell you doing?” Cole said.

  “It’s called sterilization. I dip all my instruments in the acid at my office. Reduces the rate of infection and gangrene.” The doctor poked a piece of Culliver’s protruding intestine back into his body before stitching. “Seven years ago I’d have eased his pain and set him aside to die. Today there’s a chance to save him.”