-Part One-

  The Scarred Man

  Charlie Peeples never slept well, even though he had the old station house to himself. He lay there on his rickety wooden cot and stared at the cracks in the ceiling and the cobwebs in the corners and felt anxiety in his bones. He felt the fear that the Sisters would call upon him in the night and kill him.

  He would imagine them in their lair, directly below him, in the dank dirt cellar. Did the Sisters even sleep? Eyes wide open and staring, Charlie Peeples could see them in his mind's eye, standing close together and hissing unholy secrets to each other in the dark.

  So he would sleep in troubled fragments, waking with every creak of wood or howl of wind or rowdy caterwauling from one of the fort's newer residents.

  Funny thing was, Charlie was probably the only man in the fort relatively safe from the Sisters. He was the one they called upon when they needed fresh blood. And Charlie provided it.

  That night, as he lay there not sleeping, they summoned him once again.

  It started, like always, as a dull hum at the back of his skull, as if a distant train was rumbling in on the long-disused tracks that ran by the station house. The humming grew until his brain rattled and he gritted his teeth and pushed palms against his temples.

  And then the dual sing-songy voices, lilting and sinister in their seeming innocence—Charlie. Charlie Peeples ... You must come to us, Charlie ...

  He rose from his cot, trembling, as the voices trailed off into little girl laughter. He stumbled in the dark until he found the lantern, lit it, and made his way to the trapdoor behind the dusty ticket counter.

  Come, Charlie, the voices buzzed.

  He stared at the trapdoor for a long moment, dreading it as always, until the Sisters sent a jagged current of pain through his skull and he winced and scrambled to open it.

  The smell of them came rolling out, through the close quarters of the station house. They stank of rotten meat and death. Charlie knew he'd inherited that from them, that stench. They took and took, and gave only that in return.

  He raised the lantern and descended into the dark.

  The Sisters lived in blackness. The cellar amount-ed to nothing more than a small, wet hole in the ground, but it was their home. It was where Charlie had first found them, where they had always lived, as far as he knew.

  He negotiated the treacherous wooden steps, breathed in the stink. The numerous wounds on his chest from the Sisters' attentions ached dully.

  Charlie, they said, from somewhere in the darkness. Come closer.

  The lantern light bathed the cellar in pale yellow blotches. Charlie peered through it. Near the far wall, he spotted their small, slender forms.

  To an outsider, and in the dim, uncertain light, they would have been mistaken for two little girls, about ten years old, wearing torn and dirty dresses and holding hands. Dark tangled hair hung over their faces, obscuring their features. Charlie was thankful for that.

  "I'm here," he said, his voice shaking and weak. "Do you ... do you need to feed?"

  Soon enough, the Sisters said. We will have our fill. But now, Charlie, there is something more pressing.

  Their voices cut through his skull and pounded in his brain. They had never spoken to him with actual words. He doubted they could.

  He said, "What ... what is it?"

  A man comes. He is the Son. We must have him.

  Charlie frowned. "I don't understand that. I don't know what you're talking about. You're gonna have to use plain words."

  We sense him coming. He comes for us. He is the Fallen Son, Charlie. He is the Scarred Man. He will come with the sunrise.

  Charlie shook his head, confused. "Scarred Man," he said.

  You will know him by his mark, Charlie. He would kill us, but for you. You will bring him before us.

  "I don't rightly know what you mean. Some fella coming here? Someone you want me to bushwhack or something?"

  When midnight comes. When midnight comes it will be time for Plague. Fun, fun Plague. And the Fallen Son will be our feast. You will bring him.

  Charlie said, "Well ... I'll ... I'll do what I can, I reckon, but I don't rightly understand."

  The Sisters giggled in the dark, holding hands, shaggy heads pressed together. They didn't move.

  Charlie said, "Anything ... anything else, then?"

  Yes. Feed. We believe we will feed after all. Something to whet the appetite.

  "You mean ..."

  The Sisters looked up at him and their hair parted and he could see their horrible, inhuman faces.

  Come closer, Charlie. Give us a taste of your blood.

  "No," Charlie said. "Please."

  Just a taste, Charlie. Now.

  He set the lantern on the ground, fought back the revulsion, and unbuttoned his shirt.

  * * *

  Hawthorne trotted the Morgan out of the shadowed woods and dismounted outside the main gate of the fort. The sun was just straining up against a pallid morning sky, scattering mist along the low ground and the gnarled roots of the pine trees. There was a crisp chill in the air, and fog snaked down and around the low hills.

  There was a fifty-pound sack of salt loaded behind the saddle. He heaved it up, tore it open, and began spreading it.

  Ten minutes later, the sack was empty. He tossed it aside, hitched the horse to a tree a few yards away, and entered the dilapidated remains of Fort Mason.

  He walked through the wide-open doors, into the dirt square, his sharp gray eyes alert and cautious. There were a lot of tents and make-shift shacks and even more empty spaces. The place smelled of corruption and unwashed flesh. And there was something else—an uneasy atmosphere, a vague aura of dread that hung over the fort like a looming storm.

  The Army had abandoned the fort after the plague the previous year, and the hostile Utes they'd been there to fight hadn't come within ten miles of the place since.

  The Utes knew the place was bad.

  But a few outlaws, stragglers and hangers-on didn't have the sense the Indians had, and now called it home. In the windows and doorways of some of the former barracks and officer's quarters, Hawthorne caught glimpses of movement.

  A small train station built of splintered pine and rough stones butted up against the train tracks at the far end of the fort. Weeds were snagged in the rails. Most of the loading platform had been dismantled for spare lumber. On the other side of the tracks, a rusty water tower trickled brown water into the dirt.

  Hawthorne walked into the station.

  A tall, gangly, sick-looking man stood at the counter, his hands resting in front of him like two big, pale fish. He appeared to have been doing nothing but standing there before Hawthorne came in. He stank of rot.

  "Good morning to you, sir. If you're waitin' for the train, I'm afraid you got a long haul ahead of ya. It don't stop here no more."

  Hawthorne ignored the death smell on the man, said, "Are you the station master?"

  "Was. Once upon a time. Now, well ... I'm just a fella that lives here."

  Hawthorne noticed the cot in the corner of the room. He reached into his coat and pulled out a crumpled wanted poster. He put it on the counter, said, "I'm looking for this man."

  The former station master frowned, looked at the poster without touching it.

  "Can't say ..." the station master cleared his throat. "Can't say as he looks familiar, mister. Why you looking for him, you don't mind me asking?"

  Hawthorne said nothing, and finally the station master cleared his throat again and tried, "Are you, uh, the law? Or a bounty hunter?"

  Hawthorne leaned in close and spoke in a low voice, full of constrained violence. "This man left the nearest town a week ago, riding out in this direction. He's been through here. So are you gonna make me ask you again?"

  The station master blanched, stuttered, "Well, I ... that is to say, I might could have seen a man riding through. Fact is ... fact is, sir, he might well could still be around here. Somewheres."

  "Where? The barracks?"

  "No, sir. There's a stone building not ten paces from this station, sir. The Army used to use it as a brig. Could be you might find something, well, helpful there."

  Hawthorne shoved the poster back in his pocket and walked away.

  Just as the station master had said, the stone building squatted forlornly next to the station. It was the only structure Hawthorne had seen in the fort not made of wood, and not looking flimsy as a fleeting thought.

  He started toward it at a casual pace, drawing his revolver, a formidable Smith & Wesson Schofield .45. From the outside, the building looked deserted. The windows were boarded and the door stuck partially open at an angle in the rough dirt. No horses were reined anywhere near it, and no sign of life.

  A hawk circled over Fort Mason, soaring on the wind currents, searching out prey. It cried out once, the sound echoing across the sky, before swooping down the hillside and out of sight.

  Hawthorne heard a noise inside the brig, a soft shuffling of boots, and the unmistakable click of a gun hammer being drawn back.

  A slow, nasty smile spread across Hawthorne's narrow face. He took another step, and then kicked in the door with one well-worn boot.

  He took in everything relevant in a split second—there were four men, two of them armed. One was leveling his gun at Hawthorne, aiming when he should have been firing already, and Hawthorne shot him in the neck.

  The other one was just slapping leather, and as the first gunman fell back into a jail cell, Hawthorne swung the Schofield around in the gun smoke and put a bullet into his chest. The force of it slammed the second man back into a set of metal bars, but he didn't drop his gun. Hawthorne gave him a second to realize he was as good as dead, but when the realization didn't come fast enough he gave him another bullet in the gut to put a finer point on it.

  The other two stood horrified, and one of them, a rail-thin fellow in a ragged suit and Derby hat, threw up his hands and said, "Wait! Wait, mister! Don't shoot!"

  His partner stood next to him, round face drained of color, and Hawthorne saw that the man had wet himself. Piss had darkened his trousers and now pooled on the stone floor of the jail. He wore a battered Stetson and an ornate vest like you'd find at a high-end store. He couldn't seem to speak.

  Hawthorne stepped into the jail, gun pointed at Derby Hat. He said, "I only need one of you alive to answer my questions. Which one?"

  "Please, mister, we ... we tried to talk them out of jumpin' you, honest to God. Please."

  Blood was beginning to spread across the floor, seeping out from underneath the bodies of the two gunmen. The first one, with his throat torn away, wasn't completely gone yet. He lay face-up, choking on his own blood, unable to even raise his hands to staunch his life flowing away. Hawthorne stepped up to him, aimed at his head, and put another shot into his face.

  The sharp, nasty tang of gun powder suffocated the room, and a cloud of smoke hung low in the air. Hawthorne trained his gun on the man in the Stetson who'd pissed his pants.

  "I reckon I'll kill you," he said. "You don't seem to have much to say anyway."

  He cocked the hammer, and Stetson finally found his voice. "B-B-Baron! I know where Baron is, I'll talk, don't kill me!"

  Hawthorne hesitated for a moment, lowered his gun slightly.

  And then he saw the subtle shift in Stetson's demeanor, the relaxing, and noticed Derby Hat's eyes stray to the door behind Hawthorne, and Hawthorne heard a foot step behind him and he spun around but not fast enough.

  Something hard came down on his right shoulder, sending a numb current down his arm. He dropped the Schofield, started to scramble toward his attacker, but the next blow connected against his temple and the image of the station master, holding a steel pipe, hovered above him as he dropped.

  * * *

  Frank Baron had eluded Hawthorne for six months, ever since robbing the Englehart Ranch and killing Englehart and his family. He knew the law was after him, and probably some bounty hunters too, but it was Hawthorne who worried him. He was a spooky sonofabitch.

  He'd heard stories about Hawthorne. How he would hunt his prey relentlessly, murder in his weird gray eyes. How he didn't care a whit about a guilty man's life. How he lived solely to kill the wicked and never stuck around for the bounty.

  None of it was fair, Baron thought. He wasn't a wicked man. He just did what he had to in order to survive. Englehart wouldn't give him the pay he deserved, and they'd gone back and forth about it until finally Baron had went and got drunk, got mad, rode back to the ranch and killed Englehart in his sleep.

  And Englehart's family, well ... the wife woke up, didn't she? She woke up and tried to stop him. He had to kill her. As for their two daughters, he was doing them a favor. Baron himself grew up without parents and knew what a hard road that was. The girls were better off dead.

  He took all the cash in the house, some fifteen hundred dollars, and hightailed it out of there.

  With that Hawthorne bastard on his trail.

  Baron heard about Fort Mason from some odd little fella in a dive tavern nestled in one of Boulder's seedier districts.

  It's a good place to hole up. Some outlaws and such there, and it can be a mite dangerous, but it sure as hell's better than lookin' over yer damn shoulder all the time.

  Fort Mason. Ain't that the place where all that disease and stuff happened? That wastin' away ailment?

  Yeah. But they done burnt all the bodies and the Army lit out from the place, left it to rot. Even them Indians don't go near it. Makes it perfect for hidin' out.

  So Baron was sold on the fort, even though folks had a lot of unsettling things to say about it. There were rumors about corpses found in the vicinity, drained of blood, and other stories about how, from nearby towns, black smoke could be seen sometimes hanging over the fort, along with the horrid stench of burning human flesh.

  He'd been there a week and hadn't seen nor heard a damn thing to support the wild stories. Sure, some of the men who'd been there for longer than a few weeks seemed ... off, maybe. Pale and frail-looking, with crazy fire burning in their eyes. And they smelled peculiar. But if you stayed away from them, kept company with the fellas of more recent arrival, you were fine.

  Of course, some of them had a tendency to drop out of sight from one day to the next, but so what? It wasn't a town or a settlement. It was a place where wanted men found sanctuary for a while, and then moved on.

  Baron felt relatively safe at Fort Mason.

  Until that sonofabitch Hawthorne caught up with him.

  And now here the sonofabitch was, shackled to the wall in the brig, unconscious. Baron stood before him, arms crossed above his ample belly, torn between terror at seeing the bastard again, and satisfaction at him being chained and helpless.

  Pete and Neil—two fellas Baron had become chummy with since arriving at the fort—had taken the time to secure Hawthorne and fetch Baron from his tent. "Thank Charlie Peeples there," Neil said, holding his bowler hat. "He snuck up behind him and whacked him a good one on the head."

  Baron knew the station master was behind him, could smell him, but he turned to the pasty man standing by the doorway anyway. "I owe you, buddy," Baron said.

  "Weren't nothin'. I knew you and your friends were waitin' on him and had an ambush set up. Just wanted to do my part for a fellow traveler."

  "Well, I owe you, ain't no two ways about it." Then, to Pete and Neil, "And you fellas too, for not ratting me out."

  Pete and Neil didn't say anything about how Pete had pissed his pants or how he'd been ready to sell Baron out as soon as Hawthorne pointed a gun at him. Their pals, two fellas Baron didn't know, lay dead on the floor. Pete and Neil had disarmed Hawthorne, dragged him to the wall, where the rusted old irons were, and clapped the shackles on his wrists and ankles. On the wrists, it was one chain, about three feet long, slipped through a heavy bolt in the wall. It held Hawthorne's slumped body suspended with his arms above his head.

  Baron looked at him. Even out cold, Hawthorne was intimidating. He was lean and hard-looking, with close-cropped black hair streaked with gray at the temples. A jagged white scar in the shape of a cross was cut into Hawthorne's forehead, like the very mark of Cain.

  "So what are you gonna do with him?" Pete said.

  "Don't rightly know yet," Baron said. "I'll think of something."

  Charlie Peeples spoke up. "If'n you don't mind me puttin' my two cents in, I reckon you should leave him, at least for the night. You know. Sleep on it and all that."

  Baron glanced at Charlie, surprised by the interest. The fella was usually quiet, didn't seem to take up a hand in other folk's matters much. But the forced casualness in his voice now was obvious. Baron said, "What do you care about it?"

  "Oh, I don't. I don't care nothin' about it. Just a suggestion is all. I'm just sayin', let him stew a bit, you know? Come morning-time, maybe you'll have a clear idea 'bout what to do with him. Just ... you know, leave him alone for the night. Leave him here in the brig."

  Charlie seemed downright jumpy now. He wouldn't look Baron in the eye.

  Baron frowned, and shrugged. "Maybe that ain't such a bad idea."

  "Absolutely," Charlie said. "Absolutely. It's a damn good idea, if I may say so myself."

  "Do whatever you want," Neil said. "Hey, me and Pete are gonna go to the mess hall for some whiskey come nightfall. You comin'?"

  Baron nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, I'll meet you boys there."

  Pete gave the key to the shackles to Baron, and he and Neil headed out. Charlie lingered by the door until Baron turned to him and said, "Something else?"

  "No, nothin'. I'll be seein' you."

  With a quick furtive glance at Hawthorne, Charlie left, and Baron turned his attention back to his captive, who slumped against the shackles. Only the slight rising and falling of his chest betrayed any life in him at all.

  Baron smiled. "Okay," he said. "You'll keep 'til morning, I reckon. But you can be sure of something awful happening once morning comes, you son-of-a-bitch."

  -Part Two-

  The Sisters

 

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