Devils Unto Dust Read online

  Dedication

  For Mike

  For all the reasons

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One: The Town

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part Two: The Road

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part Three: The Storm

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Part Four: The Dark

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Part Five: The Start

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Emma Berquist

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART ONE:

  THE

  TOWN

  Texas, 1877

  The desert is white as a blind man’s eye,

  Comfortless as salt.

  —Sylvia Plath

  1.

  Life out here is hard, my mother used to say, so you have to be harder. Even she wasn’t strong enough to fight off the sickness. By the end she was just a shell of herself, her skull showing through the skin on her face, talking nonsense when the delirium took her. Sometimes she didn’t know who I was or what was happening. And then she remembered, and it was even worse.

  She lasted longer than most do. It doesn’t really matter, it didn’t make a difference, but I like to think it means something. That she was fighting to stay with us. That her life wasn’t wasted, digging into this patch of nowhere.

  I love the desert, love the hidden beauty of it. When the light falls just so and the heat shimmers off the ground, the desert is as graceful and endless as the sky. I love the way the ground cracks open under my feet, the fissures spreading out like veins in a shattered mirror. The air so hot it burns your lungs, the dust collecting in the corners of your eyes, the sand whipping against your skin until it’s raw; this is my home, and it is beautiful. If I could, I would turn my back on this town and start walking, leaving behind the unbearable weight. But I know better than that; the desert may have my heart, but this town will take my bones.

  Glory, our town is called, for no other reason than irony. People here are bad at naming things, even my own parents. Daisies don’t grow here, not in this hardscrabble dirt. Not that anyone calls me Daisy, not since I was old enough to know better. The name does not suit me; it is bright and yellow and sweet, and I am none of those things. And Glory is dead as sun-bleached bone and twice as cursed. Maybe it was different when people first settled here, before the sickness started to spread; maybe it wasn’t always a sandy hole of a town, but that’s all I’ve ever known it to be. Those who could afford to got out quickly, leaving the rest of us to whatever fate we deserve. There’s nothing standing between us and the desert shakes but some barbed wire and the men who hunt the sick. It’s only a matter of time before this town crumbles into dust. When the sick finally outnumber the healthy, we’ll all be as dead as my mother. Or worse.

  Today I wake up the way I always do, gasping for breath. It’s the panic that I shove down all through the day, but I can’t hide from it at night. The dreams gnaw at me like dogs worrying old bones, the pressure on my chest tightening until I force myself awake, into the real and unending nightmare. It’s still dark out, though dawn can’t be far off. I wait for a minute, trying to swallow the fear away, breathing in the smell of the mattress: hay and old sweat. I can just make out the shapes of my youngest brother and sister a few feet from me, both curled up on their sides. They are identical in almost every way, down to the way they sleep; I hold my breath until I’m sure I did not wake them. Still, I am tense, tenser than usual; something else is wrong. I wait, and wait, and then I finally hear it: a scratching sound, faint but distinct. A new jolt of panic surges through me, and I am instantly wide awake, sitting up and straining to see through the dark. Shakes don’t usually get through the fence, but it’s been known to happen. When the guards are young or drunk they don’t always walk the entire perimeter, and our house is about as far from the gate as you can get. My mind fills with images of blood splashed against the walls and I tell myself to calm down; even if one made it through the fence, there’s no way a shake could get in the house, not when our door is locked tight and bolted. Still, to be safe, I make my way to the door, my bare feet knowing exactly where to step to avoid the creaking boards. Our house is nothing more than a large wooden box with the barest suggestion of walls. We have a stove and some furniture, but the bedsheets need airing and I can’t keep the dust out.

  My father built this house, laid the wood and did the chinking and daubing, and it is just like him: ragged and aging poorly. The sand and the heat are hard on everything. Pa did his best, I suppose, but he spent more time picking out flat stones for the foundation than he did building the roof, and it sags in places. I blindly feel along the wall until my hand closes around the butt of my revolver, hanging from a peg in its holster. One chamber in my six-shooter is always loaded; sometimes seconds can make all the difference. I put my ear to the door and listen. The soft scratching in the dirt and whisper of wood scraping could be a dog or a coyote, even a healthy one that was too quick for a shake to catch, but I am not willing to take any chances.

  We strung up bits of broken glass all around the porch, and I strain to hear any tinkling. There’s no wind tonight; the air lies warm and stagnant, trapping heavy smells and smoke close to the ground. I lie down on the wooden floor, revolver in hand, trying to peer through the crack between the door and the floor. But it is too dark and the space is too small. I bite the inside of my cheek, considering; it sounds too quiet for a shake, though I wouldn’t bet my life on that. Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to be moving, which means I’ll have to deal with it sooner or later. Might as well be now.

  I get to my feet, my back protesting, and reach for the small barn lantern hanging by the doorjamb. I jiggle it and hear a faint splashing, so there’s stil
l some oil left. Surprising, since I haven’t refilled it in weeks, but oil is more costly than candles and it’s easy enough to go without. I light the lamp and turn the flame up, throwing the doorway into sharp relief. I fumble a bit to get the bolts open with my gun in one hand and the lantern hanging off the other. The last lock sticks and I have to force it back before easing the door open a sliver, bracing my body against it.

  Light from my lamp illuminates a patch along the wood and the prickly poppies that are dying by the steps. The scratching stops, and I wait a moment before opening the door farther. Lamplight floods the porch and the dirt beyond, and I take a step forward, scanning the ground with my gun pointed at what I hope is chest level. A flick of movement and my stomach drops as my finger tightens around the trigger.

  But it’s only a rabbit, a cottontail I think, though it’s hard to say for sure with the tail and most of its backside missing. It’s been a while since I’ve seen one; between shakes and hungry townsfolk, slow and soft creatures don’t last long. I don’t know if a coyote or a shake got to it, and the callous part of me is angry because I can’t take the chance it’s sick and it’s a waste of perfectly good meat. It scratches at the dirt, inching itself forward, somehow still moving. I don’t know how it got under the fence without back legs, let alone how it made it this far without bleeding to death. I lower my gun and walk over, setting the lantern down close. It blinks round wet eyes at me and I sigh. I take no joy in killing things, but it’s kinder to put it down than to let it suffer. The noise of a gunshot will wake up the twins, so I put my hand on its back, feeling the soft flutter of its heart under thick fur.

  “Sorry, boy,” I tell it quietly. “It’s no safer in here than it is out there.”

  I break its neck quickly and cleanly, flinching only a little when the bones snap. I use my fingers to dig a hole, the dry dirt crumbling quickly. When I’m done I dust off my hands and stand up, my breath hissing out slowly. I stamp down the grave with my foot and consider going back to bed, but it is close to dawn. I stare out into the night, the land made unfamiliar by the darkness, the shapeless ground receding and melding into the blackened sky. The view is no better by day; our acres are scant and unlovely. I pick up the lamp and watch the light quaver around me, feeling alone and insignificant in this small bright circle.

  “Morning,” a voice says, and I jump so hard I’m lucky my gun doesn’t go off. I swear and turn to see the tall frame of my brother standing in the doorway.

  “Or is it morning yet?” Micah asks. He sees my face, lit up by the light. “Sorry, Will, didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “You didn’t scare me,” I say crossly, walking up the steps.

  “Liar,” he says. Micah never lets me get away with anything less than the bone’s honest truth. He’s a stickler, that one, but then Ma was the same way; she had no use for sugarcoating.

  “What are you doing out here?” he asks when I get close, his brows knitted together over dark eyes.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you,” I say, which doesn’t answer his question.

  Micah glances at the gun in my hand and frowns. He’s a worrier; it comes from being inside his own head so much. He’s smart, smarter than most in this place, and it hurts me to think of what he could be if things were different.

  “I’m gonna make biscuits for breakfast,” I say to distract him.

  “What’s the occasion?”

  “I’m as sick of grits as you are, that’s what.”

  The truth is I need a way to save this morning. I don’t like waking up to blood and death, I get enough of that in my dreams. I don’t want to remember this day as the day I killed a rabbit; instead, it will be the day I made biscuits.

  I follow Micah inside and take one last look at the small mound of fresh dirt before I shut the door and bolt it fast. Poor, stupid thing. It should have known better. This is no place for the weak.

  2.

  I put the gun back in the rack and take a long drink of water from the bucket we keep in the kitchen. I’ll have to boil more from the pump soon. It is a lengthy and tiresome process, but necessary. The shakes don’t seem to like water, or fire, but it’s still possible one of them could contaminate the pump. We can’t take any chances, not when the sickness spreads so easily.

  The floor is dirty. I can feel grit beneath my bare feet, and I really should try and sweep, but that can wait until after the biscuits. I can tell how much flour we have left simply by holding the flour sack, a skill we all learn early in Glory. A knot in my stomach is directly related to that sack, and it gets tighter and tighter as the sack becomes lighter. I will have to go to the Homestead and barter for more soon. We can’t afford to buy it, not with the first of the month coming and our dues still to pay to the Judge. The prospect of talking to him leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth. The Judge has little patience for women, and I have little patience for a man that cruel and greedy. He’s technically the governor now, or at least he fancies himself as such, but everyone still calls him the Judge. I don’t even know what his real name is, nor do I care. In Glory, his word is law, and if we cannot pay our dues, we lose the protection of the perimeter and are left to the mercy of the desert.

  It wasn’t always this way. Sure, Glory has always been a rougher kind of place, on account of us being the last town before the land gets too harsh to farm and too brutal to settle. Mostly folks just passed through on the way east to Best or north to Plainview. But when the Judge took over, he put the word out that he would grant clemency to anyone willing to turn shake hunter. Maybe he even meant for it to help, maybe he really thought he could kill all the infected and that would be the end of it. But the more men he sent out, the more the sickness spread. All it takes is a bite or scratch and it’s only a matter of time before the fever and the ague and the tremors start. And now our town is crawling with former criminals, murderers and thieves, foul men who choke up our streets. There aren’t enough jobs to go around, not with the number of hunters who swarmed to Glory. Mostly they drink and fight one another, waiting to go back out to the desert and shoot those left to a fate worse than death. What they can’t take out on the shakes they visit on the rest of us, stealing and brawling and killing without consequence. I can’t tell anymore which are worse, the shakes or the ones who took to hunting them. The hunters, I think, because when they kill they know exactly what they are doing.

  I boil some water with a small scoop of coffee so I can think straight, then get to work on the bread. I mix flour and a pinch of our precious salt with the sourdough starter I’ve kept going for almost a year. I take out my anger at the unfairness of this life on my dough, beating it viciously. When my arms are tired I cover the bread with a worn and holey cloth and leave it on the table by the grimy window. The bread rises with the sun, the symmetry relaxing me. Sunrise is a glorious thing in the desert, the way the light breaks and spreads over the flatlands, a beacon of safety. The shakes are sluggish during the day, and easier to spot. They don’t have their minds anymore, and I think the heat makes them tired, just as it does with the rest of us.

  There are bits of flour on my hands and I realize that I am still wearing my nightgown as I wipe my fingers on the scratchy thing. I pull on a pair of worn trousers, the pant legs rolled up to fit and the waist held up by a snakeskin belt Pa made for my thirteenth birthday. That was back when he still had Ma to remind him of birthdays, and I’ve had to punch new holes in it twice. The pants were Micah’s until he outgrew them; it annoys me that my little brother is already taller than me at fourteen, or at least it would if it didn’t embarrass him so much. Micah is shy around strangers, though he talks back to me often enough.

  I glance at where he sits at the table, tinkering with a penny knife with a loose catch. He’s forever trying to figure out how to take things apart and put them back together. When he was eight he stole Pa’s pocket watch, the one with his initials engraved, and pried all the gears out. He never figured out how to repair it, but Pa let him keep it and
he still wears it, for show I guess. Since then Micah’s gotten much better at the fixing part, which is helpful, seeing as how the twins destroy everything in their path.

  “Can you watch the twins later?” I ask him. “I have to go to the Homestead. We need flour, and I need to pay our dues.”

  That gets his attention. “Aw, do I have to? Can’t you just tie ’em to a post somewhere?”

  “If you want to go, I’ll stay here instead.”

  Micah makes a face at me. The Homestead’s where the shake hunters convene and drink and fight and generally make a loud nuisance of themselves. It’s where the Judge sits and collects his fees, where my father gambles away whatever money he makes. I’d be happy never to step foot in that place again, but Ma always said you need to pick your battles.

  I give him a crooked smile. “It’s only for a couple hours. If I have to suffer, you have to suffer.”

  By midmorning, the temperature is starting to climb. I tie back my hair, but pieces of it come loose and plaster to my face. I haven’t cut my hair in more than a year, not since my mother died. She always cut it for me, and I can’t quite bring myself to do it without her. It seems wrong, like a final admission that she’s not coming back.

  Once the dough has risen, I divide it into fat round biscuits to bake. Half I’ll leave for my siblings to argue over and the rest I’ll take to trade at the Homestead. I rummage around the tins on the shelf until I find the empty coffee can we hide our money in. I pull out the bills and I sit at the table and count it three times while Micah watches.

  “Ninety-eight,” I say, setting the bills down on the table. “Minus twenty for the fee . . .”

  “Seventy-eight,” Micah says, always quicker than me. “That won’t last long.”

  “It will get us through next month.” It amazes me that all we have in the world can be held in one hand.

  I count out twenty dollars and put the rest of the money back in the can. I fold the bills and stuff them into a pocket sewn into my belt, where no one will see them. I don’t trust the kind of people that frequent the Homestead. It’s not much money all told, but there are hunters who would easily kill me for it.