And The Burden And The Lesson

The mattress shifts beneath the pair of them, and it jostles the barrel of his gun against Ives’ temple. In the dark, Boyd can only guess at their respective positions. He’s all but kneeling on the man’s chest. The sag of the straw mattress would have been enough to wake all but the lightest of sleepers, but it’s too much to say whether the newly minted colonel was sleeping at all — playing dead, more like.

“Be quiet,” Boyd says, “if you make any sound I’ll put a bullet in you.” But there’s a quaver in his voice that can’t be suppressed.

“Without that reassurance I’d think you had a mind to put a bullet in me anyway.”

“Quiet!”

Boyd jostles against him, and Ives holds out his hands, Christlike. “What’s the meaning of this?”

“You know, colonel. I’m not crazy, and I’m not a liar.”

“It’s the middle of the night, soldier, do we really have to play twenty questions?”

Boyd only has one question for him, and it’s the question that will cement what happens next for him — if he has proof, then he has proof. There must be marks — there must be proof someplace. Six bodies in the cave, there were six, not five, and now there’s seven — or eight — or how many more? How many times has this bloodstained ruse gone on out here? Too many. There must be marks — cut marks on the bones, torn flesh still clinging to the hoof. Bite marks. Even a bourbon-soaked backcountry veterinarian incompetent enough for Fort Spencer should be able to draw the correct conclusion from that.

Boyd clears his throat. “When you murdered Colonel Hart — what did you do with his body?”

The man draws a breath. His throat makes a dry unsticking sound. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You know. He never did you any harm, so what did you do with what was left of him?”

“What was left? That’s a funny way of putting it.”

“The corpse.”

“I was led to believe that the poor man’s remains were never found. If temperatures dip any lower we’ll find him in the springtime more or less intact. Of course, there’s the local wildlife to consider…”

 

“What would you know about that? I thought you were a preacher.” Now he’s a military man — with smooth white shoulders, and a neat beard, and not a mark on him.

“A man should know what land he inhabits. These mountains are full of bears, wildcats, all manner of vermin. Scavengers.” The man called Ives runs the backs of his fingers down Boyd’s stomach, making his muscles flinch. “They’ll eat his soft parts first. Have you ever seen a battlefield after the action’s come and gone? The carrion birds, and the wild dogs, and the rats. They go after the faces first — first the eyes, and then the throat. They burrow down, and clear out the pluck and and the liver and the lights, all of the offal you’d buy at a butcher’s shop. Then they strip the flesh and scatter the bones. It’s an efficient system. Easier with a team.”

His voice in the dark is like a chain around Boyd’s heart — even, lilting speech employed to captivate him. He came to America like everyone else, and now he’s taking up his residence — slinking in to fill the empty spaces on the map. The sound of it makes Boyd shiver.

Men don’t only die in battle. Soldiers die from want, starvation, disease, desperation — they butcher each other over games of dice, and their friends let them lie for the rats to find. The vermin had come for Private Reich, but only in the night, they’d come for Boyd —

“They’re animals,” Boyd says. “That’s what they do.” There’s no team. The mountain lions and the rats aren’t comrades, they’re opportunists; they’d feed on one another just as soon if they only knew how.

“And what are you, Captain Boyd?”

“I’m not a rat, or a dog. I’m a man.” Boyd twists the barrel of the service revolver, tipping Ives’ head and making him flinch away. The effect is ruined somewhat by the sound of his laughter.

“That’s quite a tool you’ve got there, Boyd. It’ll serve you better with a shot in the chamber.”

He’s forgotten to cock the damned thing. The sound of the hammer drawing back splits the air. In that moment of distraction, Ives’ hand finds him through his drawers — making his skin crawl and his cock stir. Boyd lets the service revolver drop, but only for a moment — he presses the barrel to Ives’ throat instead. Still enough to maim, if not kill. Boyd had seen a man shot through the neck, almost cleanly, in the heartbeat’s worth of time before all the blood gushed out in one red pulse — the smell of it is with him now, in his nose, in his mouth. The smell of Ives, clean and scrubbed and pomaded.

“Don’t.” Boyd grimaces. Ives will do what he tells him to, and nothing else.

“You’re the same as I am, and you’ll be happier when you admit it. You’re made of the same stuff.” His thumb traces the head of Boyd’s cock, chafing away a wet droplet with the rough pad of his finger. Boyd makes an involuntary noise. “You seem all but primed to go. Take that pistol off me and I’ll relieve you.”

“I’m not stupid,” Boyd says. Just desperate.

“That seems debatable.”

Ives lunges for him, and Boyd jerks back, but the two of them collide — this new man called Ives is quick as the devil, and in the dark he smells like bay leaf and clove, like stolen luxury. His hands makes fists in Boyd’s hair, as he kisses him so roughly and probingly that there is no other choice but to yield and admit him — his tongue slides across Boyd’s front teeth, brazen as a whore, and Boyd breathes a moan against his mouth. It’s all he can do not to bite his lip, but Ives must feel his jaws twitch with the impulse and rocks forward, crushing them closer — many wanton kisses, enough to redden Boyd’s mouth and scratch his cheek. This is the creature that lay beneath the pitiful thing they’d rescued just the other day — not a man of the cloth, that’s for damn sure. He’s no more a reverend than Boyd is a war hero. He’s barely even a man, whispering filthy things as Boyd sucks his mouth with ardent kisses, desperate kisses.

They’re not the same. He came here to kill this man and now he no longer knows what it is he wants to do. Needs to do. This is wrong, but his blood is up, and he’s never felt stronger, never felt more vigorous — Ives is made of whipcord and long bones, and he makes all the flesh of Boyd’s body ache and burn. He has never felt more alive than this, more of an animal.

Boyd fumbles the man’s nightshirt up, one-handed, and Ives is good enough to assist him — the man isn’t wearing anything else, which is a lunatic’s choice on a Fort Spencer night. The heat of his groin is enough to broadcast that he’s hardly suffering for it — here in the dark they are in an isolated pocket of sound, warmed by blood-heat.

“I’m nothing like you,” Boyd says through gritted teeth. The man they’d all called Colqhoun is nothing better than a beast. He eats his own kind. He’d eaten an innocent woman, but not until he’d already had his way with her.

“But you could be, Boyd.” Obscenely bright, pleased with himself. It’s all in his voice. “You’re closer than you think.”

This contemptible man, this animal, with his silken voice and his darting eyes — this liar. Boyd wants to take him here, in the dark, to force him down on his face and make him feel the full force of his contempt. Boyd forces back his leg, and Ives permits it — permits Boyd to force his knee in between the man’s thighs and to feel the taut muscle there, the indistinct assurance of a raging hard-on laid against his belly. Boyd’s own erection is hot and slick, plenty slick for a quick raw fuck — the kind of thing to leave you limping — but it’s not desire that stokes him now. It’s something else. The shadow junction of Ives’ thighs is there in the dark for him, the tight split of his ass, tight and waiting —

“Fuck you,” Boyd hisses, and thrusts the gun into him.

The man’s an animal, a butcher, filthier than a sick dog. Boyd wants to make him suffer. John wants to break his bones, to leave every muscle and sinew strained beyond bearing, he wants to eat him up — the cowardice has fallen away, the sickness has dropped away like an old snakeskin and left him raw and naked with need. Let it be a sign of his hate.

“That’s new,” Ives says. He sounds pleasantly surprised. The barrel of the revolver pressing in dry makes his hips hitch — the motion is obscene, and the greedy parting of his legs to admit it, riding down on the hard metal. Boyd thrusts the gun deeper into him out of spite, and feels him spasm —

“You killed them,” Boyd says, “you ate them,” and his mouth is full of the memory of blood — of flesh on the bone, the smell of his own cracked marrow as salty and rich as spunk. His breaths come raggedly, in time with Ives’ panting and his own sick thrusts, the pressing of his cramped wrist. “You killed them all—”

But he hadn’t ate them all. He hadn’t touched Reich. John had done that.

Ives twists like a wanton under him, slippery-handed and shameless at every thrust — faint sounds escape him, like the sounds of struggle.

“Why don’t you pull the trigger? If I didn’t know better I’d say you’re stalling—”

“You’d like that?” Boyd pants, spittingly angry.

His disgust and fear have been replaced wholesale by hunger, animal hunger — the battlefield blind hunger that he’s only ever witnessed and never felt until then, crushed beneath a mountain of dead flesh with a dead man’s brains running down into his mouth. He could shoot his guts out like this — see if his virility helped him then.

Ives’ voice is stroking him like silk — not the preacher’s voice, the priest’s voice, but the officer’s voice as caressing as a woman’s hand. “You’re not a coward, are you? Captain?”

Ives’ cannibal breath on his face, Ives’ hands bringing him off as the gun barrel gouges deeper — he’s in the shallows now, at the terrible tight-wound end of his suffering, and Ives’ suffering is just beginning. One way or another, he’ll get him for what he’s done. Boyd’s thighs tighten around Ives’ leg, crushing him against the sorry mattress.

He’s not a captain — he shouldn’t even be a soldier, but it’s too late. This war has been nothing but a farce, a perverted warm-up for bigger and better things on the horizon, and Boyd’s been nothing but a foot soldier. Men like Boyd will move west by the thousands, and they’ll topple down, they’ll topple into the mouth of this thing like an open grave.

Boyd spills wet on Ives’ belly, and feels him tremble with black laughter — his hand jerks back in surprise, and the gun barrel with it exiting with a terrible raw tug. It’s as if a cord has snapped, and he nearly topples off the bed — now that would really make the rest of the camp come running to see what the fuss was about, wouldn’t it? A thump and a gasp and a gunshot, and that terrible affectionate laugh.

Ives rolls him over, and claps a hand to his cheek before Boyd can do a thing about it — he’s stunned and unstrung by his own release, altogether unstrung.

“We’ll make a soldier out of you yet, John.”