If there is a god, I hope he welcomes you.
If he didn’t, Cricket would raise hell until God got sick enough of the fool he’d let him in anyways.
Decker found Mercer's grave under a maple tree painted with the last burnished colors of fall. Plain granite, inscribed with her name and the date she died—three years ago, in the spring.
That had been right before Cricket had shown up at Ender’s Ridge, just months after Elias. Decker ran his hand over her name. The first was illegible, like someone hacked away at the stone. Mercer was her only identification, carved in letters seeming too harsh for a woman Cricket loved.
Sandy red soil piled high as Decker sank his shovel into the ground next to her grave. Safine never moved from guarding Cricket.
Only one walked through the cemetery as his grave formed: a woman with a cane glinting in the moonlight shuffled to the edge of the pit and asked who was being buried.
“A friend,” he said, forcing his shovel into the last layer of clay. She was gone when Decker hoisted himself out.
Night passed to early morning, and fog rolled in as they lowered him to his final resting place.
The first time Decker met Cricket Conklin, he had tried to kill him.
Chasing adventure with revolvers and outlaws and washing life down with whiskey, the boy lived hard, fell harder. He’d brought three lawmen hot on his tail the first day he arrived, tripping into the saloon, eyes bright and unaffected as he swung over the counter to hide in the back room.
“What the hell are you doing, kid?” Decker had asked sharply before his attention snapped to the lawmen milling at the bridge.
When they’d been taken care of and drifted away, he dragged Cricket out back by the necklace around his throat. He was a liability, with no indication that the veil protecting the town affected him—a danger to their way of life.
The damn pendant got in the way of his neck and snapped the tip off Decker’s left fang clean off.
“Crazy bastard.” Cricket had grinned, clapped him on the shoulders, and flirted with Safine until she’d allowed him a room, under the agreement she hadveryparticular tastes and he was not one of them. The next morning, when he’d found Decker’s stash ofimported tobacco in the cellar and helped himself, Decker nearly tried to kill him again before grudgingly accepting he’d been added to their ranks, disturbing the staleness of the saloon.
Cricket always returned. Dust-covered and tired, he’d slouch on one of the chairs and try to root out the melancholy in himself with gambling and tall tales.
Decker suspected most of them were false.
Now I’ll never know for certain.
Safine stared into the grave, unblinking. There was nothing to say. Nothing could make this better, explain why this happened, or how to stop the rest of them from joining him.
Decker had been running from something his entire life—home, family, war, lovers—until his life slowed to a crawl here, where there was some semblance of safety. And now even safety lay in the grave in the form of Cricket Conklin.
The first rays of sun etched between the last clinging oak leaves, and Decker promised himself, promised Cricket, McKinney, and the dozens more they’d lost, that this time he wouldn’t run. If he died here, he’d be honored to be buried amongst friends.
Bitter coffee streamed from the pot as Decker wove between tables, filling cups for Safine, Willa, Sister Inez, and Laurie. He topped off his own cup with the last of the old blood scrounged from the mercantile and a heavy splash of Northern whiskey.
Soil crumbled from Decker’s sleeve as he lifted the cup to his mouth and he swiped it to the floor to join the rest of the tracked-in graveyard dirt.
Decker’s head spun like creaky wheels as he numbly sipped. Gibson’s cows becoming infested with biting lice, Sitara’s illness, now the boils taking a third of the town. Whitton was involved—he had no doubts about it—whether he caused the sickness or merely capitalized on it. His interests lay in immortality and stretching the limits of the human body, not curses or illness, but right now it was the only thread to follow.
Across from him Laurie flipped through his Bible, soundlessly reading passage after passage.
Thomas had read him the Bible on several occasions, haltingly, in a soft voice as he picked out the words under the light of their fire on their way out West. Thomas favored the Old Testament, with tales of judgment and redemption, most of which Decker had long forgotten.
Decker’s neck prickled, raging against the fog of the past. Thomas loved one particular story about deliverance and oppressors serving their dues.
The coffee turned to ash in his mouth. “Exodus.”
Laurie stared at him.
“Flip to Exodus,” he said, dragging his chair closer.
He thumbed through ragged pages until he reached the second book.
