Read Beneath Ceaseless Skies #172 for Free Online Page B

Eldred’d rigged up around his furry shoulders. Even Halpern could smell it, entrails dragging behind them, as the high road finally took them down. When everything around them was quiet except for the slide of the horse’s flesh, Halpern’s boots, and Junior’s breathing, Eldred looked back.
            “We’re not tracking it,” Halpern said. “It’s tracking us.”
            “How long will half a horse sate it?”
            Halpern still hadn’t put his gun away. “It won’t.”
    * * *
            A shining afternoon turned into a greasy dusk, and they reached the place where the wagon’d been left behind. Pieces of wood jutted out like bone, though actual bones were absent. The gouges that Halpern had seen, that mirrored the marks on the horsemeat, stood out like frozen ripples on a pond.
            Merrill’s wolf stopped. “Stay here, or go on?”
            Halpern grunted. “There’s no good place to fight one of them.”
            Eldred stared up at the sky, then looked to Halpern. “The brighter the moon, the stronger we are. Tonight’s the night to kill it. We’ll build a fire, then wait.”
            Junior scampered off to bring in pieces of wagon wood and brush to burn, under Halpern’s watchful eyes. Merrill freed himself from the harness and arranged himself behind what remained of the horse, his back to the nascent fire, his eyes out at the thin forest beyond. Eldred paced the edge of what was probably safe, sniffing deep.
            Halpern sat down by the fire and watched its colors change. Junior sat beside him. “What is it you’re hunting?” he asked.
            “Used to be a man.”
            “What happened to it?”
            “It—he—ate someone. Now he’s cursed to always be hungry,” Halpern answered, as Junior stared in frank disbelief. “It’s an Indian curse. Same as yours, I guess.”
            “I never did nothing to no Indian,” Junior said. He gathered his knees to his chest.
            Halpern grunted in agreement, then picked up another branch and tossed it into the fire.
    * * *
            As the night went on, Halpern stoked the embers of the fire. The wind kept shifting, and each time it did he felt like he could feel the thing, breathing on him. Only Merrill’s and Eldred’s stillness kept him calm.
            “I taught your momma how to shoot,” he said, after the third time he’d caught Junior dozing off too near the fire. “She was good, too. A dead-eye.”
            Junior’s eyes glittered with the memories flashing inside his mind. “I never knew that.”
            “Bet I know a lot of things about her that you don’t.”
            “Maybe so, maybe not,” Eldred’s voice warned from the darkness outside the firelight.
            “Her favorite number was thirteen. She always wanted to have a palomino colt. She could play the harmonica good as any man.”
            Junior laughed. “I knew that one.”
            “The merits of harmonica playing are debatable,” Merrill said from his station by the carcass.
            “And I know she prolly would have wanted a different life for you.”
            Eldred made a warning noise, deep inside his throat. “Halpern—”
            “How do you mean?” Junior asked, cutting Eldred off.
            “School, for one. How can you expect to come down into town when you can’t read nor write? And secondly, it wouldn’t kill you to go to church now and then.”
            Merrill laughed. “Shows what you know.”
            Halpern looked over his shoulder at the wolf. “I ain’t talking to you.”
            Junior stared into the fire. “I miss her.”
            “Me too.” Halpern wondered if he missed her so much as he missed the chance to make things right. As long as she’d been alive, there’d always