The dead had walked for six months now. In that time, Arthur had wryly been thankful for yet another reason that he and Sadie were here in Nuevo Paraiso. After all, where the only people they had killed were a handful of Del Lobos who’d come at them. Being back in more northerly places with much bloodier memories, and possibly seeing the faces of people whom he’d been the death of once already, and having to put them down again, might well have been too much.
It wasn’t exactly the peaceful life he’d long envisioned, but at least the fight was now for something good, something clear and fine. They fought to protect the living and to give the dead rest again, and he could accept that. He was certainly helping people by this, and that helped balance his very lopsided scales somewhat.
And for today, he and Sadie were out hunting. Not for the undead, though their eyes and ears were keen for that, but for food. The people of Chuparosa, thankfully safe within their gated adobe walls, always needed feeding, and nobody was fool enough to go out alone unless they wanted to become undead.
Bea and Mattie were safe back home, under Karen’s watchful eye. Some said that for both parents of young children to go out together was foolishness, giving Sadie a glance that invited her to stay home as they thought a woman clearly ought but both he and Sadie knew there was nobody else either of them would trust more in the danger of the desert and the risen dead than each other. Going out together meant they both came back alive. That was how it had long been between them, and how it was, and that was that.
“I swear,” he said, tracking a herd of goats, their shaggy coats indicating they’d run wild for a while now, “if I ever find out there’s some bastard who started all this–”
“Nobody knows,” Sadie pointed out. “Some fool touching some cursed artifact, or making dark deals with the Devil, or if it’s supposedly just God’s judgment like the preachers keep ranting, who the hell knows? Until we know that, ain’t no fixing this. All I know is we’re alive, and I aim to keep it so.”
“That’s the way of it, just about,” he acknowledged, and suddenly something in the middle of the goats caught his eye as the goats scattered, bleating and screaming. A wolf? Quickly snapping to it instead, Sadie beat him to the shot, and the thing dropped in its tracks.
Heading up to it, he could only stare at it. “Jesus, that thing looks like a wolf humped a boar and a porcupine.” The ridged back and pointed snout, the quills, and the grey-green skin and eyes that were an unsettling red even in death, told him that like much these days, this was no natural thing. He’d heard people talking about these beasts. Chupacabra, they called them. The goat-sucker. The sharp, bloody teeth and the goat it had dropped with one bite certainly made some eloquent argument for that name.
He sighed, reaching for it to skin it. The goat they could use, for certain. They couldn’t eat the meat of the chupacabra, because it would make them sick, but the pelt and claws and the like would fetch good money as a curiosity from someone. There had been some Harvard or Yale–maybe Princeton–professor down here making noises about wanting to collect specimens. If he hadn’t gotten eaten yet, maybe he and Sadie could sell it to him. He glanced over at her, unable to resist a slight smile. “You ever miss them days when the strangest thing that happened to us was outrunning Pinkertons?”
She laughed, patting him on the shoulder, before crouching to skin and butcher the goat. “Sure. Though at least the shamblers are dumb. That’s a comfort.”
Arthur well understood by this point that they were supposed to look after the littles, Jake and him. Though Sadie, of course, would insist she needed no looking after, even at seven, and nine-year-old Henry alternated between worshipping the two twelve-year-olds and insisting he was old enough to not be treated like a baby. Only five-year-old Caroline went along with things peacefully enough…at least until she got a notion in her head and wandered off, chasing whatever it was that she did.
He and Jake had been poking curiously at some bones bleached in the desert sun, trying to figure out what kind of beast had been there, and turned back to see only Henry and Sadie there studying them too. “Where’d Caro go?” Jake asked, a note of alarm in his voice.
Sadie looked around. “Dunno. Ran off again.”
“Well, we’d best go find her,” Arthur insisted, all sorts of visions of Caro being turned into bleached bones herself out here in the desert. Too many bad things out here to be cautious of, and that was for sure. Thirst for sure. Snakebites from the rattlers ready to defend their territory. Running across men worse than his daddy had been who might not be kind to a little kid, and Momma and Aunt Elsie and Aunt May and Uncle Rob were all worried about things stirring up here in Gaptooth Ridge.
He’d seen some things traveling with his pa before he’d gotten killed over a poker game in the Tumbleweed saloon. Knew bad men well enough, he guessed. But there were things about some of those men he’d seen hanging around Tumbleweed of late that set a low note of alarm even in him. The way they wore their guns, the way they looked at things, the easy swagger in them like they thought they owned the whole town and the whole county besides, told him these weren’t men who’d do no more than try to rob up a store.
Jake didn’t think it would amount to much. But Jake was a good kid. A preacher’s boy. Someone who grieved his pa’s death earlier this year so much, and Uncle Will, Will Adler, had been pretty near to a saint. Good enough to try to be a fine pa to Arthur, along with Rob Griffith. Good enough to take in Beatrice Morgan and her son and call them kin these past six years. He missed Uncle Will too, but he didn’t say so too much. It would feel like stealing that grief from Jake, from Will’s actual son. Claiming something he had no right to have, and his own father had left him with nothing but a name, a battered hat, and memories of a loud voice and angry blows. He almost envied Jake in some ways to have a father to mourn, and how messed up was that?
He knew he didn’t come from that kind of blood like Jake did. Lyle Morgan might not have been that dangerous compared to the men coming down from Rathskeller Fork, but he’d been bad. Arthur was trying, doing his best to be something different. Most days it seemed possible enough, but he supposed he could never be as good as Jake. But at least he knew enough to help protect the younger kids from what was maybe coming here. Assuming they hadn’t lost Caroline, anyhow. Swallowing his panic, he said, “Sadie, you come with me. Jake, you take Henry.” That was the thing sometimes. Jake didn’t like to make those kinds of decisions, so he and Arthur worked well together as a team there.
They found Caroline in the shade of a busted-up old wagon, studying a lizard. She looked up at Sadie and Arthur and beamed, pointing at it. “See? It’s a dragon!”
Tiniest dragon ever, Arthur thought, but he couldn’t help but smile at Caro’s imagination, as ever. “Sure is,” he said. “Don’t want to get too close to it. Dragons like stealing little girls, I hear.” Caro gave a shriek of laughter at that, giggling in that happy, openhearted way she had.
“They take princesses, silly. Not a princess.”
“No, you ain’t a princess, you’re just silly yourself,” Sadie said, rolling her eyes, but smiling at her sister all the same. “Come on. Let’s go home.”
i’ve been playing a lot of RDR2 since i finished RE8 and I gotta say I love Arthur so much ! He is shippable with so many people but I think he looks awesome with Sadie
Hearing the clanging of the wooden spoon against the leg of the table again, May Griffith sighed and leaned down, pulling up the tablecloth and peering into the cave-like shelter. “Sadie, for the love of all that’s holy, will you please–”
Amber brown eyes, so like her own, peered back at her from the shade, and Sadie gleefully said “No!” Punctuated it with another thwack of the spoon against the table leg for emphasis.
Sadie, at a year old, had learned three words. Namely, Ma,Pa, and her current favorite, No. Probably learned because she’d been hearing it so much these past months from both her parents, as well as Will and Elsie Adler on the frequent occasions the two families got together for dinner in the afternoon.
Everyone said boys were the trouble. May gave a derisive snort at the idea. Henry, at three, wasn’t nearly so much of a handful as little Sadie with her willful curiosity. And Elsie’s Jake was as sweet as could be at six, though she hoped like hell that stayed with him when adolescence and manhood came upon him.
She heard the sound of Rob’s boots on the floor, and heard his low chuckle as he said, “We got a budding musician, I see.”
“A real stubborn one.”
Rob winked at her, and she couldn’t help but smile. “Stubborn as her mother. Whoever the lucky fella turns out to be, that husband of hers is gonna have quite the fine adventure.”
“Rob Griffith, you–”
He laughed, leaned in, and kissed her cheek. “No complaints on my end. And I figure any man who ain’t sensible enough to not try to bridle our Sadie won’t be worth the bother anyhow.”
She gave up on it, and accepted the wooden spoon music, such as it was. Given the things Sadie could be getting into, this one was relatively harmless. “What’s the news in town this morning?”
“They connected the rails in Utah two days ago. We got us a true transcontinental railroad now.” He handled his tin mug easily, despite the two fingers on his left hand lost in a skirmish in North Carolina just before the end of the war. He’d come home to Pennsylvania, and to her. Far more than many women had got.
He was here, and they were making a life together, in a world where all sorts of things seemed possible with the carnage of the war done and over. What a thing that news was. “Hope they start building a spur here to Tumbleweed soon enough. Ain’t gonna make for much of a cattle town like they promised us without the rail nearby.” It was hard land here in the desert, even for ranching, so unfamiliar from the green hills they’d both grown up in, far too close to a town called Gettysburg that nobody had heard of until six years ago.
But if they became a cattle town here in Tumbleweed, that would keep things steady and sure. The stockyards would always need cattle, and so long as the trains came here, cattle ranches and cattle trails would follow. America had proved it could build a railroad coast to coast–building one to here in New Austin would be child’s play by comparison, and Tumbleweed only made sense as the place to pin the western part of the state’s future. She poured herself a cup of coffee as well, letting herself savor Rob’s news, and the hopes they both had, now seeming all too real.
