“You’re mad because you wanted to make a deal with Perry and I didn’t,” I say.
“No,” she says slowly, like I’m stupid, “I’m mad because you tortured and killed a man after I gave him my word he would live. Again.”
“Ah, so this is about Denver.”
“Not everything is about Denver, Jane.”
“But this is,” I say, holding her on my lap when she makes to flounce away. “And here’s the thing about Denver: I told you that I was planning on killing the O’Reillys right after we talked to the sheriff. And you know I ain’t one to break a promise.”
I’m about to tell her, for the thousandth time, how the O’Reillys deserved to die. I’m about to tell her, for the thousandth time, that all the people we’ve been chasing deserve to die. And worse besides. But the look she gives me shuts me right up.
The thing is, I know I’m right. But I’m not willing to lose the one person I got left over it.
After Gideon fled Nicodemus, Callie nursed me back to health. She sawed off my arm, kept the wound from getting infected, and made sure I had enough to eat and drink. All I did the entire time was imagine the twenty different ways I was going to kill Gideon Carr. I thought about small Thomas and the Duchess, Sallie and Nessie. I thought about Cyrus Washington with his careful manner and soft voice, the confident way he discussed the risk of the vaccine and his passion for his town. I even thought about Jackson and how those dead that had ambushed him on the prairie came from Summerland. Knowing what I did of Gideon’s penchant for experimentation, I was soon convinced he’d had even more to do with the end of that thrice-cursed town than I’d suspected at the time. In my mind, Gideon had killed Jackson just as surely as he’d killed poor Thomas. Him, and his reckless pursuit of a cure.
Winter set in, and Callie kept us both alive, foraging for food in nearby towns until I was strong enough to go out hunting with her. Life became very different when the dead were no longer a threat, and she taught me how to take stock of the prairie for dangers that weren’t shamblers.
It’s hard to say just when I got sweet on Callie. It wasn’t an all-at-once sort of thing. I reckon there’s something about being stuck with a person for a moment that makes you start to see them differently. She told me stories about her family, about Gideon when she first met him; I told her stories of Miss Preston’s and Rose Hill. I even told her about my heartbreak over Jackson, and my visions of him nearly disappeared. Things were good, and by the time we ended up in Denver we were sharing more than just stories. Unlike so much else in our lives, it felt . . . easy.
I guess falling for someone always is. It’s the staying in love that’s hard.
The Colorado Territory was the first time we fought, and I reckon that was because it was the first time we’d encountered other people in almost a year. The horde had wiped out most of the towns still standing in Kansas; whatever Indian nations were still about were good at keeping themselves scarce as Callie and I traveled west so that most days as we walked we were the only living souls about. But all that changed once we got nearer to Fort Laramie, a heavily fortified, bustling crossroads trading post in the Wyoming Territory. For some reason the horde hadn’t roamed this far west, and the shamblers we did see were quickly put down.
Fort Laramie was the first time we encountered news of Gideon Carr.
It was a small thing, a newspaper article from the Denver paper. There, in the smallest font possible, was a headline that upended the foundations of my new life:
BRILLIANT SCIENTIST LOOKING FOR VOLUNTEERS TO TEST NEW VACCINE
It was like seeing a ghost, and it was all I could think about for days. How long until he turned folks after making a mistake? How many people had he killed already, the kind of people no one really cared about? Thoughts of Gideon and the people he’d killed went round and round in my head until I finally realized that no one was going to stop Gideon Carr.
Which is why I had to end him and his reign of terror.
It was about this time that Callie and I began to realize that we would be remiss not to find a way to earn some money. Since no one would hire a one-armed girl to be their Attendant and Callie had none of the necessary training, we started taking bounties. It was lucrative work, and the thing about bounties is that the sheriffs posting them are already past the point of desperation. Which means they ain’t too picky about who delivers on them. And that was the case with the O’Reillys.
The bounty on those boys’ heads had only been for livestock rustling and petty thievery, but they’d killed a family of Negroes. The O’Reillys had come onto their property pretending to be beggars, and the Turner family had welcomed them in and fed them, even gave them a place to sleep. And in return, once the Turners had gone to bed, the O’Reillys murdered all of them in their beds. It was the kind of crime that should have seen them hanged. But killing Negroes wasn’t against the law in Colorado Territory, just like it wasn’t illegal to kill an Indian in most places, and so the sheriff had only been worried about the crimes of theirs that had been perpetrated against white folks—cattle rustling, stealing a few chickens. If there had ever been any doubt in my mind that the lives of colored folks were cheap, the Turners’ tragic end had put them to bed.
There was no court in Colorado that would hold those boys accountable for their true crimes. But more than that, while looking for the O’Reillys we discovered that they’d done some work for a man of science with a laboratory outside of Denver.
And so, when we caught up with the O’Reilly boys, I took the liberty of appointing myself judge and jury. But not until after I’d discovered everything they knew about Gideon Carr. Everyone gives up what they know at some point. It’s just a matter of how much cutting you have to do before they do.
We were too late in getting to Denver, Gideon was long gone by the time we’d arrived, but now we knew that Gideon Carr was hale and hearty and using lowlifes like the O’Reillys to do his dirty work.
Killing the O’Reillys had been easy, and after that, well, I realized that it was much simpler to collect a bounty on a dead ruffian than a live one. I’ve spent so much of my life fighting and killing the dead that the living seem like a cakewalk in comparison. Sure, they might fight back, but if you’re quick and you’re ruthless, there’s not much to worry about. Either way, I was willing to do whatever I could to make sure Gideon Carr paid for his crimes.
And if Callie had any objections, well, eating fine food and staying in nice hotels shut them down.
Until now.
Callie doesn’t say anything for a long time, and for a moment I’m afraid that I’ve gone and done it this time, that she’s going to leave me in the night and I’ll be on my own. I don’t relish the idea of it being just me and Salty. But we’re so close to finding Gideon now that I can practically smell him, and the thought of finally catching up with him after all this time is a sweet one. Maybe finer than Callie’s kisses, truth be told.
That’s when Callie looks me dead in the eyes, and her expression ain’t angry in the least. It’s indescribably sad.
“I ain’t mad that the O’Reillys are dead. They were bad people, and the Turners deserved justice. I ain’t even all that mad about Perry, because Lord knows he was a sonuvabitch. It’s just . . . all this awfulness, it takes a toll, Jane. This doesn’t feel like justice, it feels like revenge. And just what do you think is going to be left of your soul if you keep letting vengeance take tiny bites out of it?”