She did not like killing things. And here she was, preparing to kill one more thing. Not that she felt conflicted about it. She just didn’t like the idea of it, resented that she would carry this weight with her for the rest of her days. It was not a sin, to protect herself against violence by putting an end to it — but the act would stay with her forever. Her mind would always have there to go, that memory to reflect on, and it would likely have a stronger pull than most of the others. Each death did not lessen the load of the previous. But you grew the muscles to better carry them. John used to have nightmares about the men he had killed. He rode with some general during a violent time in the territory. John had said the general’s name many times, as if Martha were to recognize it, but she did not recognize it and so it did not stick. John would wake up in the middle of the night sweating and crying like a child. She had not asked, but had assumed he’d done some unforgivable things.
The killer was at the inn, finally. Martha had not raised her rifle, had not even thought to raise her rifle. She had not even registered his approach at first, but snapped into focus when he dumped the spent shells from his pistol and began to reload. They hit the ground like spilled coins. Somehow, the sound of those shells clicking against the dirt rang throughout the town louder than the muffled shots from within each home. It was the sound of him leaving those deaths behind. It was an unnatural sound. It was monstrous. There was a desperate look in his eyes, like a cornered dog. But there was a matter-of-factness to his movement, like a lost man, decidedly looping the same patch of desert land in the hopes that death will find him more quickly. She knew that face. She knew this man. She had been born to kill him.
Just then, Mary appeared in the window from which Martha had exited. She was trying to open it, but could not lift the frame more than an inch or so. She knocked, softly. Martha shook her head. The killer stepped onto the porch. Mary tried again, to lift the window, but with no success. The boy was not with her.
“Martha,” whispered Mary.
Martha shook her head, waved her hand.
“There are spiders,” said Mary.
Martha waved her hand.
The killer cracked the door and stepped into the inn and Mary vanished from the window.
Martha tried to remember, had she shut the door to the bedroom? She had when she had tried to set herself up in the front room. But after? Before she exited through the window? She could not remember.
There were two windows that looked out onto the alley, the window she had exited from and a window between the alley and the front room. From her position, she would not have been visible from the front room, unless the killer were to press himself directly against the window and look down. From where she was, she had no real view into the inn through either window, and if she rose to one or the other she would expose herself to whomever stood in the room. She kept low and worked her way out from behind the crates and around to the front of the inn. The porch was raised slightly off the ground, but the space between the dirt and the building was not enough for her to squeeze through. A hero would have charged through the front door, but she did not know any heroes. She knew dead men, and the men who’d killed them, and the boy. The killer was inside the inn with Mary and the boy and Mary was out of the vanity. Martha needed to act fast and protect the child, but she was out of any sensible ideas and was starting to feel frozen there on the dirt, hunched beside the front porch. Thinking it through kept her from having to move. She heard no sounds of struggle, no real movement. Every second that passed without gunfire loaded the next with more and more potential. She was bound to break from the weight. She heard wood cracking and imagined the children were done for. She rose onto the porch, flinching at the sound of its creaking, and spotted through the window the image of the killer pulling floorboards up and setting them against the wall. She heard and saw him speaking but could not make out the words. She was perfectly still and silent as she could be. Her breathing seemed too loud and dangerous, so she held her breath. He did not look up. If he had, he would have seen her there on the porch, holding her rifle against her like a rope. Something had happened to her. Time had slowed and she’d lost her nerve. She was as still as a rock or a tree, or a gravestone. He was directing his pistol to the hole in the floor. He was talking and nodding as if to someone who was afraid of him. He shook his head. The door to the bedroom was closed. He reached into the hole and withdrew an infant, wrapped in a filthy blanket. The child was crying and he stood and held it against him. He lifted the blanket to examine its face. He turned and fired into the hole, then tucked his pistol into his belt and headed out the front door.
He saw Martha there, clutching her rifle. She did not raise it. He paused only a moment before directing his attention back to the screaming child, and then rushing down from the porch and toward the stable. Martha had the thought to shoot him in the back, but there was the child. Instead, she rushed into the inn and back to the bedroom, casting only a casual glance at the hole in the floor, the inside of which was too dark to determine much at the speed she was moving. Mary was not in the room. The vanity was shut. She opened it and found the boy hunched, alone, crying into the space between his knees. He had wet himself again, and the floor of the vanity.
“Where is Mary?”
The boy did not speak.
“Mary,” said Martha, into the room.
There she was, under the bed. Her hands appeared first and then her face. She did not seem upset, but was glad instead for Martha’s return.
“There were spiders in the closet,” she said.
Martha scooped her up. She would have scooped the boy up too, but for the urine.
“Stay here one more second,” she said to Mary.
“I don’t want to go in the closet,” said Mary.
“Just sit on the bed then,” said Martha.
Martha set her hand on the back of the boy’s head. She told him it was okay and that they were safe. He seemed comforted.
“I was scared,” he said, and she told him it was okay.
She left them, the boy in the vanity and Mary on the bed, and returned to the hole in the floor of the front room. Inside, she was able to make out a man on his back. There was a bit of light from the room and the cracks in the floor and she could see that he was on his back and still. A dead man. He had on the clothes of a mobile man, a deputy or a rancher, not a retail man or a smith or an innkeeper. She could not see his face.
“Is there anyone alive in this hole?” she said.
There was no reply.
A horse thundered past the inn then and she spotted the killer on its back, vanishing toward the path that led to the woods. He was not hunched over or working the horse for speed, but was instead upright and gentle looking. She determined he was still carrying the child. It was hardly larger than a bowl, that child. She could not imagine what a man like that would want from something so small. She assumed it was the baby of a landowner or a political figure, and that he was holding the baby for ransom. But there was always the possibility that the man was evil incarnate and that the things he was determined to do with that baby would not reward imagining.
“Mary,” said Martha. “Do you remember how to make a chicken?”
“Yes!” said Mary. “You pull out all the feathers and bake it in butter.”
“Do you remember how to kill a chicken?”
She did not.