The front of the cabin, sheltered by a low beamed porch, was shuttered with thick pine slabs, and the door, a flat panel of solid pine, was crisscrossed with steel bands. The cabin looked dusty, and dry leaves had blown up all along the windward face, as if the last man who had lived there had boarded it up and gone west in the dying days of the last age. A shrill cry from overhead made them all look up as a golden eagle circled far above them, three long sweeping passes traced against the pale blue sky, before he decided that they were not prey — at least not easy prey — and he wheeled away to the south, peeping absurdly.
Katie walked up to the cabin door and kicked it hard, hard enough to make the dust bounce off the planks. Grit drifted down off the underside of the porch, glimmering in the late-afternoon light.
“Pete! You in there? It’s Katie.”
Nothing. The wind rolling in across the plateau. From an unseen spring bubbling up in the cliff face came the hissing murmur of racing water. In a stand of trees at the far end of the ledge a crow cursed them and then laughed raucously, joined in a moment by others of his kind — from the sound they made, a multitude, all of them well hidden in the trees, their cries echoing off the face of the cliff.
“I don’t like all them crows around,” said Katie. “Isn’t natural. Now what, trooper?” said Katie, looking at Dalton quizzically.
Dalton lifted the Colt Python and blew a fist-size hole in the upper-right hinge plate, the wood chips flying, the boom of the gun sending a huge flock of crows soaring into the blue sky, braying and screeching madly. Another shot into the middle hinge, and a third into the lowest one, followed by a fourth round into the door latch. In the deafened silence that followed the only sound was the oiled metallic ratcheting as Dalton reloaded his Colt.
Katie kept her Winchester leveled on the door. Fremont, his back to the two of them, was watching the curve of the road, the trees at the far end of the shelf, the open plateau, his .45 in both hands, the muzzle slightly lowered.
Dalton stepped up to the door, put a gloved hand into the gaping splintered hole where the door latch had been, set himself, put a boot against the frame, and gave the door a massive pull. It groaned against the timbers, shifted a half inch, and then flew right out of the frame, the huge door slamming to the ground with a thunderous clap and narrowly missing Dalton’s boots as he stumbled backward off the porch. Katie caught him in a wiry grip to keep him from falling. The doorway loomed open, the interior as black as a mine.
Katie stepped forward, but Dalton caught her by the arm.
“No. Wait. Listen.”
Katie stopped, her head cocked. A low murmuring buzzing, rising and falling, deep, almost at the lower limit of hearing. The sound — terrible and frighteningly familiar — flowed over Dalton like a wave, stopping his breath. Fremont stood a little way behind them, listening to the same sound, his face going pale and his eyes widening.
“What the hell is that?” asked Katie, shaking Dalton’s hand off and walking up the stairs. “It sounds like—”
A single green fly flew straight out of the middle of the open frame, buzzing aggressively around them, followed by two more.
“Katie,” said Fremont, “you better—”
And then a torrent, a storm cloud of flies, a living horde of buzzing fat flies, their distended bellies glistening blue and green, their wings a shimmering blur, poured, literally poured like black oil out of the open doorway of the cabin. The three of them bowed down under the stream of flies like people in a strong wind as the swarm flowed over them, and flies crawled down their necks, and into their eyes, and rustled up their open sleeves, slipping into their mouths as they gasped for air, buzzing and rattling deep in their ears, crawling busily over their eyes, in their hair—
They all three broke and ran, stumbling away from the river that was pouring out of the interior of Pete Kearney’s cabin and spreading out across the open ground of the plateau, crawling, flying, buzzing, an unspeakable sickening flood. They beat the air around themselves as they staggered away from the cabin, Katie screaming as she ran, Dalton grimly silent, his lips set tight against the greasy flies he could feel crawling over his mouth, crawling up his nostrils, Fremont close behind, bellowing like a bull.
They covered a hundred feet before the swarm diminished, before they could breathe without inhaling flies, and there they stopped, panting, stunned, horrified.
In five long minutes the torrent of flies had slowed to a stream, and then to a trickle, and then to only a few bloated flies buzzing around the doorway, and a few more crawling up the outside walls, on the underside of the overhanging roof.
The deep organlike note of their buzzing diminished into a constant burring sound, the chatter of their wings or the rustling sound they made as they rubbed up against one another in clusters, their bodies glimmering with gasoline colors in the dying light.
The wind from the valley floor had been gaining in strength as the evening came on, and now it was racing across the plateau and into the open door, driving away the clusters of flies around the cabin, blowing them into the air by the thousands.
The three of them stood there, in shocked stillness, staring in bleak horror at the cabin until the wind had cleared most of the flies away, a time out of mind that turned out to be, by Katie’s watch, no more than ten minutes.
A kind of suspended calm came back to the little plateau and the space around the darkened building, and in that false calm they walked slowly, warily back across the open ground, stopping at the foot of the stairs. Now an overpowering stench, the stink of dead meat and rotting flesh, drifted out through the door, forcing them back again. From inside the cabin they could hear a low, busy, murmuring hum.
“Oh good Christ,” said Katie. “What’re we waiting for?”
She raised the Winchester and strode firmly into the darkness. Dalton and Fremont looked at each other, and then both men followed her inside. Into the suffocating stench, the cloying reek of putrefaction. The interior of the cabin was as dim as a crypt, the only light coming from the open door, but they could see a large shape in the middle of the room, wrapped in a seething cloud, and the buzzing noise was very loud. The walls were moving, and the boards under their feet were thick with black cockroaches, their wings chittering and whirring. Fat cold slugs dropped onto their heads from the rafters, and tiny biting flies flew at their faces. Katie, her face set and hard, bone-white but steady, turned to Fremont. “Get those shutters open.”
“Katie, I’m not sure I—”
“Open the goddamned shutters, Willard!”
Fremont went to the nearest window, his boots skidding on the crunching, slippery floor. He hammered at the steel lever and the shutters flew outward and away, and hard flat sunlight streamed into the cramped little room. The air was alive with buzzing flies. They crawled on every surface and hung from every fixture. They swarmed and buzzed and scuttled across the huge scrawled drawing spray-painted right across the rear wall of the cabin, the drawing that Dalton, in the recesses of his heart, had been afraid that he would find here ever since they left Butte.
And they swarmed in their millions around a huge shapeless mass in the middle of the room. Barely visible under the crawling layers of busy biting flies was the bloody hide of a big buck deer, and the hide of the buck had been wrapped tightly around what looked to be the figure of a man, although his shape was only vaguely human.