“Nothing to be shamed of,” he’d said. “My experience is that a crowd attacking will be deterred if you scream and scream and keep on screaming. Top of your fucking voice. Shatter crystal at a hundred paces. Make them think they’re doing a lot more damage than they are. Good chance it might make them stop just a little while sooner.”
Abe hadn’t the slightest idea whether screaming had helped or not. Unconsciousness had come slinking along and swallowed him into its velvet maw.
Then nothing.
His attempt to take stock of his injuries hadn’t really been all that successful. There was only one thing that Abe was positively, definitely certain about.
He was soon going to die.
They’d made that clear to him.
He remembered that he’d recovered once, a little earlier. It hadn’t been full dark, and the rain had eased.
Abe had opened his eyes, blinking and choking, liquid splashing in his upturned face, into his open mouth. It was bitter, salty and warm.
“What the fuck?”
“Just a start, you little bastard!” said a voice, anger overlaying the soft country drawl.
Three men stood around him, the last of them buttoning up his pants. Abe couldn’t see their faces, but he didn’t need to. He could still remember what they looked like from the tumbledown store in the back-wood ville.
They took delight in telling him what was going to happen to him. The details didn’t matter all that much. The end result was going to be death, and it was going to come as slowly and painfully as their ingenuity could manage.
“Knives”
“Fire”
“Needles”
“Razors”
“Gasoline”
“Hammers”
“Suffocating, hanging, drowning, burning, shooting, stabbing, castrating, slicing, crushing, breaking and gouging”
It was a litany of hatred and pain that quickly lost all sense of meaning for the helpless little man.
One of them had squatted astride him, sitting on his chest, muddy boots holding Abe’s head still, while he leaned forward and gripped him by the throat. Fingers and thumbs ground into the front of the neck, cartilage creaking at the pressure, shutting off Abe’s breath, holding him as he wriggled and squirmed, choking him until blackness swam up and myriad tiny silver spots swirled inside Abe’s skull.
The same man had laughed as he’d finally let him go, standing up, looming over Abe.
“Got you and we’ll get your murderin’ friend. Start after him after dawn. He won’t get far. Others of us out and around the hills, on the watch. Lots of us was kin to Luke. Don’t figure on just walkin’ away and lettin’ go. Blood for blood’s what we say.”
Abe hadn’t even seen the work boot that struck him with savage accuracy, just behind the right ear, tossing him back into the darkness.
AROUND MIDNIGHT, Abe became aware that the wind had veered more southerly, taking the rain away with it on a bank of low cloud. The skies cleared and the stars broke through, pinpoints of diamond light staring down impassively at his suffering.
It became much colder and he found himself shivering. Once or twice it crossed his mind to call out and beg for mercy. Even if it were only the dubious mercy of a bullet through the back of the head.
But yet another of Trader’s thoughts came to him. “If you think begging might save your life, then you should just get down on your knees and start licking the boots. But this isn’t going to be true more than one time in mebbe a hundred thousand. So you might as well keep your mouth clamped shut and look to die with a shred or two of dignity.”
Now that the wind had dropped, Abe could hear the gang of men who’d captured him with such ease, smell the smoke of their cooking fire and the flavor of some sort of meat being scorched over the flames.
His mouth began to water, and he realized that he was also extremely thirsty. But his previous experience with his captors made him realize that asking for something to drink wasn’t likely to be a very good idea.
The men were singing a crude song about a gaudy slut and her experiences with a beaver trapper. Every now and then Abe heard bellows of raucous laughter.