His wife’s head, scalped and with the lips cut off, hanging on a fencepost, hissing, “I’m pregnant—
Wickerson awoke in sweat.
Alone.
Dawnlight trickled in through dirty windows, vaguely illuminating a frontier homestead in disrepair.
He walked outside.
Pissed.
Squinted at the silent landscape: America: flatness rimmed by dark and distant mountains.
Like living in a soup bowl of death.
He spat on the dry dirt.
Visited the freshly dug graves with no headstones and said a prayer for his murdered family.
Said a prayer for vengeance.
The Comanche would return to kill him. But, Lord, he’d be ready, and he’d take many with him.
Amen.
He grew gaunt, subsisting on hatred, water and beans.
One night there was a terrible storm. Lightning crawled across the night sky like luminescent veins, and thunder recited the apocalypse.
When it was over, Wickerson found his wife’s grave disturbed—
Dug up as if by rats.
And her headless corpse slashed open at the belly—
Where, nestled within, writhed:
A green child.
Although its colour induced in him a primal nausea, to say nothing of its hideously inhuman physiognomy, Wickerson picked up the child and carried it inside.
He fed it what he had and nurtured it.
In time, he grew fond of the child’s green repulsiveness, seeing in it a physical analogue of his own soul.
Once, under spell of alcohol, he stumbled outside and saw, as if looming behind the mountains, two gargantuan figures, ancient and warted, hunched over, cloaked and hooded, holding skull-topped staffs, with which they began pounding the ground—pounding in tune with his pulse—and as they pounded, a rain fell and they disintegrated, until there was nothing behind the mountains but featureless sky.
The Comanche came soon after that. Thirteen, war-painted and on horseback, circling the homestead.
Wickerson shot at them from broken windows.
Then they stopped—
Gathering—
And Wickerson saw that the green child had taken its first steps: in front of the homestead.
He ran out too.
At peace with coming death.
But the Comanche merely gazed, bunched astride their horses, mouths agape and pointing at the green child, which tottered forward—
Before lunging at the nearest rider—
Knocking him from his horse; pouncing on his back; punching its tiny fist into his neck; and, in one horrible motion, ripping out the entirety of his spine.
The Comanche horses reared up!
Then the green child stood, holding the wet spine as a staff, and uttered unrepeatable sounds, which caused the horses to become dust.
The Comanche collapsed.
The green child spun the spine-staff, weaving the air into threads—and, before the Comanche could react, bound them together with such force their eyes popped from their sockets.
Lifeforce, pressed out through their pores, nourished the soil.
Plants sprouted.
And the bound Comanche themselves, dead and desiccated, became the trunk of a great tree, on which grew fruits like human hearts, rich with blood and glowing with the promise of a new and lasting Eden.
“My Lord,” said Wickerson.
Amen.