CHAPTER 3 #4
“I prayed on my knees every day of my life that you would never come back to claim it, Nero,” the old pastor said, beginning to walk slowly toward the back of the carpentry shop, where a curtain of coarse burlap divided the work area from the mortuary.
“I prayed because I knew, with the certainty of scripture, that on the day you put your hands on that iron again, death would collect too high and too bloody a price from every living soul in Bitter Creek.”
“The collecting has already started,” Nero answered flatly, following the old man’s steps through the gloom.
The pastor led them along a narrow corridor to a small crypt of rough stone at the back of the little church, an underground space used to store bodies through the hard winter months, when the Texas ground froze too solid to allow the digging of graves.
In the middle of the packed earth floor, hidden under an enormous waterproof tarpaulin and camouflaged by several heavy oak logs, rested an immense rectangular shape.
The old man helped shift the logs with difficulty, coughing repeatedly at the century-old dust rising from the ground.
When Nero took hold of the corner of the tarpaulin and hauled it back with one sharp movement, Elena smothered a cry of horror and brought a hand to her mouth.
It was a coffin box, entirely black, built of high-density oak and fully reinforced at every edge with thick brackets of cast iron.
It bore no resemblance whatsoever to a coffin meant for the burial of an ordinary human being; it was visibly wider, deeper, and infinitely heavier, made to survive intact for centuries beneath the earth.
The whole thing was sealed with a thick steel chain and a solid iron padlock.
“It is exactly as you left it when you went away, five years ago,” the pastor said, reaching into the pocket of his nightshirt and handing Nero an old iron key, heavy and covered in the marks of rust. “Nobody dared touch it. Not even Vance’s hired men and mercenaries had the courage to violate anything kept inside church property. ”
Nero took the key. The metal passed an instant chill into his fingers.
He knelt on the packed earth before the black coffin, fitted the key into the heart of the padlock, and turned it hard.
The dry crack of iron giving way broke the silence of the underground crypt with the violence of a gunshot.
He gripped the handle and lifted the heavy lid of American oak.
Inside, perfectly wrapped in thick layers of rough cloth soaked in mineral oil to keep the rust off, lay no skeleton and no decaying corpse.
What lay there was Nero’s true past. The dark, polished metal of a machine of destruction that did not seem to belong to that time or to that world.
A genuine experimental relic of war, a masterwork of heavy mechanical engineering, mounted with an enormous crank of polished bronze and a circular rank of ten long steel barrels arranged in a carousel.
A rotating repeating gun, capable of spitting two hundred lead balls a minute.
A mechanical reaper of human lives. Elena took two quick steps back, her eyes wide with pure astonishment as she finally understood the magnitude of the horror the bounty hunter carried in the saddle of his deepest memories.
“My God…” she murmured, her voice unsteady, shifting her horrified stare between the iron machine and the emptiness of Nero’s expression. “You truly mean to drag that monster to the gates of the Cross Ranch?”
Nero rose slowly from his knees, putting the iron key away in the inside pocket of his travelling coat.
He pushed the heavy lid down, shutting it with a muffled crash of wood and iron, took the structure by the sturdy metal handle at the front, and dragged the black coffin across the dirt floor with a frightening ease, as though the burden were no more than an empty crate.
He glanced sidelong toward the reverend, who was watching it all with his palms joined at the height of his chest, mumbling a silent prayer for mercy.
“Start preparing the ground and digging the graves, Reverend,” Nero said, his voice echoing darkly off the limestone walls of the crypt. “Tomorrow, at the first lines of the sun, you’re going to have a great deal of work down here.”
The old pastor swallowed hard, looking at the outline of the machine gun hidden in the wood, and let out one last piece of news before the hunter reached the corridor:
“Listen, Nero… wake Gideon at the machine shop at the end of the lane as soon as you go out. He’s finally finished the special order you left with him.
” Nero stopped for a second. He reached his free hand into the grey canvas sack at his waist, drew out a heavy fistful of a hundred dollars in gleaming Union gold, and held it out toward the clergyman’s trembling hands.
“The frame of your church is in a terrible state, Reverend, falling to pieces,” Nero pronounced, walking on and dragging the black coffin behind him. “Do something about those crooked boards. The Father’s house ought to look decent for the ones who are coming.”
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