Guided by the flickering dance of his lamp's spectral, blue flame, Thaddeus Turner led his surviving family through the unnatural and deep darkness that shrouded them from Harlington's hired guns and their risen dead. Strong brother Glen supported the Turner patriarch upon his wide shoulders. Glen was as awkward as any of his brothers, and his steps pounded unsteadily upon the dust. Glen supported his father with his strong, right arm, while he stretched his left behind him into the dark so that his brother Grant could clasp his free hand and follow the path provided by father's lantern through the thick darkness. Robert in turn grasped the hand Grant extended behind him. Maggie held on to Robert's, so that none of the surviving Turners would be lost to the dark as long as they maintained their family chain.
The hands of Thaddeus's children trembled at the explosions of guns and cries of frightened, and dying, men. Maggie cried out many times at the sound of shuffled steps trailing on her heels. Thaddeus lifted his lantern's blue flame a little higher each time his daughter shouted from the rear of that family chain. Bone-shakers were not immune to the fear those they summoned from the earth were capable of bringing. When he feared most, Thaddeus placed his faith in that his talisman lantern would shroud them from the dead's hungry eyes. Though they trembled and shook, though so much fear hovered in the dark that strangled their minds, the living Turners maintained their hold on one another's hands and made their way through the perfect black.
Maggie had not believed the thick door that separated their home's great room and their father's sanctum would hold against the onslaught her risen brothers had raged against the barrier. They had huddled in that black sanctum as those powers their father summoned had breathed unnatural life into the corpses assembled in the great room. The dead had needed little time to smell the scent of that tainted coin that pulled them from the ground for revenge. They had smelled the taint of that gold lingering on Maggie's hands. They had thrown themselves against that thick, inner sanctum door. Their hands had beaten like hammers against the wood. Their teeth had scraped against the frame. The door had shuddered upon its hinges. Maggie had feared her risen brothers would tear her asunder after that barrier shattered, no matter how her father's lantern tried to shroud her from the dead's eyes.
The foolishness of the Harlington posse had proven Maggie's salvation. The posse had neared the Turner cabin behind the encroaching fires, shouting curses and blasting bullets against the cabin's walls. The scent of Harlington gold had drifted into the cabin with those shouts and shots. To the risen dead, that scent had been pungent. The risen brothers had redirected their rage. Their pounding against the door had ceased. Shrouded by pure darkness, Maggie had held her breath as she listened to the dead's shambling footfalls depart the cabin to find those tainted with the smell of the Harlington gold, tainted with the smell the dead's rage craved.
Maggie clasped tightly onto brother Robert's hand and followed its pull deeper into the darkness that surrounded her as they moved further away from that cabin that had been built by seven strong Turner brothers. Those folds of black shadow did not obstruct noise as they did light. Maggie flinched at the sound of gunfire. She winced and stumbled each time a bullet tore through the air near her. Maggie's heart raced as the sound of an unrecognized tongue drifted to her ear and swooned her mind. Maggie shuddered and maintained her grip upon the hand of the brother she could not see in front of her, putting her faith in the small, spectral flame of her father's lantern because she had nothing else in which to invest her hope.
Maggie sobbed for the gurgled cries of anguish that invaded the enveloping dark. She twice tripped upon the bodies of men dying upon the dust at her feet. Still, she did not lose her grasp on that hand in front of her, though the bodies at her feet groaned as she stepped past.
Those minutes during which Maggie stumbled through the dark felt like hours, with the sounds of dying men surrounding her, with the sounds of that strange tongue her reanimated brothers mumbled in the dark. Maggie thought they walked miles before the dark dissipated. The quarter moon's light watered her eyes as if she squinted at a high sun. Her brothers stood ahead of her, their shoulders slumped as ever.
“You brothers have done well,” Thaddeus swayed on Glen's shoulders. His arms lowered his lantern, but he did not yet extinguish its light while the shadows lingering behind them continued to shroud the Turner cabin in black. “You have prepared everything as I have asked, but this is not the time to rest. We can never again rest after raising our brothers from the dead. Their rage will drown any sense of family that might remain to them. We cannot linger. Those risen brothers will soon enough smell the gold Maggie's hands have touched.”
The Turners owned no animals. It was a fact that first made Dry Acre suspicious of the kin, for no one could claim to be a rancher without livestock and working horses. Animals of most any kind, particularly horses and dogs, howled and growled at the Turners. No animal would suffer being bridled or domesticated by any of them. Thus the Turners owned no saddles, wagons or carriages. Animals sensed the unnatural that lingered upon Thaddeus's family, and the beasts would only bite and claw at whatever Turner hands attempted to soothe them.
Thus, the Turners could not rely on more traditional means of transport. Ever an inconvenience, the handicap was now life-threatening. Thaddeus's contorted limbs could not walk. His skin could not withstand the day's sun without quickly burning and blistering. Nor did Maggie share in her brothers' stamina, and she realized how the discomforts she felt would only be magnified upon her father, who would not be able to travel very far at all without the comfort of shadows enveloping him. Maggie suspected her father would not be able to maintain such shadows for very long following the expulsion of magic his power worked to raise the dead. The reanimated would be on their heels, wrathful with hate, hungry for revenge against any hand tainted by Harlington coin.
Glen knelt to a knee upon the dust. Thaddeus squirmed off of his son's shoulder and lowered himself upon the ground. There, he regarded the means of the transportation his family would need to rely upon during their flight.
“I'm afraid my coach will be more of a burden than before,” Thaddeus sighed. “You boys have done well to prepare the old family litter.”
The litter that rested in the dust did not encourage Maggie's hopes of escape. A square litter set in the center of two long and thick wooden poles. Maggie had not seen her father's curtained litter since the Turners had arrived outside of Dry Acre. She had hoped that her brothers had burned the litter once they had finished building the Turner cabin. There had been something shameful about a family whose father demanded his sons to serve as porters as they carried his curtained litter across the wild. Maggie watched her father drag himself along the dust with his long arms, and her heart sank at the thought of her remaining brothers struggling to support the litter's weight. The litter was meant to be supported by at least four brothers. Now, there were only three.
Thaddeus anticipated his daughter's concern. “I fear that my ride will be a crooked and jostling one now that there are only three sons to carry me.”
Maggie grimaced. “Do you expect me to carry an end to one of the poles?”
Thaddeus tilted his head and regarded his albino daughter. “I fear you will soon enough be forced into a litter of your own, girl. You have unleashed the power, and it cannot be placed back in the bottle before it reshapes you. No, Maggie, your shoulders are not crafted for carrying such weight. Your brothers were born with the strength. Leave them to their purpose.”
Maggie felt for her father as she watched him pull his weight into the curtained litter with broken grunts and wheezing breaths. How much would she sacrifice to those powers that defined a bone-shaker? She had always thought herself ugly. But how terribly would those powers she unleashed morph her bones? She no longer felt like the same sister who had cradled dead Samuel's head after Harlington's hired gunfighter planted a bullet through his forehead. Her hands
had accepted the coin Emma offered. She had traced the runes of her father's craft int the dust of Harlington's ranch. She had summoned that foul swarm that devoured both beast and man. She had exhumed the bodies of her dead siblings so that her father could unnaturally summon new life into them, and now those dead were fast upon her heels.
Maggie realized she had taken many steps down a bone-shaker's path as she watched her father struggle to lift himself into his curtained litter. She wondered how much her ugliness would grow as she watched her three remaining brothers lift their father's litter upon their shoulders and begin their trudge towards whatever new acres they might find to again call home. Their feet pounded dust into the air, and Maggie's eyes teared for the sting.