The sickness swept through the town and the surrounding ranches and carried off all the men in the space of a fortnight. There was nothing the women could do but wash the fever sweat from their faces and listen with eyes closed to their midnight death rattles. In hushed whispers among themselves, the women spoke of judgment and last days. The schoolteacher Anna Mansion put no truck in that talk; to her it was nothing but fear and superstition. Still - the men died, old and young, even the Matlick boy in his crib. The women were now alone with the wind and the cactus and their thoughts, and in time their lives went on.
By a vote, they made Anna sheriff. She didn’t ask for it but she wore the gunbelt and badge just the same. Whether it was the desert solitude or some remnant of whatever it was that killed the men, something fundamental had changed, that was clear. Once peaceful, now tempers ran high among the women and friction was like the hot sand that drifted along Main Street. Where there had been laughter, now there were raised voices that became screaming matches that became saloon catfights.
What in hell have we become? Anna wondered, but she did her job and kept the peace, or at least a semblance of it. The town needed law and order now more than ever. Then came the night she put Suzy Knight in jail, for slashing a barmaid’s face with a broken bottle. Suzy, barely eighteen and a young beauty that favored her mother Tabitha; yet it was her father’s eyes that Anna saw glaring angrily at her.
“Mama already hates your guts!” Suzy spat. ”She’ll have your tits for this!” As if Anna didn’t know that. Even before the sickness, a mutual loathing had kept Anna and Tabitha Knight well apart, a studious avoidance only fed the rumors that when Thomas Knight left the ranch to visit the saloon he sometimes visited Anna’s bed too.
“Let her come,” Anna said quietly.
The red sun was low in the sky but the yellow one was nearly at zenith the next day when word came that Tabitha was at the saloon. Anna stood and unbuckled her gun from where it rode her hips. This was not to be settled with iron. It went too deep for that. The heat was thick as a slurred curse as she walked the hundred yards from jail to saloon. Tabitha was waiting, watching for her, her back to the bar. They stood there in silence for a long moment, passable as sisters in boots and jeans and linen shirts damp with sweat. Both had cut their hair short since the sickness, Tabitha’s black as night and Anna’s golden.
“You have my daughter,” Tabitha said. “I’ve have her out, and I’ll have your badge, too. The town has gone mad completely, making a whore the sheriff.”
Anna shook her head. “Your girl stays until we have a trial.”
Tabitha’s laugh was short and bitter. “A trial! Aren’t we formal! The men held trials, sure, in the time before. Did it make a difference? We settle this ourselves, Anna, in blood, not in a courtroom.”
Anna’s face was stone. “I know you hate me. But at least you got to hold Tom’s hand as he died,” she said.
Tabitha’s dark eyes glittered. “Keep his name out of your whore mouth,” she said, her voice low. Her hand dropped to the pistol that hung on her hip. “I was his wife.”
Anna spread her hands to show she was unarmed.
“Not here,” she said. “Outside.”
***********************
The women of the town gathered like the swirling sand as Anna and Tabitha crossed the street to the livery stables and the small mesquite wood corral behind it. Tabitha dropped her gunbelt in the dust outside and slipped between the gnarled rails. Anna glanced up at the broiling sun now directly overhead and followed her as Tabitha strode to the center of the corral.
“I should have done this before, while he was alive to see it,” Tabitha said. “But this’ll do, here and now, with Them watching.” She gestured at the women at the railing. Anna didn’t answer. Inside she boiled, tumbling spinning screaming I was more wife to him than you were! But what could such a claim even mean now, with Tom dead, with all the dead? She and Tabitha shared hate and pain and despair, and they had each other to spend it on. Nothing else mattered.
Tabitha unbuttoned her sweat-damp shirt and peeled it off like a rattler sheds its skin. Her breasts were full and bare, her dark nipples long enough to cast small downturned shadows on her skin in the noon sun. Her belly was flat and hard. She showed no stretch marks. She’d birthed Suzy when she was only seventeen herself and barely four months after she and Tom had vowed forever. She was thirty-five now and the ranch had carved her body.
The crowd made no sound, as if this was now normal, to see one of them strip to the waist at mid-day with a mortal enemy. Anna closed her eyes briefly against the heat and a wave of madness. It had come to this. Hadn’t she known it would when she arrested Suzy? Hell, hadn’t she known it when word reached her that Tom was dead?
“With your tits out too, Anna,” Tabitha said crudely. “Woman to woman. Wife to whore.” Her fists were already clenched.
“I’m not a whore,” Anna said. She unbuttoned her shirt, her eyes on the bead of sweat that formed between Tabitha’s breasts and ran down her stomach. She thought of how Tom’s hard cock had felt against her own belly when she kissed him. She remembered every time she and Tom had made love. “He loved me,” she said, and Tabitha flinched as if whipped. Anna’s shirt fell to the dirt and her breasts were there on display in answer to her challenger. “Woman to woman,” Anna repeated, as if in a dream.
Tabitha stepped forward but Anna made no move in self-defense. She owed his wife first blood, she thought. After all, fornication is a sin, even if not listed in the Book as adultery is, and as loneliness should be. Tabitha’s fist bit into her ribs, like a dull axe to a stubborn tree.
“Beat her ass, Tabby!” came the first hoarse shout as Tabitha drove Anna backwards with body blows that took away her breath. She twisted in the barrage, now bringing her arms in to guard her breasts. Tabitha laced a fist across her mouth that turned her, blood bursting from her torn lip. As she spun, Tabitha hit her in the back, uncaring if she faced her, eyes wide but blind. Anna fell forward against the corral, her breasts across the rough wood of the top rail.
Tabitha hit her in the back again, and then again. The blows were heavy as the blacksmith’s hammer, the dark woman’s arms hard with muscle. Anna’s head snapped back each time, her teeth clenched. Pain rippled through her body. I deserve it. Tabitha hit her in the side again, like a spear. Anna screamed, bitter blood in her mouth. Tabitha threw her spinning into the center of their crude arena so that she landed on her back, arms outstretched.
The watching women made their wagers. Why not? What other joy did their lives hold? It was Friday noon, and several of them were already drunk. Anna rolled to her hands and knees and Tabitha savagely kicked her in her chest. She crashed to her back again with a choked sob of pain, cradling her breasts.
“Get up,” Tabitha said, cold as ice in the desert heat. “Get up, you fucking bitch.”
Anna slowly rose, dirt stuck to her torso, imbedded in her sweat. Penance paid, she thought. Tabitha waited until she raised her fists. Then the two women bludgeoned each other, boots scuffing the ground as they swung and hit and swung again. Knuckles cut the features of their faces, crude sculptures gashing their eyes and mouths. Fists marked their torsos with livid, blooming blotches, red flowers of pain. It was a savage, cruel, seemingly endless interval of mutual brutality that crescendoed and only ended as they clinched, sobbing.
In the intimacy of their clinch, Anna drove her fist low into Tabitha’s belly, just above the low waist of her jeans, where her womb lay. At least you have his child. Tabitha moaned with a deep cramp of pain but tightened her forearms across Anna’s shoulders and smashed her skull into the blonde woman’s brow. Blood from the gash she tore spattered on both women’s breasts, scarlet drops of sweat. Anna wobbled but sunk her fist into Tabitha’s belly again, deeper this time, trying to tear something loose, to burst her ovary. The dark woman sagged against her with an inhuman sound, breasts pressed to breasts.
Anna’s arms instinctively locked around Tabitha’s torso. She squeezed her rival to her, felt her spine pop and her ribs creak. At thirty-three and childless, Anna’s unspoiled breasts had not a hint of sag and Tom had often lingered on their beauty, circling her areola with one finger or with his tongue as she squirmed with pleasure. Now they were her weapons, and Tabitha mewled at the pain of Anna’s rigid nipples driven like nails into hers. Anna was no soft schoolmarm. Her years of labor that culminated in digging graves had forged her arms into lean muscle as strong as any ranch wife, and Tabitha suffered cruelly for it.
“Crush her tits, Anna!” This was a different voice, as any group of size will separate itself into tribes, and tragedy divides rather than unifies. “Break her fucking back!” She thought she might; Tabitha’s mouth was open in silent, gasping pain as she tried and failed to break Anna’s grip. Her breasts were flat, her nipples bent and folded into her. But Anna’s bleeding brow was right there and Tabitha had both teeth and claws free to open the gash she’d made before to a palm’s width. Blood flooded Anna’s eye, a curtain of copper red. She spun away, dropping Tabitha from the vise of her arms, her hands flying to her ravaged face.
For a long moment, there was silence but for harsh sobbing breath. The sun itself had paused to watch, as carnage is Nature’s way of entertaining itself. Then Tabitha’s fist crunched into Anna’s cheekbone, bone on bone, the impact gruesomely loud, mingled with a cry of exertion and a bleat of pain. Anna fell, her length measured in the dirt, her body twisted at the waist.
Tabitha gripped Anna’s hair and dragged her. She lifted her against the fence and hung her there, a scarecrow to the ever-circling vultures.
“You. Fucked. My. Tom.” Each word was spat more than spoken, each guttural syllable punctuated with a fist to Anna’s breasts and belly. Tabitha’s fury was as wild as the desert wolves now, sweat jumping in fine beads from Anna’s flesh when the blows landed. Anna cried out each time, an inarticulate choking spray of blood and saliva.
Again, Tabitha snarled her quatrain indictment, again Anna’s torso took the full force of despair and rage. Her left breast was purpled and swelling hot and tight, its inner workings burst by Tabitha’s fist, her distended nipple dripping
A third time, Tabitha shrieked her judgment song of hate and destruction. Anna’s head hung forward, her hair just long enough to veil her eyes, as the dark woman’s fists plunged into her body. One of the watchful women looked away, her gaze falling on the cemetery beyond, so recently enriched. One empty grave, dug but unfilled by some miscount, stared back unblinkingly, denying nothing.
“Kill her,” murmured a voice but no watcher could say from whence it came, or if it was a command, or a wish, or an uncaring observation of sacrifice made without purpose. Tabitha stood there, exhausted arms hanging, her own chest heaving.
Anna lifted her face. It bore the weight of their world. “It won’t bring him back,” she slurred through torn lips. Tabitha fell to her knees, sobbing, her hand pressed against her stomach. Anna braced against the fence and kicked her, in her face, the steel-toed boot crumpling the cartilage of her nose like tinfoil.
Now it was Tabitha who was dragged by her hair in a shambling stumble on her knees. Anna pushed her head over the lowest of the three fence railings, fitting the wood under her chin against her throat, then stomped the back of her neck. Tabitha gagged, unable to scream, unable to voice her pain. Anna kicked her in her breasts, and all she could manage was the thin whine of a trapped wolf. Anna stomped her again, this time in the small of her back, driving her pelvis down into the hardpacked earth.
“Tides turn.” Another voice from their watchful chorus, and Anna wanted to laugh at the madness, as there was no ocean within a thousand leagues. She pulled Tabitha from the fence and lifted her around her waist and drove her down against the top rail. The ancient mesquite splintered and broke rather than Tabitha’s spine, but the spasm that convulsed the ranch woman was almost as cruel. She hung there for a heartbeat, then slipped to a heap in the dirt.
Anna closed her eyes and swayed. She might’ve prayed, but the plague had proven to her there were no gods listening, not to them at least. A shadow fell from a heavy thundercloud that blocked the sun’s light but none of its merciless heat.
Tabitha stirred. It wasn’t over.
She stood, with difficulty. Anna let her, staring dully, listening to her own heart throbbing in her temples and neck and wrists.
They faced each other, minds dead to everything but pain and instinct. Without grace, they simply flung themselves forward, a collision of near-broken bodies, a mutual driving of each other down into the dirt. They grappled, hands at faces and throats, sweat and blood mixed as their bodies intertwined. Tabitha forced her right breast into Anna’s ruined left, and was gratified by the sob of pain the blonde woman gave back.
They rolled like this, locked together, first one on top and then the other. Nails raked raw slashes into their backs. Jeans were forced even lower on their hips. Teeth tore at their shoulders. The first lightning bolt struck the church as Tabitha bit into Anna’s neck, exploding the steeple into fragments of clapboard. The pealing thunder made it so only she could hear Anna’s frenzied scream.
The rain came as Anna threw Tabitha off. Not a single Watcher so much as looked away as the heavens opened, the first drops as hot and fat as blisters, then the deluge. The two were washed clean of dirt and blood and sweat, if not sin. Their hair was plastered to their scalp and faces. Their jeans were sodden, their boots heavy. Their torsos gleamed in the glare of each fresh bolt of lightning. The corral itself ran with rivulets of rain as it turned from hardpan to a morass of gritty mud.
On their knees, Tabitha lashed a backhanded right fist across Anna’s face, followed with a savage left to her ear as she twisted with the impact. Anna collapsed to all fours, her head ringing, and Tabitha landed on her back like a cougar dropping from a tree. Her weight drove Anna down into the thickening mud and the dark woman gripped her hair to force her face into it. Anna’s eyes and nose and mouth filled with choking sludge as Tabitha leaned over her, pushing down with all her lithe strength. Anna writhed futilely.
“Drown h - ” The cry was swallowed by another thunderclap, but Tabitha had other plans. She squatted in the small of Anna’s back and dragged back her head. The blonde woman gagged and coughed, mud streaming from her face as Tabitha pulled first her left arm and then her right arm back and locked over her thighs.
“Now, you bitch - take it!” snarled Tabitha, and reared back. Anna’s spine bowed cruelly. Her face turned up into the downpour, mud running from the corners of her mouth. Her battered breasts jutted up and out, rain drumming her raw nipples. Her stomach muscles burned, stretched to the point of shredding apart. Tabitha laced her fingers across her chin and held her quivering there, her breathing slowed to shallow gasps.
“He didn’t love you,” Tabitha hissed into the rain. “To him, you were just a whore to fuck for free.”
It was a lie, but it was torture rather than truth that Tabitha wanted. She pulled back another inch. Blood was pouring from her own broken nose faster than the unrelenting thunderstorm could wash it away. She felt Anna jerk as the cartilage in her ribs cracked, and she rejoiced. She could see over the blonde’s shoulders, could see her pulled-tight breasts, one swollen and misshapen. She thought of her husband’s seed on them, the blonde whore cooing, licking his cock clean.
She screamed as the madness took her completely and she pulled back another inch, her boots buried in the mud. She felt Anna’s arms go limp across her thighs. The rain lessened, then stopped, as if the heavens too were listening for labored breath. Tabitha’s back and arms cramped horribly as she still held tight. A crucifixion of this sort means pain for the executioner as well as for the condemned. The final rain drops could have been tears from Anna’s open, empty eyes. When Tabitha’s arms were also useless, she let her rival fall face down in the mud.
“Might makes right,” a Watcher whispered. Heads nodded at the soundness of this theology. When Tabitha could speak again, she gave the orders; only two, simple and eagerly carried out. Some of the women went to the jail; Suzy smirked as she walked free, and straight for the saloon. When the barmaid returned, head down in thought, she looked up only at the sound of Anna’s gun being cocked in Suzy’s hand.
The second order - Anna’s body was hung on the corral fence, and left there. Whether as a warning, or as a macabre trophy, it hardly mattered. The yellow sun set, at last. The evening, and the morning were a new day.
