THE BROTHERS DOOM
A TALE OF WE THE IMMORTALS
by Luke Warfield
Scribe in Black Press
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THE RIDER EXPLODED through the thickets and into the yard, rushing past the flabbergasted Jaith who had lost all feeling in his arms and legs. All he could do was stand and watch as the rider spun his mount and whooped and drew the beast up into a terrifying rear—a hulking monster of red horseflesh with void-black eyes and a lacertine snout that spat tongues of fire with every exhalation.
The rider sat naked wholly, pale and glistening in the moonbeams. His hair sparkled as burnished gold, and the patrician face, the one Jaith remembered from all those years ago, glowered at him with the grim severity of a disapproving saint. The rider spun his mount again, this time showing off a set of sheared stalks where wings had once flourished, his back and sides now slathered in a sluice of golden ichor. The rider then issued an even greater cry than the one previous, and he put the reigns in his mouth and brandished a pair of pistols one in each hand and spurred his mount forward—yelling and thumbing and firing.
Death’s come! Death!
Jaith Doom reacted on instinct, his hands moving all by themselves. Jaith leveled the rifle and fired right as a gale of bullets pelted his own body all over. The head of the rider’s mount burst in a particle cloud of blood and viscera, and the steed collapsed chest-long to the dirt, throwing the rider through the air and down with it in demise.
Pain lanced through Jaith Doom’s body. He coughed and wheezed as he felt about his person in search of the wounds.
“S—t!”
The first of them he found located above his left collar bone, a small hole that cut clean through the fur coat as if it were made of vellum. The second had bitten into the underarm of that same side, dripping like an old waterskin with faulty stitching. His left leg throbbed, for it, too, had been punctured at the thigh, and there was also a burning sensation in his groin. When searched, Jaith confirmed yet another leak in the human hull. Jaith panicked, but before he could act on remedying the situation, movement bestirred across the yard. A dark body lurched upright with a gasp, the revenant’s face splattered with gore and grime.
It was Colt Doom—alive!
The elder Doom coughed and spat and glanced about as if he had forgotten where he was or why he was there. When he finally spotted Jaith nigh fifty meters across the plat, Colt Doom scrambled to his feet and rushed his younger sibling down, yelling the battle bellow of the First Cavalry dragoons. Jaith reached for his boot knife, but Colt was already on him by the time he drew it forth. Colt kicked Jaith’s hand and it snapped with a loud, branch-cracking noise, and the blade flung away.
In a half-breath, they were rolling about the parcel struggling to get at each other’s throats.
Jaith bit, clawed, and tore at his enemy’s naked hide, all pain gone now, a mere faint recollection as he entered that state of disembodiment the mystic Tremblers called ecstasy.
Jaith rolled on top of Colt and drew up his fists and smote his foe upon the brow. He did so again, and again and again, and again and again and again and again. It was pure blood lust now! A frenzy! Nothing could thwart him nor take him!
I will be free!
Jaith bore down on his enemy’s throat, linking his big, bloody fingers around Colt’s flabby tissue. He squeezed with all his strength until his adversary’s eyes bubbled in their sockets. Colt kicked, wiggled, and wrenched, but it was no use. Jaith was too big. Too strong. Too honed in.
Acute pain suddenly spiked through Jaith’s collar bone, and he screamed, releasing his foe immediately thereafter. In a strange turn, though Jaith knew not how, for it transpired that quickly, the enemy was sitting on his chest, fingers jammed deep into his wound, dug in like a hook through the gills of a fish. The pain made Jaith helpless as he yelled and writhed, striking out at the interloper, straining to throw him off like a wild ostrix.
No! no! no! no! no! no!
Something punched Jaith’s skull from the side. Blunt. Heavy. A popping noise. Fuzziness. He blinked. The enemy, a shadow figure now, a dark watcher, held something in its hand. The shadow man raised it high... then brought the thing down on Jaith’s head again—and again and again, and again and again and again and again.
In his mind, Jaith appealed once more to the gods, begging their intervention.
This time, the boon was answered, for in that moment, Jaith Doom felt no more.
COLT DOOM DROPPED the blood-slaked stone in his hand, and he stood and looked upon the mortis-bound figure that was once his own and only brother. In an act of startling fury, Colt beat his chest and let forth a war cry so piercing and awful that some claimed to have heard its peal as far away as Bishop’s Point, where credulous yeomen ascribed that dreadful stridency to some nameless evil of Perdition’s siring. Colt flung himself upon his brother’s corpse and sobbed, all wrath exorcised now. The terrible deed was accomplished; there could be no undoing it. The angel’s prophecy had come to pass. It was he, Colt Doom, the last brother standing: a victory bequeathed without honor and tendered at a price beyond the most unbearable of reckonings.
The sobs... not just tears of grief, but release.
“Jaith!” Colt yelled, and he tore clumps of hair from his scalp with hard pulls. “Mother, fergive me...”
Colt Doom wept for a long time.
IT WAS TO be a gray and smoky morn, a portent of pending rain for those on the flat, and further snow for the lone grave that lay freshly cut and filled upon the mountain. Colt Doom stood looking down at it, enrobed in his brother’s bearskin coat, the fur smattered with the blood of the man who now occupied that small rise of turned earth. The raiment smelled of bananas, a by-product of Jaith’s pastime alchemizing blasting oil, no doubt, and the odor reminded Colt of his arrival in New Migdad some twelve years ago.
Back then, the great North-South Railroad had just broken ground in Clayton County, positioned to carry the mass migration of hopeful husbandmen, wily carpet-baggers, and genteel plantationists to the sunny province respectively: men and women, all of whom, would try their hand at the difficult trade of citrus farming, for which the State Assembly offered one hundred acres free of cash-money to those with the mettle and industry to assume the venture.
Initially, Colt, too, had answered the assembly’s call, confident his upbringing on the family farm would bolster his chances of a successful proving up. But the only thing Colt’s tenure as a citrus farmer proved to be was a failure, lasting just three, brief years without viable yield. Like his late sibling, Colt had toiled in his fair share of odd jobs thereafter: longshoreman, lighthouse keeper, cashier... In contrast to Jaith, however, Colt had managed to find a modicum of success in the end, unexpected as though it was.
Colt sighed and wiped his face. He felt an odd sense of relief there and then, and he quietly hated himself for it. Twelve years of existential fear, paranoia, and despair did strange things to a body. Twelve years was a long time.
Colt turned his focus back to the grave and drew out the photograph and held it up. Moments ago, Colt had finished the toil of interring his kinsman, setting rocks about the perimeter of the mound. Once finished, he punctuated the tomb with a small cairn piled at the headspace for a marker, utilizing the very slag piece used to complete his awful deed for a capstone. The object was still smeared afresh with the blood of the dead. Colt wanted it that way; it was his silent confession to the world. By positioning the stone there, he gave himself permission to forget, to never dwell on these matters again. Nary a blink, nary a breath, as Ma Doom used to say.
Colt leaned on Jaith’s Rawlins gun as a crutch, his bum leg wrapped in rags and throbbing like damnation. The mangled ear burned both hot and cold simultaneously. The effects of the potion were nearly gone, all the aches and pains of mortal flesh returning, reminding him that he was, in point of fact, just a man. There were also shrapnel wounds from the cabin blast in need of attention. He ought not linger, lest he join his brother in death.
Colt hobbled forward and slid the tintype under the bloodied stone and returned to his position at the foot of the plot. He looked away and checked the cloudage, then turned back to the grave. A cold wind swept by and snapped at his hurts. This world was changing indeed, little by little, each and every year, proving less fertile, less tolerable. The ‘grews had said the planet was dying, and Colt hated the ‘grews more than most. Jaith Doom was dead, and it was the hand of the angels that drove it all to fruition. It was their dark magic. The Brothers Doom were merely pawns in an act of desperate revenge; that was the capital T truth, and it boiled Colt’s blood.
“I’ll kill ‘em all!” Colt heard himself. “I promise ye, brother, I’ll git every, last ‘grew sum—h I git my hands on! I’ll join them wizards back home. I’ll cut their wings ‘n’ burn ‘em all fer what they did ter us! I swear on that! On my life I—”
The sound of foot patter tickled Colt’s ears, cutting through his oath. Something like claws on broken trail. Someone was riding up the path; he felt it.
Colt leveled the hunting rifle and turned to meet them.
©Luke Warfield. All rights reserved.