Free Shadow on the Sun by Richard Matheson Page A

muttered Corcoran.
    Finley blinked. Then, as Corcoran stepped back, he moved out onto the walk, eyes stark with pain. This was the moment he had dreaded most since yesterday. Abruptly, a fragment of his dream flared briefly in consciousness: him coming out of some building, seeing the two bleeding bodies. He shuddered and stepped down off the walk into the mud. Corcoran followed him.
    Finley stood beside the second horse, his hand closed around a cold, white ankle. He felt sick with premonition. These two, still bodies could plunge everyone in Picture City into a bloody nightmare again.
    â€œNow tell me it wasn’t Injuns,” Corcoran said between his teeth. “
Tell
me, Finley.”
    Finley drew in a fast breath of the cold, morning air. “Al—” he started.
    With a sob of fury, Corcoran tore the blanket away.
    â€œ
Tell me it wasn’t Injuns!
” he cried.
    Across the street a woman moaned softly and had to be supported. On the walk, Boutelle gagged and caught onto one of the columns that supported the balcony overhead.
    â€œ
Oh, my God,
” Finley murmured.
    One of them was naked, his blood-drained body raked with deep, blue-edged gullies, half his chest torn away. The other, the one who had been Jim Corcoran, had no face—only a blood-oozing mask of shredded meat. Here an eye was missing, there an ear. Gouges deep enough to lay the hand in sideways had been slashed across backs and bellies. Nerve and artery ends hung like black ribbons. In one thigh, bone showed. From the half-missing chest, rib ends stuck out jaggedly, their ivory darkened by blood.
    Finley could not speak or draw his eyes from the butchered remains. He felt his heart thumping slowly and heavily in his chest. Horror swept over him in waves that seemed to blot away the sane world which he had managed to cling to until this moment.
    He hardly felt the hand on his arm as Corcoran turned him. He stared blankly at the trembling, wild-eyed man.
    â€œYou get them soldiers,” Corcoran muttered hoarsely. “You get them right away. You hear me?”
    Sucking in breath, Finley disengaged Corcoran’s shaking fingers and picked up the blanket lying on the mud. Carefully, he laid it back across the two bodies and closed his eyes for a moment, trying to force back into himself the strength he needed.
    Then he turned back and took Corcoran’s arm.
    â€œCome inside,” he said.
    Corcoran jerked his arm away. “I’m takin’ them to Packer’s,” he said.
    â€œAl, we—”
    The heavyset man turned away, moving almost drunkenly. He stopped in mid-step and looked back over his shoulder.
    â€œI’m comin’ back here in a couple o’ minutes,” he said. “If you ain’t ready t’go for the soldiers by then, I’ll go after them murderin’ bastards myself.”
    â€œI’ll be here, Al.”
    Corcoran untwisted the reins of his horse and started walking it away. Behind, the second horse lurched forward, the two bodies twitching at the abrupt movement. Finley stared at the arms and legs as they began to hitch and sway. He wanted to call after Corcoran, but his voice would not function. He knew he should go with the nerve-shattered man, but he needed a little time to get hold of himself. He stood, wordless, watching Corcoran move away toward Packer’s Funeral Parlor.
    It wasn’t Braided Feather.
That was the only thought his mind could manage. Yet what good would it do to say that to Corcoran now? What dissuasion could it possibly be to a man who had found his two brothers in that hideous state and, with his own hands, put them on horseback? By any judgment of sanity, he should ride immediately to Fort Apache and get the soldiers, send them after Braided Feather’s tribe.
    Finley shuddered. That was the crux of it, he realized. This
wasn’t
sanity. It was all a maniac’s dream. No Indian had done that to the Corcoran brothers. Only