Free Skin Medicine by Tim Curran Page A

band strung together with bloody bandages and pride that was quickly eroding.
    Within an hour, the shelling began.
    The walls collapsed, the roof caved-in. The wounded and weak were buried alive in the rubble. Johnny Miller, Cabe’s best friend in the world, was decapitated by shrapnel. The survivors tried in haste to dig the others out—their screams and pathetic whimpers echoing through the frosty air—but it was hopeless. As the Yankees pressed in, shrieking and blood-hungry, Cabe slipped off into the woods with three others—Sammy Morrow, Pete Oland, and little Willy Gibson. They trudged through swamps and crawled through bramble thickets until they were caked with cold mud, their faces scratched to the bone and uniforms cut to ribbons.
    Little Willy was out of his mind, alternately giggling and sobbing and Sammy Morrow kept yelling at him, calling him a mama’s boy and telling him it was time to get weaned off that fucking tit already. But Little Willy ignored him, carrying on conversations with men long dead.
    “ He’s crazy, Tyler,” Sammy told Cabe. “We can’t make a run with this bastard at our heels. He’ll give us away.”
    “ We can’t leave him.”
    “ Why the hell not?” Sammy wanted to know.
    But Cabe figured if he didn’t know the answer to that one, what was the point of explaining it to him?
    Just around sunset, fatigued and shivering, having had no food in well over twenty-four hours, they were ready to lay down and die. Pete Oland, reconnoitering ahead, discovered a tangle of dead Yankees in a little clearing flanked by a dark, denuded thicket. Cabe counted ten men. Ten men in blue rags that had been obscenely mutilated. They had been scalped and dismembered. Faces had been gouged from the skulls beneath. Their bellies had been opened, internals yanked out and strewn in every which direction like bailing wire.
    “ Goddamn,” Pete said. “Ye ever seen anything like it?”
    “ Injuns,” Sammy told them. “All them Injuns under Pike.”
    And maybe he was right, Cabe had thought. The Cherokee and Creek, Chocktaw and Chickasaw. Wouldn’t have been the first time that Indian troops had gotten a little excited in the carnage and reverted to their old ways.
    “ I don’t like them Yankee bastards,” Sammy said and kept saying. “But this…Christ in Heaven, there ain’t no reason for this! Ye hear me? Ain’t no reason! Goddamn injuns! Civilized tribes, my ass!”
    Cabe told them to get control of themselves. The men were dead and they had died horribly and savagely, but they were dead. There was nothing to be done for them. He had his boys dig through the corpses and viscera, stripping off greatcoats, blankets, knapsacks, and cap boxes. Any food they could find and especially weapons. Whoever had slaughtered these men had left their Enfield rifles. Cabe figured that well-supplied and well-armed, his group could make it back to the retreating Confederate lines.
    It was a plan…only it didn’t happen.
    As they looted through the dead, disgusted to a man, a platoon of Yankee cavalry came bounding out of the thickets, ringing in the Confederate soldiers like a noose. There was no escape. No quarter. No nothing. Cabe had been through a lot up to that point…but robbing the enemy dead and then being caught at it like a bunch of ghouls…well, that was pretty much the end of the sad, old road.
    The bluebellies dismounted.
    Although a lot of them looked a little worse for wear with their dirty, ripped uniforms and gaunt faces drawn hard by war and atrocity, they were looking pretty good compared to Cabe and his men.
    The Yankee soldiers got real excited when they saw the condition of their fallen comrades. They had to be physically restrained by their sergeants. As it was, they were like a bunch of slavering mad dogs surrounding the Southerners.
    Then an officer walked through their ranks.
    A tall, wiry lieutenant in a flapping blue frock coat and a Hardy hat, campaign sword at his side