Free Skin Medicine by Tim Curran Page B

catching the dying sunlight. His face was set hard as marble, those blue eyes just as electric as ball lightening. He walked around the litter pile of the dead Yankees. Flipped one over with his shiny black boot. He showed no emotion, but his eyebrows kept arching, the corners of his lips pulled into a skullish frown.
    Cabe knew he had to defuse an ugly situation. “Corporal Tyler Cabe, Second Arkansas Mounted Rifles, sir.”
    The lieutenant announced he was Jackson Dirker of the 59 th Illinois.
    Something about his bearing and steely silence made Cabe’s blood run cold. Here was a man who obviously garnered instant respect from his troops and was no doubt a good soldier…but here also was a man who, despite his reserve and indifferent manner, seemed to have an almost violent, savage aura about him that bubbled just beneath those crystal blue eyes like acid waiting to devour flesh and bone.
    “ Sir…we, we came upon these bodies in this condition. Our unit was chopped up at Pea Ridge, we’ve been on the dodge since yesterday. My men haven’t had a decent meal in days,” Cabe explained, his voice shrill and cracking, because, God, he knew how bad it looked. “We were only going to gather some weapons and food off these…these dead…just enough to survive with.”
    The Union soldiers were all shaking and filled with a blank, mindless rage. Little Willy started babbling nonsense that no one could understand and a burly sergeant told him in an Irish brogue to shut his peckerwood Johnny Reb mouth and shut it right fucking now. But Little Willy was crazy and lost in some dream world and he kept right on, choosing the worst possible moment to begin bragging about how many Yankees the 2 nd had killed. The sergeant made a pained, choking sound and pulled an Army Colt and shot him in the head. Little Willy’s skull came apart like a shattered glass vase and his brains vomited into the grass and he fell straight over like a dead tree.
    Cabe and the others started shouting and yelling and the Yankees quickly overpowered them. Cabe was knocked to the ground with a rifle butt to the temple and Sammy and Pete were roped to ash trees, then stripped to the waist.
    Dirker came walking back from his mount with a bullwhip, something about him just as dark and venomous as rattlesnakes coiled in a ditch. “Graverobbers, ghouls,” he said in a weird, whispering voice. “Killing a man is one thing…but to mutilate him, to do…something…like…this…”
    The whip began to snap in the air, its braided length curling and unfurling, waking and stretching…and then Dirker began venting himself. The whip lashed against the bare flesh of Pete and Sammy’s backs, laying them both open in bloody gashes. Dirker kept snapping that whip until both men quit screaming and went limp, their backs like bleeding meat. Cabe came to his senses about then and threw two Yankees out of the way, making for Dirker and then that whip licked him across the face with an explosion of biting agony that dropped him to his knees. It lashed out again and ripped into his cheeks, opened his nose in a ragged laceration. Then he was down and near senseless and that whip clawed at his face again and again and again.
    The next thing Cabe knew, he was in a field with maybe a hundred other Confederate soldiers. They were force-marched to the Mississippi River where they were loaded onto the rotting hulks of old steamboats. They were packed into the lower decks and the next week or so was spent down there in the filthy, cold blackness, eating and sleeping and living on stone coal that was two-feet deep. The boat took them up the Mississippi via St. Louis to Alton, Illinois where they were loaded into cattle cars for the trip to Chicago. By the time they reached port, there were dozens of staring corpses packed down there with them…men who had succumbed to the cold, starvation, disease.
    In Chicago, the Confederate soldiers were marched some two miles to Camp Douglas