Status Updates From The Night Silver River Run ...

“You’d . . . ”
“Be our secret,” he said. “No one else need ever know, not even your boy. People can be real sympathetic. Such a loss, such an ordeal. They’d hardly have cause for suspicion or fault-findin’, would they? But I have to hear it from you.”
“Yes,” she whispered. She blinked, as if at her own audacity. Then, she met his eyes, and repeated it stronger. “Yes. Please.”

Outside, the noisy hoo-raw continued; he recognized Nate’s voice in what sounded like negotiations and figured someone in town had kept their guns and their wits about them enough to force a stand-off. He also smelled smoke, probably Unholy Joe having torched another church after making his customary gory offering to the Devil.

His face . . . his eyes . . . where his eyes should have been . . . gnarled knots of scar tissue twisting from temple to temple . . . the bridge of his nose a craggy ruin . . .
She brought up the gun to fire, but the man with no eyes fired first.

Torches flared. Shadows cavorted. Someone bashed open the post office’s door, hollering, “Special delivery!” and three men crowded in, jeering and waving pistols, like they anticipated meeting no resistance. Well, surprise on them, wasn’t it? Shane shot the first one between the eyes and blew a fair brain- and blood-laden portion of the back of his skull all over the faces of his comrades.

That were some poetic, and he wished he could write it down. He’d forget by morning. Only, there wouldn’t be no more mornings for him, or for anyone else in this town. When the sun rose, it’d rise to slit throats and stabbed hearts, to necks snapped and strangled, to lopped-off heads. To blood. So much blood.

Death come in the night. Like a plague, but not the smallpox or cholera kind. More the kind like what the preacher talked about, like in Egypt, dark angels moving door to door in silent slaughter.
Hadn’t he seen it with his very own eyes?

Leonard took the next door, which let onto a room flooded with moonlight. A portly man of middle years occupied the bed, smiling and smacking his lips in his sleep as if dreaming of oysters in cream sauce. One slit throat later, and planning the next day’s menu was no longer his concern.

Otto kept their official tally, but Leonard wasn’t of a bad mind for figuring himself and made it fourteen dead already. Fourteen dead, not a shot fired, the rest of the valley none the wiser. Knife-work, mostly, though Billy-Jack specialized in neck-snapping. He was a small sort, but wiry and surprising strong for his size.

A stout stone-and-log house stood partway up the western slopes of the wooded mountain foothills. It boasted a corn field, a garden plot, a hen coop, a barn big enough for a couple goats and a pony . . . and a view of the valley spreading out, the river a ribbon through it, the town clustered so peaceful-like with no way of knowing the violence about to ensue . . .