It would be their last night on the mountain. Aguirre came two days ago to tell them to bring down the sheep. Two days of preparations for this thing which a lifetime could have never prepared him for. Ennis felt a sick taste in his mouth, like the taste he'd gotten that night when the sheriff came knocking to tell three kids that their parents were dead. It was happening all over again.
He took his time coming down for dinner. He watched the valley disappear in the sliding glow of the last sunset, trying to remember the colors and store them forever in his head, until it occurred to him that they looked like fire. He wondered if this is what those cities of the Bible, cities filled with Sodomites, had looked like as they burned with fire raining down from heaven.
He turned his back to the sky and watched the dark mass of mountain instead. This was his final trip to camp alone. Tomorrow morning they would ride back up together, and they would bring the sheep down from here together. This was his last. He had barely begun to comprehend the sun that had risen over this place when it was already setting. It's over.
Ennis looked ahead into the fold of years and saw that Jack could be no more to him than a memory and a mountain, a far-off place and a far-off time. Nothing else was possible. His hands shook, and he jammed them into his pockets, already remembering the color of fire descending before the Angel of Death from heaven. He'd inadvertently memorized it before he'd understood what it was, but he knew he would always hold the recollection of that righteous light. Ennis was running out of time. Tonight, all they were, all they had, was to be folded up and laid waste. The thing they'd built for themselves would be torn to ruins upon this mountain. Tonight, their empire was going to fall.
Ennis ran a clammy hand around his throat, feeling pressure there, though of what he could not say. His blood ran cold, because he knew how this would play out.
He rode to camp in his usual quiet stillness, more tense tonight, under the blood-red sky. He let Jack take him in the heat of the moment, though he could feel the brimstone on his skin in the heat of the large fire Jack'd built up to last them the night. With every crash of their bodies against the packed dirt, Ennis felt walls crashing down. The city was burning. Dying, they were dying. They'd run out of time.
Waking, Ennis was torn, wanting to stay in this haven that had been his home, and run from its death-plagued streets all the same. It cut his heart to shreds. Either way, though, the choice was not his. He'd had his glory, and the rest was all a matter of another day's work.
He turned his back to the sky and watched the dark mass of mountain instead. It's over. Ennis hoped the sunrise would be cleansing. He made a deal with the dawn, that maybe he could forget the memory of Sodom if the clear blue water of sky would quench the flames.
Instead, the sun rose behind a dense, gray cloud, like the smoke of a furnace, sizzling with judgment and retribution: the fallout of last night's fire. Ennis's blood turned to ice. No, what was theirs truly was no more and could never be. The signs had been sent, the signals cast. He knew Jack would die at his side if he'd let it be so, but their empire had already fallen. The only thing left to see here was smoke and ashes, and Ennis could not let Jack become a pillar of salt upon the blackened rock.