Disclaimer: I don't own Hell On Wheels nor do I make any money for writing this story.
Redemption
A bullet zinged past Cullen Bohannon's head as he hunkered down behind the tangled dead fall that clogged the old stream bed. Another shot nicked off a piece of timber that ricocheted off his left cheek, drawing a little blood.
"Give yourself up, Bohannon!"
The voice belonged to one of the men in the posse that had chased him into this box canyon.
"Damnit!" Cullen hissed as he repositioned for return fire. I can't see a damned thing, he thought as he dropped down to relative safety behind the logs.
He swiped a hand across his smarting cheek and saw that the wound was minimal. He knew he deserved more for his crime; that of killing an innocent man. With my bare hands, no less! He had tried to justify in his mind that the Yankee sergeant had deserved to die. That even fighting against the south somehow, any Yankee soldier still needed killed. Just another Yankee nobody, he thought wistfully.
Still, that one death brought him up short about his vengeance killings he had already committed for their part in his family's deaths. He could not shake from his mind that last desperate attempt by the young sergeant to prove his innocence. The man had been correct – the discharge paper clenched in his lifeless hand proved that he had not been anywhere near Mississippi when Cullen's family had been killed.
He I deserved to die for killing that sergeant, he Cullen thought as . Now, his hope of to escape diminished by the second. Besides, he was tired of running and weary of feeling this aching remorse in his heart for the other lives he had snuffed out for war crimes against his family.
The brutality of the Civil War had crumbled his sense of integrity and fairness and self-respect. Self-preservation at all costs replaced these traits and even the brutality that he gained as the war grinded on surprised even him at times. When engaged in the bloody business of killing an enemy, that man became nothing more than an object rather than a human being.
Then, after the infamous battle at Gettysburg that left more than half of the Confederate troops dead or wounded on the battlefield, a. A Yankee medic had told him as he lay on an operating table that he had been lucky to have only a slight wound in his side.
Lucky? Cullen wondered if that was even a word he could hang onto because then he was shipped off to Andersonville Prison. Despite recovering from his wound, he had wished time and time again that he had just died then and there on the Gettysburg battlefield rather than suffering at the hands of the Yankee prison staff.
"Bohannon!" Another man shouted from beyond the rocks below. "This is your last chance to give up!"
"Alright! I'm coming out!" Cullen didn't even bother to ask them not to shoot him for he felt at that moment that a bullet in the head would blessedly end his misery.
He clambered over the dead fall, pistol in his right hand above his head. Each second he expected to hear the gunshot that would end his sorry life.
Handcuffed and his feet shackled at his ankles made him feel even more vulnerable than he had felt in Andersonville Prison. He expected no fair treatment now as deputies shoved him into a jail wagon with three other prisoners. He realized that he looked like he chewed nails for lunch and his scruffy appearance served to keep the other prisoners from trying to chat with him. He relaxed against the solid iron bars of the jail wagon lost in his remorse.
If there was a God, which he used to believe there was, he felt beyond redemption. What god would give him a second chance? There was no sense in prayer since he felt that God had forsaken him and all the other fighting men from the South. The North had won the war. and were setting about putting the South back together with the rest of the United States. There was no use in even staying on in Mississippi when the President released him and the others from Andersonville.
The northern authorities had confiscated his land and he had nowhere to live. Nor did he relish the thought of fighting in civil court to retain his land; land that he had inherited from his father. There was nothing left for him after he buried his family.