The Guns of Santa Sangre (10 page)

“No, not them.” Tucker dug his spurs into his stallion’s flanks. “Let’s go!”
 

The ridge lay ahead in the daylight. The men charged for the hill. They almost made it when six Federales galloped their horses around the edge of the canyon to suddenly surround them on all sides, hooves sending up clouds of flying dirt and pebbles. The grizzled, tough men wore dusty tan uniforms and were armed to the teeth. Their button coats were crisscrossed with rifle straps. Each had a tan cap on their heads. The knee-high black boots, brass buckles and spurs glinted in the sun. The soldiers already had pistols drawn, and a few had rifles to their shoulders.
 

“
Halto
!” their Captain yelled. He was a swarthy, gaunt man with military bearing and a sunken, oily aspect to his countenance.
 

The gunfighters quickly circled their horses, hands by their guns, braced for action.
 

Tucker looked up and nudged his chin at his friends and they followed his gaze. Thirty feet above them, on the cliff of the ravine, more Federales rose into position, rifles aimed down their noses at the gunfighters’ heads.
 

“Easy,” he said to Fix and Bodie. They were way outnumbered and outgunned.

“Mornin’.” Tucker clenched his jaw and regarded the beady-eyed commandante.
 

Pilar spoke up first, words in Spanish tumbling out of her pretty mouth as she plaintively implored the impassive Federales, gesturing her hands emotively. Tucker only knew a little of the local language, but thought he caught something about bandits and a town and protection, and he figured she was explaining they were with her to help save her people. But then she rode up too close to the Captain and he struck her silent with a brutal swipe of the back of his gloved hand. She just cringed in her saddle, watching him and the other soldiers with fear and despair.
 

The three gunslingers reacted in a rage that surprised them, a bond already formed with the girl they had just met that morning, and in unison their hands moved an inch dangerously closer to their holstered weapons.
 

There was a resounding chorus of ratcheting
clicks
of hammers being drawn back on the guns of the soldiers surrounding them, and the cowboys thought better of reckless action.
 

Tucker clenched his jaw. “You didn’t have to do that, asshole.”

“
Que
?” the martinet replied.

Fix squinted. “Something we can help you boys with?”

The Federale Captain barked, “What are your names?”

“Smith,” said Bodie.

“Jones,” said Fix.

“Abraham Lincoln,” replied Tucker.

The commandante squinted and pulled a folded wanted poster out of his jacket, looking it over. Pilar watched the soldiers and the gunslingers in alarm, her eyes tensely dodging back and forth. The cowboys exchanged slow, laconic, loaded glances. Fix’s jaw slowly worked his chewing tobacco. The Federale officer passed the wanted poster to his Sergeant, who displayed it.

Recognizable likenesses of Tucker, Bodie and Fix’s faces were on the paper.
 

Pilar glanced back at her fierce hirelings to see what they were going to do and what they did visibly surprised her. Tucker started to chuckle, and he was joined by Fix and then Bodie, and now they were all three laughing and then the Captain’s fat lips split and he was laughing too, until his medals-laden chest shook, and now all the soldiers in the canyon were laughing like it was one big joke. But Pilar knew it was not funny and people were about to die very badly.

Fix spat a glob of tobacco juice on the poster.

The Federale Captain went for his gun.

Like one deadly killing machine, the gunfighters quickdrew their pistols from their side holsters, amazingly fast, blowing the Captain clean out of his saddle. Dismounted, the Federale seemed to Pilar to float in the air forever, arms and legs twirling, big flowers of blood and jetting gore erupting from the holes in his chest. Even bigger discharges of red meat out his back splattered the faces of the soldiers behind him, even as their heads disappeared in a disintegration of hair and skull. The ventilated commandante finally hit the ground and lay still in a great cloud of settling dust.
 

By then the air was alive with flying bullets that boomed and buzzed and whined around the canyon like furious bees. Lightning and thunder burst from the muzzles of the gunfighters’ irons as they fanned and fired, again and again, in every direction.

Pilar cowered in abject terror as her horse reared and pawed the air, turning on its hind legs as she grabbed onto the saddle for dear life to stop from sliding off, but the girl toppled from the panic-stricken animal’s rump onto the hard ground and smashed her shoulder. When she looked up, framed against the sun she saw the titanic behemoth of her horse on its back legs over her. Its powerful shod hooves came down on the ground directly at her head. Pilar rolled away as two slugs ricocheted off the ground in an ear-shattering din
that cut her scalp with chips of rock. The horse’s hooves crashed down by her head, and she lay flattened on the earth seeing only the exploding bullets and the rampaging legs of many horses. She saw a set of familiar hooves charging straight for her and curled in a ball covering her head, cursing herself for her weakness, knowing she was about to be trampled to death, failing her people.

It was going to hurt to die.

But that didn’t happen.

The horse thundered past her as a hand grabbed her arm and pulled with amazing strength. It heaved her like a feather up off the ground and over her rescuer’s saddle, as he shielded her with his shoulders and chest. Pilar knew his scent, the good smell of the one called Tucker.
 

The horse steered around, and the cowboy carefully placed her on the ground behind a large boulder at the edge of the raging gunfight. As her feet touched solid earth, she looked up at the gunfighter in his saddle and saw the flash of kindness in his wild, concerned eyes.
 

“Stay down!” he roared.
 

The girl nodded, breathless.
 

With that, his spurred horse charged around the boulder back into the fray, him holding onto the saddle with his knees as both hands held pistols and the guns belched fire, over and over.

Pilar covered her ears and peered around the edge of the rock, watching it all go down. A thrill of excitement such as she had never experienced filled her while she gazed on, transfixed. The shooting raged in a frenetic chaos of horses and men and flying slugs that she saw unfold with intense detail.

The jaw of one of the soldiers was shot off.

Another took a bullet in the eye.

Now some had abandoned their horses to seek cover behind the rocks. Up on the ridge, two soldiers leaped up from cover, silhouetted against the sun. They traded fire with Fix, then Tucker.

Tucker quickly crisscrossed his arms, aiming his left-handed gun over his right shoulder and his right-handed pistol over the left, firing upward twice, toppling two of the Federales off the cliffs above them. The men fell screaming, trailing ropes of blood until they hit the rocks with a wet
splat
. Tucker had whirled his horse around and was firing two-fisted and straight-armed at three other soldiers who blasted back with their rifles. His pistols empty, Tucker holstered them and in one smooth move withdrew a pump shotgun from his saddlebag. He raised it to his shoulder, one hand holding down the trigger while the hand on the pump jerked back and forth in a blasting motion that never ceased. Sparks and flashes ricocheted everywhere on the canyon walls. The Federales fell.

Pilar watched enthralled from the ground behind the boulder. She had not seen these gunslingers fight until now, and had never seen men such as these in action. They moved like one weapon, and it was a dance of lethal beauty. Now she knew what they could do.

In the midst of the battle, Fix got off his horse, gave the skittish animal a smack on its rump sending it on its way bolting out of the melee, and stood on his own two feet. He seemed more comfortable that way. The little gunfighter just held his ground, terrifyingly still, as bullets flew around him, calmly placing his aim and surgically picking off soldiers. Pilar observed that Fix made few moves, measuring every gesture, and that his very stillness and implacability under fire rattled his enemies. They hesitated a second too long to take proper aim, and by then the unblinking little man had them targeted and his slug was in flight. Bullets whined past him, but he didn’t flinch. He was scary, dressed incongruously in the soiled black gentlemen’s vest, suit and bowler hat.

Bodie’s horse was hit in the head by a stray round and went down, spilling the giant Swede out of his saddle. Both came to earth with a great crash. He pushed the heavy, dead stallion off him with one hand. Grabbing up his Winchester, he waded into the skirmish on foot with a great roar of fury and a very big grin.

Tucker had been hit.
 

She didn’t see when it had happened but now his face was screwed up in pain as he held a bleeding puddle of red on his arm, though it didn’t seem to stop him as he yanked off his handkerchief and with a quick tugging motion tourniqueted his arm tightly. The soldier who had shot him needed to reload and was bathed in desperate sweat fumbling fresh rounds into his pistol. Without missing a beat, the bearded gunslinger one-handed his pump shotgun with his unimpaired hand and blew the soldier clean away. Catapulted back a good twenty feet through the air against the side of a cliff, the Federale slid down the wall, sliming a snail trail of blood, already a corpse.

Whirling her head, Pilar saw Bodie swinging his rifle by the barrel like he was swatting at flies, clubbing the soldiers in the heads, emptying their skulls as they dropped like sacks.

Then suddenly, they were the last men standing. Half-visible in an eldritch ether of gunsmoke and dust, Tucker, Fix and Bodie stood tall and still on the body-strewn ground, the three men fearsomely silhouetted in the haze that hung in the air. Pilar watched them from behind the boulder, her heart pounding in her bosom. It was over.
 

These were terrifying men.
 

Who was it she had hired?
 

What had she unleashed?

True, the blue-eyed one had risked his life to shield her body with his own when the shooting had begun, had gotten her to safety and had not thought twice. Yet what of the others, she worried, maybe they were worse. Then she remembered what her father always said.

You can tell a man by the company he keeps.

She didn’t know here if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

One thing Pilar was sure of.

She had chosen well.
 

The gunslingers holstered their pistols and looked around. The ground was littered with uniformed corpses. They’d gotten them all, of that Tucker was certain. The wanted poster wafted in the wind, riddled with holes. His arm smarted, but a quick once over showed the bullet had gone clean through, so he tightened the scarf tourniquet and figured he’d tend to the wound when they got to the town in a few hours. They must be close now. Looking at Fix and Bodie he saw they were all right.
 

The taut little mustached gunfighter was wandering among the corpses, giving them the long eyeball. He stopped by one, fingered his lip hair, and then patted the dead body down for valuables, feeling around the pockets.

Bodie had already gotten busy gathering their horses from across the ravine where they had bolted. The giant was selecting a fresh bay from one of the dead Federale’s mounts since his own horse had been felled. He led the animals across the gully, soothingly patting their flanks with his great hands and making comforting sounds, and there he tied them off. Then Bodie walked to where his horse lay dead, bleeding from the head. Getting down on one knee, crestfallen, he untied the belts of his saddle with his sausage fingers and removed it. Shoulders slumped, he carried his saddle back toward their tethered horses and began to tack his new horse.
 

Looking the other way, Tucker saw Pilar rising from behind the rock, shaken but with a look of great relief on her face. He gestured to her it was safe to come out and she approached, looking down at all the dead men and crossing herself again and again. That was the first time he noticed the small silver crucifix on the delicate chain around her neck. The peasant eyed the hard gunmen with naked awe, respect and horror. She was probably wondering who the hell she got in bed with, he figured.

“Daylight’s wasting. Let’s ride,” grunted Tucker.

“Not yet,” Fix said.

The small, wiry, flinty-eyed cowboy hunkered in a crouch, rummaging efficiently through the cadavers’ clothes, stealing money off the dead Federales. He used his gunstock to knock out the gold teeth of one carcass and pocketed his grisly bounty. “They won’t be needin’ none of that
dinero
.” Fix made a brisk, tidy search of the other corpses’ clothes in a matter of minutes. The peasant was mortified. When the little man had stuffed his pockets full of coins, wallets, loose bills and bloody, glinting metal teeth, he wandered over to his horse and dumped the spoils of the kill into one of his saddlebags. “We’ll divvy up at the town.”