The Guns of Santa Sangre (26 page)

Pilar’s brow furrowed. “But what if they see us in the back and attack. We will be slaughtered.”

Bodie nodded. “The girl’s got a point. It’s risky. Those people don’t have weapons. I say we give her a few guns and silver ammo so she can pass ’em out to her people that best can shoot, that way we squeeze those creatures in a shit sandwich.” Bodie looked at Pilar, and she nodded with a small smile.

“If we die, we die bad.”

Fix stood up with a grunt and straightened, hands on his hips, leaning back and popping his spine and stuffing his pearl-handled Colts into his side holsters with a squeak of leather. “Then there’s only one thing for us to do.”

Tucker looked at him sideways, fingering his beard. “What’s that?”

“
Kill ’em all
.” A slow smile spread across the hard little man’s face. His eyes twinkled. The others grinned too, and just then a vast and ominous epic shadow fell across their faces as through the slats in the blacksmith’s shed a mean slender red thread on the horizon was all that remained of the sun.

“It’s time,” said Tucker.

“Let’s do it,” said Bodie.

“What are we waitin’ for?” said Fix.

The four heroes gathered up their ammo belts stuffed with silver bullets and their many guns. They stuck the rifles, pistols and silver rounds that were not on their person in their saddlebags and saddle holsters, weighing down their steeds. Tucker loaded up Pilar’s mustang with weapons, seeing to it she had guns and ammo to distribute to her villagers when she broke them out. The animals were tense and obedient, somehow sensing the great battle ahead. Outside the blacksmith’s shop, the three gunfighters and the peasant girl mounted up on their horses.

The men tipped their hats to her.

“Good luck.” Tucker smiled.

She crossed herself. “God bless you.”

The three men and the lone girl rode off in two different directions.

Chapter Eleven

The village lay in repose at dusk.

The deserted town was bathed in an ominous red twilight hue.

Three lone gunfighters rode through the shadows of the empty square toward the hill leading up to the church. Above them dead ahead, Santa Sangre loomed, its stark white walls and steeple bathed in crimson light, the doors and windows shadowed, like a stripped skull. The hard men kept their hands near their weapons as they trotted down the empty dirt street. It was a long ride, and the world seemed to bend around them, extending the distance toward the inevitable. Nothing moved, there was no sound but the quiet clop of their horses. The vultures were gone, resting up for the feast to come. It was easy to imagine. Ever bigger grew the hill and, atop, the towering ramparts of the brooding mission of iniquity where their combined intertwined destinies had led them. Then the town fell behind them and their horses embarked upon the gravel path winding up a steep grade toward the gloomy doors of perdition, and the hour was nigh.

The untended fields sprawled eerily quiet and still in the gloaming. Dead crops were draped in burgeoning shadows. The peasant girl rode bravely alone around the back of the hill leading toward the rear of the church, steeple rising sinister and stark against the dying embers of the sun. The white pueblo of the church of Santa Sangre was the color of blood, like its namesake, she thought. The wheels of fate were set in motion and it was in the hands of God now, Pilar accepted as she gripped her reins. She knew no fear. She was doing her part.
 

As her rump smacked against the saddle leather, the girl scanned the arid piles of wheat and corn on either side of the rows. She remembered running through them as a little girl with flowers in her hair when the crops grew tall and proud and golden, waving to the farmers on some beautiful forgotten day when the village was happy, and she was young and knew what it was to play. Now, as Pilar rode through the decaying chaff of the fields, she beheld the exaggerated shadow of herself on her horse, rifle sticking up, bosom sticking out, hair seeming to billow and blow ethereally behind her in the wind like a warrior goddess. She thought that mythical silhouette looked as splendid as a heroine on one of the cover paintings of her dime western books. Yet it was her, so she breathed that idealized shadow image into her whole being. It buttressed her spirit and she drew strength from it. Alone on the ride to Santa Sangre, profoundly solitary in the calm before the coming storm, engulfed by the hush of vast empty fields, Pilar knew what it was to be her own hero. The hill to the cathedral was very close now, maybe a hundred yards, and the narrow trail she would ride up came into view. Many thoughts filled her young mind now. She wondered how many of her people were still alive within the walls ahead. She wondered if the gunfighters had already arrived there. Over and over in her head, she planned her entrance through the back door of the church, so she did it right when the time came, knowing that moment was mere minutes away. She must not fail. They must not fail. But a church was as good a place to die as any, Pilar thought, thinking the gunfighters’ wry cynicism must be rubbing off on her.
 

Now the time for thinking was over.

The time for action had come.

Her horse took the hill.

The sun dropped below the bloody horizon by the time The Guns Of Santa Sangre rode to the doors of the church. They were draped with ammunition belts loaded with silver bullets, and each of them carried a rifle slung over their shoulder and had two pistols stuck in their holsters.
 

Mosca sat on the step waiting for them, his eyes like destiny. “I said you would be back.”

“Let them people go.”

“And if we don’t?”

“We’ll kill all you son of a bitches.”

The Jefe smiled ironically to himself, tossed a pebble, then rose to his feet, brushing off the seat of his pants. “You should not have brought my mother into it, gringo. My mother is not a bitch. She heard how you insulted her and she is very angry. She is here now. With us. Look.” Mosca pointed to the sky and the almost full moon on the rise, an omnipresent white orb looming like a hallucination in the feverish nocturnal desert atmosphere. The gunslingers saw the moon but looked quickly back to the bandit leader, whose voice had disturbingly changed, becoming guttural and coarse. “
Mi madre ve y oye todos
, she sees and hears all. My mother, the mother of my men and I, is the moon and we are her children,
comprende
? The children of the night.
Los ninos de la noche
. She is full. I love her.
Amor a mi madre
. Tonight she shall enjoy watching as you die very, very badly, gringos.”

Bodie, Fix and Tucker looked around and realized that while Mosca was talking, fifteen bandits had quietly surrounded them like prowling coyotes, closing off the road up the hill. Tall, hulking shadows lurked in the pale moonlight and their eyes seemed to be glowing red.
 

Mosca grinned, flashing his rows of gold teeth. He closed his mouth, smiling, working his jaw, his tongue moving inside his cheeks. Then he put his hand on his mouth and spat something into it. Reaching out his fist, he opened that hand and in his palm was a pile of gold teeth. The gunfighters looked at the bandit leader who looked back at them, his mouth opening as his lips pulled back in his fat face revealing rows of toothless gums. Then, before their eyes, new teeth pushed through the gums, sharp and white and canine.
 

The gunslingers exchanged laconic glances. “This is bad.”

The other bandits were disrobing, their bodies convulsing.

The cowboys’ frightened horses suddenly reared, neighing in raw terror, nostrils snorting, hooves pawing the air, pitching the gunfighters out of their saddles to the dirt. The force of the impact knocked the wind out of Tucker, Bodie and Fix. As they crawled to their hands and knees and looked around, what they witnessed was beyond comprehension.

Mosca and his men were going into seizures, screaming, howling and frothing at the mouth, their entire bodies spasming. Beneath their stretching skin and new thick, black hair, their bones were lengthening and rearranging with cracking, ripping, squishing sounds. Their lower legs began to bend and extend like the hind legs of dogs, kicking up the dust, which filled the air and turned them into nightmarish silhouettes. Long claws popped out their nails in splatters of blood as the spikes cut through the flesh of their fingertips. Their hands curled and elongated into foot-long talons.
 

Tucker grabbed for his fallen pistol that lay by the foot of one of the bandits and saw that foot sprout fur and the toes grow pads and bloat into a paw.
 

“Aim for the hearts!” shouted Tucker.

A barrage of bullets exploded as the gunfighters’ pistols blazed away, and they pumped silver into the chests of eight of the transforming werewolves. The cowboys were dead shots and punched ragged holes into two of the beasts’ rib cages over their beating hearts. Instantly, those creatures roared and howled in dying agony, dropping to the ground, huge paws and talons slashing the air until they stiffened, fell still and died in the dirt, blood jetting like fountains from their wounds.
 

As soon as they were dead, the werewolves instantly transformed back into men. The inhuman shapes of the monsters’ awful anatomies shrunk, reverting to the small, broken, filthy naked bodies of the bandits sprawled on the ground.
 

Immediately, their werewolf brethren set upon the human carcasses of their comrades and ate them whole. The beasts’ savage canine jaws ripped and tore flesh and muscle from bloody bone and gulped it down viciously, eyes red coals, clawing and slashing one another to get at the chow. The wolfmen were distracted in their cannibalistic feeding frenzy long enough for the gunfighters to crawl to cover for a few short moments. The cowboys tightened themselves into a circle, facing the werewolves who again closed in on all sides, shrieking and spitting in mad-eyed rage. The hairy creatures reared and crouched, glaring at the gunfighters.

They attacked.

The three horses the shootists rode in on rolled and tumbled down the hill, throwing up huge clouds of dirt, until the steeds got themselves upright and stood outside the perimeter, rearing and watching the action. Scrambling to his boots, Bodie drew both revolvers, silver bullet tips glinting in the cylinder, and stood to face the bandits. His eyes widened. The gunslinger was staring right in the furry face of Mosca, whose jawbone dislocated as the front upper teeth stretched forward, cartilage crunching. Further and further, jagged white fangs sliced through the gums like rolls of razors, as the nose became a black snout that jutted two feet out of the face to give him the head of a gigantic wolf. Hairy, pointed ears twitched. Saliva and froth spewed from the mouth as its long tongue slathered and swept hungrily. The spine stretched and bullwhipped as the rib cage became narrow and deep and hollowed, and on its huge back paws with its long arms and massive talons, the eight-foot werewolf towered over Bodie. A thick, bushy and furred tail swept behind its haunches.
 

Tucker, Bodie and Fix blasted away with their irons, unleashing gunshots that leapt like bolts of lightning from their muzzles as they fired into the mob of wolfmen, sending a few more straight to Hell. The moon splashed down on the scene like a searchlight, emblazoning the creatures the bandits had become. Their horrific transformation complete, fourteen of the hissing, snarling, roaring monsters clambered over one another to tear the cowboys to ribbons. The three men hit the ground and rolled on their stomachs through the open doors of the church, taking the battle into the belly of the beast that was Santa Sangre.
 

Inside the gloomy pueblo chapel, the gunfighters ducked behind a blood-smeared pew, emptying their guns into the wall of monsters. Tucker unslung his Winchester repeater and gave Bodie and Fix cover as they reloaded their pistols with silver rounds from the belts strapped on their chests. They were instantly surrounded as the fearsome hairy creatures advanced on them through the open doors of the church and closed in right and left through the nave like a pack of titanic wolves. The air was rent with a supernatural cacophony of throaty roars. Bodie and Fix rearmed and spun their cylinders shut with a whizzing
whirr
, a Colt pistol in each hand. The gunfighters took deadly aim at the werewolves who leaped for them just as they unleashed silver with their guns.
 

Pumping a shot smack into the heart of a wolfman, Fix saw it slam back into the pueblo wall and sink to the floor, smearing a snail trail of gore as it reverted to dead human form. The other creatures hungrily devoured the corpse and tore at one another to get a mouthful of a ripped-off severed leg, tugging the limb in their jaws like mongrels fighting over a bone.
 

Inhuman shadows fell over Bodie, who whirled to see two creatures pouncing toward him. With a gun in each hand he shot them in the hearts and it was two dead stinking bandits that landed on him before he shoved them off and fired at the other monsters over the pews. He ran out of bullets fast and was just starting to reload when he saw the shadow of werewolf jumping at him from behind. Yanking the forged silver knife from his belt, Bodie spun and slammed the blade to the hilt in the monster’s upper left chest, giving the weapon a nasty twist as he killed the beast.

The close quarters of the church rang loudly with the roars and snarls of the creatures and the deafening gun-blasts reverberating off the walls. Combined with the horrid, fetid stench of the creatures, the smell of gunpowder and cordite and their own sweat of fear, the gunfighters were nearly overcome.