The Guns of Santa Sangre (27 page)

One of the bullets ricocheted in a shower of sparks off a holy water fountain and the sparks quickly ignited the hanging curtains by the busted windows. A serpent of flame slithered up the drapes and coiled across the wooden beams of the ceiling, a viper’s nest of fire quickly spreading over the roof.

Tucker raised his rifle to his shoulder and squeezed the trigger just as a werewolf dove on him, slavering jaws spread wide as an open bear trap. The creature landed mouth first on the long steel barrel of the Sharp’s rifle and when the weapon discharged it exploded its skull in a gory raining galaxy of brain and fur and bone fragment as its head was blown clean off. The heavy carcass of the monster landed on the gunfighter, who yanked the barrel of the rifle out of the grisly trailing viscera of the blood-jetting neck stump still dangling a loosely attached lower jaw.
 

But the werewolf was not dead.

Its decapitated torso became violently animated, and its talons struggled to slash at the cowboy pinned under it.
 

Tucker pulled the trigger repeatedly but he was out of bullets, silver or otherwise. Desperately, he quickly brandished the Sharps rifle, gripping it by the stock, and the hot barrel seared his palm as he braced it against the wolfman’s powerful limbs, pinning the talons away from his face the claws slashed viciously at. “Boys!” he yelled in panic. The haunches of the headless creature’s hindquarters pumped, its rear legs climbing against the floor, padded back talons digging into the blood-slippery wood. Tucker struggled, his grip on the gun keeping the monster off him weakening as the jagged claws
whished
through the air by his face to claw it off. Suddenly, the cowboy felt an awful searing pain in his shoulder and winced as blood sprayed his face from a ragged wound. He was going to die for sure, he knew it, and gave a last hopeless sidelong glance at the ground to see Fix drawing one of his pistols from his holster and tossing it skidding around and around in circles, across the floor right into Tucker’s open hand. That same hand closed around the handle of the Colt Peacemaker and jammed the muzzle of the long barrel under the left side of the chest of the werewolf where the heart was. His forefinger squeezed the trigger, blowing the still-pumping heart out the back of the monster’s spine.

The creature fell across him, very dead.
 

Santa Sangre was engulfed in flames by now, and angry tendrils of conflagration plumed across the wooden rafters of the church as smoke billowed through the fulgurations of fire. Pieces of blazing timber dropped from the ceiling inferno onto a few of the werewolves and they instantly ignited, fur spewing flames, but still the burning creatures attacked.
 

Hell had come to earth.

The outside of the church sat under the dank cover of night beneath the bright nearly full moon. Unobserved, Pilar carefully rode her horse up to the back hitching post, dismounted, and drew her pistol she held with both hands. She slung the straps of four repeater rifles over her young shoulders, grabbing the bag of silver bullets her gunfighters had given her to arm the peasants. The girl could hear the roars and gunshots booming from within the cathedral. There was a thickening fog of smoke from the fire wreathing the area. The peasant girl drifted in silhouette, clenching the hog leg of a pistol as she slid up against the wall, eyes wide, checking the area for werewolves.

A fresh fusillade of shots from inside.
 

More monstrous roars.
 

Now screams.

The hulking shape of something huge reared in the dense smoke. Gasping, Pilar raised the gun in both hands and pointed it. She released her breath. The apparition was only another frightened horse tethered to a post. Exhaling, the peasant reached the tiny door at the base of the wall. It was a square of oak, with a latch on a dowel that slotted into a notch. She opened it and crawled inside, bravely entering the church on her hands and knees.
 

Under the building there was a crawlspace, barely two feet of distance between the cathedral floorboards and the dirt ground. Pulling herself along on her belly, the peasant girl gripped the guns and crawled beneath the floor over bare earth through the murky darkness. Firelight pulsed through the smoky spaces between the slats above her. Sporadic gunshots, thuds of falling bodies, animalistic roars, shouting voices, frightened and agonized screams were a distorted, muffled symphony. The girl knew where she was going and dragged herself on bent elbows and knees through the soil steadily deeper into the crawlspace.

Then she saw the eyes. Red. Glittering. Hundreds of them like tiny coals in the thick choking smoke. Pilar froze in terror, gagging from the rank, suffocating fumes of the close atmosphere. A horrible furry sea of rats came squealing and scrambling in an undulating rancid carpet out of the gloom at her, crawling all over her pinned body as she helplessly screamed, utterly hysterical. Then the rats were gone. They had been fleeing in stampeding panic, not attacking.

Gasping in relief under the planks, she was almost about to move when she heard the wings. A vast, fluttering curtain of squeaking vampire bats surged out of the inky smoke-filled darkness in a storm cloud of flapping wings, jeweled eyes, sharp teeth and skeletal claws. The airborne rodents hit Pilar like a tidal wave as she screamed hysterically all over again, covering her head as the flood of bats washed over her. Then they, too, beat a hasty retreat.

Gripped with fear and fighting tears, Pilar finally reached her destination. A trap door directly over her. Footfalls on the floorboards above. “It is me, Pilar! Let me up.”
 

Her mother’s voice responded. “Pilar!”

“Mama it is me, open the hatch!”

GGRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR…

Pilar froze at the low growl, nearby. Two glowing red eyes, not bat or rat but big as plates, shone in the dark. It was what the vermin were fleeing. The gigantic hungry werewolf was down in the crawlspace with her. The bristly spine of its unnatural back crammed into the tight space rubbed along the planks above as it pulled itself out of the gloom on its big thick paws with a steady
scrape scrape scrape.
Its fanged jaws snapped at the air, tongue lolling, nostrils flaring. The monster’s progress was slow but relentless.
 

“Open the hatch, Mama! Hurry!” Pilar cried desperately.
 

Above her, many hands fumbled with the latch and threw it open. She gripped the pistol in both fists and fired twice into the darkness between the red saucers. One of them went dark as she shot an eye out. The savage creature howled in berserk high-pitched agony and pounced at her. Just as the hatch was flung open, the girl leapt upward, bare feet leaving the dirt ground under the church just as a hairy tree trunk of an arm and shovel of a talon raked at dead air where she had lain an instant before.
 

Leaping up through the trap door, Pilar landed on both feet safely on the wooden floorboards of the small back room, catching her balance as the guns clattered to the ground, surrounded by the people of the village who had been imprisoned in the room. Her townsmen slammed the hatch shut and locked it. Quickly, the girl took her pistol in a two-handed grip like Tucker taught her and pumped a full load of bullets through the floorboards at the unseen creature pounding on the locked hatch. The planks kicked up splintered wood as the slugs thudded holes into them. Underneath, the wounded maddened creature wailed in dismal anguish but still beat on the floor in its weakened state.

“I knew you would come.”
 

Pilar turned breathlessly to see Bonita standing facing her, her little sister’s eyes bright and tearful.
 

“I promised I would come back for you, little one, didn’t I?” Overjoyed, Pilar set down her weapons and swept Bonita up in her arms, hugging her in blessed relief and gratefully kissing the girl’s face and head. Brushing away the child’s filthy hair, the girl looked her over, checking for injuries. “Are you alright, Bonita, did they hurt you, were you scared?”

Bonita smiled like sunlight and shook her head vigorously. “I wasn’t scared, not really, because you always keep your promises.”

“
Bueno
.”

Now the gunfire was growing more clamorous in the chapel next door and Pilar set Bonita down for there was much to do to get everyone out of there alive. Her vow to her sister was unfulfilled as yet.

“
Mi hija
.” Having almost forgotten about her, Pilar choked back tears at the sight of her mother’s wrinkled, beaming, sobbing face. The little old woman embraced her joyfully and the other villagers hugged Pilar with great relief that she was alive. She kissed and clenched hands with a few, then shook them off, reloading her pistol with silver bullets. “I have brought men. We have made silver bullets for our guns to kill the werewolves. But we must hurry. Make haste, my friends.”

“What do we do?” Her mother trembled.

“While they fight them and kill them,” her daughter replied, “we go out the back way and take the horses.”
 

More roars came from below as another werewolf joined the first one beneath the floorboards, blocking their retreat. The crowd of unarmed villagers exchanged fearful glances. The boards below their feet shook and began to crack from the onslaught of claws below, trying to get at them.
 

“So now we make a different plan.” Pilar shrugged.
 

She passed out the guns.

Inside the church, the cowboy gunfighters engaged the monsters in a pitched battle.
 

“Get those people the hell out of here!” Tucker yelled to Bodie as he cranked off shot after shot with his Winchester rifle at the wall of hair, fangs and claws. Fix gave his buddy cover as Bodie leapt over the pews, scrambling across the burning altar. The big Swede could already hear the muffled screams and cries for help from the trapped villagers inside the back room. He leapt onto the tabernacle. Reaching the door, he crisscrossed his arms, firing the pistols in opposite directions, smoothly shooting two werewolves coming at him on either side straight through the heart. The two beasts fell, swiftly transforming back into men and were quickly devoured by three wolfmen resembling eight-foot-tall fiery torches. The stench of burning fur and rank canine flesh choked the cowboy as he jerked back the wooden beam bolting the door and flung it wide.

A flood of grateful peasants poured out of the room like a tidal wave of water from a burst dam. Bodie held them back but the people froze in their tracks when they got an eyeful of the spectacular horrific tableau of the fiery church swarming with werewolves that blocked their way.
 

“Give ’em guns and ammo!” yelled Tucker.

Fix was already on it, grabbing a belt of silver bullets and shoving them into the waiting hands of the villagers. He grabbed an armload of rifles and pistols from the bandits’ weapons stockpile and dumped them on the altar. The peasants swiftly took up arms and grabbed fistfuls of silver bullets and stuffed them in the breeches and cylinders of the firearms. The naked women, the fight back in them, also brandished weapons. Sweat glistened on their bare heaving breasts.
 

“Shoot for the hearts!
El Corazon
!
El Corazon
!” Tucker shouted, gesturing to them, and put a round square into the left side of a rampaging wolfman, dropping it in his tracks, to demonstrate.
 

The Mexicans crossed themselves in awe as they saw the corpse go from beast to man but then they got busy shooting werewolves. Pilar stood in front of the others, firing her pistol in a two-handed grip. The air filled with gunfire as bullets screamed and ricocheted and caromed. Fangs and claws and fur flew. All was chaos. A final battle of good and evil was taking place as side by side the gunslingers fought with the villagers as one army, making a last stand, delivering the seemingly relentless hordes of werewolves to perdition. They fired until their guns were empty, hammers clicking uselessly on spent chambers. They were out of silver bullets.
 

More monsters reared out of the flames. Forced back, the humans retreated to the vestibule. The creatures blocked their escape through the front doors of the church and advanced on them, enraged.

Then Tucker saw it on the floor.

A last canvas ammo belt filled with silver bullet cartridges.

The cowboy leapt forward and picked it up, falling back into the huddled group of his fellow gunfighters and the villagers cornered in the nave. Even though he had the ammo belt, he knew in the time it would take them to reload their guns, the werewolves would tear them asunder.
 

So the cowboy pulled his arm back and heaved the last ammunition belt as hard as he could at the wolfman leading the pack.
 

The creature caught it in his talons.
 

It was the beast whose eyes Tucker recognized as Mosca, the bandit leader. Its black rubbery lips pulled back in a drooling leer over the rows of bloody fangs as it held up the ammo belt as if to display it in triumph. Flames licked across the fur of its arms but it paid them no notice.
 

The other ten werewolves stomped forward through the burning pews, their paws collapsing the cindered wood in showers of sparks and timber as the creatures gathered to the right and left of the leader of the pack. Mosca threw his snout back and roared savagely, clenching the canvas strap lined with silver slugs.