The Guns of Santa Sangre (9 page)

Behind the fence, the bleached white skeletons of six dead horses lay in a heaping pile on the ground, their skulls and leg bones torn completely off their bodies, and rib cages broken open to reveal open black holes of their gut cavities. Long, dragging tears of teeth and claw marks marred their skeletal remains. Clouds of flies swarmed in the eyes and mouths of the dead horses’ craniums. Globular eye sockets gaped as if from the unimaginable agony of the horrific way they died.
 

“They didn’t have to kill them horses,” growled Fix, who hated cruelty to animals though he didn’t admit it.

“They didn’t just kill them. They scourged them,” observed Tucker. “You boys know any Injun tribes this area do that, a warning mebbe?”

The stretched equine jawbones and jutting teeth were contorted in death’s head grimaces. Some of their dried guts hung draped from the rails of the paddock. The stench of old rot and bile was overpowering.

“None I ever heard of. And this ain’t Injun land.”

“Could be a war party,” added Bodie.

“I don’t know what the hell this is. Exceptin’ that this is Mexico.”

They hunkered by the edge of the corral abattoir and considered the porch to the outpost a few paces ahead. Huge streaks of black char rose up the adobe walls by the splashes of clotted blood as if buckets of gore had been tossed against the structure. The roof beams were incinerated.
 

Tucker looked back and saw the peasant girl riding closer after her initial trepidation. The look on her face was not as frightened as he would have expected from a plain and simple girl, it was like she had seen this all before.
 

“Stay back,” he called to her.

Shaking her head, the peasant warily climbed off her horse and followed the men as they approached the ominous stagecoach junction. The doors and windows were black and foreboding like the sockets of a skull.

Death was here.

Movement in the doorway darkness caused the three gunfighters to raise their weapons, ready to fire.
 

With a bitter caw, five filthy buzzards exploded out the open door and beat a sickening ascent into the searing bleached sky.
 

The gunslingers entered the outpost, guns leveled.

Inside the structure, Tucker and Bodie stared at what lay before them in raw horror and these men had seen it all. Even Fix’s eyes bugged out of his head, finger sweaty on his trigger. The large room was dark and gloomy, bright sunlight cutting through the musty air in big shafts that revealed the inside of the building was washed floor to roof with clotted blood. Countless flies were stuck to the dried gore, wings twitching. The decayed skeletons of several people dangled from ropes on the ceiling, hung from their feet, bones rattling in the dry breeze. Swarming flies buzzed.

“Hellfire,” Fix whispered.

The cowboys covered their noses with their kerchiefs, wincing at the horrible stench, their squinty eyes regarding the ghastly scene, then each other.
 

Several piles of bones were assembled around the dirt floor. These people had been passengers, waiting for the stage but meeting up with something else instead. The skulls and femurs were immediately recognizable as human. The skeletons had been gnawed clean, and those tidy piles were neat, deliberate. Clothes were heaped in another pile, black with dried blood, so the victims had been stripped after they were killed. Tucker gauged there were maybe eight to ten sets of human remains. Two of the skulls were very small and delicate, a child and an infant, both crushed in like porcelain dolls. A stuffed teddy bear Tucker guessed belonged to one of the children sat slumped over on a wooden table, its black button eyes blank as if erased by what it had witnessed. He saw a heap of emptied suitcases and carpetbags piled in the corner by the small stove. The luggage had been rifled through, valuables filched, robbed. The work of bandits, likely, from the looks of things, but what kind of bandits would do this to people defied comprehension. Then again, Tucker didn’t know these parts, and maybe these looters had showed up after whomever had done the killing. A dead, half-smoked cigar sat on a rusted metal horseshoe ashtray, probably still burning when the killers came. Tucker picked up the stogie, put it in his mouth, and lit it. The smoke drifted out of his lips, and helped wash away the carrion stink of the place as he looked around.
 

Fix kicked at a buzzard waddling in.

“Awww God, they killed kids, poor little kids didn’t do nothin’.”
 

Alerted by the distress in Bodie’s voice, Tucker slid his eyes over to see the towering Swede crouching under the low roof, his cement-block face crumpled in a distraught expression, huge hands holding the tattered, blood-drenched lace and frill homemade dress of a little girl now just gruesome rags in his thick fingers. The cloth slipped through his hands, dropping with an empty sound on the sodden dirt. Tucker watched the despondent Bodie run his hand in dismay through his hair, clenching and unclenching his repeater rifle in the other until his knuckles grew big and white as pebbles. This was the worst thing any of them had ever seen. The leader felt it too, the same rage they all did, and knew as his friends did that if they came face to face with those responsible, the gunfighters would kill them real slow, shoot them apart piece by piece and watch them die screaming in their own blood and shit all day long. Then they’d cut their heads off and put them on sticks. They’d done it before.

“Those was bad kills,” Fix said.

“Them people was skinned alive,” muttered Tucker.

Bodie shook his head. “Goddamn massacre. Never seen nothing like it. Ever.“
 

“You figure it was the same sumbitches in this town we’re going up against?” Fix worked his jaw.

Tucker nodded. “Reckon.”

“Scalphunters?” Fix spat.

“Nope.” Tucker shook his head, fingering his beard. He indicated the messy mops of grisly matted pelt on some of the faceless skulls. “They’d have took the hair.”
 

“Right.”

Bodie shrugged. “Coyotes, then? Rabid mebbe?”
 

“Open your eyes, Bodie. Look.” Fix bristled at the other gunfighter’s stupidity. “They’s hung from the rafters.”

Tucker glowered. “Pulled apart limb from limb while they were alive, too, from the looks of things.” He hunkered down by the piles of arm bones pulled off the dangling skeletons and grimaced at the teeth marks gnawed to the marrow. “And eaten.”

“Eaten?” Bodie squirmed squeamishly.

Fix stared impassively. “Nobody should die like that.”

Taking off his hat, shaken to the core, the wiry little gunfighter went outside for air. The other two gunslingers remained, legs weak, as if the empty eye sockets and grinning teeth of
los deparacedos
, the disappeared ones, wished them to bear witness a few moments longer.
 

“Who would do something like this?” Tucker whispered mostly to himself.

“It was them,
senors
.” The girl stood in the doorway, her arms crossed, her honest gaze grim.

“This was what come to your town?” Fix asked from outside.

“
Si
.”
 

Bodie whistled.
 

“Then lady, you got some big problems,” Tucker grunted.

“That’s why I have you,” the peasant answered, a fact simply stated. And he thought he might have seen her smile, just a little.

“What the hell have we gotten ourselves into?”

“Boys,” muttered Fix. “I found sign.”
 

The cowboys went outside, glad to get out of the slaughterhouse. The abattoir of an outpost sat festering in the light of day. The vultures, afraid of the armed men, hung back, impatient for them to depart so they could resume their feast.

Tucker and Bodie walked up to Fix, who had squatted down on one knee a dozen yards away by a huge amount of horse tracks heading away from the outpost due south.
 

“Must be them.” Fix looked up. “Heading away from us.”
 

“They came here before our town. The first night we heard them it was from the north.” Pilar fought tears. “You see? You see what will happen to my people if you don’t help us? Please help us,
senors
. Please.”

Tucker nodded. “That’s what you hired us for, ma’am. But we better get a move on.”
 

They saddled up. All four spurred their horses hard, getting the hell out of there and urging the animals full gallop until they were long gone over the next ridge. The ghastly outpost and its congregation of buzzards fell out of sight, if not out of mind, to their rear. The dry, raw wind of the open desert in their faces washed the stench of death from their noses and mouths, but the taste lingered, until at last they let up on their horses and slowed to a canter on the dusty trail.
 

Chapter Five

As they rode on, Tucker looked over his shoulder and saw the distant dust trail of a group of horses and riders on their tail.
 

Fix looked back too with a furrowed brow. “What is it?”

Tucker squinted. “Mebbe something. Mebbe nothing.”

When they looked again, there was no sign of anything behind. Bodie’s hand went to his pistol in his holster. “We got trouble?”

Tucker shook his head. “Nah. Outpost back there rattled me some is all.”

They didn’t ride far when Bodie whistled. “Boys, we got company.”
 

The two other gunfighters looked up to see what their fellow shootist was eyeballing.
 

Back about a mile off, through the melting waves of rising heat, a wall of riders was coming in their direction, kicking up dust.
 

“That who I think it is?”
 

Tucker nodded. “I’d bet money. Let’s get out of here.” The men spurred their horses and took off.
 

The girl started her horse to gallop in order to keep up. “Why are we riding so fast?” she hollered.

Tucker yelled to her over the pounding hooves. “We need to make time to get to your town!”
 

A maze of granite canyon breaks lay directly ahead. A piece of luck. The cowboys and the girl made for them. A labyrinth of gray mud arroyos and gulleys networked the valley for the next few miles, big enough to ride horses through. They might lose their pursuers in there. The cowboys and the peasant trotted down a steep narrow draw until it spilled out in a wending ravine that tooled through the cool high rock walls thirty feet above them. Their hooves splashed through a thin stream of water flowing by. They didn’t look back, just forged ahead, as the bend went right, then left, then right again. There was no sign of it spilling out, or even an indication of where it led. Tucker understood while the canyon breaks offered an escape route in which they could lose those after them, the gunfighters were also trapped, boxed in. If they got cornered their backs were to the wall. Worse, if their adversaries were up above on the top of the ridge and spotted them riding down in the ravine, they would have the high ground and pick them off easily. A quick glance at the worried looks on his fellow gunfighters’ faces and Tucker saw they were thinking the same thing. Fix certainly was. That damn Bodie was probably thinking about grub. It was a double-edged sword being down here, and Tucker wondered whether it had been a mistake. That was when he heard the sound of hoof beats, a great many, echoing down in the latticework of ravines with them. He knew then that he didn’t have to worry about these pursuers being up on the ridge, because they were right down there with them and would catch up directly.
 

“Lock and load,” he snarled.
 

“Good. I’m getting sick of this running crap,” said Fix.

“We don’t know how many they are,” shot back Tucker. “There’s no money in mixin’ it up with these whoever-they-ares, plus we got silver to get to and best save our bullets for that. I say we lose ’em.”

“I’m with Tucker.” Bodie nodded.

They pulled up their horses and stopped at a fork in the canyon. Dark, craggy, twisting ravines broke off in three directions. The muffled echo of the hooves of many riders loudly reverberated seemingly from all directions, a sound like a rushing river, rebounding off the walls of chipped rock rising thirty feet above them.

“There’s a lot of ’em. But I’m ready,” panted Bodie.

“Which way?” snarled Fix, pulling up his reins and urgently looking left and right down the empty ravines leading off in opposite directions into the canyons. The sound of horses was growing in volume, more distinct, but it was impossible to tell which way they were coming at them from. Pilar tossed her head as she gazed around her, face sweating and beautiful with alarm.
 

“I don’t know,” Tucker growled through gritted teeth, pump shotgun in one hand and reins in the other as he turned his horse in a circle, listening. He shot a desperate glance upward at the notch of the top of the pass. “Find a trail leading up to the top of the canyon, then we get the high ground and shoot down at ’em.”

“Where?” shouted Fix.

“This way.”

Pilar was wild with fear, hunched in her saddle. “It is
them
,
senors
!”