Wild Country (6 page)

Quantrill grinned, seeing the ammo box taped onto the dash near the old girl's short-barreled shotgun. It was illegal for civilians to shoot boosted twelve-gauge single slugs, but not for this leathery old mare to display an empty cartridge box. If you knew anything at all about those low-recoil, rocket-boosted twelve-bores, you knew they'd go right through most bulletproof glass. All in all. he decided, this little old lady made her point eloquently without so much as clearing her throat.

For nearly an hour, Quantrill watched the broken countryside and thought about its future. When he'd first landed that deputy job, freighters carried "bulls"—sharpshooters who literally rode shotgun, or with Heckler & Koch assault rifles, in the cab and inside cargo holds protected by armor. In the past four years, the U. S. marshal's men had ambushed, chased, or simply scared off so many bandits that freighters were no longer easy prey. Citizens in SanTone could once again get fresh grapefruit from the southern valley, fresh beef from Abilene, diesel fuel from Odessa. . To some extent, the taming of the freightways had been Quantrill's doing; his and fifty other men's, including Espinel. But Espinel's death proved that life was still cheap in Wild Country. The big landowners often held their spreads with hired guns against squatters. Some of those hired guns worked for little or nothing. Like Rawson and his pals, they needed a base of operations en route between Coahuila and. say. Kansas Ringcity.

How many years before Wild Country could be tamed? With determined law enforcement and honest courts. Quantrill guessed it might be managed in five more years. With things as they were, it might take forever. Especially when too many people moved into the lawless region with high hopes and expensive equipment, but without weapons or ability to defend themselves. Hapless settlers became part of the problem, furnishing easy pickings from Laredo to Yuma. The old issue of gun control was still an issue, despite evidence from towns like Ruidoso and McCook.

Quantrill was fond of Ruidoso, in central New Mexico. It lay in a low mountain range that afforded cover for a robber's route most of the way to the Big Bend region. That being so, a townful of shops and horse race enthusiasts might have seemed a magnet for troublesome brush-poppers. Nearby Cloudcroft had known the nightmare of gun-toting gangs and groups of outlaw hovercyclists. Not Ruidoso!

The township of Ruidoso lived mostly on its horseflesh, one way or another. The town fathers dressed up their horsetown image with frontier celebrations, and they issued fines when they caught a local businessman out of uniform. That uniform ran to Justin boots, rakish Stetsons, jeans with heavy nylon chap panels, and string ties above colorful long-sleeved shirts.

Those jeans didn't really need heavy cartridge belts to hold them up; the belts were for handgun holsters. The postwar city ordinance phrased it as a "compulsory token wearing of sidearms." While urging wearers to peacebond their shootin' irons with ribbon ties to the holsters, nothing was said about ammunition. Roughly once a month, Ruidoso peace officers had to disarm someone. Once a year they had to deal with a shooting. On the one and only occasion when several outlaw cyclists explored Ruidoso together, they soon developed headaches from eyestrain and from frequent darted glances in all directions. They stayed long enough to buy six-packs and aspirin and sought their fun elsewhere. No armed group ever seriously thought about invading Ruidoso. Obviously the town could become noisy, true to its Spanish name, in one hell of a hurry.

McCook, Texas, was a different story; one that Quantrill would never forget. A small town at the southern tip of Texas, McCook leaned on the services of the larger McAllen nearby. McCook's chief of police, wise in the ways of reelection, knew better than to try outlawing personal firearms in his town. With malice toward none, he persuaded most townsfolk to his own version of the Second Amendment to the Constitution. That amendment reads: "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

The chief, knowing his rhetoric, did not call attention to the final phrase, which, absolutely and positively,
guarantees
citizens their personal rights to keep and bear arms. Instead, he focused on the words "well-regulated militia." He convinced the good folks of McCook that they would display the perfect model of a well-regulated militia by storing their personal weapons in a city armory. Little McCook even had a few dry runs, hoorawed by local media, in which citizens got in line to receive their pistols, plinking rifles and birdguns long enough to handle and inspect them. McCook's brave experiment, and its holovision coverage, was a published invitation for plunder.

A border bandit named Saltillo assembled two dozen
cimarrones
and converged on McCook. Some came on horseback, some on hovercycles, and a half-dozen hardcases arrived hidden in a small van that supposedly carried Mexican diesel fuel for legal sale.

Of course, they overran the police station first. The value of the firearms kept there would have paid for the raid. But Saltillo had seen the old silver icons and the jeweled trappings in the church paid for, over the generations, by McCook's devout TexMex Catholics. He figured to hit the bank as well since the church itself would be such a quick knockover.

Saltillo lost one man at the police station but bagged the chief and over a hundred weapons.
Cimarrones
cleared the streets with rapid volleys and went for the bank next because it happened to be so near the police station. They took forty thousand dollars and three lives there, but they also took their time ransacking the place. Too much time, when the local priest was as thorough and as decisive as Father Quemada.

The good father had heard the worries of his people long before: had agreed to hide the deadly weapons of his parish—or rather, to look the other way when lockers were opened in the church meeting hall. Of McCook's three hundred people, "perhaps thirty ran for the church when the shooting, started. Most of them intended only to pray for salvation.

Saltillo's men held target practice on the stained-glass windows to terrify the priest and his parishioners, then burst in on what they thought would be a huddled mass of victims. Some, in fact, were screaming and praying near the nave when the
cimarrones
stormed inside.

Saltillo and five of his bravos were shot dead just one pace inside the church by the damnedest concatenation of gunfire imaginable: pellet guns, five handguns, rifles of several calibers, and a sawed-off shotgun firing double-aught buckshot. Father Quemada's combat team was two men, several boys, a half-dozen women, and a pair of teenaged girls. Rumors of a man in black robes firing his own assault rifle were never verified, but it was said later that Father Quemada had the look of a man in need of confession.

Before Saltillo's remaining men fully realized the meaning of this eruption just ahead of them, they were met full face with hot metal blessings from the pure in heart. This was not the kind of greeting the
cimarrones
had counted on and leaving more of their people flopping in the dust, they lit a shuck for the border.

Three more of Saltillo's men got perforated during the hellish confusion of reversing hovercycles and a van loaded too heavily with stolen guns. By this time McCook's few stubborn Anglos with guns at home got them into play; sniping from cover, shaking with buck fever, steadying down, sniping again.

A few of Saltillo's band got away. McCook got the van and its guns back. Saltillo and the police chief got decent burials. No authority near Wild Country got very far, after that, with schemes for the wholesale removal of personal arms.

Now, Quantrill watched an ancient Volkswagen diesel pickup jounce down a dirt access road near the freeway. He noted and approved of the thick plastic armor bolted to its cab. It obscured part of the windows and it looked like hell, but it said the driver wouldn't be candy in a skirmish. Still, some people came to the region hoping that their claims to government land could be upheld by someone else, without they themselves being ready to operate as a well-regulated family militia. Some of those good people were lucky. Some were driven out by night-riders who may, or may not. have been on payrolls of other ranchers. Some of the newcomers were robbed, raped, tortured, killed by persons unknown.

At least one recent killing bore a clear message. According to a deputy's report, the dead man was found on the spread of a rancher. Perhaps he had been caught rustling a few calves, for he had been treated to an ancient Spanish custom reserved for rustlers: the death of the skins. Apparently while still alive, he was bound inside the fresh "green" hide of a yearling steer and left there without further attention. A pitiless sun, and shrinkage of the hide, had done the rest.

The rancher, old Mulvihill Garner expressed great surprise when the iron-hard hide was found with its grisly contents. The hide bore the Garner brand. Could the old man have done it? Surely not, for old Mul Garner's arthritis kept him off the range. His strapping, hell-raising son, Jerome? But Jer spurned anything that smacked of Spanish influence and lacked his dad's knowledge of the old punishments. Well,
somebody
had done it, and people tempted to lift Garner sheep or cattle understood the message in the death of the skins.

Quantrill knew Jer Garner slightly, as a little dog knows a big dog. Twice, at weekend dances around Rocksprings, Jer had arranged to jostle Sandy Grange's dance partner. The first time Jer demanded an apology, got it, and decided that Quantrill had-failed a test. The second time had only been for good measure, to remind Sandy who was the biggest bull on the spread.

Ted Quantrill knew better than to misbehave at a public dance: Sandy had to live with folks thereabouts, even if he didn't. With much of Wild Country's control in the hands of ranchers, and with some of them happy to keep it wild, the region partly justified charges by northern critics. Northerners sneered that when you scratched the veneer of the new Southwest, you found the Old West just beneath, now a mix of high tech and whang leather. Some of the finest families in the Southwest kept that reputation going, claiming you could forge a better new world while keeping a bushel of tradition. Folks in the mold of a Kleberg, a Goodnight, or a Dahlman did what they could to maintain the mixture of old and new. And then, of course, there was Quantrill's destination today: the old Schreiner spread, nucleus of Wild Country Safari.

Quantrill alerted the old-girl with the buzzer as she neared the turnout to the north gate of Wild Country Safari; heard the whine of regenerators as she slowed her big rig expertly. In common courtesy, he climbed down and hit the macadam running so that she would not waste precious energy stopping and accelerating from rest. He turned away from her dusty wake, walked to the untended gatehouse, placed his left thumb against the printmatcher. Then he went inside and selected a
surfer
. Safari management did not let its help get stranded forty klicks from their work stations.

The enormous spread of Wild Country Safari had begun, a century before, as the "Y O" Ranch, an arid region where the pioneering Schreiner family dug wells to water their stock. By the time Ted Quantrill was born, the Y O brand was famous—not so much for the blooded stock as for the wild game and endangered species that generations of Schreiners brought in. The list ran from addax to zebu; you could find oryx, tiny gemsbok, towering giraffe, shambling bison, and velvet-hided sable for photographs.

After the Sinolnd War, Schreiners bowed to necessity and leased the entire spread to LockLever. The giant corporation added nearby lands and now had a spread that covered parts of three counties. A nearby LOS tower sent narrowcast power into the spread, but it took only a little of that power to pump water from deep wells. Much more was needed to run the weird assortment of entertainments LockLever built, and all of it together was world-renowned as Wild Country Safari. LockLever's huge investment was paying off already.

Highrollers floated in a converted delta dirigible from DalWorth to a pad just over the hill from Faro; but they clattered and bounced the last few klicks by stagecoach.

Wearing a rented costume, you could easily forget that Faro's plank sidewalks and clapboard saloons were all parts of a careful reconstruction. You could win a pile at faro, monte, poker, craps, or roulette—though more often you lost a small bundle. You bathed, if at all, in a high-backed zinc tub. You slept, if at all, on a cornshuck mattress that rustled louder than coal down a chute, in a room with a pitcher and bowl. If you wore a sidearm, you submitted to a company peacebonder strap that shrilled a microwave alert if broken.

In the past year, more Americans had made enough money to visit the little sin city. This was one good sign of America's slow economic rise from global disaster. Still, many of the moneyed visitors spoke Arabic or French or Spanish, and Faro boasted too many obvious foreigners gawking at each other for Quantrill's comfort. He seldom had business in Faro and rarely went there even for the cheap honest redeye at the Long Branch Saloon. The north road led to Faro, and Quantrill ignored it. The west fork arrowed over rolling lands and out of sight toward the Battle of Britain and Thrillkiller sites. He ignored that road, too, and turned toward the south.

Separated by great distance on the vast spread, connected by macadam ribbon, were other sites of very different entertainment. To the south was the old ranch complex where Quantrill lived. Here, big-game hunters found their cruel sport, and the ranch staff bred cattle: Herefords and Brangalo for beef, Longhorns for show. Quantrill mounted his fat-wheeled little surfer, extended its sissy handle and seat, then urged it along the macadam.

For short runs, he sometimes rode a surfer as he had ridden ordinary skateboards before the war. But only a dunce would tire himself by standing up for an hour, creating extra wind resistance, while the energy cells drove him whirring crosscountry. He used the surfer in its scooter mode and wondered if he were getting old.