The Guns of Santa Sangre (2 page)

The woman screamed again.

The door on her side was torn off completely. A black chasm gaped through the shattered-wood opening. Her hair and clothes were swept by the whipping wind. She clung to the frame on the door for dear life. Something had her from behind.
 

Time stood still.
 

Whistler stared regretfully into the hooker’s bulging eyes, seeing her fingers slip from their purchase on the wagon. He did her a kindness by shooting her once in the forehead as sinewy black furred paws snatched her out with claws the size of carving knives.
 

The wolves fell back as the rig careened around a treacherous curve.
 

Whistler risked it and stuck his head out the opening to look up at the driver’s perch. It was empty. The wagon was driverless, the galloping team of horses ready to send it to a ditch at any moment. Those monsters were still out there.

The bounty hunter was alone on the speeding stage and his guns were empty.

His Winchester carbine repeater was in the luggage on the roof.

Swinging out the open door frame, Whistler reached up, grabbed the roof rail and began to pull himself out of the carriage. Immediately he was blasted by the wind from the hurtling wagon. As he struggled to haul himself up into the empty driver’s perch, he used boots as well as hands for purchase but was nearly tossed off to certain death by the heaving motion of the stage. The huge bounding black shapes were everywhere behind him in the wake of dust off the wheels, resembling giant elongated wolves. As the hunter shrugged himself up with his arms and elbows onto the slatted seats, something grabbed his leg. He felt like his limb had been hit by an axe and a searing wetness spread across his entire calf. Ignoring the pain, the cowboy got all the way up on the top of the stagecoach and began reaching for his suitcase lashed to the roof. He tore off the ropes and pushed away the hooker’s satchel, knocking it off the wagon top where it bounced to the ground and flew open scattering lingerie and undies. Then with both hands, he located his own suitcase and pulled the lid of his leather case open quickly to draw out his long steel Winchester repeater rifle.
 

Now armed, the bounty hunter confidently used the roof rack as a turret to steady his aim, opening fire on the rampaging creatures attacking the stage.
 

“Eat lead, you ugly sumbitches!” he shouted as he squinted down the gunsight and pulled the trigger and cocked the lever again and again. Fire erupted out the barrel as spent shells flew every which way from the breech. The beasts were struck by his shots right and left and fell and rolled, but they got up again. He cocked and fired, cocked and fired, and they went down and got right up and before he even considered he was running out of bullets, he knew this was no good.
 

A bear-sized black shape leaped on top of the team of horses and went to work with front and rear claws. Two more black shapes jumped at their legs and hamstrung the animals with their talons, bringing all two tons of stallion down at the same time in a terrifying jumble of harness and horse flesh and hooves. Bones snapped and bridles twisted. The chains of the harness linking the team to the carriage got tied up in the falling horses and the wagon impacted the whole huge knot of dead animals. The stagecoach flipped fifteen feet up in the air and spun twice before it came crashing to earth in smithereens of shattering wood, rent steel, flying wagon wheels and chassis parts. John Whistler was tossed a good hundred feet like a limp rag doll. He landed with a hard thud on the rocks and heard something inside him break.
 

Can’t pass out, he told himself.
 

The man crawled for his gun.
 

His fingers touched the cold steel, and everything went funny.

Something struck his neck, and Whistler was rolling, the world turning over and over then right side up again. The ground was sideways. He saw his decapitated body lying ten feet away from him in his good suit, neck stump cleanly cleaved as the last oxygenated blood to his brain kept his severed head conscious for a few remaining seconds. His trunk was dragged by dark paws into the inky blackness as a huge fanged red maw swallowed his head whole.

Chapter Two

Alvarez woke to a white-hot sun searing through his eyelids.

He was flat on his back in the burning desert sand.

The flesh of his arm was being ripped away.

And then the thief was screaming as he blinked his crusted eyes open to see the rotted pink head of the stinking buzzard, its foul yellowed beak tugging at a flap of wet red flesh on his bicep. God, the pain! Panic and terror turned his guts to jelly. Out of pure reflex, he grabbed for the gun in his belt, yanking it out of the holster to jam the muzzle into the vulture’s black-feathered chest, pulling the trigger again and again.

Click click click.

Empty.

Shit!

It was coming back to him now how he used up all his bullets the night before and the horror he had used them on.

Right now he was being eaten alive by a carrion bird ripping a piece of his arm off while more vultures circled overhead. Adrenaline kicked in. Flipping the big Colt Navy pistol in his hand to grip it by the barrel, he wielded the wooden butt like a club, bringing it down again and again on the buzzard’s fetid skull, beating its brains out. The vulture flapped its wings, blowing its stench, and screeched and cawed against the blows. “I am not dead yet, you stinking bastard!” the bandit cried hoarsely. “So you don’t get to eat me! I kill you first! I kill
you
!” Alvarez brutally pistol-whipped the vulture until he felt the mottled skull cave in. Soft wet matter splattered his hair. Then the disgusting bird was down on the ground, not moving except for the death twitch of its limpid talons. The man laughed in demented triumph. “Who’s dead
now
, eh? What, nothing to say? Hahaha! That’s right, because it is
you
that is
dead,
you filthy fucking scavenger! I, Alvarez, am alive!”
 

Not for long.

Sitting up took great effort, as did staggering to his feet, but the wounded man managed to stand up. He swayed, dizzy from loss of blood, blinking away white spots in front of his eyes from the sun he’d been staring into. When his vision partially cleared he saw that he was alone in a sweltering desolate expanse of the Durango desert stretching out in all directions as far as he could see.
 

The dead vulture lay at his feet.
 

Alvarez shuddered at the memory of it feeding on him.

His dangling right arm throbbed in raw, savage pain. To his horror, the awful wound from the night before was festering. Bite marks of huge teeth punctured his swollen bicep like rows of bullet holes from elbow to shoulder. Blood was caked and dried over huge raking bruises on the rent flesh. The arm bone felt broken by the clamp of those monstrous jaws. He tried to move his fingers but they were numb and not working.

Now all at once he remembered the monster that wounded him last night; horrific memories of fangs and fur flooded back. A half-remembered nightmare that was all too real.

Filled with dread, the man looked around him until he located the stagecoach outpost in the distance. It jutted like a broken tooth out of the arid terrain a half a mile away. The small structure sat silent and still. Nothing moved inside, and from what he recalled, nothing would. Flocks of vultures flew in and out of dark windows that resembled eye sockets of a skull. More ugly buzzards perched on the wooden roof or circled like black fangs in the sky, attracted by the death that lay within. A path of his footprints in the sand led from the outpost up to where he had fallen and the indentation of his own shape on the ground with the wide dark stain of dried blood buzzing with flies. The stagecoach junction was a tomb, and while the little building afforded the only shelter from the deadly heat, he would sooner die before returning there.

But Alvarez knew he better find a doctor before gangrene set in.

It wasn’t going to be easy.

The wounded man was in the middle of nowhere, engulfed by pitiless badlands vast and empty that seemingly went on forever. The sun was a searing oven, roasting him from on high.

What was he going to do? he wondered.

Better start walking.

Move those legs.

So he began taking clumsy steps, buckling under the punishing heat.

Touching the pocket of his trousers, Alvarez felt the bulge of the pouch; he still had his silver, what had gotten him into all this. Too bad he would not live to spend it because his wound was bad, so much blood lost, and there was nowhere to go for help.

But he kept walking.

And walking.

The day got hotter.

He grew closer to death with each unsteady step.

The wounded man would stagger over a hill in desperate hope he would spot some sign of civilization only to crest the rise to face more blasted empty terrain. In his delirium and despair, the thief was not sure how far he had walked before he saw the horses.
 

Two of them, in the distance; twin horses and riders melting like a mirage out of the watery waves of rising heat. He raised his hands above his head and flagged them down, praying that the
caballos
and
hombres
astride them were not a hallucination.

Alvarez had fallen to his knees and wept in relief when the two Federales rode up, even through he had been running from them only yesterday. What a difference a day makes. Their tan button coats and caps blotted the sun as they sat in their saddles, light glinting off their brass buttons and the cartridges in their bullet belts. “I surrender,
senors
, please, take me in,” the thief begged, and the obliging
policia
federal
took him into custody directly.

The prisoner Alvarez sat at the table.

The rusty iron manacles bit his ankles.

The fat Federale sat across from him. The thin unshaven one leaned against the wall. They were inside a squat single-story outpost nestled in the foothills, a few miles from where he had been picked up. The police station, if it could be called that, was a hovel. Brick walls, dirt floors. A rifle rack in the corner. Two cots against the left wall. Empty whisky bottles. In the next room, he could see the bars of a cell. The air was close and stank of sweat and body odor.

And gangrene.

His arm wound had been washed and bound with a dirty cloth, but was infected. He could already smell the onset of necrosis. “I need a doctor,” Alvarez groaned through teeth grit in pain.

“We said we will get you one,” said the cop behind him. “After you talk.”

They had found the silver when they searched him. The pouch sat on the table, out of his reach, and there was no point in lying to these men.

“My name is Pedro Alvarez,” the prisoner began. “And I will tell you what you want to know.” You bet you will, said the grim expressions on his captors’ faces. One way or the other.

The fat one pushed a worn wanted poster showing a trio of
Americanos
under his nose. “Do you ride with these men?” the thin one barked. Alvarez stared dumbly at the hard faces of the three bad men in the crude sketches, but the letters on the crumpled paper meant nothing to him.

“Look at them!”

“He asked you a question, shit for brains!” The thief got punched in the back of the head by the cop against the wall.

“I can’t read.” Alvarez lowered his eyes in shame.

“Their names are Tucker, Bodie and Fix.
Hombres muy peligrosos.
Gringo
gunmen down here who have done many robberies, killed many people with their fast
pistolas
. Do you ride with them?”

“No,
senors
, I do not know these men. I swear I have never seen them.”

“You have not heard of the reward?”

“What reward?”

“You have never ridden with these gunfighters?”

“I do not know them!”

The fat officer punched the table with a beefy fist. “Then where did you get the silver? We know you stole it!”

“I am a thief. I robbed the money, as you said. It was a paymaster in Sinaloa but I did not kill him,
senors
, just hit him on the head a little bit, enough to drop him. This I swear to you on the grave of my mother. For the last three days I have been on the run. My plan was to catch the stagecoach at the Aqua Verde junction and escape to Mexico City, but the stage it never came. Last night, we had all of us been waiting there for hours at the junction when the trouble started.”

“
Who
was waiting?”

“There were five of us. Two
vaqueros
, the man who sold the tickets and a fancy woman and her little girl. They steered clear of me,
senors,
because of my stench for not having bathed in days, and that was fine with me. I did not want to be noticed, you see. My brain was worried the Federales would catch up to me any minute, and if I did not get on that stage and get to Mexico City then I was a dead man.” The prisoner laughed ironically. “Just a few hours ago, I thought getting arrested was the worst thing that could happen to me, but I was wrong. Now here I am, you caught me, and I am relieved because what I met up with last night was worse than anything the law could do to me.”