Conquistadors

by Jeff Kirkham

  But they’d stopped at the McCallister ranch for a reason that still eluded Noah, and that feeling generally came when he’d skipped a step. Even though he still hadn’t penetrated the actual scene of the battle, Noah retraced his steps back to his Land Cruiser, conscious of each footprint he added to the tableau. When he got there, he took in the bigger picture.

  That’s when he noticed the sparkling nuggets of glass on the road. There were too many to have been made by bullet impact alone. Noah followed the tennis shoe prints backwards. They disappeared when they hit a band of shimmering gravel. He stood up straight and looked around.

  He saw the cable.

  Anchored to a huge boulder on the far side of the road, a three-eighths inch thick length of aircraft cable lay partially buried in the dust. The scattered and granular remains of automotive glass spread across the dirt road beneath it.

  The first car hit the cable…

  Bill picked this fight. Noah smiled. The old idiot had taken on at least twenty gangbangers by himself. Not a bad way for an old Green Beret to die.

  He pictured it: when the cars came barreling down the country lane, Bill had pulled the cable tight with his tractor and clotheslined the whole caravan of rice burners. No doubt he knew what he was doing, and he knew he’d probably die in the process. But for some reason, the dumbfuck had yanked that cable and kicked off a losing battle.

  At first, Noah blamed it on the preps. That’s what Bill McCallister called his massive store of apocalyptic supplies and preparations: his “preps.” His old man loved nothing more than to blather on about his end-of-the-world strategies; two-thirds of the time it had been Bill’s default topic of conversation. Noah had heard, ad nauseam, for most of his life, how Bill was “ready for bear” when “the shit hit the proverbial fan.” The old man must’ve been laughing like a schoolgirl at recess when all his planning actually came down to a gunfight with a pack of evildoers.

  Noah crouched down and looked more closely at the roadway. Several blood trails extended from where the vehicles had been stopped by the cable. He almost missed them because the dry dust had sucked up the moisture and formed dirty, little cocoons around the blood trails. It didn’t look like blood as much as dark brown caterpillars in the dirt.

  Bill must’ve laid into the gangbangers with his rifle the moment he’d hopped down from his tractor. Noah scanned the surface of the road and discovered a constellation of dust clumps, laced with drying blood. He picked up one of the clumps and rubbed it between his fingers. A gelatinous grey slime squeezed out of the dirt clod. It was some dude’s brains, more than likely. It smelled like a combination of pig fat and sunscreen. The disgusting goop on his fingers made Noah reconsider.

  Bill hadn’t brought this level of hate just to try out his preps.

  Noah stood up and stretched his legs. The town of Patagonia sat just two miles down the road from Bill’s ranch. Bill hated government and he hated most people, but he would do anything to protect that parched, one-horse town. Drinking coffee and telling lies every morning at the corner gas station made even a hard man love a place.

  Noah pursed his lips and looked in the direction of Patagonia. The town hid behind a mountain, but it was dead south from Bill’s ranch. It made sense that Bill would stop them here at any cost.

  Now that he knew to look for blood clumps, Noah noticed a massive, congealed puddle in between the tire tracks of the rice burners. Bill had drained a man’s heart with his big gun and that man had fallen dead on the spot. Noah circled the deathbed and found another two sets of sneakers running away from the battle and toward the rock where the cable had been anchored. They’d been the cowards—or maybe the smart ones.

  Noah moved from the LKP, “Last Known Point,” to where the men had rushed the gate. It happened after the Honda burst through the chain-link. Two of the ‘bangers seemed to have died from fatal bullet wounds when they got out of their cars, and maybe more had died in the vehicle that got clotheslined by the cable. Noah didn’t imagine that a modern airbag would save a dude from taking a three-eighths cable to the face.

  Inside the gate, a bunch of new blood trails appeared on the gravel and in the dust. Noah counted six of them. Two of those looked like they stalled out behind the belly-up Honda. Those were probably wounded men who had taken cover.

  The ground between the gate and the Honda was heavily sprinkled with Berdan-primed, steel casing 7.62 x 39. The gangbangers had been shooting AK-47s. There were a few nine millimeter rounds thrown in, but it struck Noah as odd that all twenty guys were shooting the same rifle.

  Gangbangers usually shot whatever they could steal or buy on the black market. Why would they all shoot the same caliber and manufacture of bullet? And why would they pile up the bodies of the dead? These weren’t the behaviors of random thugs.

  Noah plucked up one of the AK rounds and smelled it. The smell told him nothing, but it gave him a second to ponder.

  Maybe not gangbangers per se. Maybe cartel soldiers. Maybe they’re heading back south across the border.

  Why? Why cross over into Mexico?

  The pockmarks in the dead Honda told Noah a piece that he’d already assumed: Bill shot most of these guys with his big FN SCAR rifle. The old man kept the massive thunder stick by the door, hanging from the coat rack like most people hang their keys.

  If Bill had had more time, he probably would’ve come at them with his belt-fed M60 instead of the SCAR. He actually owned the M60 machine gun legally—having done months of paperwork with the BATF and having paid more for the belt-fed than he’d paid for his pickup truck. He might’ve won the battle if he’d had time to get the M60. He might’ve won the battle if his son had been here to fight by his side.

  He should’ve been by Bill’s side. He shouldn’t have given Bill shit for talking during the movie. He should’ve been a better friend and a better son.

  Funerals were no place for personal regrets, Noah reminded himself as he wiped away a tear. With the world shutting down, he couldn’t imagine anyone taking time to honor their dead. This was all the funeral Bill would likely get, and Noah wasn’t about to screw it up. He sucked in a breath and spent a minute watching a lazy cloud drift behind a hill. Then he went back to work understanding his father’s killers.

  After an hour creeping around the scene, examining the sign left by the gangbangers, Noah arrived at Bill’s first shooting nest. Glittering brass danced in the midday sun where Bill had fired at least six mags of 7.62 x 51 out of the SCAR. The SCAR had probably been stolen by the ‘bangers, but Noah could see the clear outline of the rifle in the dust where Bill had dropped it after it went dry.

  In the middle of the field of brass, a hundred boot prints were stamped into the ground. Noah could picture Bill in his cowboy boots, pouring rifle fire into the small army of criminals while he turned to engage one group, then another.

  A handful of spent cartridges had been mashed into the dry dirt by heel prints as Bill launched himself toward the farmhouse. Noah pictured him running his big rifle out of bullets, dropping it and hightailing it toward the house under a barrage of AK rounds.

  With the sun now directly overhead, spotting sign would be difficult, but Noah was in no hurry. With a four hour head start, the cartel soldiers would’ve already hit paved road in Mexico and vanished into the Sonora. Tracking them would be long and difficult—probably futile. Another hour or two here at the ranch could yield information that might help Noah cut their track farther down the line.

  In truth, Noah wasn’t worried about taking revenge. Bill had already exacted a hefty price, taking his vengeance in advance with absurd interest. The old man had found the death he’d always wanted, and he’d dragged a passel of shitbags with him to Valhalla.

  Noah realized that he’d drifted off for a moment, brooding over Bill’s boot print in the field of cartridges. If he was going to find Bill’s body at the end of the track, he damned-well was going to track it properly.

  Noah bobbled his tracking pol
e and crouched down, scanning until he found the next cowboy boot-heel in the dust. He poked the pointy end of the tracking pole into the back of Bill’s heel print and slid an orange rubber band up the pole until it marked the back of the first heel print—giving him the precise measurement between the left boot and the right boot. The stride measured almost seventy-five inches. That meant Bill had been running like his ass was on fire.

  Noah’s tracking pole was an old ski pole he’d found at a garage sale years before. He scratched inch marks in the aluminum and added the orange rubber band for this purpose—to act as a gauge between footprints.

  He duck-walked to the next print, and again, held the orange rubber band at the back of the heel depression. He swept the pointy end of the pole forward in the direction of travel and followed it with his eyes. The human eye tended to wander unless specifically directed to do otherwise. The stick made focusing on a small area of ground much easier. He would’ve missed the next print if not for the tracking pole. Dust had partially obscured it.

  With the help of the pole, Noah moved forward, one-print-at-a-time. After fifteen minutes of crouching on the ground and working the track, he reached the porch of the farmhouse.

  He carefully scanned in and around the track and found no blood. Bill had apparently made it this far without any major holes in his rawhide.

  The next boot track had been partially hidden by sneaker tracks in the dust on the porch. Those were probably from the surviving soldiers plundering the house.

  His dad had definitely gone inside, then reappeared on the threshold. Noah assumed he’d grabbed another weapon. Bill kept guns around the house like some old women kept cats.

  Based on the doorframe being splintered all to hell, Noah assumed Bill had used the jamb as cover for his next attack. The new shell casings scattered on the floor were also easily-identifiable. Bill had grabbed his old Marlin .45-70. Noah hoped he’d blasted at least one city boy with the cowboy gun. It would have a symmetry to it.

  Noah finally turned to the piece that’d been bugging him from the beginning: the blast mark in the dirt, just thirty yards off the porch. It wasn’t another plate charge. It wouldn’t have made sense to plant one so near the house and Bill had never bragged about a second booby trap. Plus, the blast scar was nowhere near as big as the hole under the Honda.

  Noah had never tracked sign on a battle scene before. In fact, he had never shot at a man, much less killed one. He’d seen plenty of blood on the ground while tracking—mostly from whitetail deer and javelina. But he’d never seen a blast scar like this one. The old man had taught him about explosives, and the two of them had even lit off pipe bombs together just to get some field practice. But Noah didn’t know enough to say for sure what caused the explosive scar on the hardpack dirt. Either the old man had hidden another explosive trap in his yard, or the gangbangers had brought grenades from Illinois.

  If the old man had hidden another trap or had stashed grenades, Noah felt positive he would’ve told him about it. There was no way Bill would keep his mouth shut about a prep that dramatic, at least not from Noah.

  A wave of emotion rolled over him. He needed to know for sure if his father was dead.

  On the outside chance that Bill’s body was in the house, Noah carefully piloted his own footprints around the porch and ducked through the shattered door. The house was blown all to hell. Thousands of bullets had torn through the walls and the furniture and had dismembered the place in a maelstrom of floating duff. There were few footprints, and all of them were city-bought sneakers, now mostly filled in with dust. He saw no cowboy boot prints, but he picked through the small ranch house anyway, checking the two bedrooms, the kitchen and the single bathroom. His father’s body was nowhere to be found.

  Still exercising meticulous care to walk around the sign in the house, Noah worked his way back to the front door. When he again saw the shattered door frame, he searched the floor for blood spatter and saw nothing beneath the transparent layer of dust and sofa stuffing.

  Noah stopped and took a deep breath that reached all the way down to his balls. He fought back a sob that rattled its way into his throat. The backlog of so much loss felt like it’d accumulated in his chest and now it wanted out. Noah heard his father’s words in his mind, uttered god-knew-how-many times as he’d grown up on the ranch.

  Walk it off, son.

  He wiped his face, put his hands on his hips and resumed.

  The boot prints in the porch dust had been completely hashed by sneaker prints, but Noah walked a circle around the porch and cut across what might be a partial cowboy boot print. He rotated around to get the sun in front of him, and the shadows revealed it to be a clear print from the forefoot of Bill’s boot. But when Noah went to measure from the heel of that print, the point of the tracking pole totally overshot another print. Bill had stopped running and started walking. Noah slid the orange band to the new stride—now about twenty inches. The new track hit the blast scar then suddenly vanished. Noah stood and looked in a slow circle.

  Then he saw the top of a boot, tipped on its side, ten feet from the blast scar.

  Bill’s cowboy boots—the same boots he’d worn for almost ten years—had “pull-up loops” on the tops, making it easier to insert fingers and pull them on--particularly helpful for an old man with beat-up knees.

  Noah saw the unmistakable shape of a pull-up loop. He picked his way to the boot, each step becoming more convinced it was Bill’s. With his tracking stick, Noah speared the loop and lifted the boot off the ground. Inside, he found a ragged bone and a mass of red flesh.

  Bill’s foot.

  Noah looked up to check on the lazy cloud, but his eyes swam beneath a flux of tears. He couldn’t bring himself to look inside the boot again, so he turned it around in his hand and examined the outside. There was no question it was Bill’s.

  Noah held the boot in one hand and pinched the bridge of his nose with the other. The sob rattled from up inside him and Noah choked it down again, this time mashing it into a billet of steel in the back of his throat.

  Bill had taken him in and poured everything a crusty, old commando could pour into a boy. Noah felt his grief and his gratitude comingle. He remembered Bill’s words a few days earlier.

  When you have something beautiful then you lose it, only a fool would waste time regretting it.

  Noah ran his shirtsleeve across his eyes and argued with Bill for the last time.

  Damn you, Bill. I need you. How the hell am I supposed to find true north without you around, yanging in my ear?

  He had known his father was dead since he saw the tracks at the border fence. Now with his dad’s boot heavy in his hand, he knew it in a different way. In an ultimate way.

  Noah looked around at the violence and chaos Bill had left in the wake of his passing. He smiled away his tears, and laughed wet and loud at the extravagant manner Bill had chosen to go out. What a melodramatic old fart. He couldn’t just grow old and vanish. He had to take down a pile of thugs and blow up his ranch in the process. Valhalla would be a better place for him. At very least, there would be more conversation around the feast table. Old Bill never knew when to keep his yap shut.

  Noah walked over to the porch and dumped the dust out of his own boots. He no longer cared about disturbing track. This funeral was over. It was time to get back to work. Noah got as close as he could to the smoking pyre of bodies and tossed Bill’s boot on top. With the body undoubtedly somewhere in the mix, he would keep it as whole as he could.

  Noah wanted to get on the track left by the gangbangers, but first his old man would want him to pack up whatever preps he could and take them with him.

  They’d always joked around, calling Bill’s prep bunker Noah’s “golden parachute,” the only inheritance Bill would likely leave his son. The ranch was mostly owned by the bank, and Bill had spent what little cash he had on beans, bullets and bandaids for his “prep bunker.” He never even talked about paying the land off.

&nb
sp; “You working on my golden parachute, Dad?” Noah remembered joking a couple weeks before when he found Bill hidden away in his bunker.

  “Yep, son. I got your inheritance waiting right here in my hand.” Bill had held up his middle finger. Noah smiled at the memory.

  With the sun going down and the funeral over, Noah wasn’t going to piss off the old man’s ghost. If he didn’t load up the preps, Bill would find a way to come back from the grave and kick his ass.

  Noah backed his Land Cruiser up to the barn, pretty sure that he would need to make a dozen trips to get the whole load. To his surprise, the bunker door was open and the stairs were exposed to the world. Noah climbed down the stairs and regarded the mess. The cartel soldiers had clearly raided the preps, but it didn’t seem like they’d taken much of the food or sundry supplies. However, they’d obliterated Bill’s stock of firearms and ammunition.

  The “Doomsday Cache” had been hidden underneath the old man’s “office” in the barn. That office had been where he’d stored his old army pictures, memorabilia, and where he drank that nasty mescal he got from his buddies across the border. But the bunker under the office was virtually impossible to find. Noah had lived there for two years as a boy without ever discovering its existence, and he’d scoured the damn ranch looking for cigarettes and porno magazines—anything the old man might be hiding from him. Even so, he hadn’t seen the “prep bunker” until after Bill had given him a stack of hints. It’d turned into a two week scavenger hunt for young Noah.

  As a boy, Noah noticed that there were two toilet plungers hanging next to one of the horse stalls—not particularly interesting except that there wasn’t a toilet in the barn and the plungers were in mint condition.

  Looking into one of the plungers young Noah saw a steel reinforcing pin from the connection point where the handle screwed into the rubber cup. The interior lip that normally formed the seal had been trimmed away so that the plunger was in effect just a big suction cup. Noah had confirmed that the second plunger was modified in the same way. Taking the plungers into the office, Noah sat at the desk and scanned from floor-to-ceiling, looking for concealed hatches.