by RW Krpoun
The light spilling into the hallway reached my legs as my first shot punched a black hole in the white shirt just above the third buttonhole, squarely in the center of his sternum, the impact knocking him back a step. His ugly face registered shock and surprise in equal measure as he fought to regain his balance atop legs suddenly gone wobbly and his right hand wavered between reaching for the wound and his revolver. I ignored him and rushed forward, slapping the lamp onto a handy side table as I went.
Dress Shirt’s legs folded as I vaulted the railing of the left-hand stairway and landed on the steps as a second Indio shouldered past his comrade with a double barreled shotgun held at the hip, only to run into five fast shots from Nhi’s Luger, the rounds walking across his torso from the bottom of his left lung to his right shoulder; her accuracy was good but she still fired too fast and too much, although she was burdened with that lightweight German 9mm Parabellum round. The squareheads weren’t going to go far trying to market that caliber.
He managed to fire both barrels into a crate of books as his legs folded; Nhi nimbly jumped atop a decorative dresser and then over the rail onto the right-hand stairs as I backed up a few more steps. Someone yelled outside as the shotgun man collapsed and then the long narrow windows to either side of the rather fancy door blew in as several shooters unloaded at the portal. Since we were high and to the sides nothing came even close, although the house took some serious injuries and the lacy curtains on either side of the door were fatally hit and collapsed to the floor in a rattle of brass rods.
Leaning to the side as the shots tapered off I saw a younger version of Dress Shirt in canvas trousers and a colorful shirt kneeling by the wagon reloading a break-top revolver and shot him twice in the chest, promptly sliding over to press against the wall as the gunfire erupted anew.
As the shooting tapered off I could hear shouting in some heathen language; looking over, I could barely make out Nhi, like me hugging the wall, but I could see the gleam of white teeth that was her grin. A spunky girl, that one. I tapped my chest and pointed up and over with exaggerated motions. She tapped her turban and stabbed a hand towards the door.
I loaded a full magazine as I eased up the stairs and turned to my left, heading for the nearest door and the patio doors in the room that would lead onto the decorative second story walkway that encircled the second floor. Slipping the latch, I came out onto the walkway fast and ready, but I was alone: the shooters were still in the street below pounding away at the doorway.
Slipping down to the corner, I belly-crawled to the edge and peered out from under the hanging cast-iron holly leaves of the green-painted railing.
Below me Dress Shirt was sprawled on his back breathing his last, and Shotgun’s legs were sticking out of the doorway. The kid I had shot was face-down in the gutter, and another Indio was crouched against the building across the way binding up a wound in his thigh that was leaking scarlet into his peon trousers. An Indio was leading the team that was hitched to the wagon up the street as the horses didn’t like the shooting. Four more were standing in the street blazing away with handguns into the house below me with considerable enthusiasm.
What gave me pause was the number of crazies being attracted by the gunfire; they were staggering up the street at best speed, only to veer off and look purposeless when they reached the Indios, who largely ignored them. The Indios might have gotten used to the sight of the crazies, but I hadn’t.
Still, there wasn’t anything to do but to plunge ahead, and it was better to deal with the Human opposition while they were still happy to stand in the open and shoot at a doorway rather than to wait until they started thinking.
Taking a careful breath I stood and opened fire, working left to right. The crazies raised their wailing cry which caused me to throw one round wide, but they were quicker on the uptake than the shooters; I had hit three of those in the street before I had to dive for the floor and hastily rolled back around the corner as bullets spanged off the cast-iron rails and punched up through the flooring. I still had one in the chamber but the magazine I dropped into my shirt was empty-I was seeing why it was so easy for Nhi to get into the fast-firing habit.
Speaking of that little terror, she popped out the patio door as I was slotting a full magazine into place, startling me, but not as badly as she might-I had been keeping an eye on that avenue.
“Fire,” she observed quietly, pointing down. “They shot the lantern.”
“Great. You hear the crazies?”
“Yes. What is in the wagon?”
“Dunno.”
“We should see.”
A rifle shot made both of us jump, although it was on the other side of the house. “That’s Captain’s rolling-block. How fast is the fire spreading?”
“Pretty fast.”
“Let’s go see what the others are up to.” I led the way towards the rear of the house, where I was careful to use the corner for a safe look, which was good: Mac was crouched behind a chimney on the single-story house behind ours, rifle at the ready. He acknowledged my cautious wave, and we moved around as Captain’s rolling block barked again. Leaning over the rail I saw that worthy kneeling against a post, reloading. Tobias was directly below us, mounted and holding the other hoses’ reins. Down the street the Indio I had seen with the wagon team was sprawled in the roadway, and a crazy was down and leaking brains not far from his corpse.
“Great,” I slapped the railing as more crazies trotted around the corner of the house, wailing. “No outside stairs.”
“Jump down onto horse like cowboy,” Nhi suggested, managing to keep a straight face for a second.
“Yeah, yeah. Go ahead and climb down. Tobias, take the horses back to the far corner of the next house.”
Bracing myself against a roof support I opened fire as the first crazies gimped into range; below Captain switched to his Mauser, and Mac, having gotten back to his horse, opened up with his rifle a moment later. There were only about twenty of the zombies and they did not fare well coming down the open street towards us.
Reloading as Captain picked off the last one, I holstered the M1911 and laboriously climbed over the railing. Nhi had climbed down like a cat going up a tree, but I was a lot older than I had been the last time I climbed anything. Quite frankly, I am not fond of heights and never have been. I ended up hanging from the edge of the walkway and then carefully dropping to the ground.
“Sounds like you found yourself a fight, if nothing else,” Captain observed as I swung aboard Pork Chop and stowed my lock picks and the empty magazines I had stashed inside my shirt. “Who were those jaspers?”
“Chucks, or whoever they are. Indios.”
“Chuj.”
“Check the wagon,” Nhi insisted, not looking up from the magazine she was refilling.
“Yeah, let’s take a look.” I urged Pork Chop forward with a nudge of my heels.
“You find what you’re looking for, hoss?” Captain slid his rolling-block into its saddle scabbard.
“Yeah.”
“That why you set the house on fire?”
“Nah, that just happened.”
“Things happen around you, Seth, you ever notice that?”
“Its caught my attention once or twice.” I drew my saddle Colt as we came around the corner, but if any of the Indios were still upright they had taken to their heels. “I’m going to take a look at this crew.”
The fire in the house was getting going pretty good as I went from body to body collecting weapons and looking for news. There wasn’t much to learn-they had stick-like symbols tattooed on their arms that might have been writing or an imitation of writing, they were men who lived hard and rough wearing looted clothes, and their pockets were filled with all sorts of pretty gee-gaws. More ominously each wore a worn black stone disk about the size of a silver dollar on a cord around their necks; the stone looked to be the same stuff as the statues. I used a silver fork one had in his coat pocket as a probe to work them off the bodies, and flu
ng them into the heart of the building’s flames.
Amazingly, Dress Shirt was still alive when I got to him, wheezing heavily and his face having gone gray. My round must have clipped his spine because he could only twitch feebly as I relived him of his stone and chucked it into the inferno. After securing his revolver and ammunition, I leaned close. “Who do you work for?”
He worked his lips but nothing audible emerged. Straightening, I shot him between the eyes with his own weapon, dumped the rounds, put the unloaded revolver with the others and used the jacket I had laid them on as a crude bag.
Captain had the wagon team calmed and Nhi was standing on the driver’s bench as I tossed the coat-sack of handguns and cartridges over the tail gate. “What were they stealing?”
“Show him,” Captain nodded, and Nhi turned from whatever she had been looking at to hop into the wagon bed.
I took the rifle she passed me and examined it. “Spanish Mauser, Model 1893, 7x57mm in caliber, bolt-action, five-round staggered box magazine.” I studied an arsenal stamp. “Spanish Navy issue, looks like, with US Marine inspection stamps.”
“War surplus,” Captain observed sourly. “Captured from the Dons, inspected, then sold, ended up down here.”
“Good rifles, the locals had some in the Islands.” I passed the weapon back up to Nhi. “How many?”
“Twenty.” The Captain was still scowling into the wagon bed, probably pondering the irony of weapons he had faced in Cuba ending up in hostile hands in Mexico.
“Ammunition?”
“Twenty-five cases, twenty-five thousand rounds if they’re all full. The weight’s right, anyway.”
“That’s a lot of ammunition.”
“Mebbe not. There’s a nearly-new Maschinengewehr 08 in there, too.”
“A what?”
“A machine gun, Imperial German Army Model 1908. Belt-fed, water-cooled, it’s the German version of the Maxim gun.”
“I thought the Brits bought out Maxim?”
“I think so, but you can’t keep the squareheads out of anything.”
“So who did this this load belong to originally?”
“Rebels, is my guess. There’s some other stuff, personal weapons, too, nothing special. I figure Green Coat or whoever’s in charge sent some of their helpers back into town to scrounge up more firepower when they realized that grabbing the orphans wasn’t going as planned. The boys decided to help themselves to some loot along the way.” He held up a sack with a bolt of cloth jutting from the top. “And a lot of canned goods and booze. I figure we can donate the cash and useful stuff to the orphans and dump the firewater.”
“Yeah, they had the family silver and a bunch of books set out for gathering at that place,” I jerked a thumb over my shoulder at the burning house. “Well, one of those rapid-fire guns would certainly have ruined our day-let’s hope they don’t get another. Meanwhile we can haul this load back and see what the notes can tell us.”
“We’re turning into step-and-fetch boys,” Captain grumbled as he looped his horse’s reins onto a handy hook on the wagon’s side. “Chinee firework mechanics, Austrian diggers, and now German machineguns.” A thought struck him. “You know how to use one of them?”
Mac, who had been sitting on his horse as silent as a statue, shook his head.
“I know how to use a Maxim. Probably isn’t a lot different.” I swung up into my saddle as Nhi scrambled aboard her patient mule.
“Let’s hope so. We’re gonna need everything we can get before all this is over.”
Because of the wagon we headed out the main street to take the road back to the presidio.
“I hope this is our last trip here,” Captain groused from the wagon. “I don’t like this place.”
“I don’t, either,” I shifted in my saddle, looking behind me.
“What?” Nhi asked.
“We’ve got eyes on us.”
“Yeah,” Mac nodded once.
“I hate this place,” Captain muttered as he snapped the stock in place on his Mauser.
“Company,” Mac announced as we reached the edge of town. Up ahead a line of dusty horsemen were moving into a trot at the sight of us.
“No uniforms,” I observed. “Rebels or bandits.”
“Rebels,” Captain set the brakes. “Bandits wouldn’t be coming towards armed men with an entire town sitting empty.”
“That seems right. You suppose they’ll want their guns back?”
“More’n likely.”
The leader of the group was a young man in the fancy trousers and vest you see vaqueros wear when they’re in town trying to impress the senoritas, with a nickel-plated Colt catching the sunlight in a fast-drawn rig that had lots of silver do-dads set into the leather. The other fifteen or so were dressed as peons riding badly on poor horses, and armed with Remington carbines and a collection of sidearms that looked like they had robbed an El Paso pawn shop. Several also carried machetes, and these I marked as men who were more dangerous than the rank and file.
And Billy Taylor, moving up from the rear of the group, now wearing a Colt in a reversed old-style cavalry holster, a Winchester’s stock jutting from his saddle scabbard.
“Hey, that’s your buddy from the cantina,” Captain observed.
“Imagine that.”
“Small world,” Mac commented.
“Yeah, and getting crowded fast.”
The leader drew up in front of us in grand style, while his troop plodded to an untidy halt. A couple eased their horses out to the sides, and I noted they were also men who were carrying machetes. So: a mix of veterans and novices.
Billy urged his horse to the front alongside the leader, and smiled tiredly at me. “Hullo, Seth.”
“Billy,” I nodded. “Mexico’s getting a lot smaller these days.”
“We got word that there’s trouble down here and came down to see what is what,” he shrugged.
“The revolution isn’t enough to keep you busy?”
“Maybe not.” He jerked his chin towards the town. “What is going on here?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
The leader impatiently spat a stream of Spanish. Billy answered, and after a couple exchanges he turned back to me. “Colonel Ramirez wants you to understand that looters and thieves will be hanged.”
“Colonel?”
Billy shrugged. “You do what you can. He’s a good man, just a little young.’
“Billy, I know you will have trouble believing this, but we’re on the side of the angels in this business. There’s an orphanage in an old presidio twelve miles in that direction that’s going to be the site of a massacre if we don’t get back to it with everything we can muster.”
“Who is going to do the massacring? Where is everyone here?”
I shook my head. “Listen close, Billy, and remember who I am. I’m not given to flights of imagination or whimsy. There’s a guy, we don’t know his name, he has some Indios from the deep south helping him, they have this snake oil business that turns people, adults, into madmen. Raging killers, I mean tough killers-you have to hit them in the head to stop them.”
He stared at me. “What, you mean the whole town…”
“The whole town, a troop of cavalry out east, and by now quite a few little villages, I imagine. Probably more that we haven’t heard about-this isn’t something small.”
He didn’t look like he believed me, but after a long pause he started relaying it to the Colonel. I glanced over at Mac while the conversation was rattling away, but Billy must have been sticking to what I told him because Mac didn’t slip me a wink.
My Spanish wasn’t up to following, but you didn’t need a word of the language to see the Colonel wasn’t buying it for a second, and that while Billy was trying to take my side he really didn’t believe me, either.
Finally he turned back to me. “The Colonel says you can depart, but you will have to leave the wagon.”
“How about you come with us to
the orphanage? Its only twelve miles, and there’s a monk there who can explain the business a lot better than I can.”
The Colonel wasn’t interested. “Seth, just hand over the wagon.”
“Why won’t he listen to the monk?”
Billy sighed. “The Colonel feels that religion is not a viable concept.”
“He doesn’t believe in God?”
“No.”
“Great bunch you’ve hooked up with,” I grinned at him. “I’ve heard about things happening down here. Ugly things. You sure you’re on the right side?”
Billy flushed. “Look, there’s seventeen of us. Just ride away.”
“Billy, Billy, Billy. You were there with the Fourteenth when we walked through a sea of Boxers. Didn’t that teach you that numbers can lie? You’ve got five, maybe six that will pull the trigger, while there’s three with ice water in their veins behind me, and the kid is no slouch, either. Worse than that, we are all marksmen-we can ride away, and before you’ve gone five miles we’ll be stripping the guns from your corpses and resuming our trip. Those Remingtons are single shots and short-barreled; most of your boys couldn’t hit an ox at fifty paces, I bet, and your Colonel isn’t even carrying a rifle. You know what long-range rifle fire from a trained man can accomplish.”
He sighed.
I waited, but he just stared at Pork Chop’s head. “Captain, mount up.”
“We could take them,” that worthy observed as he swung to the ground and walked to his horse.
“We will,” I nodded, drumming my fingers on the butt of my cut-down shotgun. “You’re making a mistake, Billy. You’re on the wrong side.”
“I’m just trying to help people.”
“The wrong people, Billy.”
I don’t know if I was serious about circling back and picking them off-there was no doubt we had the skills, Captain most especially, and Mac was steaming like a nitro left too long in the hot sun. Nhi looked angry, and to be truthful I wasn’t happy at all, either.