Chains ran from the gear work to a set of wheels and pulleys in a block-and-tackle arrangement mounted on the left wall, controlling cablelike rope hawsers that ran up the wall and across the ceiling, before dropping straight down to the sides of the rectangular lift platform below.
At the top of the capstan, a number of wooden spokes jutted out horizontally from the hub, allowing the central shaft to rotate on its axis, turning the gears below and manipulating chains and ropes to raise or lower the platform as needed.
The block-and-tackle rigging enabled a few stagehands to work the platform.
Manuel and Vincente took their places at the capstan, freeing Hector.
“Two of our men are onstage behind the curtain keeping an eye on things. I will tell them that the time has come for the axe to fall,” Hector said. “A time we have been waiting for for so long, fearing it might never arrive.” He crossed to the spiral staircase along the right-hand wall, starting up it, rifle in hand, six-gun in his belt.
Ringo paused, waiting for Hector to ascend and pass the word to his fellow rebels. A moment later, he started up the spiral staircase, with its wooden treads and iron risers and struts, corkscrewing around a vertical central iron shaft.
The staircase shook and swayed under Ringo’s tread as he mounted to the top, through a hole in the ceiling—a ceiling that became a floor once he’d gone topside.
Now he stood in the wings.
The backstage area was lit, but not brightly. The curtains were closed, screening the stage from the audience on the other side.
On the side of the stage opposite from Ringo, Hector stood, animatedly talking to another stagehand. A third stood at center stage where the curtains joined, peeking out through a narrow slit between them to keep watch on the comings and goings in the theater hall, ready to sound the alarm should any show sign of coming back behind the curtain.
Seeing Ringo, Hector pointed him out to the stagehand to whom he’d been talking. Ringo raised a hand in greeting, the other nodding.
Urged by Hector, the stagehand started down the staircase, disappearing through the hole in the floor. Descending to the under-stage floor, he crossed to take his place at the capstan.
He, Juan Garza, Polk Muldoon, Vincente, and Miguel stood in the spaces between the capstan handles, each facing the back of the next man before him in his slot, each gripping one of the horizontal spokes in both hands.
La Vieja stood in the under-stage doorway, holding back the girls crowding the halls.
Pepe Herrera stood beside the wall, gripping the wooden handle of the lever controlling the trapdoor mechanism.
Matt, Sam, Remy, and Jeff were aboard the lift platform. Matt and Remy sat crosslegged on the platform, Indian–style, the machine-gun cart between them. Each held the cart to steady it. Sam and Jeff stood at opposite ends of the lift, gripping the twin vertical hawsers rising to pulley wheels set in the floor beside the short ends of the trapdoor hatch.
Remy consulted his pocket watch. “Eight o’clock, showtime!”
Herrera threw the switch, tripping a set of jointed rods and gears running up the wall and across the ceiling to the trapdoor.
A series of solid metal thunks sounded as the mechanism shot home. Above, the seemingly solid ceiling parted, hinged hatches swinging open to fall vertically in place, opening a rectangular space in the stage floor.
The men put their weight against the handles, digging in, moving forward, pushing the spoke handles gripped in front of them. The capstan rotated on its axis, turning the intricate clockwork gears and wheels stacked under the platform. They, in turn, hauled in the chain, winding it around the central shaft at the base, heaving at the hawser ropes attached to the lift platform.
With a jerk and a heave, the platform left the floor, rising ceilingward. There was the creak of taut hempen rope, the squeal of recently well-oiled pulley wheels and toothed clockwork gears.
The platform rushed upward through space, swiftly rising up to and through the trapdoor hatchway. It fit neatly in the oblong space, its topside level with the stage floor, with only a hairline crack around the edges to indicate the platform’s outline.
Matt, Sam, Remy, and Jeff—and the Mitrailleuse-bearing cart—appeared onstage, materializing as if by magic.
Below, seeing the platform was in place, Pepe Herrera threw the lever home, locking the platform firmly into the stage floor. Not so firmly that the four aboard it failed to quit it as soon as possible, rolling the cart clear of it, too, pushing it downstage towards the curtains.
Handles on the legs of the cart allowed the wheels to lock in place, freezing them and immobilizing the cart.
“You came onstage like Mephisto the Devil popping up in the opera Faust,” said Ringo as he joined them, being a man of some wide-ranging culture.
“Our mission is not only to raise hell, but to loose it,” replied Sam, himself not unschooled in the realm of the arts.
Remy readied the Mitrailleuse, ramming a cartridge plate into the receiver at the underside of the piece, hitting it with his palm heel to ensure it was properly lodged. Matt stood beside him, carefully studying Remy’s actions, fascinated by the gun, absorbed in its workings.
Remy pulled the bolt forward, then pushed it back, engaging the firing mechanism. He set the piece for single-shot capacity.
From beyond the curtains came a hubbub of crowd noises, the rise and fall of loud talk, and bodies stirring.
Matt and Jeff flanked the machine-gun cart on one side, Sam and Ringo on the other. Hector and a second stagehand waited in the wings, manning the ropes controlling the opening and closing of the curtains.
“Ready,” Remy announced.
Matt waved a hand, signalling the stagehands. He shouldered his rifle, as did Sam, Ringo, and Jeff.
Hector and his sideman heaved away at the ropes. Curtains parted in the center, the open space widening as twin sets of red velvet curtains rushed away from each other to the sides, baring the stage.
Beyond the proscenium arch, the audience was revealed, 150 flesh merchants, male and female, decked out in gaudy finery, massed up front in the center orchestra seats, surrounded by bodyguards, pistoleros, and fawning hangers-on. Their faces were flushed with wine, eyes glittering, all eager and expectant for the show to commence, the bidding to begin.
A hush of silence fell like a death knell on the assembled vice lords as they experienced the shock of recognition. The open curtains unveiled not a clutch of fresh young captive beauties clad only in thin, short, sleeveless, white cotton shifts for quick and easy removal to expose every inch of their intmate nubile charms (made more piquant by tearful eyes, trembling mouths, and quivering chins), but rather, the shape of their own deaths.
Annihilation was nigh.
Oohs and aahs of appreciation and scattered applause were almost all stilled now, though a few slow-witted dolts and drunks continued enthusiastically hammering meaty palms together in heavy-handed clapping. A collective gasp of mingled terror and outrage went up from the audience.
Don Carlos was not a humorous man. It was known he was not given to pranks, jests, and similar foolishnesses. He was all business. No, this was none of his doing.
The pause lasted but an eyeblink, a space between heartbeats stretching out under the monumental strain of awful revelaton, stretching out into eternity.
Then—
Eternity snapped—shattered—as Remy opened up with the Mitrailleuse, the others cutting loose with their rifles.
Remy turned the hand crank, milling out rounds like a butcher working a meat grinder, turning fresh meat into hamburger. He went for the guards first. They were a sweet target ranged along the side and rear walls of the theater.
More were on the rear wall, so he targeted them first, swinging the machine gun on its tripod, sweeping the muzzle from left to right. He mowed down the line of guards like a row of clay pipes in a shooting gallery, and with as little compunction.
Flames bearded the wide, disk-shaped mu
zzle, spearing from one barrel bore to the next, thirty-seven in all, brass cartridges arching sideways out of the ejector. Guards were spinning, swirling, throwing their arms up in the air as they went down, smearing blood on the wall behind them, a wall progressively cratered by machine-gun fire.
The four riflemen were no less enthusiastic, picking off the guards along the side wall. They fired, then levered fresh rounds into the chamber, and fired again.
Clamor racketed off the walls: gunfire, screams, shrieks. The flesh peddlers in the center orchestra seats were hurled into pandemonium by stark-raving fear. Some threw themselves below the seats to the floor; others tried to flee, tripping each other up.
A lull opened in the clamor as Remy exhausted his thirty-seven-shot cartridge plate, pausing to reload. A couple of pistoleros standing in the aisle near the stage swung their six-guns toward the machine gunner to take him out.
Matt Bodine swung his rifle into play, drilling the gunmen with some well-placed shots. They crumpled to the floor.
Remy reloaded another cartridge plate, the Mitrailleuse resuming its lethal chattering.
Sam Two Wolves focused his firepower on a tempting target he’d spied out the day before while reconnoitering the opera house.
A length of thick hempen rope stretched from a wall-mounted cleat to center ceiling, where it threaded a block of wheels and pulleys to stretch downward to the hub of a chandelier, now a wheel of light dangling over the audience’s heads like the Sword of Damocles.
Sam’s rifle blasted the rope in the same place time and again, cutting into it above the cleat, which he used as a guideline to concentrate his tight firing group. The rope came partially apart, chandelier lurching downward some few feet before jerking to a halt.
Its frosted globe lamps and strings of beaded crystals rattled and tinkled as the chandelier swayed like a pendulum.
The vice lords below looked up, heads tilted back, necks cording. The rope still held.
Sam took careful aim and fired once more, parting the rope. Loosed, the heavy chandlier plunged floorward, the now-severed end of the rope racing upward, whipping through pulley wheels.
Shrieks of the hopelessly doomed sounded beneath the plummeting juggernaut, only to be cut off by the scythe of the crash. A dozen or more were crushed beneath. Others at the rim were struck down like half-squashed bugs.
Globe lamps shattered, spewing fire, flames licking over velvet seat cushions and gold-braided ropes, setting ablaze those helplessly pinned beneath the great weight.
Carried away by the carnage, Jeff Howell vented a bloodcurdling Rebel yell, its piercing shriek rising to a whooping crescendo—the famous “howl” that had given him the name of Howling Jeff.
His rifle barrel began to glow a dull red as he slung lead throughout the hall, gunning down foes.
Armed guards rushed down flights of stairs to the edge of the overhanging balcony, rifles raised to fire down at the killer angels performing onstage.
Matt Bodine saw them coming, raised his rifle barrel and opened fire.
One guard was hit, causing him to tumble down the balcony stairs in a bone-shattering somersault. Another, tagged, let the rifle fly from his hands. Clutching his chest where he’d been hit, he bowed forward from the waist, and pitched headfirst over the brass balcony rail to fall shrieking into the seats on the floor below, silenced by a sickening crash.
Not pausing, Matt swung the muzzle in line with the next target, squeezing the trigger. A third guard was hit. He sat down hard, dead. Matt picked off a fourth vaquero and then there were none, at least not in the balcony.
The vice lords were not minded to return fire, fair fights against armed foes not being in their line. Helpless girls barely out of childhood were more their meat.
Panicked fugitives fled blindly in all directions at once like so many chickens with their heads cut off, tripping each other up. They collided, crashing into each other, fighting madly, tearing, and clawing at one another. The weak and luckless went down to be trampled by those still on their feet.
A bullet whizzed past Ringo’s head, so close that its passage lifted his long hair.
The shot had been fired by a tough in evening clothes standing alone between rows of seats.
He missed, but Ringo didn’t. A rifle bullet drilled the shooter through the chest, a red carnation of blood blossoming on his ruffled white shirtfront where the bullet had found him.
A figure jumped up from where he’d been crouching behind the seats, darting into the aisle and running madly toward the back of the hall—
Sebastiano.
Sam had been looking for him, but Sebastiano had kept under cover until now.
Sebastiano ran with arms and legs pumping, sprinting on his toes, fast eating up the distance between himself and escape.
Sam shot one of his legs out from under him. Sebastiano fell sprawling.
A fat old bawd overstuffed into a too-tight, green satin gown and her two bodyguards came hurrying up the aisle. Sebastiano was in the way, so they ran him down, trampling him underfoot.
Sam paused, holding his fire for a few beats. The hefty madam and her two protectors ran on, leaving Sebastiano sprawled on the carpeted aisle, twitching and jerking. Clutching the arm of an aisle seat, he began trying to pull himself up.
The woman in the green dress and her bodyguards were under the balcony, closing on the safety of the lobby door. Sam shot them down, all three.
Sebastiano somehow hauled himself forward and began crawling up the aisle, pulling himself from seat to seat, dragging himself along with one dead leg trailing behind him. Sam shot him in the arm that was pulling him along. Sebastiano went down again and lay there writhing and squirming.
Doors at the far wall burst open, pistoleros rushing in, blasting away with six-guns at the men onstage. Matt and Jeff cut them down.
Sam dropped a kill shot into Sebastiano’s back, shattering his spine, and turned to other targets.
Fires started by the chandelier downed by Sam were going good now, ripening into a hearty roaring blaze in the middle of the center orchestra seats. A number of small independent fires had combined into one furious conflagration, smoke columns rising from it.
Some of the vice lords were on fire, long red tongues of flame licking greedily over gaudy checked suits and body-hugging gowns, turning the wearers into human torches.
The theater was filling with heat, smoke, screams. Matt Bodine reckoned that he and his fellow revengers had done their part here.
Diversion? The carnage in the theater hall was more than enough. Vengeance was sweet, but the purpose of the mission was to rescue captive girls.
Matt motioned for the others to stand down and begin the retreat. Hector and his fellow stagehand had already gone below to the under-stage area.
Matt and Sam stood side by side, laying down covering fire while Remy and Jeff pushed the machine-gun cart back on the platform.
Ringo stood in the open hatchway of a spiral staircase, waiting for the others to step on to the platform. When they were all in place, he went down the stairs into the under-stage room.
Herrera and the others stood by, manning the capstan, waiting for the signal.
Ringo descended the staircase halfway.
“Take it down!” he shouted, leaning over the rail, hand beside his mouth.
Pepe Herrera threw the lever that worked the trapdoor mechanism, unfastening the restraining bar and clamps holding the lift platform locked at stage level, opening the traps.
The men at the capstan put their shoulders into it, setting the wheel in motion, circling the central shaft.
The lift platform started downward, sinking through the oblong hatchway. Matt, Sam, Remy, and Jeff sat on the platform to better maintain their balance during the descent. Ropes creaking, pulleys squealing, the shaking, shimmying platform sank through the hatchway and through empty space toward the floor.
It touched down with a bump, Herrera once more working the lever, closing the tr
apdoors and sealing them shut. No enemy gunmen could shoot down through the hatchway at them, should any of the foe have the presence of mind to do so.
The under-stage rear doors were open, Pima Joe and Ed Dane standing beside them. Gunfire and shrieks could be heard throughout the opera house grounds.
Remy and Jeff rolled the cart off the platform, Remy pausing to reload a fresh cartridge plate.
“That’s a powerful piece of ordnance you’ve got there,” Matt said, pausing to reload his rifle.
“Be sure to tell Stebbins that,” Remy said, grinning.
“Hell, I’ll tell Davenport!”
Sam reloaded his rifle, then went to the rear doors, approaching them from the side so as not to outline himself in the gaping doorway.
“Sounded like hellzappopin’ up there, Sam,” Ed Dane greeted him.
“I said we’d bring down the house.”
“Sure, but what do you do for an encore?”
“Get the girls out of here.”
“A lot of folks have the same idea,” Ed Dane said, gesturing toward the open doorway, which framed a group of people gathering outside.
A mixed bunch of townsfolk and campesinos was collecting there, with more coming every minute. Many had come with some vain hope of rescuing stolen daughters, wives, and sweethearts—impossible dream now turned into tantalizing reality!
“They’re waiting to take their gals home, too,” Ed Dane said.
“We won’t disappoint them,” Sam promised.
Hector was outside speaking to the people, getting them ready for the big breakout. The Tombstone raiders moved the machine gun outside to provide covering fire if needed, Jeff Howell pushing one side of the cart, Polk Muldoon the other. Remy stood at the rear manning the gun.
The crowd parted, letting the Mitrailleuse move to the fore, commanding a field of fire across the rear grounds and gardens of the opera house.
Violent action raged in front of the building, where a mob of townsmen and campesinos tore into slavers and buyers fleeing the burning opera house, shooting down vice lords and Don Carlos’s vaqueros and flunkies as they came stumbling down the front stairs.
Blood Bond 16: A Hundred Ways to Die Page 27