Читать книгу The Wolves of El Diablo - Eric Red - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

The cantina sat off the beaten desert trail, a ramshackle structure at the foot of a lonely canyon in the barren Mexican badlands. The red sky was a bloody sickle on the horizon, a full yellow moon on the rise.

The saloon was a cheap hovel cobbled together from mismatched boards and a tin roof, a gob of chewed tobacco God had spat in the desolation. A hand painted sign outside the blanket-covered doorway advertised cheap whisky for the unlikely passersby on the rural trail. A few horses were tethered to the post outside, tails swishing flies in the lazy heat.

Tumbleweed rolled, stopped, rolled again, was gone.

A cloud of dust appeared in the distance, shattering the stillness.

Eight riders materialized, huge, ragged and unkempt, coming on with frightening speed and purpose.

The Mexican bandits rode up, brutally reined their horses outside the cantina and swung out of their saddles, dusty boots hitting the dirt in a jangle of spurs. The gang was six men and one woman, a hairy bunch. All were wildly hirsute in appearance, bandoleer gun belts draping their chests, sweaty hats or bandanas on their heads, jackets and trousers old and covered in filth. The brigands didn’t bother to tether their stallions for the lathered animals were too fearful to budge from where they stood. Wild eyed, snouts frothing, the horses cowed as their harsh masters pushed aside the hanging ragged blanket and stalked through the door into the cantina.

Once inside, the leader of the bandits took off her hat, shook her lush black hair loose to tumble down her broad powerful shoulders and brushed it out of her face. The woman was savagely beautiful with hard Aztec features, cruel lips and startling blue eyes a blaze of turquoise in a brown and ageless windblown face.

Her name was Azul. The word meant blue in Spanish.

As pack leader, the woman entered the cantina first, the other bandits following obediently on her booted heels.

The other customers looked up at the chorus of ringing spurs as the bandits filled the place. Five Mexicans sat at makeshift tables drinking dirty glasses of cheap whisky in the stifling heat, three sunburnt cowboys and two Federales huddled perspiring in the shade of the cantina like lizards under rocks. Flies buzzed. The place reeked of cheap alcohol, sweat, dirt, and body odor.

Azul’s fierce predatory gaze scoured the cantina, her lip curling in displeasure when she did not see what she was looking for. Heads swiveled to watch her, all eyes fixed to the bandita’s voluptuous figure framed in the failing light through the doorway. The customers ogled her heavy brown cleavage bursting against her leather shirt, twin firm mounds fighting to bust loose of their cloth restraints. Azul smiled like a slash of a blade.

Fools. How well she knew those cabrone looks—they always came right before the screams.

With a squeak of the leather gun belts slung on her shapely hips, Azul strode purposefully past the faces watching her strong rounded buttocks pumping like pistons under her trousers atop her long legs. The atmosphere in the bar quickened, the air crackling with mounting danger. A pungent smell of strange animal heat mingled with the bar odors. Azul’s seven hulking, bearded, filthy vaqueros were fanning out behind her. She cast a fiery glance at her gang then cut her gaze to the wakening full moon in the sky. The bandita smiled for she was well protected.

The bartender watched Azul’s bouncing tits as she approached fearlessly. Behind the nailed boards that passed for a counter, the scrofulous barkeep’s shifty eyes still ogled her breasts as the bandita bellied up to the bar. A fierce whistle from her puckered wet lips brought his eyes up to her own and the raw force of Azul’s stare shackled his eyeballs.

Azul slammed a paper handbill down on the bar. “I seek these hombres,” she whispered in a husky susurration, animal in cadence. Drawing a slow glance down to the paper under her hand on the counter, her eyes pulled the barman’s gaze along with hers to the handbill.

The crumpled wanted poster bathed in red hued twilight showed the crudely sketched faces of three gunfighters. The names of the notorious outlaws were stamped in bold block type lettering above the thousand-dollar reward notices on their heads.

Samuel Tucker.

John Fix.

Lars Bodie.

“Have you seen them?” Azul demanded.

The bartender shrugged. “Gringos all look the same, but I have not seen them.”

“They would have ridden from the north.” The bandita’s lips compressed with hatred. “From Santa Sangre.”

“I have not seen these vaqueros. Haven’t seen you before either, señora,” the barkeep said warily. “Where are you from?”

“We ride from the south.”

“You are bounty killers, sí?”

“No.”

“You are friends of these men?”

“No.”

Outside the cantina window the last of the sunlight trickled away as a cold tide of moonlight flooded the darkness of the bar.

The rest of the bandits were fanning out behind their leader, taking position around the room, blocking anyone’s escape. A pungent smell of animal heat was in the air. The brigands regarded the moon through the window with flares of eyeshine in their hairy bearded heads.

Customers in the bar grew nervous and a few hands moved nearer to the guns in their holsters. The Federales exchanged uncomfortable glances, knowing it was their job to do something but seeing no money or profit in it.

Sensing the threat, the bartender reached below the counter, fingers inching towards the sawed-off Remington shotgun loaded with double ought buckshot he stowed there. When his hand closed on the stock of the weapon it emboldened him. “What do you want with these men?” he suspiciously demanded of the strange woman.

“They killed my brother,” she snarled.

When Azul spit out the words in answer, she spat out teeth that popped from her gums and clattered on the bar counter, shocking the bartender—he was doubly startled as he saw the sharp canine fangs punch like tusks through the pink flesh where her teeth had been seconds before.

Her hair was growing, the bartender saw.

The beautiful thick black trestles flowing like a river from Azul’s head now poured like a fountain of hair over her shoulders. The barman marveled at this in the few seconds he had left to live, until wonder turned into revulsion then horror as patchy bristles of pubic-like black hair rustled in a forest out of the smooth skin of her face as the bandita grew a beard. Her eyes pulled apart with a scraping of skull socket bone, her jaw dislocating with a sickening crack, razor sharp rows of salivating fangs disfiguring her mouth like a bear trap inside her cheeks. Azul was in great pain, leaning on both hands on the bar, arms lock elbowed—those furry hands reshaped in a popping of breaking and reconfiguring bones and cartilage as jagged talons punched in sprays of blood through her fingertips, shattering the nails, as the palms of her hands became black pads. The claws raked deep marks in the wood of the counter.

By now the bartender had time to lug the shotgun out from under the bar. He was busy shouldering the weapon to blow the she-thing’s head off but the sight of the front of her face stretching as the skull punched out a prodigious gaping wolf snout caused his fatal hesitation in pulling the trigger. And the werewoman attacked. Lunged over the bar and ate his face. His entire head was instantly gobbled in the slavering maw of the beast, savage jaws snapping shut, crushing his skull like an egg, splattering a yolk of brains and blood across the bottles on the bar and the mirror.

The splashed curtain of blood dripped like melted red candlewax down the mirror, reflecting the werewolf Azul had become shearing the bartender’s head off his shoulders with her fangs, biting through tendon and spinal column and swallowing the decapitated head down her gullet in ravenous slobbering gulps. Behind her, the bloody mirror reflected a ghastly tableau.

All around the cantina, the other bandits were turning into werewolves and revealing their horrific true selves. The seven screaming, agonized men suffered violent seizures, eyes rolling up in their sockets revealing the whites, frothing at the mouth, toppling tables and chairs as they staggered and thrashed in the pitiless moonlight blasting into the bar: spines whiplashed, legs twisted into dog-like haunches, bushy tails sprouted from hindquarters. The dirt floor was littered with piles of discarded clothing the bandits shed while transforming. Frozen in horror where they sat, the terrified customers in the cantina stared in shock and awe at the sudden sickening spectacle happening around them. Now, growing to eight feet in height, the half-man half-wolf monsters crouched hungrily under the tin ceiling and looked for prey.

One of the policia federales was less drunk than the other boracchos in the cantina and moved quicker than the rest, ran for his life but never reached the doorway. A towering black shape blocked his path, a hairy paw with huge scythe-like claws raking deep through the canvas of his uniform and cloth of his undershirt ... RRRRR-RRR-IIIIIIIPPPPP ... talons digging through the fat flesh of his chest and cleaving the ribcage, cleanly exposing his red wet lungs and beating heart, and ripping the organs from his chest cavity as the soldier’s discarded dead body was tossed back fifteen feet and crashed through the wall.

The second Federale, very drunk, wobbled up from the table, fumbling his pistol out of his holster in wide-eyed horror at the wolfmen surrounding him.

He got off one shot.

His severed arm clenched the pistol as it fired by involuntary reflex.

The arm was torn out of his shoulder right as the gun left the holster.

The spinning, blood spewing detached limb whirled through the air, its aim off.

The bullet exploding from the barrel blowing half the soldier’s own face away.

Killed instantly, he was the lucky one.

The first vaquero was shrieking as he retreated firing his six-shooter blindly at the gigantic wolfmen descending on him in buzz saws of teeth and nail. His slugs punched through the beasts’ chests and exploded out their backs but the monsters were unfazed as they tore him limb from limb reducing the man to a pile of meat.

Two werewolves grabbed the second Mexican cowboy by the arms and legs. One wolfman had the feet, the other the hands in a frenzied, ravenous tug of war like two dogs fighting over a chew toy. It ended when the man came apart in the midriff and the creatures pulled the top and bottom halves of the corpse away with them trailing ropes of pinkish intestine that tripped up the third vaquero as he tried to get away, screaming in unimaginable horror, cries which didn’t last long once he stared up from the floor into huge globular eyes that were psychopathic whorls.

All around the cantina abattoir, volcanic eruptions of bright red oxygenated blood blasted across the ceiling, cascaded down the walls, flooded across the floor, a shiny black tide in the supernatural moonlight. The moon that shone down on the lycanthropes was not the same moon that shined on mankind elsewhere in the world, the light turgid and moribund here like the air and space the werewolves moved in was a vacuum that tore the fabric of reality.

At the bar, the werewoman watched the carnage with approval as she effortlessly ripped one of the legs off the bartender at the hip socket and chomped the raw meat off the femur, gripping the leg in both hefty talons.

Azul liked watching her pack feed while she ate.

The boy saw it all.

From his hiding place in the cellar under the cantina floor, the peasant watched through the crack in the trap door. Beginning at dusk, he witnessed the whole thing from when the bandits walked in on two legs, became monsters on four legs that killed and ate everyone, to when they walked out as men on two legs again at dawn.

His name was Pedro. He was ten years old and had brought supplies that afternoon from his village that the bar owner had purchased. The boy was unloading them in the cramped fruit cellar beneath the cantina when the bandits came at twilight. The werewolves they had swiftly become did not see or smell Pedro below in the cellar from the surfeit of blood and manflesh for their gorged nostrils in the bar, so the peasant escaped the savage slaughter that befell the others.

Throughout the long, long night Pedro stayed hidden. Paralyzed with fear, he peered through a tiny crack in the trapdoor at the gorge-rising horrors above him, witness to the entire ten hours the eight werewolves butchered and devoured everyone in the bar until the gnawed bones of the corpses were picked clean. Time passed slowly as the peasant gazed out from the fruit cellar, unable to look away as the creatures chewed and gobbled every last scrap of flesh from the stripped bones. Only then did the monsters rest, bellies engorged, and one by one fell to the floor where they stretched out and slept. As the beasts snored, Pedro had not dared move from the spot lest he wake them and be discovered. He was secure in the knowledge that when the sun rose the wolfmen and the wolfwoman would return to human form and ride off. Then it would be safe for him to emerge and flee the slaughterhouse the cantina had been reduced to.

He knew this because he had seen it all before.

The peasant had known werewolves and been face to face with the creatures, and he knew what to do—Pedro’s village of Santa Thomas had been held hostage when bandit wolfmen such as these had occupied his church and changed its name to Santa Sangre. Last month, three American gunfighters had destroyed them all with bullets of silver and freed his people. The werewolves were all dead, of this he had been so certain ... yet here tonight were more.

While Pedro had not laid eyes on a woman werewolf until now, her face was strangely familiar. The boy wracked his brain in the darkness as the gurgling wet snarls of the werewolves’ snores and explosive stinking farts came through the crack in the trapdoor—he had met her somewhere before, but where?

“They killed my brother.” The bandita’s parting words to the bartender before she ate him repeated inside his brain until at last he remembered where he had seen her face before.

But it was not her he had seen.

The bandita bore an unmistakable familial resemblance to the brutal bandit leader named Mosca who led the wolfmen who took over his town, who murdered and terrorized so many of his friends until the tres pistoleros had ended him. “I am looking for these hombres,” the wolfwoman had said. There were three faces on that wanted poster he had seen from his position under the trapdoor.

The wolfwoman was Mosca’s sister!

There could be no doubt she was hunting The Guns of Santa Sangre who with bullets of silver had gunned down her brother and his gang of bandit wolfmen.

And she wanted revenge on the men who killed Mosca in the worst way.

The three shootists surely believed they had killed all the werewolves, Pedro worried. They would not be expecting a vengeful sister and whole new gang of bloodthirsty bandit wolfmen tracking them looking for payback. Pedro knew he must warn los tres pistoleros of the danger but did not know where they were now. The gunfighters rode out of Santa Thomas a month before.

They needed to arm themselves, be ready.

These men had saved his town, saved his people. Pedro owed them that.

And so, the peasant hid in the fruit cellar fretting as the hours passed. Finally, a trickle of warm sunlight filtered into the basement through the slit of the opening of the trapdoor. Morning had come.

The sounds that came then were horrific for as the sun rose the monsters suffered the torture of another agonizing physical reversal back to human form. Outside the trap door were grisly noises of bodies thrashing, male and female screams, of flesh ripping, bones cracking and cartilage shearing until those sounds ceased and all was quiet above the peasant youth beneath the floor. Pedro heard the forced respiration of werewolves returned to human shape, struggling to their feet. Mindful to stay sheathed in darkness, the peasant dared a careful glance through the crack in the trapdoor.

For all the horror he had seen these last hours, Pedro could not take his eyes off the naked woman. She was magnificently exposed as she rose from the ground and stood up drenched head to foot in gore, her colossal breasts and big nipples covered with blood that dripped down her voluptuous thighs to the untamed bramble of black pubic hair nested between her legs. She walked brazenly nude past the naked men, who also showed no modesty as they got up and yawned and scratched their balls and dangling cocks. The peasant boy had never seen a woman out of clothes before and her bare body gave him a throbbing hardness in his crotch, despite her being soaked with blood. Gathering her loose-fitting clothes from the floor near the bar, the woman tugged trousers over the proud mounds of her ass and slung a serape and poncho over her bosom. She buckled the gun belts to her thighs, pulling on her boots and spurs. One by one, the other bandits retrieved their clothes and dressed, moving with the slow, bleary gait of men who were hung over after a hard night’s drinking. “We ride,” the bandita barked in an order that broached no argument as she strode out the front door. Her gang followed like a well-trained pack of dogs, nearly as scary as men as they were as monsters.

Pedro could see through the doorway as the hairy brigands swung into the saddles of their big horses—the cowed and fearful stallions had not moved a hoof the entire night. With a savage whoop, the gang drove their boot heels into the spur-scarred flanks of the horses and galloped off, charging north like thunder.

Before they rode out, the savage bandita threw a bottle of whisky through the bar doorway that exploded on the ground then tossed a match from her saddle. Flames whooshed up and lapped away at the wooden walls of the cantina shack. Within minutes the structure would burn to the ground leaving no evidence of the lycanthropes’ feast in the ashes.

Choking, Pedro tried not to cough as thick smoke poured through the opening of the trapdoor. Through the crack, he saw angry licks of flame engulfing the bar and floor strewn with human bones. The blaze spread like brushfire. Waves of searing heat scorched the boy’s face as the temperature instantly rose like an oven in the fruit cellar. Visible through the fiery conflagration, the distant figures of the bandits melted in shimmering waves of heat rising from the doorway. Pedro was getting cooked in the basement and knew he had to flee now or be burned alive. Seconds later, the sounds of the galloping hooves had faded and The Men Who Walk Like Wolves were in the wind.

It was safe to emerge. Scrambling up the ladder out of the fruit cellar, the peasant staggered through the billowing inferno all around, recoiling from the sights and smells of the butchery. Dodging flames, he hove through the window in a running dive, hitting the hard ground outside in a summersault just as the whole ramshackle cantina went up in flames. His horse was still tethered to the post, rearing and pawing the air to get away from the heat and fire. Pedro clambered into the saddle.

Riding safely away from the burning bar, the peasant lad squinted over his shoulder at the dusty wake of the departing bandits on the distant horizon, hot on the trail of The Guns of Santa Sangre.

God help them when they catch up, Pedro thought.

The boy rode hard for his village of San Thomas, recently known as Santa Sangre.