Читать книгу The Wolves of El Diablo - Eric Red - Страница 7
ОглавлениеCHAPTER TWO
“Bless me, father, for I have sinned.”
“What is it, Pilar?”
“I have hatred in my heart.”
“For whom, my child?”
“For the men we call The Guns of Santa Sangre.”
“They saved our village from the werewolves, Pilar. Saved all of our lives. Killed all of the monsters. It was because you found and brought these men that the town survives. Why do you hate them?”
“Because they left.”
“Their work was done.”
“Because they left me.”
“I see. You loved one of these vaqueros?”
“Yes.”
“Heartbreak is not a sin, my child.”
“I gave my virginity to him, father.”
“Did he force you?”
“No. Never. It was my free will.”
“He promised he would marry you?”
“No.”
“Did he say he would take you with him?”
“I knew he and the other two, Fix and Bodie, would ride away when they had killed the werewolves. It was in the books.”
“What books do you mean?”
“The western pulps. The dime novels the old missionary brought for me to teach me English when I was a little girl. They were always stories about brave gunfighters who came to a place and saved the people from bad men with their six guns and swept the woman off her feet, but always in the end rode off on their horses, alone. I believed this was how it would be.”
“The vaquero did not lie, then.”
“But now I am alone. I am husbandless. Why is it I feel so abandoned, father? I feel such a fool. These naive childish notions I had. The vaqueros left not because of a noble destiny ... they just left. Left me behind. This is all.”
“Your place is here, in the town. People depend on you.”
“I know this.”
“The calientes are men of action. They could not remain here.”
“I know this too. I know all of this, Father.”
“But?”
“It shames me to confess.”
“Go on.”
“At night, when I lie in bed, with no tasks to occupy my mind, I miss the vaquero’s lips on mine, his hands on my body. And when I imagine him with some other woman, a whore perhaps by this time, I am consumed with such a jealous fury I hate myself for feeling so wretched and harboring such ugliness. It is wrong. I had never been this way before I met los tres pistolas.”
“The Guns of Santa Sangre are men of honor, Pilar. They fulfilled their promise. And they took no payment for their deeds because the silver was gone. You must not hate them.”
“Then why do I hurt so much?”
“Because they are your friends.”
“Yes. And I miss them.”
Pilar blinked against the bright sunshine as she stepped out of the makeshift confessional built on the site of the half-rebuilt church on the hill above the village of Santa Thomas. Her people had wasted no time restoring the mission brick by brick and were well underway with the reconstruction of the church and steeple. Already, the spired structure looked humbly majestic atop the hill lording over the huts of the village below. Some men were climbing ladders and whitewashing the adobe façade in front. On the other side villagers carried wood through the great oaken doors to replace pews and transepts of the nave that had been torched in the gunfighters’ showdown with the wolfmen. There was much work still to do. Soon the town people would be able to worship there again.
It had been a month since the battle at the church.
For the first time in her life, Pilar no longer feared the full moon that would come tonight, for a full moon had risen last night, bringing nothing with it but the stars in the sky.
Pilar had been born and raised in the village that now a month later still bore the scars of the werewolves who had enslaved the town and scourged the people. She was just twenty, statuesque and voluptuous beneath her canvas peasant dress, her womanly body firm from manual labor. Pilar was very beautiful and glowed with vitality. Long lush raven-black hair flowed down her broad shoulders and framed her strong and angelic rural Mexican features. People in the village had often said that Pilar resembled the Madonna in the old paintings. Her soulful eyes were a deep and warm brown but the hardness in them was new, for though it had been just a month since the three American gunfighters had ridden off, Pilar had aged years in the shootists’ absence. Four weeks ago, she had been a naive, stout-hearted young village girl when she boldly left her besieged village and with youthful nerve and resolve disguised herself as a boy to hire three gunslingers of the breed she grew up reading about and idolizing in western dime novels. But while the bad men ultimately rewarded her faith and pluck by annihilating the werewolves, in the end she was disillusioned and stripped of her girlish romantic notions for one simple reason ... They left. In their departure, they had taken her innocence with them and that could never be returned.
She brushed a tine of hair out of her eyes blown by the fragrant dusty morning breeze, heart swelling with pride at the busting village life happening all around her—the farmers with the plows, the children with their mothers, the horses and chickens and pigs passing by. She had never thought or dared to hope that things would return to normal for her people in their town after The Men Who Walk Like Wolves had besieged their village in a bloody reign of terror a month before. Already the horror felt like years ago.
Life was back to normal so why did she experience such discontent, Pilar wondered? The answer came quickly to her: the young woman chafed within the confines of her village now, bored with the day-to-day routine in a way she had never been before everything happened, back when she had imagined growing old and dying in Santa Thomas. The village had not changed, she had. It was the fighting, the bullets, the blood, the romance—the thrall she had experienced fighting side by side with the gunslingers vanquishing the monsters—that had changed her. The action was in her blood now. Pilar missed the sting of combat, the tang of gunpowder in her nostrils, the racing of her heart, the pumping of adrenaline in battle. Most of all, she missed Tucker’s hot kisses and the heft of him inside her that one passionate day.
Her little village bored her now. It seemed smaller, constricting, closing in on her more with each passing day. Her blood felt like it was drying up, turning to powder in her veins. And her gaze constantly swept now to the vast desert beyond the town borders, the great big world beyond. Once adventure was in your blood, it stayed there, it seemed. This very morning when Pilar woke, she could not imagine spending another day in her beloved village she had risked her neck for, let alone the rest of her life.
But her friends were gone.
And she was here.
Worst, the man she loved was not at her side. She missed Tucker terribly, a constant ache in her heart. Pilar prayed he would return but knew he never would.
Make the best of it, Pilar.
Forget about them.
Until today, when Pedro rode into town shouting about the werewolves he had seen, she almost had.
Pilar heard the galloping hooves and swung her head to see the fast-approaching rider charging out of the desert into the village—it was Pedro. The boy hurtled down off the ridge in a cloud of dust and rode hard through the streets into the center of town, scattering villagers as he reined his horse by the fountain in the town square. Farmers who had been knocked aside shouted at the agitated youth who urgently jumped out of the saddle, too upset to bother tethering his horse. The animal wasted no time abandoning him for a watering troth where it began to drink. Pedro looked very pale and shaken from up where Pilar stood on the hill. Out of earshot from her, the boy was babbling and gesticulating with his hands to the nearby villagers beginning to gather around him. The faces of the people became alarmed as they listened. Some women put their hands to their mouths.
Watching at a distance, Pilar felt a hard little knot of fear tightening itself in her stomach. What could Pedro be saying that alarms them so? Figuring she better find out, the young woman hurried down the hill of the church into the square, joining the growing crowd surrounding the young farm boy. There, she caught snatches of what he was saying. Soon Pilar had heard enough. In slow disbelief, she pushed through the crowd, shoving people aside shouldering her way through them to stand face to face with Pedro. The boy looked up at her with mortal terror in his gaze.
Only one thing on earth brought that particular look of fear to her peoples’ eyes, Pilar knew with dark certainty.
“Apártate, Pedro,” Pilar hushed. “Get ahold of yourself.” Her voice was firm but quiet for she never needed to raise it. Since recruiting the gallant shootists who saved their town and taking up arms beside them, Pilar was the unspoken leader of her people, her authority recognized by all. “Cálmate y dime exactamente lo que viste”: “Calm yourself and tell me exactly what you saw.”
Doffing his hat, the lad’s scruffy face and hair were covered with sweat, his eyes liquid with fear.
“Han regresado,” was all he said. “They are back.”
Gasps and choked whispers rose from the crowd behind Pilar but her gaze remained locked on Pedro as she stood with him amid the circle of villagers. It took a conscious effort to keep the fear out of her voice as she asked: “More werewolves?”
He nodded and the crowd shuddered.
“They are coming here to our village?” she asked very softly.
“No.” Pedro shook his head adamantly. “I don’t think so. It is our pistoleros they are after. The leader of these werewolves is the sister of the jefe of the monstros who took over our town. She is one of the lobos and is very angry our pistoleros killed her brother. De veras, she wants revenge. Por favor, Señora Pilar, if we do not warn Señors Tucker, Fix and Bodie then the she-wolf and her monstruos will catch them soon and kill them very, very badly, I think.”
Pilar listened, steeling herself with resolve.
She knew what she had to do.
Had made preparations in case this day ever came. It had.
Grabbing Pedro by the shoulders, she looked sharply in his face. “Where are the werewolves now?”
“They rode off after The Guns of Santa Sangre the last I saw them.”
“Which way?”
“Norte.”
With a nod, Pilar’s face whipped around as she swung her gaze to her small hut in the center of the village. Turning her back on Pedro, she rose, pushed through the crowd and strode across the square to her house with single-minded purpose, feeling all eyes were on her.
Her home was a small adobe hutch with two windows and a blanket over the doorway, like all the huts in the village. Ducking inside, Pilar drew the blanket shut behind her and stood in the small empty living area. Two bedrooms led off the main room and she checked those first.
“Mama? Bonita?” Pilar called but knew her mother and little sister were in the fields at this early hour of the workday. The peasant woman sighed heavily. Her familia were in no danger but Pilar regretted she had not a minute to spare to find them and say her goodbyes. What if ...? Pushing any thoughts of not seeing her mother and sister again out of her mind, she simply vowed to herself she would return, and that was that.
Alone inside her humble casa, Pilar took a deep breath and walked to the boards on the dirt floor covering the small pit she had dug a month before. There she knelt reverently.
She knew this day would come.
Lifting off the boards one by one with great purpose, Pilar saw her hands were shaking removing the wood covering the hole in the ground she had dug.
Inside the hole were two rifles and three pistols ... a Sharps bolt-action rifle, a Winchester repeater rifle, a Colt Navy revolver, a Colt Single Action Army revolver and a two-shot Derringer pistol.
And fifty-seven silver bullets.
The silver cartridges were of different calibers: .22, .45, 36, .476. The rounds filled the two bandoleers and gun belt stacked beside the guns. The firearms and leather ammo belts were covered with copious amounts of dried blood, for the boraccho who had owned them and brought them to the village had died very badly. A month ago, Pilar had watched from the hill as the drunk old man had ridden into the village to kill the werewolves occupying the church only to be reduced to a pile of meat. The following night The Guns of Santa Sangre had annihilated the werewolves in a furious battle, and the next day Pilar had secretly gathered the old man’s balas de plata y armas de fuego from his mutilated corpse and buried them in the hole she knelt over now.
When The Guns of Santa Sangre rode away after killing the wolfmen she kept the silver bullets, even though she knew she they deserved them as payment, thinking one day she might need them.
Today was that day.
Pilar picked the gun belt with the silver bullets out of the hole and buckled it around her waist.
She slung each of the ammo belts crossways across her shoulders and bosom.
Checking the rifles and pistols were loaded, she holstered two of the handguns and shoved the third in her dress then slung the two rifles over her shoulder.
Taking a deep breath to steel herself, Pilar walked to the mirror and watched her reflection, soberly regarding the strong fearless woman who stared back at her. It was no longer the young girl she used to see in the looking glass.
She was ready.
Crossing herself, Pilar said a quiet prayer, for she was and would always be a woman of faith.
Then she pushed past the blanket covering the doorway into the hot valley sunlight and stepped outside.
No words were spoken by Pilar, her carriage erect as she strode through the parting crowd toward the stable. Vaulting the fence, she threw saddle and tack over the strongest horse though it wasn’t hers, belted it sure, stowed her two rifles in the saddlebags, and swung into the saddle. Digging her heels into the flanks of the stallion, the woman galloped straight for the fence and jumped the horse over it. Galloping down the dusty dirt street of the village, Pilar charged swiftly up the steep ridge leading out into the Durango desert badlands and rode away out of town into the desert. Due north.
The wind felt good in her face.
The guns felt good in her holsters.
It was good to be in action again.
Her friends were in danger. They had saved her people. Now it was her turn to save them.
And if in the attempt she died, it would be in Tucker’s arms.
Azul raised her hand.
The riders pulled up their horses with brutal jerks of the reins and stopped on the dusty hot desert flats, an inhuman vista of scorched desert beneath unrelieved skies. The view was shimmering. The bandits watched their feral leader sitting tall in her saddle, turquoise eyes alert beneath windblown hair, nose raised, nostrils flaring animalistically.
She sniffed the air.
Sniffed again, detecting a scent.
Her head snapped east.
Digging her spurs savagely into her cowed stallion’s flanks, Azul charged without delay in that direction followed by the galloping horde of hairy bandits on lathered horses. Soon they were completely lost to sight in the desolate wastes. When the curtain of settling dust died down it was as if the werewolves were never there, vanished spirits in the heat distortion rising up in melting waves off the baking tundra.
Several miles up the trail, the charred embers of the campfire were still warm to the touch when Azul dismounted and touched them with her fingers.
Her bandits remained on their horses in the ravine beneath the hot crush of the sky watching the bandita hunkering down on powerful lupine haunches. Her trousers stretched taut on her buttocks. Her boots creaked with their tough leather of stripped tanned human hide. Running her tapered fingers through the dirt, Azul picked up a handful of soil, brought it to her nose and sniffed. A satisfied glint of recognition flashed fiercely in her feral gaze from the tang she smelt. Then her brutally beautiful face broke into a ravishingly razor sharp grin as she rose and stood to face the other wolfmen now in human form.
“Three were here. The three who killed my brother. I smell our blood mingled with the weak stink of their man sweat.” Azul dropped the handful of soil and wiped her hands together coating them with dirt to bring her elementally closer to Father Earth. “One was wounded and his blood tainted but he did not turn in last night’s moon. Three manflesh rode out this morning. They are not far and their sign is fresh. By tonight’s moon we will catch up to them and feast on the marrow of their bones. Ride!”
With a hideous savage whoop, the bandita sped in a loping stride to the rear of her petrified horse and vaulted over its rump into the saddle. Twisting her hips, wrenching the steed between her powerful legs, she dug both spurs and drove her horse in such a sharp turn the animal toppled and collapsed onto its side. Dust kicked up. Staying in her saddle, Azul forced the injured horse up onto its staggering legs, reared it up on its hind haunches and galloped headlong into the desert. Werewolves took no care with horses and rode them until the animals dropped dead. If the other horses seemed ready to keel, the lycanthropes would tear the head from the shoulders of the horse that dropped and this sight would strike such mortal terror in the other animals they would carry their pitiless riders another fifty miles without complaint until they too fell, hearts exploded from exhaustion and fear.
Tall in the saddle, Azul kicked her horse into motion. She gestured to the east and beckoned her men on, urgently, impatiently. The werewolves began to string out as they increased speed across the valley floor. Azul cast a savage glance back at her six bandits hurtling on horseback behind her. The full moon was already a ghostly wisp in the thickening twilight of the vast El Diablo sky. Below it, the bandita charged across the bleached bone expanse of Mexican desert wastes, blood up, so close to her hated prey she could taste them.
She would taste them, oh yes.
And soon.
Miles away in El Diablo, Tucker caught the silver bullet that Fix pitched him. He gripped it meaningfully in a gloved fist. “You sure about this?” he said.
Fix nodded tersely.
“You?” Tucker asked, swiveling his flinty gaze to Bodie for confirmation.
The big Swede cracked a broken grin. “Hell yeah, I’m sure.”
“It’s your asses if you’re wrong.”
“If’n you was gonna turn into one of them werewolves, you woulda done last night during the first full moon’n I would have put that slug through your heart directly. Like we all agreed.” The taut little shootist Fix shrugged. “A full moon is a full moon. Stands to reason if’n you didn’t turn into no hairy sumbitch then, ya ain’t gonna turn into one tonight. Trust me pardner, if’n you had started howling last night we wouldn’t be having this here conversation because you best believe, friend or no, I would not have hesitated.”
Tucker didn’t doubt him; his pal’s saturnine expression made that plain and clear.
The three tough rugged American gunfighters tugged the handkerchiefs over their faces below their Stetsons, sitting erect in their saddles of three horses on the ridge of the tall ravine looming high above the railroad tracks below. Their loaded six-guns were drawn.
The trio of shootists known as The Guns of Santa Sangre were in the bowels of El Diablo, which meant The Devil in Spanish and was an apt moniker for this dangerous hell hole of a place: a forbidding barrier range of monolithic canyon massifs, towering cliffs and plummeting gorges stretching hundreds of miles in all points of the compass, great super plateaus and bottomless crevasses that gave way to blasted desert oblivion—a true no man’s land. In the west, the dying sun setting over the jagged crags spread a deepening sanguine glow that bled lengthening crimson shadows, colors of the range’s satanic namesake, across a hostile and pitiless terrain. Purple shadows of twilight dappled the colossal gorge. The sun was low, a faint ghost of the full moon in the dim.
A railroad line ran through El Diablo. It was the only way through it. The outlaws had taken position out of sight behind big rocks in the ramparts high atop the rambling system of canyons and would not be spotted by the train when it came.
They wanted to get in and get out.
The desperadoes were armed to the teeth and braced for action, pumped with adrenaline, but had nothing to do but wait for the train to show. So, they jawboned to take the edge off before the shooting started.
“I know you would have shot me through the heart, Fix,” Samuel Tucker agreed, rubbing his beard. The big ruggedly handsome cowboy had a chipped intelligently pale-eyed face, and was leader of the gang because he was the thinker of the bunch. “Sitting up the whole damn night looking up the barrel of your pistol with your finger on the trigger wasn’t my idea of a relaxing evening, friend.”
“You drank up our whole last bottle of whisky, Tucker, what are you gripin’ about?” Bodie scowled, dry and on edge. He hadn’t had a drink in twenty-four hours—the bottle had been their last and Tucker had not let go of it. Figuring it might be their comrade’s last night on earth, Fix and Bodie had let him.
“If it was you, Bodie, you’d have drunk all the whisky too knowing Fix was meaning to shoot you,” Tucker said defensively. “Hell, I know that’s what I told him to do if I became one of them creatures, but I needed some Dutch Courage and under the circumstance you can’t blame a man for taking a drink.”
“Or five,” snorted Fix.
“Or the whole damn bottle,” sputtered Bodie.
“That’s why you been hung all day and we ain’t,” Fix smirked. “Been a pleasure watching you wince from that headache.” The short spare compact gunfighter was dressed in a weathered black suit jacket vest and trousers and wore a black bowler hat instead of a Stetson. His resemblance to an undertaker was fitting. Twin pearl handled Colts hung from his holsters. John Fix was by far the deadliest shot of the three and the coldest killer when the situation demanded it. A sardonic sense of humor and dour disposition were his personal stock in trade.
“Yeah, Tuck, that serves you right drinkin’ all our whisky you bein’ hung all damn day and we ain’t.” Lars Bodie laughed loud, massive barrel chest on his mountainous six-foot eight-inch frame heaving like a steer. The Swede’s muscular tree trunk arm hoisted a hand the size of a cow hoof to swipe a tear of mirth from his friendly, dumb eye.
“Fuck y’all,” Tucker grinned. His hangover had just recently abated as evening came on. “Oughta shove this here silver bullet up both your assholes.”
“That’d be a good trick,” Fix winked.
The shootists all chuckled.
Tucker cracked a grin, heartened by his comrades’ trust. Fix and Bodie had just returned him the silver bullet as a token gesture of faith even though tonight was the second full moon and that slug was their only protection against Tucker if he grew fur and claws. Back in the church of Santa Sangre, Tucker had suffered a flesh wound from one of the wolfmen in the shoot-out. The outlaws had learned that the bite from a werewolf turned you into one and in the heat of battle Tucker did not recollect if he had been bitten or just clawed. Until last night, the gunfighters had not known if their leader would become a wolfman when the next full moon rose.
Luckily, he hadn’t.
And Bodie and Fix were betting that tonight Tucker wouldn’t either. His friends believed he was fine because they simply had to, trusting each other with their lives. Theirs was a codified masculinity. Friendship, camaraderie and mutual reliance was baked in to the character of the three outlaws. It was their religion, all they had. They prayed in the church of fellowship and it had a congregation of three, even though that belief would cost them dear if they were wrong about one of them changing into a werewolf tonight. Tucker soberly regarded Fix and Bodie. He forced a smile. “Well boys, the good news is I ain’t no wolfman and all I got me was a scratch not a bite back there in that church. The bad news is the only reward we got from saving them wretches at the village from them creatures is that one lousy silver bullet. We need this score to pay off.” Tucker’s eyes narrowed. “Focus up, boys. We got us a train to rob.”
Lifting the binoculars to his eyes, Bodie squinted and scanned the empty train tracks far below down the mouth of the El Diablo canyon. Long moments passed as the Swede peered into the distance through the field glasses, scouting. So far, the lines were empty down to the vanishing point of the rail bed in the melting waves of heat in the distance.
No sign of the train yet.
“This place may not be the end of the earth, but you can see it from here,” Bodie scowled as he lowered his binoculars and surveyed the grim, inhospitable region stretching for boundless miles in every direction.
A month before, the three gunslingers had become heroes at Santa Sangre. It seemed like a lifetime ago now. Good deeds can be a bad habit, Fix had remarked then. He was correct. True, it had felt good saving those people, but a chest full of pride didn’t fill an empty belly—they were as broke when they rode out of Santa Sangre as they were when they rode in.
Outside the village limits, the outlaws quickly found nothing had changed. They were still wanted men with rewards on their heads with no honest work to be found for them north or south of the Mexican border. So Tucker, Fix, and Bodie went back to robberies. Old habits die hard and they stuck with what they knew: dealing in lead. The gunfighters’ guilty consciences were mitigated a bit by their heroic deeds destroying the werewolves and saving all those lives. Figured it scored them a few points in heaven and balanced out their past crimes. Being good guys had been fun while it lasted.
But right now, all three were thinking, if we had gotten that silver we had been promised, we wouldn’t have had to rob no damn train.
The past was behind them. Fix spoke for all of them when he said, “It don’t pay to think too much on things you leave behind.”
“This score is gonna be the one. I can feel it,” spoke Tucker confidently. “Those miners back there at the saloon said this railway line runs to a mining town called Rio Muerta a hunnert mile east of here and the train is headin’ back Mexico City way loaded with miners carrying silver.” Tucker licked his lips thinking how lucrative the train robbery could be. “Them that told us had no reason to lie.”
“Not with our gun barrels in their mouths,” Fix remarked, busy rechecking the loads in his pistols.
“A lot of freshly mined silver is on that train. Ours for the taking.” Bodie whistled heartily. “Them miners told us oughta know. They was heading to Rio Muerta their ownselves.”
“I just hope they wasn’t misinformed about how much silver is in those mines and how many miners is gonna be on this train,” Tucker muttered. The hours of inaction waiting for the railroad to show up was taking a toll on his nerves and he was beginning to fret and think too much.
Fix chewed his lip and brooded. “I heard rumor it may not be many. They say a lot of prospectors strike out for Rio Muerta to make their fortune because of all that silver supposed to be there, but only a few return.”
“They say a lot of crap.” Bodie shrugged off such talk.
“We’re soon to find out, I reckon,” Tucker remarked.
“Soon as this train shows up let’s rob it and cut out of this Goddamn territory.” Fix’s eyes had a hooded look.
Bodie whistled sharply to get the other shootists’ attention: “Smoke.” He passed the binoculars off to Tucker, who shifted in the saddle and put them to his eyes for a look-see.
In the magnified circle view of the field glasses, a billowing smokestack smudged the bruised sky as the smeared blur of a distant steam train emerged out of the heat waves. A high-stacked locomotive was coming their way.
It was go time. There was no more talking required so the gunslingers pulled the handkerchiefs over their mouths and got ready. The wood handle plunger to the TNT detonator felt reassuring in the palm of Tucker’s hand and he felt a moist slickness of sweat and grit inside his glove. The squat wooden box was firmly braced between two big rocks on the ridge. The cowboy’s pale blue eyes narrowed above the kerchief covering the lower part of his face. His keen gaze tracked the coiling wire leading out of the detonation box snaking down the precipice in a hair thin line until it became barely perceptible by the distant dusty wood trestles and rusty rails on the train bed far below where the bundle of dynamite sticks were lodged—one good thrust down on the TNT plunger was going to blow those train tracks sky high.
They could all hear the railroad now, chugging louder and louder, and it had a full head of steam up.
The clickety-clack of the wheels amplified around the canyon.
The train came into view.
Moving backwards.
The railroad traveled in reverse, caboose-first.
“What the fuck?” said a surprised Tucker.
“It’s going ass first,” remarked Bodie.
“Damn Messicans,” Fix spat. “Can’t even drive a train straight.”
Just then the brake van thundered into the canyon below, the main body of the train following, a string of eight coaches in clamoring procession, the huge reversing locomotive bringing up the rear wreathed in smoke as its grinding driving wheels backed the rolling stock down the line. The steam engine’s exhaust belched dirty fumes into the sky, smoke and hot cinders spewing from its stack, scattering in the desert air. It was a rugged old iron horse. Dirty paint peeled off the weathered, battered rows of ancient cars. The tympani of the rusty wheels beat a percussive syncopation on the rail bed as the train rattled and swayed its way along the tracks.
Tucker’s gloved hands clenched and unclenched on the handle of the plunger of the dynamite. He sat tensely erect in the saddle beside the other two on their horses. “It’s time.”
The outlaws’ eyes narrowed as they exchanged glances, braced for action, gave their horses a pat, adjusted their kerchiefs and cocked the hammers of their guns. In less than a minute, all hell was going to break loose. Space was closing—the dirt- covered pile of Trinitrotoluene sticks in the tracks grew ever nearer to the fast approaching steam train.
“You boys ready?” Tucker said like he always did before a job. He didn’t need to ask—the three always were ready for action—but it was a tradition.
“Yeah.”
“Fuck yeah.”
“Wait for it. On my go.”
The leader knew from long experience robbing trains they had to time it right: wait too long and the railroad would be blown off the tracks causing a lot of unnecessary injuries the robbers wanted to avoid—all they wanted was the money. Eyeballing the diminishing space between the caboose and the explosives, Tucker gauged the distance at about a hundred yards. Just about damn perfect. The steam train highballing in reverse through the blasted desert came full into view. It was eleven cars long.
“Go!” Tucker bellowed.
They spurred their horses, yelling “YYYEEE—AHHHH!”
He injected the plunger.
