The Guns of Santa Sangre (23 page)

“Silver bullets can.”

“Give me one damn reason we should go back!” Bodie yelled.

Tucker locked his friends in a steely gaze. “Those people. We owe ’em. Gave ’em our word. We can’t let those werewolves murder them people like that. If we ride away now with their silver, we'll never live it down and we’ll be nothing ever again. I’m sick of things I’ve done, boys. It’s time to stand up. I want to make a difference for a change.”

Bodie looked wildly at Fix. “You ain’t with Tucker on this are you?”
 

Fix’s eyes hardened with resolve. “Tucker’s right about one thing, them sons of bitches back there got to go.”

That previous day, Pilar had waited patiently for the gunfighters on the other side of the ridge where they were to regroup by the blacksmith’s shop if the men had lived to get the silver. The Mexican girl had heard the gunshots and knew the hour was nigh, but when she saw the three riders gallop away from the church on the horizon and keep riding north, her heart sank. They were leaving. Sunlight glinted off silver in their saddlebags and she knew the men had the treasure and were taking it. They had stolen her peoples’ only protection and salvation, and she and her family were doomed.
So this is how it ends
, thought the peasant. What had she expected with such men? They were no-account gunfighters and killers no different than the evil ones who had taken her people and her church.
 

That was yesterday.
 

This afternoon, Pilar dropped to her knees and gripped her crucifix and prayed. She prayed for her people. She prayed for her sister. She prayed for their passage from this world to Heaven. She felt herself of dust and nothingness and in her wretchedness she huddled in the utter emptiness of the desert where all was weakness and brutality and ugliness and death, but she was a simple girl, and under the hot sun in the dark hour of her abandonment and despair, her faith filled her. Her prayer was simple.

Deliver Us From Evil.

Then as she opened her eyes and cast a hopeless glance into the horizon, the Mexican rose to her feet, unable to believe her eyes.
 

The figures of the three riders were riding toward her.

Chapter Ten

“I knew you would not forsake us,
senors
.”

The three gunfighters pulled up their horses beside her on the ridge, out of sight of the church. Tucker dismounted first. “Aw, heck. We're all gonna get killed but we're gonna take some of those sons of bitches with us.”

Pilar embraced him.

The sun sank low.

He disengaged himself from the girl and tossed the saddlebags to the ground and the silver spilled out. “If we're gonna melt this into bullets we better get busy, we got four hours’ daylight at best.”

Fix sternly kept his own counsel as he untied his treasure-filled satchels and unloaded them onto the dirt, avoiding eye contact with the girl. Bodie stepped out of his stirrups, stinging. “But first, this little lady got some explaining to do about these sumbitches we’re going up against.”

Pilar eyed them all and came to a decision. “Come.”

“Where?”

“With me.”

The gunfighters exchanged glances, and Tucker threw a worried glance up to the sky and setting sun. Fix checked the pocket watch dangling by the chain on his vest and shook his head pessimistically, but the girl was already walking so they followed. She led them a short distance down the hard pack trail leading to the blacksmith’s shed. Granite walls rose tightly on either side and midway down the path she stopped and turned to them and that’s when they noticed a small cave in the arroyo. It was a few feet in height, just big enough to duck into. There was a wooden branch lying on the ground outside it. Pilar lifted it and struck a match, setting the end on fire.

Watching their heads, the gunfighters followed her in the cave.

Inside, all was darkness, but as the torch caught and the crackling flame on the branch bloomed with a gentle
hiss
, their eyes grew accustomed, and they saw glimmering faces of rock in the jumping shadows. It was cool in the cave, a relief from the heat outside. The air smelt moist, wet and earthen. They heard the clump of their boots and the
woosh
of the flame echoing in the confines of the cavern. The faces of the three gunslingers and the peasant girl were framed in the spooky flickering glimmer of the torch in her hand. The gunslingers followed in single file behind the silhouetted back of the peasant, careful where they placed their feet as she ventured deeply into the grotto without a word. The air grew cooler, and the light from the opening disappeared behind them. After thirty paces, the girl stopped, as did the cowboys.

She held the fire up to the stone wall and they saw the primitive cave drawings. “These were made by the Old Ones,” she stated with a hushed awe. “They told how men came to walk like wolves.” Flames danced around a crude etching of a group of stick-figure people and their animals.

“They were beggars…”

Tell the tale, Pilar.

Tell it well, as your mother told you and your grandmother told her, as parents have passed the tale down from generation to generation from the olden days before our village began.

The gunfighters have now seen with their own eyes.

They must know how the werewolves came to be.

They must know who their enemy is.

Mexico badlands. Ancient times. It was hundreds of years ago before the Spaniards came, before Christ, before guns, back when the tribes lived in caves.

Nobody knew exactly where they came from.
 

The nomads were without a place, without a home. They had been wandering in the desert for as long as any of them could remember, and the desolation had cooked their brains. Some said they were Oaxaca Indians, whose forefathers were Aztecs. Most agree they had traveled from the south. It had certainly been a great distance. Perhaps they were driven out of their homeland by famine or plague or other tribes. Some said they were from Veracruz or Nicaragua, but they may have been Mexican. It did not matter for they had no home. They were refugees and displaced, the nameless. These homeless Indians traveled in a band of men, women and children, wearing rags, pulling carts. They were starving, dying of thirst, suffering from exposure. The group of itinerant natives drove several crude wooden carts and burros over the brutal rocky terrain under the blazing sun. They were filthy and stinking, their starving wives and children stumbling with them.

Coyotes and buzzards trailed them, waiting for the unfortunates to die.

Many dropped where they walked. The heat was as bad at night as it was in the day, boiling their brains in their skulls like ovens, their insides melting, and bodies stanching. Their skin turned black under the hot sun and eyes turned red and their tongues swelled under the heat. They fell to be abandoned to the trailing coyotes and buzzards. Without water, they sought nourishment in the saguaro and chollo cactus but the plants gave up no moisture, and they bled precious fluid from the prick of the spines. Finally, they drank their own piss, and Mosca himself pissed in the mouths of his men to try and get them a few more paces. So it is for some in the desert. But then their piss ran black and they could not drink it.
 

Yes, they are the same ones as the bandits in the church.

The legend tells of them on the drawings on these walls, and this is how we know it is true.

The leader of the nomads was the one who is now called Mosca, the Emperor Of The Flies. He led the nomads then as he leads the bandits now, for the ones who occupy the church of Santa Sangre are the ones who staggered back then across the old lands. We know this from his ageless eyes and in them we recognize the man who was in ancient times little more than a skeleton from starvation, who is now fat from gluttony on the flesh of humans, no longer hungry and dying of thirst. Yes, we know Mosca from his eyes, the compassion gone from his gaze, but while we fear him, we understand what changed him from the terrible tale of his people, how he and his monsters came to be.

Once they were simply hungry, thirsty, yearning for a home and some small charity, but they were showed no mercy by mother earth or by the heavens, brother and sister sun and moon. The moon is a trickster, just like the coyotes, her minions on earth. We know why The Men Who Walk Like Wolves are savage as they are now, and what made them that way those long centuries ago.
 

Staggering through the sands under the beat of the sun, Mosca saw his ragged caravan stumbling behind him, delirious and dying, their feet crunching and sliding in the sand that burned their naked shoeless feet into blisters and sores. They trudged on from nowhere to noplace. The people whimpered, the babies bawled. Their cries echoed across the desolation that mocked them by its silence. Mosca probably cast many a sunburnt, fearful glance into the feral gaze of a predatory coyote in the distance. He no doubt shivered under the scavenger’s unblinking stare, for once, he knew nothing but fear. This was a weaker, broken version of the man you see now.
 

Perhaps it was one of the beggar women, clutching her baby to an empty teat, who pointed at a village in the distance. It was a Mexican silver town. A settlement of pueblos. They were saved. These people would surely give them food, water, take them in. Surely they could spare a few crumbs. The nomads moved their caravan down the street of the prosperous mining village. The dwellings were adobe and built into the caves on the sides of a cliff. The beggars had come upon a town that was very rich with silver. A stream ran through the village, and the indigenous local tribesmen panned for the glittering treasure. They had long hair and wore colorful headdresses and loin cloths. Piles of the valuable mineral sat by the banks. Kiosks and trading posts were set up draped with sterling silver jewelry and refined silver rocks.

Silver shined in the eyes of the beggars, who became intoxicated by all the wealth.

They ignored the fierce, repelled looks they were getting from the well-to-do townsmen. Everywhere, the despised beggars were repulsed and turned away. Huge tables of food were set up and every manner of fish, game and vegetable were laden there for a feast. The starving itinerants came to the table and with pathetic gestures begged the local merchants for scraps. They should have been fed, been given drink. The children at least. Instead, they were cast out. A heavily armed group of local men approached menacingly, lifting rocks, spears, and bows and arrows. Back the refugees were driven into Mexican badlands. The local silver village tribesmen chased the beggars into the barren foothills, tossing rocks and stoning them, and shooting at the nameless ones with arrows. The people of the silver town had much silver to spare, but no pity for the unfortunates, and they ran them off with no mercy. The desperate nomads were weeping and crying out in terror and despair as they fled with their burros and carts, or what remained of them. The men clutched their malnourished babes in their arms and embraced their sobbing wives, unable to protect them from the sticks and rocks.

Ah, see, Pilar, the gunfighters pay close heed, their eyes wide as ours were when our Old Ones told us the terrible tale, in the years before The Men Who Walk Like Wolves came. We have always expected them.
 

I move the billowing fiery torch to a second cave drawing beside the first, showing the stick figures throwing rocks and shooting arrows at primitive scrawl renderings of the fleeing beggars, and I continue my tale as it was told to me handed down from generations before. Now the gunfighters are exchanging glances, transfixed by the magical tale of how the werewolves came to be. I illuminate a third etching of a group of stick figures, a coyote and a big moon above them. And I continue my account…

That terrible night, the beggars understood it would be their last and they would starve or be eaten by coyotes. Night embraced the Mexican badlands of ancient times under the all-seeing eye of the full moon. It was an ugly white eye that never blinked, that sometimes squinted, sometimes was open, but once a month was wide as a stare and just such a yellow full moon hung overhead. The wretched nomads huddled around a campfire, half-naked with bones sticking out from malnutrition. Outside the meager warmth of their campfire, through the flames, they saw the faces of the hungry coyotes, waiting for the first chance to gobble them up. Beyond the circle of fire, past the flames, circled the scavenger silhouettes and reflective saucer eyes, fangs bared, mouths drooling. The people’s dying eyes were full of fear in the firelight as they gathered together. The beggar leader Mosca grabbed their elder medicine man by the necklaces of feathers and claws and he must have gestured wildly to him, speaking in tongues. Do something. Anything. No matter what for nothing matters now, nothing could be any worse, we are at the end. And so it was young Mosca, the leader of the beggars and Emperor Of The Flies, commanded their shaman to pray to the spirits to give them powers, the strengths of the coyotes and wolves, that that they might survive the night and take what they needed to feed and protect their families.
 

The medicine man shook his head, pointing upward. No, he warned. Only the moon could grant those powers and the moon was a trickster, the cruel queen of the night, and she would only make things worse.