The Guns of Santa Sangre (24 page)

How could anything be worse, Mosca insisted. He punched the beggar elder and knocked him down, drawing his knife. Behind him, all the people yelled at the old man as the coyotes closed in. I can hear them now and were I they would have yelled the same as them. The nomads warned the medicine man to use his magic or they would die and promised to throw him to the wolves first if he did not. Reluctantly, the shaman rose to his feet and began to chant, throwing powders and turning his head to the giant orb of the full moon above. All the people chanted and danced. Outside the glimmering perimeter of the campfire, the shadows of the dancing beggars became distorted, grew giant and strange, and the coyotes fled in yelping terror.

They prayed to the moon to become as wolves, and the moon she answered their prayers.
 

Speechless, the cowboys watch as I move the torch to a fourth cave drawing. It shows a large number of stick figures with their arms, legs and heads pulled to pieces over a red swath. Crude but scary sketches of wolflike creatures with red mouths and eyes and long teeth and claws are pictured ripping them asunder. I continue…

The first werewolves attacked the village that had refused them food and they devoured everyone and had full bellies. The Mexican silver town of olden times was a slaughterhouse. By the stark light of the full moon, a savage and hungry pack of wolfmen tore the villagers limb from the limb as the ground ran black with meat and blood and they gobbled screaming children whole. It was a ghastly spectacle. And after they butchered and ate the people, they took the precious silver. One of the creatures, Mosca it is said, grabbed clawfuls of moon-drenched silver jewelry from a shattered kiosk in its paws and stared mad-eyed at the shimmering metal, its slavering jaws drooling with greed. By the time The Men Who Walk Like Wolves departed, not a living soul in the village remained.
 

It is then that the truly terrible part of the legend begins.

The sky of ancient times lightened overhead.

Sunup.

The moon gave up her domain to rest, for she had been very busy and was tired, and her single eye closed. After their feast, the werewolves returned to their wives and children and the moon laughed cruelly before she departed. The nomad camp was quiet. The beggar leader Mosca, returned to naked human form, stirred awake. He blinked open his eyes in the harsh sun, and saw the ground soaking wet. Red. The same sticky red smearing his hands he regarded in growing horror, the same red filling his mouth he rubbed. Removing the piles of silver treasure he lay covered with, Mosca sat up and saw why everything was so very damp.

The tiny, scattered gnawed bones of his devoured child were beside him.

Right next to the severed breast and upper section of his half-eaten wife.

And the beggar screamed in unimaginable horror and beheld all the other nomad men returned to human form standing and screaming and staggering in indescribable terror amidst the chewed remains of their families.

For the moon was a trickster and made The Men Who Walk Like Wolves eat their own. For by giving up their human nature, she had made them base and vile below all other beasts, forever outcast, cursed to become the monsters every full moon.

As a coyote in the distance threw its head back and howled, the hideous screams of the beggar men who had been driven mad echoed like a death rattle across the barren land.

So it is said this is how the werewolves came to be.

And that is the end of my story.

Finished, Pilar regarded the attentive faces of the gunfighters standing by the cave painting, rugged countenances glimmering grimly by the flickering torchlight in the darkness. It took a few moments while the cowboys digested the legend before any of them spoke and that was after they looked one another over and up and down and back again.
 

“S’pose that’s as good an explanation as any,” Tucker said.

“Wouldn’t have believed it if we hadn’t seen these things with our own eyes. It’s why we came back,” Fix added.

“I almost feel sorry for them poor sorry ass sons of bitches.” Bodie shook his head.

“Puts me of a mind to put ’em out of their misery.”

“So the silver, the moon cursed that too, made it what would kill them?”

“
Si
. Or release them.”

“That can be arranged.”

“Little lady,” Fix said quietly. “Guessin’ by whoever drawed them pictures, the silver town stood in the valley where your village sits now, don’t it?”

She nodded. “And the werewolves have returned. As they have returned before. And will again.”

The little gunfighter scratched his jaw. “Well, I best believe we need to do something about that. That just won’t do.”

The pale ramparts of the pueblo church and steeple of Santa Sangre up on the hill lorded forebodingly over the huddled huts of the deserted village down below gripped by fingers of lengthening late afternoon shadows. The dwindling sun festered in the inflamed sky, lowering relentlessly toward the horizon. The vague outline of the nearly full moon intruded belligerently in the atmosphere, a ghostly specter impatient for the departure of the sun. There was a hush over the land.
 

Across the valley, the blacksmith’s shop plumed smoke into the dusky sky.
 

Inside, the four worked.
 

Two huge weathered cast iron kettles were set on blazing coals and logs. A wooden cask of frigid river water sat a few feet from that, the top lidless.

Bodie dumped the saddlebags of sterling silver, religious artifact chalices, statuettes, plates and crucifixes into the pots. The silver figures lost their shape as they melted into a shiny, bubbling soup.

The heavy molds for the bullets were set nearby.
 

The job would obviously have been impossible without them. There were four of the mold platters in the .45 and .50 caliber dimensions. Fortunately, the peasants built their own bullets for hunting and protection because it was cheaper than purchasing new rounds and had made careful retrieval of all their empty slug casings when they fired them. The men of the village had been trained in the frugal habit from childhood when they first went hunting with their fathers, using the old bolt action Henry rifles they kept in good repair. A cask for gunpowder sat outside, safely clear of any flames. It was one of the few purchases the villagers were required to make from the town they ventured into once a month. Alas, the barrel of gunpowder was almost empty and the gunfighters needed to be parsimonious with the powder in their own bullets. Luckily, they had those aplenty.

After emptying their rifles, pistols, cartridge belts and the pouches of ammunition in their saddlebags, Bodie had counted out 1,010 rounds to their name.

While the silver melted, Pilar stirred the pot with an iron ladle. Tucker and Fix sat in the dirt with a pair of pliers each, tugging the lead bullet heads out of brass casings from the pile they had made of their rounds heaped beside them. They used a vise clamp to hold the casings as they yanked out the rounds and dumped them in another pile. Once those were removed, they took the empty cartridge casings and set them upright side by side on a wooden plank they placed on the ground, mindful not to spill any of the precious gunpowder. They had 450 headless slugs in rows so far, awaiting the insertion of the silver heads.

It had taken an hour, working without respite or discussion, each knowing their jobs, while the sun splayed deepening crimson shadows through the wooden slats of the blacksmith’s shack on its steady march to the horizon and oblivion of the day.

The close rank air smelled of steel and firewood and char and body odor. The kettles of silver bubbled and popped like gleaming chromium molten lava, casting scintillating reflections on Pilar as she circled the ladle, making her face look metallic as a statue. She nodded at Bodie, and he came over with the first bullet mold, a steel tray with fifty rounded slots in a grid. Clenching the heavy plate with both hands by a pair of tongs, the Swede held it up as the peasant girl lifted a ladle dripping with pure liquid silver from the kettle. Careful not to burn either of them with the steaming brew, she poured the silver directly into the bullet mold, round hole by round hole. Her meticulous and deliberate manner ensured there was no overflow, and they wouldn’t have to scrape the mold clean, which would waste precious time. It was a process that had them as taut in concentration as if they had been unloading and setting fuses to dynamite sticks wet and volatile with nitroglycerine from the heat. The lives of the four were in just as much jeopardy. When done, she nodded, and the big man very carefully lowered the mold into the cold water of the cask where it instantly steamed and
hissed
and turned the metal solid.

Removing the mold and the silver slugs from the water cask, Bodie walked over to Tucker and Fix then swung a sledgehammer to knock the sterling bullet heads on the ground. While his compatriots gathered them up, he returned with the mold clenched in the clamps and held it out for Pilar. She began to ladle fresh molten silver from the kettle into the slots. The other two gunfighters set to work building the silver bullets directly. Putting ten empty gunpowder-filled casings at a time into the vise clamp, the men used pliers to press the new silver heads into the openings. They moved swiftly, and with the process repeated several times, the pile of magic bullets that would kill the werewolves grew on the ground.

The first set of silver bullets bad been cast.

They had fifty.

They had two hours.

Forty minutes produced five hundred fresh slug heads that Tucker and Fix completed as Pilar poured hot silver into the molds. Bodie used the tongs to dunk the
hissing red hot molds into wooden buckets of cold river water. The steam cast a sinister fog over the primitive blacksmith’s shop, wreathing the heroes in mythic silhouette as they did the work of the righteous. All were bathed in sweat. It was hot as a furnace in the close confines of the shed. Fix had loosed his collar, and Tucker had taken his shirt off. Bare chested, his muscles were drenched in perspiration. They passed a bottle of rotgut 100-proof whisky. This time the girl took a drink.

Tucker checked his pocket watch. “We’ve an hour and fifteen minutes to sundown, give or take.”

Fix used a wrench to tug the slugs out of the bullet casings of their ammo belts then used the same tool to insert new sterling silver heads into the empty cartridges, careful not to spill the powder. A considerable heap of silver bullets sat on the wooden plank beside him.
 

“We got six hundred and seventeen rounds. We’re doing about five hundred and thirty an hour. Let’s pick up the pace, boys.”
 

Tucker took inventory. “By my count, there’s twenty-five of them sumbitches, less the one we sent to perdition back at the canyon.”

“That’s twenty-four hearts.” Bodie grinned. “Right now, we got twenty-five shots apiece to nail ’em. We do our jobs right, we should be doing good on bullets.”

“There’s twenty four guns between them. We’re gonna get hit and we may get shot dead so it could be two of us, or just one of us, doing the killing and we can’t miss,” Tucker pointed out. “One or two of us goes down, it fall t’other grab the others’ silver bullets and he may not be situated.”

“Meaning?”

“We need more bullets.”

“He’s right, there’s only three of us and twenty-four of them.”

“There are four,” Pilar corrected.

“You ain’t coming,” refuted Bodie.

“I can fight.” The beautiful brown girl stuck out her jaw, eyes proud.

Bodie shook his head. “That Hell-hole church is going to be a slaughterhouse, and it ain’t no fit place for a lady.”

“They are my people. I will fight. I will die.”

Bodie kept working. “There’s no way that’s happening.”

“Maybe she has a point,” Fix disagreed.

“Tuck, talk some sense into her,” the Swede practically shouted.

Tucker made the final decision. “We’re going to need all the guns we can. She’s coming. That’s it.”

“Can you shoot?” Fix inquired without preamble.

The look in the beautiful peasant girl’s eyes revealed telltale hesitation.

Fix sighed. “Beautiful.”

Tucker got off his knees, setting down the wrench and sliding his soaked shirt over his bare, rippling, sweat-dripping chest. “Well, little girl, if you’re gonna go in guns blazing, I best believe you need to learn how to pull a trigger. I’ll school ya.” He rose. “Fix, Bodie, you stay here and keep making the bullets, many as you can. I’m gonna take the lady a short ride away where them sumbitches can’t hear the shots ’n learn her to shoot.”

Fix squinted. “We ain’t got the bullets to waste.”

Tucker ignored that, grabbing a few fistfuls of the standard .45s and displayed them in his open palm. “With these. Can’t use none of our regular ammo anyhows. I’ll gather the empties and bring ’em back.” Holding out his hand like a gentleman, Tucker helped Pilar to her feet, and she blushed demurely. “Back in a few.”

They departed the blacksmith’s shop for the tethered horses outside and rode off.