The Guns of Santa Sangre (28 page)

The werewolves did not see that the canvas belt had caught on fire.

Flames were licking the metal casings, turning them red hot…

Just like Tucker planned.
 

He winked at Bodie and Fix.
 

“Get down!” The three gunslingers shouted in warning as they jumped up and dragged the villagers behind the altar, shielding the peasants with their bodies.
 

PAPAPAPAPAPAPKAKAKAKAKAKAPAPAPAPAPKAKAKAKAOW!

The air was rent with deafening gunfire, as every single one of the seventy-five silver bullets in the burning ammo belt held in the wolfman’s paw fired in staccato sequence like a string of firecrackers going off, slugs flying in every direction, the rounds peppering the werewolves and making them dance spastically. Bloody eruptions like red flowers blossomed in their heads, arms, legs and stomachs.
 

And hearts.

With final despairing yelps of defiance and pain, the remaining werewolves dropped dead, crumpling onto the incinerated pews and floor of the immolating chapel.
 

As their bodies returned to human form, the flames cremated the corpses until all was ash.

The Men Who Walk Like Wolves walked no more.

The people raised their guns and cheered.

The open doors to the church lay open, beckoning out to the bright, moonlit, fresh night air and safety. There wasn’t much time. The gunfighters and villagers saw Santa Sangre was coming down on their heads. Pieces of the roof fell in burning piles of torched timber.
 

“Go!” The gunslingers grabbed the villagers and hauled them through the smoldering aisles, ducking the fiery debris raining down and exploding in showers of flame and sparks all about them. The people plunged headlong through the open doors of the church and they ran and fell and tumbled down the hill. Behind their fleeing figures, the roof and parapet of the spire of Santa Sangre collapsed in on itself and the blazing steeple crashed to earth.

The heavy mission bell hit the ground and sounded in a last single ringing gong that sang over the town and the desert, echoing across the land.
 

The only silver left was one bullet in the chamber of Tucker’s gun.

In the final hours before dawn, the gunfighters had scoured the rubble of the church, searching in vain for the slugs they’d slammed in the hearts of the werewolves, but the bandits were ash and unaccountably so were the silver bullets that killed them. Bodie said it didn’t make any damn sense. Fix said it was just part of a whole lot of things that didn’t make any damn sense and never would.
 

“You win some you lose some,” Tucker said.
 

Tired, wounded and downhearted, the three gunfighters trod down the hill. The whole village stood waiting for them. The gratitude and respect in their faces sobered the gunfighters, who watched as the men and women bowed. The girl peasant who had first walked up to them the day before and brought them here with promises of silver now bid them farewell with no silver, yet something of greater value.
 

“You are men of true honor. There is no price to this or measure of our people’s thankfulness,” Pilar spoke softly. “We will never forget you and your legend will be told by our children’s children.”

“Hell, we didn’t have nothing better to do,” said Tucker. He stood before Pilar and in her loving eyes saw home, but he knew he couldn’t stay. He wanted to say something but he couldn’t, yet in her steady gaze he saw she understood, had before they ever met, that this was how it was supposed to be and everything was alright now. Time to part.
 

The villagers brought the gunslingers their horses and saddles and the big men mounted up. The entire village watched the men go. As the three cowboys rode to the top of the ridge, they were bathed in rosy dawn light.
 

Pilar stood in front of the other villagers, her beatific face whipped by the wind, features shining with love and pride and rewarded faith to last a dozen lifetimes as she watched her heroes ride off into destiny.

She touched her belly and smiled.

Up on the ridge, the men sat in their saddles wearily, looking behind them down into the valley. Santa Sangre lay in ashes, but the tiny figures of the villagers were already sifting through the smoking rubble, like ants on a dirt hole.
 

Fix shook his head. “They’re rebuildin’ the damn church. Don’t got money to eat but looks to me like they already puttin’ it back up again.” He took a pull of the bottle of whisky and tossed it to Bodie, who had a swig and chucked the bottle to Tucker.
 

Opening his gloved fist, Tucker held out the last silver bullet that was all that remained of the treasure. “This silver wouldn’t buy us a drink, boys,” he spit. “We’re as broke as when we rode in.”
 

“Somebody had to kill them son of a bitches. They had it coming,” stated Fix.

“Boys, we done some bad stuff before, maybe we'll do bad again, but today we're the good guys. It’s a damn good feeling,” said Bodie.

They all smiled at one another, nodding. “Good deeds could get to be a bad habit,” added Tucker ironically.

“So what we gonna do about you, Tucker?” said Fix, indicating his fellow gunslinger’s bandaged shoulder. “You got bit. That means you’re gonna turn into one of those werewolves.”

“Don’t know if it was a bite, mebbe it could have been a scratch, I disremember.” Tucker eyed his companions with a wry glint in his eye. “Reckon I got a month before the next full moon and you boys find out.” He eyed the lone silver bullet in his hand then chucked it to Fix, who caught it. “Which case, you’ll know what to do with this.”

“We’re friends until then.”

“Until then.”

They laughed, their friendly voices carrying across the rough badlands.
 

The Guns of Santa Sangre rode off.

About the Author

 
Eric Red is a Los Angeles-based motion picture screenwriter, director and author. His original scripts include
The Hitcher
for Tri Star,
Near Dark
for DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group,
Blue Steel
for MGM and the western
The Last Outlaw
for HBO. He directed and wrote the crime film
Cohen and Tate
for Hemdale,
Body Parts
for Paramount,
Undertow
for Showtime,
Bad Moon
for Warner Bros. and the ghost story
100 Feet
for Grand Illusions Entertainment.

 
His first novel, a dark coming-of-age tale about teenagers called
Don’t Stand So Close,
is published by SST Publications.
 

 
Eric's recent horror and suspense short stories include “The Buzzard” in
Weird Tales
magazine, “Little Nasties” in
Shroud
magazine, ”In the Mix” in the
Dark Delicacies III: Haunted
anthology, “Past Due” in Mulholland Books'
Popcorn Fiction,
“Curfew” in the
Peep Show Volume 2
anthology, “Colorblind” in
Cemetery Dance
magazine and “Do Not Disturb” in
Dark Discoveries Magazine
.

 
He created and wrote the sci-fi/horror comic series and graphic novel
Containment
for IDW Publishing and the horror western comic series
Wild Work
for Antarctic Press.

 
Visit his website at
www.ericred.com
,
his blog at
joblo.com/arrow/blog
or
www.twitter.com/ericred

 
A killer far worse than insane.

Redheads

© 2013 Jonathan Moore

Chris Wilcox has been searching for years, so he knows a few things about his wife’s killer. Cheryl Wilcox wasn’t the first. All the victims were redheads. All eaten alive and left within a mile of the ocean. The trail of death crosses the globe and spans decades.
 

The cold trail catches fire when Chris and two other survivors find a trace of the killer’s DNA. By hiring a cutting-edge lab to sequence it, they make a terrifying discovery. The killer is far more dangerous than they ever guessed. And now they’re being hunted by their own prey.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Redheads:

The dead girl’s apartment was easy to spot. It was the only one on the third floor with dark windows. All the others blazed with light, and no wonder: the newspaper didn’t have all the details, but had printed the worst. Chris followed the boardwalk around the side of the converted cotton warehouse. Her four windows faced the ship channel between Galveston and Pelican Islands. That was probably a factor. These things always happened close to the ocean.

Chris had flown to Houston from Honolulu that morning to break into this girl’s apartment. It was another marker on a trail that began with Cheryl and twisted through thirty-six other homes and apartments and rented rooms, and disappeared into the darkness ahead. He had spent the entire flight hoping something in the apartment would light the way.
 

He said the girl’s name aloud, just to give her another breath of life.
 

Allison Clayborn.
 

She’d lived in Galveston just two years, doing research for a green energy company called Gulf Solar. Three days a week, she taught an engineering class at Rice University. She’d grown up somewhere in central Texas.
 

Chris could picture her as a teenager in the scrubby Texas hills, riding in the back of a pickup truck with her red hair blowing back, the sun lighting the freckles splashed on her otherwise white shoulders.
 

He could picture her in a white lab coat, looking at a spreadsheet on her laptop and chewing on the end of a pencil.
 

He could also picture her dead.
 

She would have had lovely breasts, and they would have been cut off or cut up, and possibly cooked if she had a cast iron skillet in her kitchen. He hadn’t seen the coroner’s report yet, but he knew her liver would be gone. If she’d fought—if she’d scratched and clawed—her fingertips would be missing from the first knuckle. Her breasts and liver would have been taken to feed some kind of sick hunger, but the fingertips, he thought, were taken for a different purpose: to keep the police from finding the killer’s DNA under Allison’s nails. But Chris knew other places to look for that.

Her condo faced Harbor Street, where a few giant live oak trees cast wide shadows from sidewalk to sidewalk. The entrance was an ornate cast iron gate framed by gas lamps. Behind the gate, stone steps led through an archway to paired oak doors. He walked to the gate, taking out his bump key. The lock was a Yale pin tumbler no different than the latch on the front doors of most suburban houses. It wouldn’t be a problem.
 

Chris fit his mechanical bump key into the lock, pulled the spring-loaded trigger three times to knock the vertical tumbler pins clear of the lock cylinder, and twisted the plug with a small torsion wrench. The lock opened in less than five seconds. It took his breath away to think how unguarded Allison’s life had been. Or Cheryl’s, or the lives of the thirty-six others he’d found.
 

He passed through the front gate and up the steps. Standing in the gas lit entryway, he opened the oak door and went into the elevator lobby. The lift was a brass cage that rose through the center of a stair case. The stairs were dark wood with heavy railings, padded down the center in a long stripe of red carpet. He climbed to the third floor and found the door marked 304. There were no sounds. At the end of the hallway a polished wooden chair sat before the window sill. No policeman sat guard in the chair. He saw no security cameras. An official seal was taped along the length of the doorjamb, and an orange sign was fastened in the center of the door with the Galveston Police Department emblem and DO NOT ENTER BY ORDER OF LAW in large red print.
 

The last forensic team had sliced the seal in half with a razor, and hadn’t replaced it. The police were done with the apartment. But the cut seal was still there, so the cleaners hadn’t come. He thought about that for a moment. The timing was critical because the cleaners would destroy what he was looking for. He was already wearing latex gloves, so he simply bumped Allison’s lock, stepped quickly inside her home, and shut the door behind him.
 

The Guns of Santa Sangre

Eric Red

Six-guns vs. werewolves in the Old West!

They’re hired guns. The best at what they do. They’ve left bodies in their wake across the West. But this job is different. It’ll take all their skill and courage. And very special bullets. Because their targets this time won’t be shooting back. They’ll fight back with ripping claws, tearing fangs and animal cunning. They’re werewolves. A pack of bloodthirsty wolfmen has taken over a small Mexican village, and the gunmen are the villagers’ last hope. The light of the full moon will reveal the deadliest showdown the West has ever seen—three men with six-shooters facing off against snarling, inhuman monsters.