Thirty yards.
“Now?” Mildred asked quietly.
Ryan lifted the SSG-70 and pressed his eyes against the Starlite scope. “Now,” he agreed.
He had time for only a single shot, seeing through the cross hairs of the sight that his man was kicked backward off the donkey, arms wide, the left side of his face vanishing in a mist of blood and splintered bone.
It took only a moment to work the bolt action on the Steyr, but by then Mildred had fired three times.
The six-shot revolver had been chambered to take a big .38 round. Mildred’s hours of dry practice paid off. She used the short-fall thumb-cocking hammer in a blur of movement, the echoes of the three rounds blurring together so that they sounded like a single shot.
She had fired from a standing position, just as though she’d been in the butts at the Games, right arm extended, left hand gripping the other wrist, sighting along the barrel, with both eyes open. Cock, aim and fire. Cock, aim and fire. Cock, aim and fire.
Each shot was aimed with lethal precision. If the center of each man’s nose had been the target bull, all three .38s would have been top-scoring aces on the line.
The men went down as though they’d been felled by a sweeping sword of divine retribution. The first of them hadn’t even collapsed off his donkey, a corpse in the dirt, before the fourth was clinically dead.
The fifth man had the luck that his animal reared and threw him onto his hands and knees, behind the braying, rearing animals, briefly covering him from the devastating fire of the rifle and the revolver.
Ryan had him in the sights for a moment, but he hesitated, not sure of a clean kill. But he knew that there was no way that the dismounted man would be able to escape from the rest of the waiting group.
“Mine!” Jak’s voice rang out loud and clear above the noise of the donkeys and the panicky screams of the unwounded man, who yelped for mercy in Spanish as he scrabbled back toward the old gas station.
“I can” Mildred began, as still as a statue at Ryan’s side.
“No.”
Jak’s wrist snapped forward, and the thrown blade hummed through the air.
Ryan lost sight of the knife in the poor light, but the man kept running, stumbling over the rough ground, leading to the unthinkable conclusion that Jak had actually missed him.
Not that it made much difference.
To the gut-tearing horror of the fleeing man, the earth moved in front of him and seven vengeful figures rose from the ground, all as pale as spirits of the night.
He skidded to a halt, looking as if he were about to fall on his face.
Before that could happen, the Navaho lifted their blasters and opened fire at him. He staggered to his knees, them tumbled over, rolling twice and finally lying still on his back, staring sightlessly at the dawn sky.
One of the Native Americans gave a whoop of triumph, and they all rushed to surround the corpse of their enemy.
“Had it not been for us, this one would have escaped to tell the tale and betray us all,” Two Dogs Fighting shouted, shaking his single-shot rifle at the watching Anglos.
Ryan was about to acknowledge the possible truth of that, when Jak interrupted him.
“No!” he called.
Sleeps In Day was brushing sand and dust off his face, hair and clothes, but he stopped at the single word from the white-haired teenager.
“What?”
“Said you didn’t chill him.”
“This is madness. The holes in his flesh leak their blood. It cries out from the barrels of our blasters. How can you say such a thing?”
“Look.” The albino walked straight up to the group of warriors and pushed them aside as though they didn’t exist. Ryan and the others had followed him down into the hollow, joining him by the corpse.
Ryan stared down at the body, seeing that the man was young, probably around twenty. His complexion was dark, and his mustache was long and drooping. His shirt was torn across the chest by the impact of the bullets, the wounds scattered, none of them actually looking to be immediately fatal.
Sleeps In Day scowled, touching the dead man with the muzzle of his own gun. “If we did not kill him, then tell me, white-hair, who did?”
“Me.”
“You?”
“Sure. Look.”
He knelt and rolled the corpse onto its face. The man’s back was ragged and sodden with blood, showing the impact of the Navaho bullets.
“There is how he died,” Thomas exclaimed. “It shows your lies.”
“None your bullets would’ve chilled him.” Jak felt in among the long matted hair at the nape. “Here.” He peeled the hair back to show everyone the hilt of the knife driven deep into the body, just below where the skull sat on the spine. “That killed him.”
“He was still running,” Sleeps In Day said. But his voice had lost its confidence.
“Like chicken,” Jak replied, pulling the leaf-bladed weapon out and wiping it on the dead man’s pants. “Like chicken.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“How much time before the General works out something’s gone double wrong?”
Ryan glanced at J.B. “Could be as long as four, mebbe five hours.”
“Could be little as an hour.”
“No.” He shook his head at the Armorer’s suggestion. “Gotta be longer than that. I reckon the bottom line on time is two and a half hours. Then he sends out a search party. By then we should’ve reached the caves.”
J.B. had taken off his glasses to polish them. “That is, if Sleeps In Day and all his brothers don’t decide to start another Indian war first.”
It was a fair comment.
There had been a degree of tension and hostility within the uneasy alliance right from the beginning, a traditional dislike that probably had its atavistic roots at least three hundred years in the past.
The near fight between Thomas Firemaker and Ryan had simply been a case of glowing embers bursting out into an intense, flaring fire.
Though that had passed, it had widened the gulf between Anglo and Navaho.
Then the bitter argument over who had killed the last of the General’s repair party had come close again to outright conflict, despite the fact that it had eventually become obvious to everyone that the mortal wound had undeniably been inflicted by Jak’s throwing knife.
Ryan had discussed the problem with all of his own group of friends, and it had been agreed that they should try to avoid any further difficulties. At least until the caves were reached and the firefight won.
The uneasy truce had been resumed.
THE BLACKTOP WOUND up and over the ridge ahead of them, opening onto a wide valley, its sides studded with groves of tamarisk and live oak.
“Look, Dad,” Dean said, reining in his mount and pointing to the right.
Doc was currently winning his battle with Judas, and he managed to stop the mule without too much of a struggle. “I observe that the General is a man who believes in leaving his calling cards at his own front door.”
There had been a series of billboards set along the road, on steel frames. Only one of these remained, carrying the message that it was only a half mile to the J. C. Wright Caverns, where “An unforgettable experience is waiting just for you .”
The remaining stark frames were all decorated with corpses, in varying stages of decay, ranging from dislocated skeletons, desiccated by the Southwest sun and wind, to bloated bodies, swollen by the rotting gases of the stomach.
As they heeled forward, constantly keeping an eye on the skyline for any sign of danger, the party fell silent at the horror of the mutilations.
Some had been crucified upside down, many of the bodies showing the clearest evidence of having been tortured by fire. Most of them lacked fingers and toes, and not one of the weathered skulls was complete.
“Bastards,” Mildred whispered. “Be good to make the Earth a mite cleaner with their passing.”
The two most recent corpses, nearest to the entrance to the caverns, looked as though they both might possibly once have been female. But it was difficult to tell, as the breasts had been hacked off and the genital areas were simply patches of scorched and clotted blood.
Most of the hair was gone, and the carrion crows had already taken the eyes and the soft tissues of the face.
But Thomas Firemaker gave a great cry of agony and hurled himself from his pony, running to stand beneath the bodies, his head thrown back, mouth open.
Sleeps In Day called out to him in a harsh burst of their native tongue.
“What’s he saying, lover?” Krysty asked.
“Looks like the poor son of a bitch just found a couple of his relatives that the General and his men took along with them for sport.”