The Guns of Santa Sangre. Eric Red

Gunfighters and killers with lots of bodies strewn in their wake. These men were good, but he was better. The bounty hunter had gotten his lead on their current whereabouts from a Mexican ramrod who had seen them just the evening before in a small outpost thirty miles east from where Whistler now stood. The trail was coming to an end. Their bodies would be slung over saddles. Or his would.

      He’d be out of Mexico one way or the other. He drew and admired his Smith & Wesson Scofield .45. It had no trigger guard. Made it faster to draw and fire unimpeded by such inconveniences. A saguaro cactus sat like an upright fork a few hundred yards away, the tines poking black spokes against the glowing rust of the end of the day. He contemplated a little target practice on the plant to kill the time, but reckoned he better save his bullets. The formidable men he was hunting knew how to place theirs.

      Mostly, he just wanted the hell out of Mexico.

      From the sound of things behind him, they were getting that wheel fixed, and it was about time. He turned around to see the fat, bearded stage driver and his young Mexican shotgunner in the scarf and vest tightening the bolts on the displaced wagon wheel and using wrenches to adjust the torque on the axle. Any time now they’d be back on the road. But he’d lost a day.

      “How you boys doing on that wheel?” Whistler called over.

      “It’s repaired, but you best settle in, mister,” the old stage driver grumbled. “Because we’re here for the night and pulling out at dawn.”

      “That does not suit me.”

      “It doesn’t matter. We’re not driving this stage in the dark, not through this kind of terrain.”

      “But—”

      “There be cliffs and ruts and ravines everywhere along the trail ’twixt here and the junction and the stage could take a plunge with one wrong turn.”

      The four people grouped by the carriage in the failing light.

      A huge full moon hung in the sky, clouded with haze.

      They heard the wolves.

      Not like any Whistler heard before. A keening, yipping lupine chorus came from all sides out in the canyons. The howls began low but rose in strident pitch and timbre until they became a high shrieking bay. It was a sound to freeze your blood. The bounty hunter looked at the stage driver, who was looking at the Mexican guard with the shotgun, who seemed like he was about to soil himself.

      “Coyotes?” Whistler asked, staring out into the near total darkness that began about three hundred feet from where they stood. The desert spaces that in daylight spread so vast were now claustrophobic and invisible beyond. The full moon was high and bright, obstructed by clouds and oddly cast no light. A tiny trickle of moonlight showed a crag of mountain peak in the gloom.

      “Sure,” said the old Wells Fargo guy.

      “Niente,” whispered the guard.

      “What then?”

      The guard didn’t answer.

      The big wolves, or whatever they were, roared in unison, a sonic garrote of cacophonic sound tightening around them. Closing in. The hooker was shivering in fear, her eyes huge as her dainty hands covered her ears against the bellowing growls. “Something’s out there. We got to get out of here,” she whimpered.

      “I’m with her,” Whistler said, confronting the driver. “We best be on our way directly.”

      The old timer threw down, yelling in the bounty hunter’s face, spattering saliva. “I told you tain’t driving this rig at night on this trail or the stagecoach will crash because I cain’t see for shit!”

      By now the four horses were starting to panic, pawing the ground with their hooves, long snouts whipping back and forth in their bridles and bits, eyes like marbles and ears pinned back at the horrific music in the hills.

      The monstrous roaring echoing around the canyons continued unabated and drew nearer and nearer. The guard, pale and face pouring with sweat, started babbling to the driver in Spanish, and the old man yelled back at him in the local tongue that Whistler barely understood. One thing was obvious. The Mexican knew what those sounds belonged to and wanted out of there. The argument became a shoving match, and the younger man won, clambering desperately up into the driver’s bench by the luggage roof rack, grabbing the reins and gesturing madly for the bounty hunter and the hooker to get into the stagecoach and hurry it up.

      “After you, ma’am,” quipped Whistler to the tart. He opened the door and eased her into the carriage with a helpful hand up her skirt on her firm rear end. Then he put his boot on the metal step and climbed in across from her.

      “Shit!” swore the old Wells Fargo driver, climbing up onto the driver’s seat and cursing the whole way. He shoved the guard aside, grabbing the reins. “I’m drivin’,” he shouted, “you’ll put us in a damn ditch. YYEEEE—AHHH!” He cracked the reins and the team surged forward, the stagecoach pulling out.

      The carriage picked up speed, scared horses hauling the rig at a full gallop. The wagon rocked back and forth on the uneven terrain as it plunged into the desert nocturne. Whistler could still hear the howling, but they seemed to be moving away from it. All he heard were the sounds of the wooden wheels on the rocks, the squeaking of the chassis suspension and the loud pounding of the hooves. He looked across from him in the tight, trembling quarters to see the hooker frozen in the leather seat a few feet away, pale fragile face staring out the open window of the stagecoach, eyes bugging out.

      “Hurry, hurry ...” she murmured.

      The big wolves bayed.

      And gave chase.

      The bounty hunter drew both pistols and gripped them in his fists, looking out the other window. The moon was waxen. Vague jagged landscape and blurred rock formations rushed past in near total darkness. The wagon was picking up speed, hurtling recklessly now, the shuddering carriage violently jarred by the broken trail. It hit a big rock and rose off its wheels, slamming down on its suspension so hard it tossed him and the woman to and fro. She screamed again and held onto the leather hand straps for dear life. The bounty hunter leaned up against the window, pistols at ready and looked out, thinking he caught glimpses of big, bounding black forms keeping pace with the speeding stagecoach.

      The loud, dull report of a shotgun blast sounded from the roof.

      Then another.

      Something hit the other side of the stagecoach like a boulder, knocking the wagon into a veering fishtail.

      The old man released a horrible high-pitched scream of agony as his body was dragged off the roof seat and smashed against the door in a blur of cloth and red flesh with a bone-snapping thud bang crack.

      The hooker saw the driver torn from the carriage and was screaming hysterically now. Whistler had to slap her silly to shut her up as he crawled across the seat to look out the other window. He fired two shots blind into the blackness, hopefully at least wounding a few of the things.

      With a terrible crash, something landed on the roof so heavy it cracked the wooden ceiling.

      The cowboy rolled onto his back, fanned and fired six times with his pistol up into the roof and blew the unseen monster on top of it off. He heard the beast land with a furry thump on the trail behind them with snarls of spitting fury.

      Whistler still couldn’t see anything, just hear it.

      Keeping a pistol clenched in each gloved fist, the bounty hunter huddled with the cowering prostitute in the center of the madly charging stagecoach, listening to the deafening symphony of chaos outside the near total darkness of the hell-for-leather ride. The tambourine of the harnesses. The frightened whinnying. The din of galloping hooves just outside the cramped interior of the carriage. The crack of the whip sounded over that, then the report of the shotgun and in the muzzle flare, the flash briefly illuminated the hulking, hard charging beasts flanking the wagon. The stagecoach barreled on through the night, suspension jouncing on the rocks and stones of the broken trail. The small compartment