The Creed of Violence (19 page)

A rurale with a leather breastplate and hair to his shoulders
whipped his horse up alongside the rails and was cut down as he flung
a stick of dynamite. It disappeared within the black hull and caromed
off the casement with fuse hissing. Men scrambled to reach it but were
too late.

The explosion rocked the coal car. Men were thrown over the
rim. The black wheels lifted, then slammed down, missing the rails.
The wheels sawed ties and scored earth and the plough-shaped pilot rammed the coal car housing and all that tonnage lifted and scythed
across the engine tearing the stack and the menagerie of steel and steam
was engulfed in smoke. A part of the frame housing tore across the
connecting rods and they broke loose from the locomotive spearing the
boiler and a gauge wheel in the cab blew into the chest of the engineer
and drove his ribs right out through his back.

The locomotive surged and the coal car listed into a decline beside
the tracks, only to be vaulted up again where it broadsided the engine.
For a few moments this architecture of ruined metal and mangled steel
plowed on at full speed and then the housing plates separated at the
seams and there was a violent hiss and a rush of flame and the remains
of train cars exploded into a volcano of dust and debris.

John Lourdes swept from the plateau and down a ravine with
Rawbone in hard pursuit. Their horses struggled up a steep incline from
where they could see through the settling smoke that the first train was
a hissing mass strewn over the tracks.

The second train was a mile back and coming on fast. It was under
heavy fire from a cavalry of poor wretches hunkered down in their
saddles and firing over the outstretched heads of their mounts.

John Lourdes wiped the sweat and dust from his field glasses and
surveyed the landscape again. If the train could get past the wreckage,
he saw where the tracks traversed a rising battlement of hills and the
train would have to slow drastically. He yelled to Rawbone and pointed
to where they were to ride. The father shouted back, as his mount shouldered wildly, that the train would never get through. But the son had
already spurred his horse toward where the walls of the canyon burned
with daylight.

They came up out of a ravine. The ground before them was clouded
with dust. They dashed past a howling band of outriders making for the
train. They were in the midst of gunfire now, charging toward a shaly
ridge with their weapons drawn. A pack of rurales swept off after them in pursuit. One of their mounts was shot from under him and the man
was flung to the earth and his own compadres trampled over him with
stunning disregard.

Rawbone had not come unprepared and he took from his shirt
a grenade and flung it back at their pursuers. A rain of metal shards
ended the pursuit. Men and mounts were torn asunder with ruthless
efficiency. Belts of flesh and leather marked the earth where they once
had been.

The great Mastodon thundered toward the smoking gauntlet that
littered the tracks. Doctor Stallings stood in the locomotive with the
engineer while Jack B was atop the tender hunched down as he fired
and fielded orders. There were men in the cars trying to hold back the
blood from their seeping wounds. There were men dead. There were
riderless mounts with their wild manes charging alongside burning railcars. The dust and smoke from this nightmare frieze rose up out of the
earth for miles.

The engineer looked to Doctor Stallings. "She won't get through,"
he said.

"Throttle it," came the order.

"We'll wreck."

"Throttle it."

"We'll wreck."

"Then we'll wreck."

The engineer did as he was ordered. They could feel the pure force
of the speed as the huge wheels began to reverb against the rails. The
hammering of the pistons driving steam through the valves grew to near
deafening.

A horseman with a bow and arrow rode upon the locomotive's
shadow. Tethered to the shaft was a lit stick of dynamite. Doctor
Stallings turned and fired. The horseman was taken from the saddle
just as the arrow left the bowstring. It rattled between the engine and the tender and exploded just beyond. The first car shook, windows
shattered, men were thrown to the floor.

The distance between the train and those scorched and battered
remains that formed a breastwork along the rails closed with fiendish
speed. Doctor Stallings heard the engineer asking the Almighty to remember him in heaven seconds before hell arrived on impact.

Across that barren pan, above the rifle fire and the shouting and
cries of the wounded, were the crushing grate and shrill of steel on steel
unlike anything the mind could conjure sending a shock wave down the
length of the couplings such that the women in the last car were flung
over and atop each other.

Son and father reached the mouth of the canyon and were leading their mounts on foot up a screed hill face that looked down on the
tracks. Like some foundried Atlas the Mastodon shouldered the brunt
of the wreckage. The huge steamer rocked and shunted and slowed and
the wheels locked and lost traction and were skidding uselessly. But
when the wheels caught and the valves opened, driving the rods forward, the savaged hull of that coal car got screeched from the tracksthe train was through.

The engineer was pale and shaken. He looked to Doctor Stallings
and nodded and Doctor Stallings leaned past him and pulled the train
whistle. Across the plain a call of defiance.

The train was minutes from the ledge where John Lourdes leaned
over and looked down at the tracks.

"We'll jump from here," he said.

Rawbone was behind him and glanced at the rails and saw if things
went bad it was a chasm and the rocks and an inauspicious end.

"Mr. Lourdes," he said, "China looks closer."

The train passed through a cut in the rock. Jack B stood on the
tender firing down at the last cadre of riders whose mounts had not
failed them or fallen back in exhaustion. The train was close enough now John Lourdes could make out the flag inked into the muscles of
that shooting arm.

The ground dropped and rose with outcroppings of rock, and the
riders drove their mounts over this tortured masonry to the point of
death. As the train pulled away one rurale on a raw and maneless beast
got off an arrow before the forelegs buckled and the withers fell.

The arrow lifted and turned as John Lourdes leapt to a passenger
car roof. It descended, picking up speed in a long whoosh as Rawbone
followed suit, cursing the world all the way back to creation but making sure the one thing he didn't lose was his derby. The arrow embedded in the deckboards of a flatcar. The fuse to the dynamite lashed to
the shaft hissed and sparkled as both men jumped the couplings from
car to car where guards lay dead as the train hiked it up through that
causeway along the rimrock.

They stood beside the truck exhausted. Dust streaked where it had
caked to the sweat running down their faces and for a few moments
they were neither son and father nor federal agent and common assassin, but two men swept up in the machinery of wholesale slaughter who
had momentarily escaped with their lives.

The father put the barrel of his rifle to the barrel of the son's as if
to acknowledge their surviving. Just then the spark of the fuse along the
shaft of the arrow bottlenecked with all that packed graphite and blew
the deck of the flatbed in front of them to pieces.

HE PURE FORCE of the concussion lifted John Lourdes onto the
truck hood. Rawbone was tumbled down the length of the flatcar only to come up on his knees gritting his teeth in pain. A spike of
bracing protruded from the back of his shoulder blade.

He knelt on the deck trying to reach around and pull it out, but he
couldn't get a hold and it was left to John Lourdes, clearing his head
and staggering over, to jimmy the stake loose while the father growled
and cursed the vile thing out.

Standing, he said to the son, "Mr. Lourdes, for a moment I thought
it was you putting a shiv to me."

"Yeah, seeing you on your knees . . . I thought you took up
religion."

The flatcar ahead of them, from its screw block to end beam, was
pure wreckage. Part of the deck smoldered, part burned. Guards rushed from the cars ahead to blanket the flames. John Lourdes pulled a tarp
from the truck to attack the fire and the father, with blood seeping
down the back of his shirt, moved to help him when came a terrible jolt
that froze both men. What followed was the deck beneath them as it
hitched and sidled.

The father was confused, but John Lourdes, with absolute and
unequivocal knowledge, understood what this meant. He dropped the
tarp, rushed to the edge of the flatcar and, kneeling, looked over the
buffer. The coupler of the flatcar ahead had been torn from its screw
block. It hung there, attached to the coupler of their flatcar like the
dead claw of some iron monster.

John Lourdes stood.

"Mr. Lourdes?"

"We've been cut loose."

The train cars were moving forward through a sweeping passway
toward the ridgeline, but it took only a few moments for their section to
slow and the one ahead to pull away. The guards trying to tamp down
the flames stopped and just stared dumbly.

John Lourdes knelt again and leaned out over the end beam, craning his neck to check the undercarriage.

The father, in pain and bleeding, called to him and John Lourdes
steadied back up, his face strained. He stared down into that decline of
hills from whence the train had come, trying to calculate how far-at
least a mile he thought-before that first turn up from the desert floor
where the track was cut through the rock face.

"Mr. Lourdes?"

"The air brakes should hold ... if they haven't been damaged. But
if they have-"

The women were on the landing and called out trying to understand. The father came up slowly, favoring his wound, so the son lent him a hoist. The train reached the sun line and soon there was only the
faint trailing of its engine smoke.

"They'll come back."

John Lourdes was waiting, feeling, listening-would the brakes
hold? "You know what it takes to stop a train on the downgrade? It's
like keeping back an avalanche. And reversing it back uphill ..."

"They'll not leave the munitions."

"Neither will we. Get the women up here and off this train, but
ahead of it."

John Lourdes crossed to the passenger car landing and pushed past
the women and their questions and ran on through the car as the father
cursed out orders for them to get over and be quick. Rawbone helped
them with a hand or caught them when they jumped and he herded
them to the front of the flatbed while he damned their womanly souls.

John Lourdes surveyed the bracings under the back landing and
knew there were extra chains on the flatcar for the maneuver he had
in mind. When he turned, he saw Teresa standing off alone watching
him. But the wary eyes and the collected silence were now clouded with
fear and confusion. He went to her and as he put out a hand, his boots
had the first hint the cars were slipping backward. The air brakes were
failing.

The last of the women jumped from the train and crowded up on
the tracks. John Lourdes brought Teresa and, with Rawbone, lifted her
down from the flatcar. The train was inching backward and stopping
the car became imperative before it picked up speed. By the side railings
were piles of heavy chain. John Lourdes dragged one loose and hoisted
it up on his shoulder, then ordered Rawbone to bring another as the
brakes were giving way.

John Lourdes was at the rear of the passenger car kicking off the
door when Rawbone dumped a coil of chain at his feet.

"What are you trying?"

John Lourdes was gasping and his shirt soaked through. As he
started to explain, the father went down on one knee and favored his
scored shoulder.

The son intended to swing one chain through the door and out a
landing window and noose it. He'd do the same on the other side of the
door with the other landing window. Then they'd get enough chain and
hook it to both nooses and drop it over the landing platform and onto
the tracks and up under the wheels to form a kind of wedge braced to
the car.

The father looked about and questioned, "Will it work?"

"I saw it done once, but not on an incline like-"

Framed in the far passenger door was Teresa. Most of a heavy
chain was slung up on her shoulder and the rest dragged like a metal
umbilicus. She was bent and straining torturously with each step.

"What in the name of madness," said the father.

She'd fashioned a reason to act, watching them haul the chains,
and she'd climbed back up onto the flatcar with the women grabbing
at legs and skirt to restrain her. She couldn't negotiate the door dragging all that iron and when the men reached her Rawbone took all that
weight upon himself.