He’d fired a shot on the heels of each “Die!” but only one hit home.
It was enough.
The bullet plowed into Slash’s right side, maybe six inches above his belt and hammering him back against the coach door, grunting. He cursed loudly against the pain exploding inside him, then raised his Colts toward Pinto. But the young firebrand had just then hurled himself and the girl off the vestibule, the firebrand howling like a devil loosed from hell.
The girl screamed shrilly, horrifically.
Slash lunged toward the vestibule step and peered back along the train to see both Pinto and the girl rolling down a steep hill toward the Animas glinting in the canyon below. They rolled . . . rolled . . . and rolled, like rag dolls, dust kicking up around them, until they were gone from Slash’s view.
Slash dropped to his knees, groaning.
He rested his back against the front of the coach he’d just emerged from.
He glanced to his right and left. The world passed in a blur as the train, dead-heading on a steep incline, headed toward the gorge and that rickety bridge.
Slash needed to get to the engine and stop the train or in a few minutes he and the rest of the passengers would be nothing more than fresh carrion at the bottom of Wild Horse Gorge. It might even be too late to get the train stopped in time to save it. They must be damned close to the bridge by now.
Still, he had to try.
He cursed loudly as, using every ounce of strength he had left, he heaved himself to his feet.
“Ahh!” he said with relief, having steadied his boots beneath him. “There!” He stepped forward, toward the next car. “Now . . . just . . . have . . . to . . .”
He reached for the knob of the next coach’s rear door. He’d nearly grabbed it when a loud thunk muffled by the train’s roar sounded from somewhere above. It was as though something big and heavy had landed on the roof of the coach ahead of him.
Thunk-thunk-thunk! came the sounds, one after another, each louder than the last.
Slash glowered up at the roof of the coach car ahead of him.
Then something big caromed off the roof and before he knew it, the big, hulking bulk of . . . of what—a man?—had smashed into Slash, laying him out on his back on the vestibule floor, head reeling, body feeling as though it had been doused with kerosene and set on fire.
“Ohhh!” Slash cried in misery.
He opened his eyes to see Pecos staring down at him, his partner’s lips cracked and bleeding, his hair hanging over his face. His hat was gone. His sawed-off coach gun hung down in front of him by the lanyard around his neck and shoulder. Two blue eyes stared out from that tangle of long, gray-blond hair.
Gradually, they focused on Slash.
“Jesus jump!” Pecos exclaimed.
Slash stared at him in shock. “Oh, fer chrissakes! What. . . what the hell are you doin’ here?”
“Jumpin’ jiminy, Slash,” Pecos cried, stretching his lips back from his teeth as he clutched his right arm. “I think I dislocated my shoulder!”
“Serves ya right, you corkheaded lummox!”
“What the hell are you so sore about?”
“You damn near killed me!”
“How do you think I feel? I misjudged the drop from the ridge! And I didn’t realize the train was moving this fast!” Pecos gazed incredulously at Slash. “What the hell you been doin’, anyway—playin’ poker on a runaway train?”
“What did I do? You almost killed me, you privy snipe. I been shot twice. And then you come rollin’ down off that roof like a boulder down a mountain!”
“Oh, hell!” Pecos pushed up onto his butt and eased his back against the wall of the forward car. “I’m the injured party here. You been hurt worse fallin’ into bed drunk!”
“Once!”
“Stop complainin’ is all I’m sayin’.”
“You’re in better shape than I am, you corkheaded scalawag. Hightail your raggedy butt up to the locomotive. If you don’t get this train stopped, we’re gonna be spending the night at the bottom of Wild Horse Gorge!”
“What about the through-chain?”
“Disengaged!”
“Damnation!” Pecos leaned forward with a grunt. With a louder grunt, he heaved himself to his feet. Leaning back against the coach wall for purchase, he glanced around. “I lost my hat.”
“Get up to the locomotive, you lummox!”
“It was a good hat!”
Slash glared at him.
“All right . . .” Pecos waved him off, then turned and pushed through the door of the forward coach. There were a good dozen people in the car, all cowering in seats. Two men lay dead in the aisle. A young, red-haired woman in a poke bonnet, and sitting on the right side of the middle aisle, turned her head from the blanketed infant she cradled before her in both arms. When her horrified gaze found big Pecos stumbling down the middle of the car, she screamed and lurched back against the wall.
Pecos held a calming hand out to her. “I’m friendly, honey! I’m friendly!”
“Are we a runaway?” yelled a small, gray-haired man in a charcoal suit and string tie, hunkered down against the coach’s left wall.
“Yessir, I think so!” Pecos said, continuing on down the aisle.
“We’re doomed!” bellowed an elderly lady behind Pecos. “Doomed! Let’s all get right with the Lord! Bow your heads in prayer, sinners!”
“She’s right,” another old man yelled somewhere behind Pecos. “Wild Horse Gorge is likely dead ahead!”
“It is, indeed,” Pecos said, aloud but mostly to himself as he shoved out through the coach’s front door. “It is, indeed.. . .”
CHAPTER 36
Pecos crossed the vestibule and walked as though badly inebriated through the very first coach in the three-passenger-car string, finding two more dead men, one slumped forward across a seat back, and one dead woman. The other passengers were howling and cowering, a baby screaming shrilly while its very young mother sobbed, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Stepping over the dead woman, who must have objected to being robbed and was thus shot through the dead center of her forehead, Pecos bounded out the coach’s front door.
Now he faced the back of the tender car. He climbed the tender car’s ladder into the giant, wood-filled bin. He crawled over the neatly stacked wood, dislodging some of it, wincing when slivers bit into his hands and knees and thighs. In the locomotive just ahead, he saw the fireman and the engineer both slumped in death.
The fireman sat back against the firebox that heated the boiler. He stared straight ahead. Blood from a bullet to his left ear dribbled down his neck, beneath his knotted red neckerchief and into the collar of his hickory shirt. Just beyond him, the engineer stood crouching forward, as though looking for something he’d dropped on the hard, grease-stained iron floor. His straw-blond hair slid around in the wind, showing the mat lines made by a hat that was now gone.
Pecos continued crawling, glancing at the engineer and then out beyond the train at the tracks that the big iron horse was chewing up way too fast.
“Hellfire an’ damnation!” Pecos bellowed, stopping suddenly, lower jaw dropping. A cold steel rod of trepidation drove itself up against his spine, from his tailbone to the back of his neck.
The bridge stretched a brown line across the deep chasm opening before him maybe a half mile away but coming up fast. Way too fast to get the train stopped in time before it hurled itself out onto the bridge.
Under a train this heavy and moving this fast, the bridge would start losing timbered struts immediately. Long before the locomotive could gain the other side—a hundred yards across the chasm—the bridge would tumble down beneath the iron wheels, like a wind-blown house of cards. The train and all its passengers, young mothers and babies included, would plunge to the bottom of Wild Horse Gorge.
Pecos dropped over the bulkhead and into the locomotive, losing his footing on the floor of the badly swaying engine, and fell over the legs of the dead fireman
. He cursed roundly, clambered back to his feet, and drunk-walked over to the engineer.
He pulled the man’s head up by his hair and drew back a little when he saw what a bullet had done to the poor cuss’s right eye socket, fired from what appeared point-blank range. It had bounced around in his skull and exited the left side of his neck.
Pecos would have bet gold ingots against navy beans that the gang had killed these two first. For some reason, they’d wanted to keep the train moving. No, Pecos knew the reason. They’d intended for all eyewitnesses to end up at the bottom of Wild Horse Gorge.
So they’d killed the engineer and slumped his body over the brakes’ dead-release lever that disengaged the through-chain that ran through the other cars.
“Sorry, fella.” Pecos shoved the engineer off the long, wooden-handled brake. He dropped with a dull thud to the floor.
Pecos drew back on the brake, grunting, putting all his weight into it. The locomotive trembled beneath his boots, the brake jaws grabbing at the iron wheels of every coach in the combination.
“Oh, hell!” he cried as the brake handle fought against him, wanting to climb back to the left. The combination’s forward momentum was just too great for the brakes. They wouldn’t grab. Pecos cursed again, grabbing the handle with both hands and shoving his torso against it, heaving it left.
No doing.
The lever picked him up off the floor and then backward as it angled back to the right, the jaws resisting the force of the barreling iron wheels.
“Forget it!”
Pecos whipped his head around to see Slash staggering toward him from the tender car, bleeding from low on his right side and from his upper left arm. He looked as pale as death, his thick, salt-and-pepper hair blowing around his head in the wind.
“We’re going too fast!” Slash lifted the firebox’s iron door, yanked the door wide. He reached back into the tender car, yelling over his shoulder, “Help me!”
“What the hell you doing, you loco shoat?”
Slash stuffed two sticks of split wood into the firebox.
“Our only chance is to get across fast enough that that bridge don’t even know we’re on it till we reach the other side!”
“You’re crazier’n a peach orchard sow!”
“Yes, I am, but this is our only chance, partner!”
Slash shoved more wood into the dragon’s maw of the firebox. Pecos threw up his hands, fatefully shaking his head, then, knowing his partner was right—gallblast his handsome mug, anyway!—sprang into action.
“Sit down before you bleed dry!” Pecos ordered Slash.
When he had the box roaring, stuffed to brimming with well-seasoned firewood, Slash closed the door and rammed the iron locking bar into place. He stepped over to the side of the housing, poked his head out to stare up the tracks.
He’d already known they were on the bridge, because he’d heard the timbers groaning, felt the locomotive pitching and swaying from side to side—even more than when they’d been barreling over solid ground. He could feel the reverberations run through the bridge beneath him.
“Ah, hell!” Pecos had peered out the locomotive’s opposite side. He glanced back over his shoulder at Slash. “That old woman had it right—I think it’s time to get right with the Lord, partner!”
“I’m as right as I’m ever gonna get!” Slash bellowed into the wind, grinding his molars when he saw several timbers dislodging from the bridge ahead of the engine.
“Then I reckon you best get ready to shake hands with ole Scratch!” Pecos bellowed back with a nervous laugh.
The timbers peeled away from the bridge, tumbling down . . . down . . . down . . . occasionally slamming into timbers below, dislodging a few of them, too, then spinning and turning end over end, plunging into the Animas running through the gorge two hundred feet below.
Slash could smell the cloying odor of pine tar wafting on the wind.
The timbers splashed into the water far away down there, causing explosions of white around them, like little scalloped stitches on a blue satin gown—one after another, until, as Slash watched, the whole damn bridge appeared to be collapsing before his own eyes as he and Pecos were barreling across it....
The world grew blurry through Slash’s eyes as the bridge shuddered, the locomotive shuddering, too, and thus Slash shuddering along with it.
“I think we’re gonna die, Slash!” Pecos bellowed, his voice shuddering too because he was shuddering inside the locomotive shuddering atop the shuddering bridge.
Slash had a dizzy, unreal feeling. A giddy feeling. In his mind he already began to drop down through the collapsing bridge toward the blue waters of the gorge. But then, suddenly, the world clarified. He was no longer dropping but caroming forward.
The blurriness went away, and Slash found himself no longer staring at the bridge disintegrating ahead and below him. He was staring at the cinder-paved bed of the rails, at the precious little rocks and pinecones and twigs and fallen leaves . . . at a forested ridge pushing up close on his left.
He turned toward Pecos, who sat facing straight ahead, eyes closed, a weird little smile on his face, as though the big, blond cutthroat were preparing to meet the angels.
Slash heard a laugh lurch up out of his chest.
Pecos opened his eyes. He stared straight ahead, frowning. He turned to Slash, opening his mouth a little with shock and chagrin.
Slash laughed louder.
Pecos turned his head to stare out his side of the locomotive. Over there, a ridge of blue-green pines dropped down toward the rail bed, as well.
Slash swung his head to peer back behind him, along the train snaking after the locomotive, one car after another trailing off the bridge that continued to quiver and sway, rock violently to and fro as more and more timbers began to tumble away beneath it. Finally, its center bucked up violently, as though a giant, invisible hand chopped up through it from below.
It was like two sheets of ice plunging together on a frozen lake.
Both ends dropped.
Slash sucked his breath, staring at the caboose at the very end of the train.
The back end of the caboose plunged downward as the bridge gave beneath it. There was a vast roar of complaining steel as the underbelly of the caboose, still being pulled by the train ahead of it, slammed into the side of the cliff and ground there, against the cliff itself, the couplings all through the train clanging loudly as the caboose pulled back against the locomotive, in the opposite direction.
The locomotive, which had been slowing quickly as Slash applied the brake and the caboose pulled back from behind, ground to a lurching halt.
A loud groaning and hissing sounded from inside the locomotive.
A fitting popped. Steam exploded out of a blown release valve. It was like the detonation of a Napoleon cannon.
“The boiler’s too hot, Slash!” Pecos bellowed, lurching toward the locomotive’s steps. “She’s gonna blow!”
Slash hurried after him, grunting against the pain of his throbbing wounds. Pecos stopped at the edge of the steps, wrapped Slash’s right arm around his neck, snaked his own left arm around his partner’s waist, and helped him down the steep iron rungs to the ground.
They headed for the trees as behind them the boiler groaned and chugged like a giant’s belly after he’d enjoyed too many chili peppers in his lunchtime meal.
“She’s gonna blow, Slash!”
“I know! I know!” Slash was moving stiffly. He’d grown weak from blood loss, and the wounds were biting him deep. He hurried along beside Pecos, sort of skip-hopping on his right foot. As they moved into the trees and brush, climbing the steep ridge, they stopped behind a giant fir and crouched, poking their fingers into their ears.
They’d witnessed boiler explosions before and it was neither pretty nor quiet.
They each edged a look around opposite sides of the tree.
The boiler clanged and wheezed, as though a smithy were inside, banging around with a hammer.
A sudden clanging explosion made the ground lurch beneath the cutthroats’ knees. The front cap of the locomotive blew out like a giant cannonball fired straight up the tracks. Anyone in its way would have been pulverized.
Several smaller fittings gave way, as well, with the sound of a half-dozen rifles being fired at the same time. One of those fittings, roughly the size of a man’s fist, slammed into the backside of the tree Slash and Pecos cowered behind. The fir bucked and trembled. Other fittings blew straight out the back of the locomotive and against the tender car, which reared like a disgruntled stallion.
More fittings blew straight up in the air, releasing the frantic screech of released steam and boiler water.
To top it all off, the locomotive leaped up off the ground, tearing free of its rear coupling. It turned nearly entirely over about fifty feet in the air above the tracks and slammed back down to the ground on the cab’s steel canopy, on the far side of the rail bed.
Again, the ground lurched beneath Slash’s and Pecos’s knees. Pinecones tumbled from branches above their heads.
The engine’s front end was angled up the slope, knocking over several pines. It slid slowly and violently back down toward the rail bed, plowing up dirt, grass, and shrubs in the process, groaning loudly to lie idle on the far side of the tracks, wheels in the air, sighing out its last breaths, like a gutted iron dinosaur.
Boiling water bathed it, pie-sized bubbles sputtering.
Slash and Pecos glanced at each other, awestruck.
When the last of the boiling water had rained down, turning to mud the area around the ruined engine, Slash and Pecos heaved themselves to their feet and stepped out from behind the fir. Clutching his wounded right side, gritting his teeth against the pain of both wounds, Slash followed Pecos back down the slope to where the tender car sat back on its haunches, like a well-trained circus horse waiting to be signaled it could stand. The coupling resembled the frayed end of a rope.
Inspecting the wreckage, they walked slowly, like men in a trance, back along the trail toward the chasm. As they passed the three passenger coaches, passengers peered out the open windows, also appearing like people in a trance or maybe sleepwalking. The baby was still wailing. Slash could hear women and children sobbing or crying.
Cutthroats Page 28
