Conquistadors

by Jeff Kirkham

  Maybe all great men faced solitary moments in windowless rooms like this one. Maybe all great men committed deeds that only steadfast men could.

  To move forward, the next step had been obvious, given the yellow holocaust burning on the horizon: the serpent required fuel. Sofía stood between the serpent and its fuel. Great victories required great sacrifices.

  Tavo told himself that his decision had nothing to do with her betrayal.

  An ear. A toe. A daughter.

  He would continue to cut away parts of himself if that was what conquest required.

  An arm. His family. His home.

  He would deny the altar of the gods no sacrifice.

  Tavo’s mind submerged beneath the pain again.

  Shadows lengthened. The heat from the corrugated ceiling abated. Sometime later, someone came for him and dragged him into the back of a Humvee.

  He thought maybe it was Saúl.

  Chapter 40

  Noah Miller

  Between O’Bannon and Ellsworth, Nellis AFB, Area 2

  Noah had squirreled away some instant coffee, but no matter how badly it cast doubt on his manhood, he could barely stand to drink it without creamer. And, he had a habit of forgetting to bring creamer.

  Once again, he sat alone in the desert with his thoughts and his ghosts. If he ever had a home, this was it. By himself with his ass in the sand, enjoying the billion gleaming souls in the canopy of stars. His JetBoil stove hissed companionably on the ground, warming his next batch of creamer-less feel-good.

  The night had entirely overcome the day and the stars finally reached their full dominion. They flickered, clumped and clotted like a floating miasma of tiny sea creatures adrift on the firmament.

  Noah wondered, if the configuration of the stars changed from one night to the next, would he notice the difference? He thought he might. He’d spent so many nights staring at the glowing Milky Way that he felt sure he knew each speck of light by heart—two stars in particular, just to the north of Orion. Leah and Katya.

  The desperate, young lieutenant had given Noah a radio and asked him to set up an outer picket along the access road to provide advance warning of an assault. Neither Noah nor the lieutenant thought that advance warning would do them any good, but it seemed like the right thing to do. It made Noah chuckle. They were mouse-like men with their mouse-like plans.

  The stars. The Abrams tanks. The massive refinery fire in the distance. The nukes. They all combined to make Noah feel insignificant. At the same time, he couldn’t help but feel like there had been an invincible, guiding hand during the last fourteen days of his life.

  --Had it only been fourteen days?--

  In fact, he felt oddly certain that the armored column would never come down the road below his little observation post. He knew, on some mystical level that the Fates had been guiding this endeavor from the moment he’d left his ranch on the borderlands. Captain Spark’s flaming death had been written in the Book of Life since then, as had Noah’s undeserved survival. He sat with a cup of coffee in his undeserving hand; resting, alive and only slightly banged up while so many others had been peeled off into oblivion.

  Most men felt like God paid more mind to them than the next man. It was part-and-parcel of the affliction of self-awareness. And yet, even knowing that, Noah couldn’t deny his certainty that God’s hand had, in fact, been tipped. He had revealed himself over the last two weeks as the Grand Architect of this jacked up, blood-soaked plot to follow the narcos into America. It rang strangely true to Noah—as though the Creator had fallen so deeply in love with the saga that thousands of lives could be consumed in the story’s wake. Yet the author was so much more than a madman. So much grander than a simple storyteller.

  A voice came unbidden from the black of night and Noah sprang to his feet, the over-and-under shotgun hunting for a target.

  “Well at least you don’t drink your coffee like a pansy anymore.”

  Noah’s mind raced to connect the voice with a face. When it came to him, his knees went watery.

  Bill McCallister stepped into the slight, blue light of the JetBoil.

  Noah gasped and lowered his shotgun.

  “You…” he looked at his father, then looked at his father’s legs. They were both whole. There was no blown-off foot. Bill wore a pair of light combat boots. “I held a funeral for you.”

  “My boy. You jumped track just like I knew you would.” Bill chuckled. “You always tended toward the dramatic, and emotional trackers are easiest to fool.”

  Something ominous stopped Noah from embracing him, or even from laying down the shotgun.

  “How did you find me here?” Noah asked as he side-eyed his adoptive father.

  Chapter 41

  Bill McCallister

  McCallister Ranch, Fifteen miles outside of Patagonia, Arizona

  Two Weeks earlier…

  “There are fifteen Japanese cars with loud-ass mufflers comin’ down Hartley Road toward your place. They just passed my gate.” Tom Bartley’s place was five miles up the road. At thirty miles an hour, that would give Bill about ten minutes to prepare.

  “Thanks, Tom. Gotta go.” Bill hung up and ran toward the tractor in the back of the house. He stopped on the porch, turned, ducked back inside and grabbed his SCAR Heavy rifle and a chest rig with six magazines that’d been hanging on the coat rack for years gathering dust.

  Never, in all his time living in Rio Rico County, had vehicles like these driven down Hartley Road. Given the collapse, Bill didn’t even have to guess what they were up to. His good nature didn’t extend far enough to let them head past and into the town of Patagonia without a fight. He could already hear the low rumble of their modified exhaust, miles away. He couldn’t know for sure that they were criminals coming to rape and pillage, but he couldn’t afford a conversation about it, either. His property would be the end-of-the-road for either them or him.

  He slipped into the chest rig as he ran. Hardly pausing, he hauled himself up onto the old International Harvester tractor and fired the engine. He popped it into gear and roared around the house to where he’d recently anchored a big loop of aircraft cable, sticking out of the grass next to the cottonwood tree in his front yard. He backed the tractor in, jumped down, and looped the cable around the ball hitch. Then he climbed back onto the tractor and waited as the mufflers blared louder and louder out of the north. With his final seconds, he checked his mag and then breach-checked the SCAR. The old commando was ready to rock.

  Moments later, the first of the low-slung street racers came roaring over the rise in the county road at the north edge of his ranch. Bill loosened the slider on the three-point shoulder sling and rested his hand on the gear shift of the tractor. A split second before the first vehicle passed Bill’s gate, he slammed the tractor in gear and pulled the cable so taut that the front wheels of the tractor jumped off the ground.

  The lead rice burner hit the brakes and slid into the cable going almost twenty miles an hour. Amazingly, the cable didn’t decapitate the roof of the car. It did decapitate the driver, slicing through the airbag and into the headrest of the driver’s seat. The next car in line slammed into the first, and so on, causing a six-car-collision.

  While the passengers were still stunned, Bill slid down off the tractor and poured five or six rounds into each vehicle, aiming for where the drivers’ head should be. The window tinting made it difficult to target ID, but Bill was fully committed to the ambush and he was definitely in it to win it.

  Men poured out of the cars and, sure enough, they were all saggy-pants gangbangers. The last time Bill had seen so many silver-plated handguns, it’d been in Saddam Hussein’s palace in Iraq during the GWOT. But moments later, the ghetto boys began pulling legitimate assault rifles out of the vehicles.

  Return fire thwacked into the tractor, but there wasn’t much Bill could do about it. He tucked tight to the front of the engine block and shifted fire from target to target, dealing out three rounds each and
knocking men to the ground like he’d hit them with a wrecking ball.

  The first effective round pinged Bill in the scalp. He felt the smack and then the burn and his vision went a little blurry for a moment. When things came back into focus, five men were trying to climb over his gate. He put at least one bullet in each before a second round hit him in the shoulder. Again, the bullet felt like it’d gone through-and-through. He shook off the raging storm in his shoulder and hunted for more targets. He’d already burned through three mags and the gangbangers were rallying, seeking cover and making their shots count.

  Bill had played this scene out in his mind many times—the battle for his yard. He hadn’t imagined so many cars and so many enemy combatants, but the principles of the ambush remained the same. Except in this case, he’d certainly die against so many opponents. When the collapse went down in the big cities, he’d buried the blocking cable across the road and had moved the trigger to his detonator over by the cottonwood.

  Some enterprising gangbanger read his mind, and Bill peeked out from behind the tractor to see a blue Honda Civic revving its engine and un-sticking itself from the row of smashed-together gangster-mobiles. Bill could’ve hammered the Honda with .308 rounds, but leaning out from behind the tractor to shoot had become perilous. He definitely didn’t want to die before he got the chance to clap off his booby trap.

  Sure enough, the blue Honda bellowed as the gangbanger went max-velocity toward Bill’s gate, hurtling through the chain. A millisecond later, just as the Honda catapulted into his yard, Bill touched off the plate charge he’d planted under his driveway.

  Nobody really understood an explosion unless he’d been near one. Even from behind the tractor and the tree, the overpressure of twenty pounds of ANFO rattled Bill’s melon to the point where he forgot for a moment where he was. He’d been blown up before, but it wasn’t something a man got good at. It was like Jesus had pressed the reset button in his brain and his hard drive had been shut down.

  Bill got up off the ground and current events came back, bit by bit. The hard drive whirred and the onboard RAM clicked and hummed. He searched about for his battle rifle and found it on the other side of the cottonwood. He breached checked it, but couldn’t remember how many rounds had been in the mag before the blast. He did a tac-reload while the “warrior program” reloaded in his brain.

  A few rounds of gunfire rattled off from across the county road, but nobody on the battlefield could aim for shit. The entire yard was choked with a dust cloud as thick as Grandma’s honey. Bill could barely see the blown-up Honda, not a hundred feet away, laying on its back.

  As the dust cleared, he began identifying targets and picking them off one-by-one. The gangbangers were taking a bit longer to recover than he was, so maybe a man did get better at being blown up. Eventually, though, the city boys recovered fully, and the full measure of return fire resumed. Bill’s cottonwood was getting picked apart chunk by chunk by hard-hitting AK rounds. He returned fire from both sides of the tree—from high and then from low. He scored hits on the gangbangers, but the inside of his head began to buzz in a way that couldn’t be good for his long-term health. Not that his long-term health was a huge consideration.

  The battle rebounded back to full tilt when Bill discovered that he’d come to his last mag. He could’ve hunted around in his pockets for the partial mag that he’d kicked out during the tac-reload, but counting bullets in a partial mag wasn’t going to happen given the intensity of incoming fire. He needed a full mag for his next move.

  When he noticed a slowdown, Bill popped over the saddle of the tractor and dumped the entire mag into the gangbangers. They had all scurried behind their rice wagons after the big explosion, so his barrage probably wasn’t dealing much death. He succeeded in getting the gangsters to put their heads down, so he broke and ran for the porch, dropping his empty rifle in the dust as he charged as fast as his old legs would carry him.

  He hit the porch in a hail of gunfire, but nothing connected. He crashed through the screen and rounded on the door jamb. There against the wall, he’d stashed two special weapons: a lever-action .45-70 and a single, baseball hand grenade. He’d put them around the door jamb that very morning imagining they would be his last stand in the zombie apocalypse. If he was going to die holding steel, he’d want it to be the big, cowboy lever action and a hand grenade. Bill smiled big as he picked them up and made his peace.

  He wasn’t a fool. He knew that the .45-70 couldn’t hold a candle to the SCAR in a gunfight, or even the AK-47s, but if he was going to die, he wanted to die fighting with a man’s gun.

  Twenty years before, he’d taken a huge risk bringing the hand grenade back from the Iraqi war. He’d stowed it in his footlocker inside a heavy, copper incense lamp. He’d carefully cut the lamp open, wedged the grenade inside, then soldered it closed. He still had the lamp in his barn office, a trophy that said “fuck you” to military regulation. He valued it more than his bronze star.

  As the front wall of the farmhouse absorbed hundreds of AK rounds, little pock-marks of light winked around the door jamb and the wall. Splinters and dust blew inward. The room grew brighter by degrees.

  Bill made himself small behind the jamb as he breach-checked the .45-70 and slid the grenade into a mag pouch on his vest. He kicked the door open and took a quick look.

  The gangbangers had moved through the gate and had taken cover behind the Honda, the tractor and the cottonwood. He slid back inside just as he caught movement around the tree. He aimed for the gap and caught a gangbanger in the open, running for the corner of his house.

  BOOM!

  The .45-70 swept the man’s feet out from under him and he hit the ground face-first. Bill ran the lever and hammered two more rounds into the cottonwood. A man lurched out from behind the tree screaming and holding his eyes. Bill put a slug in the man’s chest. He gasped and crumpled like he’d been stomped by the Jolly Green Giant.

  Bill ducked back inside as AK-47s ripped his house apart. The sunlight illuminated millions of bits of floating insulation and couch stuffing. He felt a sting across his back—whether from splinters or a bullet, he didn’t know.

  He snapped a peek and caught two more men in the open. The doorway again exploded in splinters and he returned to cover. He fished the grenade out of the mag pouch and under-hand tossed it where he’d seen the men running.

  KA-WHUMP!

  The grenade blew and someone screamed an unholy screech, like two live cats in a sausage grinder.

  “¡Cese el fuego! Cease fire!” someone shouted from the front yard. Bill considered rolling around the doorframe and shooting whoever had yelled, but truth was, he was getting tired. He’d pretty much accomplished everything he’d hoped for after he’d taken the phone call from Tom Bartley just fifteen minutes before. He hurt all over, almost more than he could stand. But it’d been a good fifteen minutes. As far as Bill was concerned, he was already dead. But bravery and exhaustion were two different animals.

  “Viejito. Are you done yet?”

  “Are you all dead yet?” Bill fired back.

  The gangbanger in the yard chuckled. “Pretty fucking close, Viejito…tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to back away from here and leave you inside your busted-up house to live out the rest of your short-ass, busted up life. Then, we’re going to head down the road and fuck the shit out of your town. How’s that sound?”

  Bill curled his lip and thought about it.

  “What the hell do you want from me, then? Why the threats, puta madre?”

  The gangbanger replied. “Because this is what I do. I’m a talent scout, ese. When I see fifteen of our soldiers shot up and two blowed-up craters in the ground, I think you maybe know how to fuck shit up for real. Navy SEAL-shit right here, Viejito. How about you come with us? If you do, maybe we’ll just drive by your town and keep going. How’s that sound, Viejito? Hey. It’s the end of the world. Who gives a shit, right?”

  “I step out and you’re go
ing to shoot me. You think I’m stupid?”

  The big-mouth gangbanger laughed. “Ese, if we wanted to kill you, we’d just set your shitty house on fire, bro. We wouldn’t need you to come out. We’re giving you a shot at breathing, at least for another day or two. How’s that sound?”

  “How do I know you’ll keep your mongrel hands off the town?”

  “We have places to be. If I bring you in, maybe the bosses want you, maybe they don’t. I ain’t going to lie: I really don’t know what the bosses think about shit. But I promise we won’t jack your town. That I will guarantee if you come with us and show us how to blow shit up. I mean, hijo de la chingada. You jacked some vatos up out here, homeboy.”

  Bill could either die in the next few minutes, or he could help the town and maybe die later. Dying later pretty much always seemed like the better option. At this point in his life, he didn’t care about anyone except his son and that town. The rest of the world could go to hell. It wasn’t as though it bothered him to join up with Mexicans. War was war. He had never fought for anyone he didn’t come to despise later. They were all pieces of shit as far as he was concerned.

  He reached around the ruined door jamb and leaned the .45-70 up against the wall.

  “All right. I’m coming out,” Bill announced.

  A big, tatted-up gangbanger stepped out from behind the cottonwood and crossed the yard. As he came closer, Bill could tell that the man wasn’t nearly as young as the rest. He was what the saggy-pants gangbangers might call an “OG.” Original Gangster. Bill knew that from watching NCIS: Los Angeles.

  “Aren’t you getting a little old to be driving a rice burner?” Bill asked.

  “Hah! Aren’t you a little old to play Rambo, First Blood?”