Sunstone

by RW Krpoun

  I wasn’t in any hurry; I expect it took us at least forty minutes to cover the next three hundred yards, but slow is quieter and much safer. We weren’t just moving slowly, though, because I stopped every dozen or so steps to listen, look, and smell.

  The value of such an approach proved itself as we drew close: on one such pause I heard an unmistakable snore to my right, a real wood-saw buzz. Easing in that direction I saw what I had thought was just a clump of brush materialize into a wagon with a canvas-covered load, and ten steps further let me work out that four men were sleeping on the ground between it and us.

  Halting, I relayed my plan in whispers, mouth to ear with each in turn. Done, Captain and I let Mac and Nhi slip forward, the pair moving like shadows. When they had a good head start I eased forward with Captain on my heels. Each of us slipped to with a foot or so of a sleeper’s feet, and when we were all in position I moved to the head of mine and brought my sap down on his skull with all my weight behind it.

  A sap is a terrible weapon; mine was a stitched leather sheath over a narrow slab of lead, and unless you were careful you could really hurt someone - just a slap from the flat side would numb an arm or drop a man to his knees with a mild concussion. Some call them a slapjack for that very reason.

  My swing was a full-arm blow with the sap turned narrow-side on; the impact split the case, warped the lead piece, and caved in the man’s skull like a pumpkin hit with a hatchet. Nhi used a hatchet, and the other two the hammers they had brought to pound steel, and none of the four victims let out a sound, although there was the thrashing of limbs you associate with a severe head wound.

  Pulling the revolver from the holster next to my target’s head, I examined a nearly-new Colt New Service, Model of 1909. Releasing the cylinder I sniffed the breech: clean, oiled, and unfired in quite some time. Closing the cylinder after running a thumb across the chambers to ensure it was fully loaded, I stuck it into the back of my belt.

  “These jaspers were white,” Captain whispered. “Nice new guns.” I heard a magazine being released from a pistol and then he nudged my arm. “Here, three magazines for your new hog-leg.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Bodyguards,” Mac murmured, laying aside a jacket he had been feeling. “Watches, new boots, well-cut clothes. Tailor work, not store-shelf.”

  “Two on guard, two relieve them, two get the night off,” Captain breathed. “We got two at least more shooters besides the walking guards.”

  “New plan: Captain, you hang behind and cover us. The bodyguards will be near the body in question, which means the north side of camp if I read it right. You keep them off of us while we do the contamination and despoiling.”

  “Yeah.” I heard his stock being attached to the Mauser. “You want my pot?”

  “Nhi, you take it.” I grabbed a folded blanket that was handy. “I have an idea. Stay behind me.”

  Draping the blanket over shoulders and neck I stood and began trudging towards the lanterns, keeping my head down and walking stiff-legged like a man freshly wakened, muttering under my breath once or twice. Ahead and to my left I had caught movement before I had stood up: a pair of Chuj guards making their rounds. I moved so they intercepted me without making it look like I was interested in them.

  The two lanterns were about thirty feet apart, hanging on six-foot tripods made of what looked like peeled mesquite, illuminating a roughly circular slab of rock about eight feet across and nearly two feet thick resting on a circle of boulders that raised its surface nearly to waist height: the sunstone. Its top was covered in palm leaves held on by thick twine, and milky chunks of rock salt were scattered across its surface. Perched nearby on an age-darkened block of wood was the cuauhxicalli - actually I wouldn’t have known it was a bowl if they hadn’t told me it was used to hold hearts from sacrificial victims. It was carved out of gray stone, oblong and sort of bowed like a canoe, overhanging the block on both sides. One end had a head of some sort, a snarling, fanged beast-face or perhaps a skull of some sort, while the other was carved into a mass of snakes or ropes or something similar. The sides were deeply incised with decorations that were unreadable in the available light.

  The two guards picked up the pace as we drew close, but what they saw in the poor light was a white man with a blanket slung around his shoulders moving slowly from a place where they knew white men were sleeping. Everyone watches for signs and sounds of stealth, for indications of cunning and subterfuge, but what is most dangerous is when you see what you expect to see.

  We were six feet apart when one gasped “Cieno!”

  Apparently he noticed that my boots were filthy from the ditches. They were strolling along with their carbines slung, feeling pretty safe, which is also a dangerous thing. The observant one went for his revolver and the other, a second behind his companion, tried to unsling his carbine, but I had had my hand on the M1911 the whole time and came up shooting, getting each twice in the chest before either was a danger to me, the heavy rounds smashing them off their feet in a satisfactory style. In the silence of the camp the pistol sounded like a howitzer.

  Then I was running, the blanket billowing off my shoulders, praying that Captain had had time to get into position. I slid in behind one of the boulders like I was going for home plate, even as a bullet glanced off an adjacent boulder.

  Hearing Captain’s Mauser barking I rolled to my feet, crouching to stay behind my boulder. Unslinging my hammer and chisel on their lanyard, I wedged the point of the latter into a handy crack and gave it two solid belts with the hammer until a bullet plowing into the sod next to my foot caused me to drop the hammer and hug my boulder, M1911 in hand. Mac was sliding in two supports to my right, and the shooter, who was in a thicket on the opposite side of the sunstone tried a shot at him. I hammered the four left in the pistol at his muzzle flash and then reloaded one of Captain’s contributions, dropping the empty into my shirt.

  “Covering,” Mac hissed.

  Cursing, I slapped the ground until I found my hammer and rose to give the chisel another few whacks until somebody’s bullet whipped past my head; this time I set the hammer down before drawing the M1911. “Covering.”

  I fired off a magazine at random into the thicket on the other side, spacing the shots out to hold anyone there’s interest. Ducking back, I reloaded and grabbed the hammer.

  Nhi hit the cuauhxicalli with one of her pots, the liquid mix catching in a bright blaze that immediately doubled the light we had to work with; being a smart girl she had hit the side of the thing so half ran down onto the wood block.

  Hearing both Captain and Mac shooting I popped up and beat on the damned chisel like John Henry racing the steam-driven hammer. I was nearly weeping with frustration that the damned thing wasn’t budging when Nhi threw her second pot and the sudden flare of light let me see that my desperate efforts had sunk the chisel into the stone until the handle had hung up in the crack. Tossing the hammer up onto the sunstone’s table-like top I drew the M1911. “Covering-I’m done!”

  Leaning around the boulder I saw legs crashing through the thicket, and my blood ran cold: the crazies had arrived. Rising up to rest my elbows on the sunstone’s top, I opened fire, blowing apart skulls as the crazies fought their way through the mesquite and Mac hammered away.

  I burned through Captain’s donated magazines and started on my own, switching to shooting torsos, two hits apiece: it might not kill them, but the impact of the heavy rounds generally knocked them down. Checking to my right as I reloaded I saw Mac pounding away on the butt of a bayonet driven vertically into the sunstone’s face, and beyond Nhi was emptying a full magazine of the Browning into the flaming cuauhxicalli, sparks leaping crazily from each hit. She should have taken to her heels by now, but she hadn’t.

  The table-like bulk of the sunstone gave the crazies pause as they approached, a hesitation which cost two their cranial integrity as they tried to work out whether to go after me or Mac. In the end they settled on an even split, but delay w
as working in our favor. Mac was still pounding away with his hammer, but Nhi was firing her carbine so I wasn’t alone in facing this bunch-what Captain was doing I wasn’t sure, nor did I feel a need to inquire.

  Three crazies were coming around my side of the sunstone; I popped one in the head and swore as the slide locked back on an empty magazine. Dropping the empty inside my shirt I slotted in a full one and released the slide, bring the pistol back to level as a heavy-set senora came around the curve of the stone only to collect a bullet between the horns. It took two shots to hit the last one as it was lurching on a damaged leg, which slowed it down but also made it hard to get a head hit.

  Struck by a suspicion I dropped to a knee to look under the sunstone, finding myself facing an energetically crawling crazy who was nearly upon me. I shot it to a permanent death and rose, pulling the magazine to find it empty. Reloading, I shot the last crazy coming through the thicket and checked my flanks and rear. Mac was just tossing his hammer onto the table, having driven two bayonets half their length into the sunstone and then apparently having beat upon its surface for good measure. Nhi, contrary to instructions, had moved over to join us, carbine at the ready. Some distance beyond the fiery cuauhxicalli I saw the body of a man, the firelight winking off the barrel of a rifle lying inches from his limp hands, so I knew Captain was on the job.

  Mac was lighting the fuse on his pot, so I unlooped mine from around my neck and handed it to him as I moved to join Nhi. “Go find Captain, stick with him,” I told her. “I’ll stay with Mac; cover us.”

  She hesitated, scowling, as the first pot crashed into the sunstone’s face and the contents caught fire. “Go on, we’ll be fine. I want you to be safe.”

  That was the right and the wrong thing to say-she hesitated a second longer, then blew me a kiss and legged it back, moving with such surety that I was confident she hadn’t lost track of Captain as I had.

  Turning back, I fired off six rounds to the north to let them know we cared and dropped the empty magazine into my shirt, one round still in the chamber, as the second pot hit the sunstone. Sliding home a full magazine, I glanced away from the direction I expected trouble to come from and saw the sunstone.

  The palm leaves must have been deadly dry-they burnt away like dry paper in a furnace, exposing the stone beneath. The sunstone’s surface had been deeply etched with rows of symbols circling around a skull-like face at the very heart of the stone, an hour-glass-shaped skull whose empty sockets seemed to be staring right at me as the flaming liquid spread across the surface of the stone.

  For a second I felt like my body was gone, that I was just an awareness hanging in midair as the stone, its engravings much sharper and liberally sprayed with blood, rested on richly carved stone supports on the upper deck of a tall structure. It was surrounded by tattooed men in strange headdresses who chanted and gestured under the guidance of a bald, bare-headed man sitting in an ornate back-less chair with a long white strip of paper across his lap. Not paper, I realized, but a codex, new and fresh.

  They had found something and made it a home in the stone, feeding it and negotiating with it as the stars wheeled overhead and younger men took the places of those who died and the blinding white of the codex was covered with symbols and drawings. Two sides working, one for power, the other…freedom? Control? Was it a home or a prison?

  Whatever I was seeing vanished as the creosote/kerosene mix reached the center of the sunstone; badly shaken, I raised the M1911 and emptied the magazine into the skull’s face, then pulled the Colt New Service and fired six rounds left-handed into the center of the sunstone, tossing the steel revolver atop the engravings for luck.

  Mac slapped me on the shoulder, jolting the rest of the cobwebs from my head. “Come on!”

  I reloaded as we turned and started to run east, only to be confronted by a group of crazies coming from the direction of the men we had killed in their sleep. Muzzle-flashes marked their passage, but they were ignoring everything in a mad lurching charge, and I had a sudden moment’s clarity: they were not coming for us, they were going to smother the fires with their own bodies, undoing the damage we had wrought.

  Sliding to a halt I opened fire, going for head shots, getting four out of seven and loading my last magazine. I heard Mac yelling and then opening fire as the crazies surged towards me, except that they weren’t: a group of zombies converge on a man in the open, but these were moving in a line abreast. I was not the target.

  I got four more before the slide locked back; releasing the slide I shifted the empty M1911 to my left hand to holster and reached for my Colt as the sudden realization struck me like a flash of lighting on a dark night. These weren’t just going to the stones, they were going to the stones under control.

  It was a flicker of green in that twisted landscape of ruddy light, inky shadow, and half-seen motion that revealed the rather obvious to me, but then, I’ve never been the smartest of men.

  Then Mac dropped a crazy and through the gap in the line was Green Coat, just twenty feet away.

  Cabral, Green Coat himself: he was tall, at least six feet, an emaciated figure who in no way looked weak wrapped in his strangely cut trademark green coat; I caught just the impression of trousers and boots but no detail of them registered, nor were they important. For one brief second we saw each other across a contrasted field, eyes locking like they do in tales of romance. His hair was long, tangled, and gray, and his face, though clean shaven, was wasted like a man in the last stages of a slow-killing illness, yet I knew without a doubt there was at least as much strength in his boney frame as there was in mine, perhaps even more.

  His eyes were so light blue they were gray, and in the instant he met my gaze I knew that he had lived far longer than I had, far longer than he should have. In that instant I felt I saw an image or images, of the sea, of the northeastern coat, Massachusetts perhaps, something of him that was forever anchored there-likely where he first set his feet on the path that led him here.

  His face was twisted in rage, rage and frustrated ambition-he knew what we were doing, what we hoped we had done, and his fury made him appear incandescent.

  We moved as one, like two puppets on the same string; I drew and fired as he brought up a black stone statue larger and even in this light clearly less worn than those I had seen before. For an eternal portion of a second we were bound together by action, he thrusting forward his black stone with words forming on his lips, and me bringing the Colt up and firing with no time for the sights, just trusting the hand to send the bullet where I was looking: Green Coat’s deathly pale face.

  The gunshot shattered whatever strangeness there was between us; it erupted in noise and flaring fire and then Cabral was staggering back, cradling his smashed left hand to his chest. I had missed my target, but not missed completely.

  The crazies abruptly staggered to a halt, two of them half-turning and bumping into each other, hiding Green Coat from me. I wasted no time in shooting the nearest five in the skull as I scuttled sideways more or less south. They recovered from their shock even as I fired the fifth round, and with hissing wails went for me with all the vile hatred their undead hearts contained.

  Except that I was moving as fast as I could, ejecting spent casings and loading fresh rounds. The Colt was an old friend and I needed no light to reload. When it was topped off I stopped and turned to shoot the first three coming at me before taking off again.

  A match flared to my left, nearly giving me a seizure because for a second I thought it was a muzzle flash, and then I recognized Tobias in its brief light and angled towards him. “Come on, Mister, safe path,” he yelled and trotted off to the southeast. I turned and fired off the last three and then reloaded as I ran.

  Only five crazies remained with us after that point-I don’t know if others got the rest or they lost interest and wandered off as they sometimes do. I put all five down, although it took fourteen rounds to do it, between the poor light and the exertion of having to keep moving. T
hat didn’t leave me with many rounds for the Colt, and the M1911 was completely out, but I wasn’t all that concerned. Tobias knew where he was going, and for now all we had to do was stay away from the foe.

  We took a much needed breather (at least I really needed it) on a little ridgeline a while later.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t shoot any,” I observed around a shirt button I had in my mouth to stir up my salvia.

  “Out of ammo, mister. Shot all I had back there.”

  “Where were you?”

  “With the Captain.” It was a nickname, not a rank, but I didn’t correct him. “Some men came up and we had to stop them. Real men, with guns.”

  “Captain all right?”

  “He got kind of hit, he said it grazed him along the ribs, but he could still run so I think he is all right.”

  “Brother Andrew is going to have both our hides for you being involved.”

  I could see him grin. “That’s all right.”

  “They ever take a strap to you?”

  “Not much. Brother Andrew makes boys who break the rules dig ditches in the garden, and girls who break the rules have to scrub the stoves. Me, I dug two whole ditches by myself, I figure. Maybe three.”

  “I don’t doubt.”

  Eventually he led me to a clump of mesquite that looked like every other clump of mesquite I had seen in Mexico, but as we neared this one he made some bird cry, and a similar cry answered from the trees. A moment later an Indian boy appeared and led us to a tiny clearing in the clump’s center.

  Nhi hit me from nowhere and kissed me-it was a good thing I had spit out the button.

  Mac and Captain were there, and a couple of teen-aged orphans; it turned out this was a spot where the outside scouts could go to rest and eat in safety. One scout was still out, watching the camp.

  I drank about two pints of water in one go and passed the canteen back to Captain. “I heard you stopped one.”