"Give 'em back their guns," Edge yelled through the choking black smoke. "You lost that round, Colonel."
But Murray was in no mood to listen or reply to Edge any more. He knew that Cochise was seeking vengeance at any price and that the Apache chief was prepared to pay part of the cost in the blood of his own braves. Once the gates were down a full scale attack would be launched and there wasn't a chance in a million of stopping a horrifying proportion of the Indians from getting inside the fort.
"Keep pouring," Murray ordered as he glanced across the compound and saw that Sawyer and his detail were in the process of climbing on the arsenal roof; each carrying a component of the rapid fire Gatling Gun.
"Mind if I go and find a better place to die?" Edge asked rhetorically as he moved toward the head of the stairway up which the buckets of water were being passed.
"Chickening out?" Murray snapped."
Edge spat. "I just figure that if you keep all your men on this wall you're going to lay an egg." He started down the stairway as the hinges of one of the gates tore free and the burning planks of pine crashed into the seat of the flames, sending up a shower of sparks. In the compound a group of civilians were grouped around the sobbing Lorna Fawcett, trying to encourage her into one of the buildings.
"They're like beasts of the jungle," a woman said to Edge.
"But it was their jungle first," he answered as he examined the buildings of the fort and decided that the roof of the bunkhouses offered the best vantage point. But he went first to the arsenal and took out a box of ammunition. He tossed it up on to the roof, then threw up the Winchester before reaching for the verandah and hauling himself aloft. Glancing across to the adjacent roof of the arsenal he could see Sawyer and his men feeding cartridges into the hopper of the wicked-looking Gatling Gun. The weapon, which was mounted on a tripod, had six barrels, each with a separate bolt, cocking and firing mechanism which were activated by a crank at the rear.
"How many rounds a minute you likely to get out of that barrel-organ?" he called across.
"Makers specify 300," Sawyer answered.
Edge grinned as the second gate crashed down. "All be over in a minute then. Can't be more than that many Apaches left alive out there."
The fire was now the only bar to the Indian attack. Murray realized this and pulled his men off the water chain and started to deploy them along the wall and down in the compound, yelling for the civilians to be issued with rifles. The commanding officer himself stayed on the wall, to the right of where the staging over the gates were now in flames. But the heart of the fire had burned out so that now it crackled rather than roared and the beating of the Apache drums could be heard again, resounding out their presage of violent death.
"Get ready!" Murray called and Edge looked toward the gates as the smoke cleared, seeing a line of Apaches ranged across the main street of Rainbow. Edge sank to his knees and then pitched forward so that he was stretched out in a prone position. He used the barrel of his Colt and the point of his knife to pry up the lid of the ammunition box, then tipped it on its side so that he had easy access to the cartridges, then, as the first warcries of the braves sounded, he rested his cheek against the stock of the Winchester and lowered his left eye behind the back sight. Throughout the fort, as the leading arc of the new sun breasted the east wall, soldiers and civilians did the same. The whoops reached a crescendo, drowning out the drums and then unshod hoofs thundered, the stomping power of so many ponies at a gallop seeming to vibrate the very walls of the fort.
"Think the bastards mean it this time," Edge muttered as the men on the wall opened up, pouring a hail of hot lead down upon the advancing braves, firing again and again, as fast as their trembling hands could work the actions of their new weapons. But they were no more than twenty-five and as their fire power took out the front riders more braves increased speed to fill the gaps.
As the range narrowed the first shower of arrows swished up to the wall. Three men were hit in the chest and fell backwards into the compound. A woman who rushed out to help a man groaning through the final seconds of his life collapsed on top of him without a sound as an arrow cleared the wall and thudded between her shoulder blades. Another soldier, no more than eighteen, took a lance full in the stomach and turned before he fell. The shaft of the lance hit the ground first and the weight of the boy caused the point to burst out from his back with a great fountain of bloodied entrails. The flagpole above the gate burned through and toppled sideways,
smashing through the skull of a man who was in the process of reloading his rifle.
Then the leading group of braves leaped across the dying embers of the burned-out wagon and into the fort. A fusillade of rifle fire rang out and three braves fell, but four more jumped from their ponies and made it into cover.
"Jesus, they've got the Colonel," Sawyer yelled and Edge took out two of the second batch of braves before glancing up at the wall. He was in time to see Murray stagger across the staging, the Colonel's face masked by blood flowing from around the shaft of an arrow buried in his left eye. Another arrow penetrated his chest and Murray crumpled to the staging.
"Looks like you're in command," Edge told the lieutenant.
"Oh, my God," Sawyer yelled. "Fire, fire, fire, damn you."
He jabbed a shaking hand into the ribs of the trooper squatting behind the Gatling and the man began to crank. The six barrels started to rotate, belching smoke and spitting death, spraying the entire area of the gates with high caliber bullets, mixing the blood of Apache and pony and piling their bodies into an untidy heap. But it had been firing for less than fifteen seconds when metal screeched against metal and a loud clang signaled a jammed mechanism.
Edge sighed and shook his head. "Never trust anything a Johnny Reb made," he muttered. "Dick Gatling ought to have stuck to his planting in Carolina."
As Sawyer shouted obscenities at his men, urging them to free the tangled metal, braves streamed in through the gateway again, losing some but getting a great many into cover. The detachment of soldiers on the wall had been reduced to ten men without even a non-com to lead them. While inside the fort the Apache infiltrators ceased their warcries and crept stealthily into and over buildings to strike silently.
A trooper's head rolled out from a doorway and was kicked viciously into the center of the compound by a moccasined foot. A terrified child scooted out into the open, chased by his hysterical mother and both pitched forward with arrows growing from their backs. Knives flashed and tomahawks thudded, arrows swished and captured rifles cracked. Upon the wall four men died in as many seconds and the remaining six tried to make the foot of the stairway on the run, blasting as they went. A dozen braves spilled out their lives in blood, but only one soldier reached the compound, there to be ripped apart by the chattering fire of the Gatling as the mechanism came free.
"Cease fire!" Sawyer shrieked in terror as he realized the machine gun was no longer of use, its deadly spray not differentiating between friend and foe. It was his final command. An arcing arrow bored a course downward through his right cheek and into his throat. "Oh, mother!" he managed to sigh before he died, pitching forward off the arsenal roof.
Seven braves scrambled up on to the roof and threw themselves at the gunnery detail, who had no time to snatch up their rifles or draw revolvers. Edge picked off three with the Winchester, then another a moment after the brave had slashed the throat of a trooper. An army boot smashed into the groin of an Apache and then became separated from the leg as a tomahawk hacked through the ankle. The trooper's scream was curtailed by a knife in the heart and his murder died as Edge sent a bullet into the brave's heart. The last trooper was locked in a deadly wrestling match with two braves and managed to turn the knife of one and drive it into the Apache's belly. An instant before the other brave could bury his tomahawk into the exposed skull of the trooper, Edge's Winchester cracked again, smashing the wrist of the hand clutching the weapon. The trooper snatched up the axe and swung it with all his
strength, burying the entire blade into the Indian's stomach and shoving the blood dripping body across the roof and over the edge.
"Thanks!" the soldier said, drawing in a large breath. It was his last. The arrow came up from the compound and entered the back of his neck, the point emerging through his mouth like a metal tongue speckled with blood. Then the blood gushed, like crimson vomit, in a powerful arc that reached across the roof to spray on to Edges face and chest.
"Just thanks would have been enough," Edge muttered with distaste as he wiped the warm stickiness from his lips and started to turn to survey the main battle arena.
He saw perhaps fifty braves advancing upon two men, and a boy who had emerged from the cookhouse doorway, the men holding their hands high above their heads, the boy pathetically waving a stick with a once-white, blood-stained handkerchief tied to it. He heard Cochise' bark an order. He raised his Winchester and fixed the chief in the sight. Then another figure staggered into his line of fire and he recognized Lorna Fawcett. She was naked and carrying something in her hands: something which dripped blood into dust already spattered with red. It was her own right breast, still linked to her body by a flap of skin. An arrow thudded into the gaping wound and she fell, giving Edge a clear line of fire at Cochise.
But the shot he heard was not his own and the Apache chief continued his advance as Edge felt a rearing pain at the back of his neck. "Christ, I've bought it," he said as he pitched forward and the sun went out.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
DEATH and smoke were an acrid stench that was sucked down his throat and into his lungs, causing his stomach to rebel with a dry retching that thrust him back into consciousness. The sun was high, beating down upon him unmercifully and he was sure if had burned a hole in the back of his head. But when he cracked open his eyes and saw the sprawled bodies of the troopers and Apaches spread around the Gatling Gun he recalled the shot and the pain. His fingertips delved beneath the long black hair at his neck and felt the rough texture of encrusted blood tracing the course of a three-inch long furrow.
Then he stopped the exploration and remained utterly immobile as he heard a sound, distant and unidentifiable at first. But as it became louder he realized that a wagon was approaching, slowly with its springs creaking and its shaft horses tiring under a heavy load. He raised his head then, gritting against the pain, and looked across the compound within the fort. It was littered with more than a hundred bodies, troopers, civilians and Apaches alike, which had long ago ceased to gush blood; interspersed with the already bloating carcasses of Indian ponies. All had died violently, many agonizingly, but none more than the two men and small boy who had been suspended by their thumbs beneath the wall staging and had fires lit beneath them. It was the odor from their blackened bodies which had wafted across the death-strewn compound to wake the man called Edge. He grimaced at the sight and looked out through the incinerated gates of the fort and down the main street of Rainbow, over the bodies of many scores of Apaches to where the wagon was approaching. It was a flatbed, with just one man sitting on the box and behind him was a cargo concealed by a canvas sheet. Not a big cargo in terms of bulk, but vast in value, Edge realized, as the wagon rolled in through the fort entrance and he recognized Wyatt Drucker.
The face of the big rancher was set in an expression of stark horror, the lines of which seemed to deepen as each new facet of the violent, battle was revealed to him. He steered the team of four horses with the reins held in one hand while the other was curled around the breech of the Englishman's Winchester.
Edge grunted and felt around for his own rifle as Drucker halted the wagon in the center of the compound. But there was no gun, on the roof—not even his Colt, which had been taken from its holster. He glanced across at the roof of the arsenal, then quickly down into the compound. He grunted again. Chief Cochise had got his Winchesters and every other weapon in Fort Rainbow. Edge felt for his neck again, but not for the wound, and discovered he still had the razor. But Drucker was too far away for this to be of any use. Then he looked again at the arsenal roof and his lean face broke into a cold grin, narrowing the eyes to slits of blue and curling back the thin lips to show an even row of teeth. There was still one gun left at the fort.
He pulled himself up on to all fours and fastening his eyes on Drucker, began to move slowly toward the side of the roof. Once there he relaxed his vigilance of the rancher to survey the six foot gap separating the bunkhouse from the arsenal. He went up into a crouch, backed off two yards and then broke into a short, ambling run. The sound of his feet thudding on to the opposite roof snapped up Drucker's eyes. The rancher dropped the reins, threw up the Winchester and loosed off a shot. The bullet gouged a furrow across the stomach of one of the dead braves. The wound was red but there was no blood: the Apache had been dead for too long.
"Hell, I thought you was Injun!" Drucker shouted as he saw Edge in a crouch a few feet from the Gatling. "Didn't hit you, did I?"
"You found it?" Edge asked.
"Anyone else left alive?"
"Just you and me."
Drucker had started to lower the Winchester, but now he raised it again, a suspicious frown on his leathery features. "Who are you?" he demanded.
Edge inched closer to the gun and shot a side-long glance into the hopper. It was more than half full. "Guy you stole from," he answered. "You want to get down off that wagon and go home to your ranch?"
"The Englishman's buddy!" Drucker exclaimed.
"I ain't got no buddies," Edge told him.
"And I ain't got no ranch," came the reply. "Apaches burned it and run off my stock."
"Tough," Edge answered. "Means you ain't got nothing to live for anymore."
"I got a million reasons to live," Drucker shouted and squeezed the trigger of his rifle.
Edge went sideways, reaching out a hand for the crank of the Gatling. Lead spat from the six barrels, kicking up a wide arc of dust puffs as Edge raked the gun around toward the wagon. Drucker got off one more shot with the Winchester, standing for a better angle but still firing high. Then the deadly spray from the Gatling's revolving barrels tattooed a pattern of holes on his broad chest. He tossed the Winchester high into the air as he screamed and his knees bent, bringing his head down into the trajectory of the flying bullets. They tore the flesh to shreds, and Drucker's cheekbones shone white in the sunlight as his body pitched forward into the dust and Edge stopped cranking the handle. The horses reared once and then became quiet.
Edge Stood up, moved to the side of the roof and lowered himself gently to the ground, careful not to jerk his neck and so activate fresh waves of pain from the wound. He walked slowly across to Drucker's body and looked down at the bloody pulp which had once been on a set of features.
"Looks like I win," he muttered. "You just can't face up to things anymore."
He found the handkerchief with which the small boy had tried to surrender and used it to wipe Drucker's blood from the box' seat of the wagon. He had just finished and was stooping to pick up the dead man's Winchester when he froze, hearing a distant sound. He straightened slowly and looked out through the gateway, across the dead Apaches and ponies, past the gruesome, hanging head of the Englishman, toward a swirling cloud of dust which was moving relentlessly along the valley floor on the far side of the river. The sound rang out again: a frenetic bugle call. And as the dust cloud drew near he saw the Stars and Stripes and the company pennant streaming in the slipstream. He sighed, rested the rifle against the wagon and took the makings of a cigarette from his shirt pocket.
"Guess everything's got to start someplace," he muttered. "It's the goddamn Seventh Cavalry. They just ain't got no sense' of timing."
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Apache Death (Edge series Book 3) Page 13
