Blaze of Lightning Roar of Thunder

by Helen A Rosburg

  So why did a dust cloud hover over the town like a veil of pale gauze? Not one horse, but many, had ridden into Santa Rita.

  Louisa bent over, gasping for breath. The fear that crowded her chest made it seem even harder to breathe. Sweat poured from her overheated body and fell like rain to dampen the earth. She willed her heart to slow that she might run again.

  Riders had come to Santa Rita. A band of men, riding hard. For what purpose?

  An answer came immediately to her silent question, an answer that had come before and launched her headlong flight for home. For Louisa knew, with sure and certain instinct, that it was not miners or Apaches.

  She could breathe again. She started to run.

  The slap of her sandals on sand came but vaguely to her ears. Her body was damp with sweat, and her mouth was dry. Terror was a hand that tightened around her throat.

  Because she could hear it now, the screaming. Men shouting. Gunshots.

  The wall around the village was primitive; organ-pipe cacti planted close together. Even when they died, their skeletons left a prickly barrier. A barrier she could see through to the carnage beyond.

  “Mama …” The cry flew from her throat, mindless, as she ran through the open gate. A gate she doubted had ever been closed. The Mexican-American War was over. Her people lived in peace. Even the warlike Apaches had become scarce, almost wiped out by the man who hunted their scalps. The man who now took the scalps of her people.

  Louisa became an animal, stripped of all humanity. A feral growl came from deep within her breast. Her lips curled into a snarl as she bared her teeth. She hurled herself at the man nearest to her, the one who had just shot her young cousin in the back of his head.

  The man’s horse skittered sideways, scared by the wild thing clinging to its rider’s leg. Louisa was dragged along, hands gripping the stirrup, teeth searching for flesh beneath the coarse fabric of the man’s trousers. She felt blows raining on her head, and her vision clouded. She gave no thought to the fact the man had a gun and had just killed a member of her family, just as the wolf gives no thought to the hunter’s rifle. She simply reacted.

  And then she could see only red. Her fingers lost their grasp, and the breath was knocked from her lungs. She tasted dirt and blood. Something hit her in the ribs. A boot perhaps, or a hoof, and searing pain shot through her side. She ignored it and pulled herself along the ground, reaching blindly for something, anything.

  When Louisa’s hand connected with something warm and soft, her mind rebelled and kept her from the reality of what she groped. The clothing that covered it was merely a useful tool, and she used it to wipe the blood from her eyes. She pushed to her feet, turning from the corpse as she rose. It was only to see the end of life as she had known it … or would ever know it again.

  The screams in the village had ceased, replaced by the pitiful moans of the dying. An occasional gunshot ended those sounds as well. The street was littered with the dead. Rough-looking men knelt among the bodies, knives glinting in the sun until the blades were too bloody to reflect light any longer.

  Louisa couldn’t think why they hadn’t noticed her. She couldn’t think at all, in fact. Her mind was numb with horror.

  They were all dead. Everyone. Women, some with children still in their arms. Old men. Old women. Everyone.

  Somewhere lay her mother and her father. Little Inez. Tomas.

  The air reeked of death. The sun beat down relentlessly, mercilessly. Louisa stood frozen in time and space. The world ceased to exist.

  The men continued their gruesome work, stringing scalps like fish on a line. Louisa’s mind still refused to function. What she looked at, what she saw, did not register. It was meaningless motion, sound, and color.

  Until a shout distracted them all. Louisa’s head turned with all the rest, turned to the slender youth who appeared from behind an adobe wall. Blood smeared his face and simple tunic. An old, but carefully tended rifle was raised in his arms.

  Something stirred to life in Louisa’s breast. The beating of her heart returned. Blood surged through her veins. His name raced to her lips, but she stifled it.

  Tomas.

  “Throw … throw down your guns,” the boy ordered. His voice shook. The rifle wavered visibly in his grip. Someone laughed.

  The hope that had blossomed so brilliantly dissolved into cold terror. Her brother had a single-shot rifle. All the men had repeat-shot pistols. Tomas hadn’t the slightest chance of survival.

  But he knew it.

  “I know I’m going to die,” he said in a hard voice Louisa scarcely recognized. “And I welcome it. But one of you is going with me.”

  “Noooo …” Louisa hissed, all the breath, all the life going out of her with that single word.

  Another laugh, this time from a thin, weathered man, the only man still sitting on his horse. It was the cruelest sound Louisa had ever heard.

  “You just made a bad mistake, boy,” the man said. “You thought you were gonna die easy. I ain’t fixin’ to accommodate you.”

  It was unbelievable how cold she felt, even with the sun beating down on her head and sweat pouring from her body. Her blood was as icy as the river water in winter.

  The rider nodded at a burly man bent over one of the bodies, and made a motion with his fingers. Tomas swung the rifle toward the kneeling man, and Louisa’s heart rose into her throat. The big man smiled. The lightning-like scar that ran through one eyebrow and down his cheek crinkled as if with merriment.

  “If you aim to shoot me, son,” he said, “do it now.”

  Tomas’s finger tightened on the trigger. Louisa could almost feel it herself. She was as taut as a bowstring. The big man rose and walked to his horse.

  “Stop,” Tomas commanded.

  The big man kept moving. He untied the rawhide that held a lasso to his saddle.

  Louisa stood transfixed, paralyzed with fear. The big man uncoiled the loop and swung it around his head.

  “Best shoot now, boy,” he drawled.

  Tomas’s eyes darted between the man with the lasso and the tall man on the horse. The rifle shook in his hands. Rivulets of water ran from his temples.

  Louisa’s tension was too great, and the arrow was loosed from its bow. The scream flew away from her before she could stop it.

  “Tomas …”

  Heads turned in her direction. Pistols were withdrawn from holsters. The lasso’s loop floated, as if in slow motion, toward her brother.

  The man on the horse grinned as he aimed his pistol at her. She knew, with absolute certainty, that he was the one who would shoot her. He was distracted for a moment, however, by the lasso’s flight.

  Louisa saw it settle over her brother’s head and come to rest above his shoulders. She watched it draw tight. The burly man threw the end of the rope over the branch of a dead and leafless tree, even as he mounted his horse. He tied the end of the rope around his pommel, then pulled on the horse’s reins.

  There was not another scream in her. Horror filled every pore of her body, every drop of her blood, every centimeter of her lungs. The big man’s horse began to back.

  The rifle in Tomas’s hands fired uselessly and fell from his grip as his fingers groped at the noose about his neck. A moment later his feet dangled above the ground. His face turned dark, and his tongue protruded. His body spasmed.

  She welcomed it, the bullet. She ran to it, arms outstretched. She saw the man’s face again, his grin. Then nothing. She did not even hear the shot.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE MOURNFUL CALL OF THE DESERT DOVES WAS THE first thing of which she became aware. The sound was a balm to her soul, the familiar music of the morning. It heralded another day of work and love and laughter, and another day to spend amid the teeming life of the desert she loved so well. Louisa stirred, prepared to snuggle under her colorful blanket for a few more moments of the predawn hour, but the movement brought only searing pain. Her side ached so badly she could not take a deep breath, and the
re was something terribly amiss with her head. She tried to open her eyes, but they seemed to be glued shut. Louisa scrubbed her fists against her eyelids.

  The motion intensified the pain. But she embraced it, for it covered something darker, something so horrible that nausea instantly filled her stomach. Louisa rolled over and retched onto the dry ground. Lightning flashed in her rib cage; thunder crashed in her head. And when she opened her eyes at last, memory engulfed her.

  Louisa lay very still, the mental pain as great as the physical. The torment was so overwhelming, she was afraid that if she moved she might break. She concentrated instead on her breathing. Slow breaths, not too deep, until her heart found its rhythm. Then, carefully, she got to her feet.

  Down the street a buzzard flapped lazily into the air. Others circled. They warily eyed the grisly remains. Louisa forced herself to do the same.

  Unless someone had miraculously escaped, she was the only one of her village left alive. Bodies sprawled everywhere. All except one, still hanging, and from that she kept her eyes averted. At least he had not been mutilated.

  There were others, she noticed, that were intact as well. Not every scalp had been taken; the old ones, for instance. Why? Because their hair was gray and would bring no bounty dollars? Why kill them, then? Why take every single precious life in the village?

  Something pushed at Louisa from deep inside, nudged at the dead place that had once housed her soul. It pushed so hard a feral grunt issued from her throat.

  They killed everyone so there would be no witnesses, no one to tell the tale of the dead. They had shot her as well. Louisa raised tentative fingers to the fire that had burned in her temple.

  The bullet had grazed her deeply. She winced, but forced herself to follow the bullet’s path. It had struck her left temple and traveled on, into her hairline. Her hair was encrusted with blood.

  But she was alive.

  The thing within her pushed again. Her lips parted as her breath quickened. Whatever it was was huge, and wished to be free.

  She was alive, alive to honor the dead.

  The thing continued to swell and grow. It pushed against the back of her throat now, stinging, making it impossible to swallow. Her eyes burned.

  She was alive. A living witness. The murderers had failed. Her life was not over. It had just begun.

  Tears streamed from Louisa’s eyes. The thing inside of her broke free, erupting into a wrenching, heartbroken sob. Emotion threatened to overwhelm her. But it was no longer strictly the emotion of loss and grief and sorrow. And what it was, would carry her through all the days and years to come, until she had exacted her revenge, and had vengeance for the dead.

  Louisa concentrated on taking deep breaths until she had her tears under control. There was not time for them now. She had too much to do.

  The sun rose to noon, blazing, and began its descent. Louisa did not cease from her labors. She hungered, but had no stomach for food, not with the task she had set for herself. She had stopped once for water, pulling the bucket up from the well. It occurred to her, briefly, that it might have been poisoned. But then she remembered they had meant to leave no survivors. There would have been no reason to set a trap for anyone left alive. She smiled grimly, then drank deeply and poured the remainder over her head and shoulders. The coolness was momentarily reviving.

  By nightfall she estimated the trench was large enough. She had no strength left, however. She would have to finish her task in the morning.

  Louisa could not, would not, return to the space she had once called her home. Instead she curled up under the makeshift roof that provided shade for the livestock corral. Manure was pungent in her nostrils, but all the animals were gone. Driven away probably, or stolen. It hardly mattered.

  Spring nights on the high desert were chilly, and Louisa had no blanket. But the sand was still warm. And the blessing of sleep claimed her the moment she closed her eyes. She did not wake until she heard the flapping of great wings.

  The buzzards had returned. She did not mind them. They were only doing what nature had intended.

  Louisa was vaguely surprised by her lack of emotion. What once would have horrified her was now merely another fact of her existence as she moved through life. Had she changed so much? Undoubtedly. There would be other changes as well, she thought, that she would discover along her way. A way that had to continue now, toward the terrible thing she had to do, had to move through, to get to the other side and go on.

  The labor was not as hideous as she feared it would be. Bodies were not only mutilated, but bloated now. It was difficult to recognize friends and neighbors by their features. And she carefully covered each one in a blanket or a shawl before she dragged them, one by one, to the grave she had dug. She took extra care with the little ones, and had to swallow a painful obstruction in her throat.

  The noon sun came again, and departed. There was only one family left, four pitiful bodies.

  Louisa had thought to dig a separate place of burial for them, but her strength was nearly gone. It did not matter anyway. They are together with God, she told herself. Armed with that small bit of comfort, she faced her final test.

  Her father had been shot in the face. She knew him only by his wedding ring. It was cleverly twisted, like the binding of two cords together. Louisa’s mother had been so proud to give him that ring because, she had said, it was a symbol of how he had bound her to him with his love.

  Louisa had to stop for a moment. Tears coursed through the grime that caked her face. She licked her lips and tasted salt. She had to focus for a time on a cactus wren that hopped in and out of the nest she had carved from the flesh of a towering saguaro. Then Louisa covered her father tenderly with a blanket her mother had woven, and did what she had to do.

  She laid her mother at his side. She had taken care not to look at her face. Senaida Rodriguez had been a strikingly beautiful woman. She put little Inez in her mother’s arms.

  Louisa stopped again, but not because she wished it. She seemed frozen, paralyzed, as if the act, what she had just been forced to do, had taken away the last of what was in her that had kept her going. She simply couldn’t move.

  The sun was barely above the horizon. Sunset was brilliant with shades of salmon and pink, and an almost impossible crimson. A coyote yipped.

  Louisa blinked, feeling she had awakened from a long, dreamless sleep. But a sleep that had brought her no rest. She felt heavy, ponderous, fearful her movements would be awkward.

  Yet the final thing had to be done.

  When she moved at last, it was like moving through thick, knee-deep mud. Louisa walked slowly to the bare and leafless tree that had once stood like a venerated grandfather in the center of their village.

  Of all the horrors, this was the worst. Tomas was a hero. He could have run, hidden in the mountains. But he had not. He had taken their father’s rifle and chosen to make his last act an honorable one. They had murdered him ignobly.

  There it was again, that peculiar swelling of emotion in her breast, something akin to, but not quite, elation.

  “You did not have your vengeance, Tomas,” Louisa whispered. “But I will have it for you.”

  The words strengthened her. She laid a blanket on the ground and cut the rope.

  That night she did not even seek shelter. Louisa dropped where she stood when her stamina failed at last. She slept where she fell.

  At dawn Louisa rose and collected every rock she could find. It took her most of the day to stack them over the long, sad trench. When she was finished, she stood and gazed on what she had done.

  There should be a priest to say words over you, but there is not, she intoned silently. There should have been a God to watch over you. But there was not.

  Her task was complete. As was her metamorphosis.

  The sunset of the third day was as brilliant as the one before it. Louisa stared at its magical colors until the fiery orange globe slipped below the horizon. The huts surrounding her lost t
heir substance in the half light of dusk. Saguaros and mesquite beyond the village gate dissolved into meaningless shadows.

  Her clothes were stiff with blood. Louisa shrugged out of them and left them lying on the ground. Naked, she turned and walked into the mountains.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ALL DAY THE WIND HAD BUILT. NOW IT WAS BRUTAL and drove straight down from the cold northeast. The long, once-green valley grass flattened, and the low gray clouds scudded southwest at an ever-increasing speed.

  Ring bent his head into the wind and jammed his hat down tighter. His horse shook himself, as if trying to loose the cold air’s grip, and continued on, nose almost touching the grass. Ring shivered, looped his reins over the saddle horn, and crossed his arms under his heavy woolen poncho.

  It didn’t do him a bit of good. The icy wind cut right through and chilled him to the bone. Worse, he thought he felt a windblown snowflake sting against his cheek.

  “Damn pelouses,” he muttered with uncharacteristic emotion. There were few things he hated more than being cold and wet. And he had no one to blame but himself. “Damn horses. Damn me.”

  Ring glanced up from under the brim of his hat and eyed the herd of animals that straggled along in front of him, bent to the wind, tails streaming out behind them. There were bays, grays, and buckskins, a black, a couple of sorrels … and the dang spotted horses, the pelouses, the cause of his current misery.

  “Ring. Hey, Ring.” A youth with a too-big hat pulled down over his long, dark hair rode up beside his boss’s bay mare and reined his own mount to a walk. “What’chou wanna do?” he shouted over the gale. “We ain’t gonna get much farther in this. Gotta turn tail and tough it out if we don’t find shelter soon.”

  Ring answered without taking his eyes from the herd. “Prescott’s not too far ahead. We’ll hole up there ’til this blows over.”