Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8)

by Frederick H. Christian

  The explosives went off with a stuttering series of bangs, like some enormous hammer striking an equally huge anvil. Angel had wired the mines along the walls in series, so that they went off perhaps half-a-second after each other. Once more the air was filled with the awful whistling hail of deadly metal, once more men fell screaming in gutted agony amid smoke and flame. One of them was the Comanche, Koh-eet-senko. A shard of metal about the size of a banana sliced through his neck at a speed of about seven hundred miles an hour. He never even knew he had been killed. The soft sibilant sound of dirt sifting back to earth was followed by a silence that was like the end of all life. Nothing moved. The surviving men stood mute, paralyzed with fear and horror. Smoke eddied on the vagrant breeze.

  ‘Enough, for Christ’s sake!’ Des Elliott whispered. His face was blackened by smoke, and one of his arms was gashed where the fragment of metal which had decapitated Koh-eet-senko had touched him in passing. He looked at Hercules Nix with naked fear in his eyes. Nix’s clothing hung on him in filthy tatters, blood smeared on his face like Comanche war paint. His eyes were empty, insane. Saliva dribbled from slack lips.

  Elliott looked around him. There were grisly dead everywhere the eye moved. The skull-faced Hisco, one side of his face a raw pulp of broken flesh, touched his arm and pointed with his chin at the only two Comanches left alive. Their eyes were wide with terror, and they were already inching away from the stinking pile of broken flesh that was all remaining in this world of their warrior brothers. Elliott nodded: let them go. There was nothing they could do, he could do, anyone could do. Turning to the Indians, he held up his right hand, palm vertical, bending all his fingers slightly forward. He pushed his hand out and brought it back, the sign for ‘go.’ The Comanches needed no second bidding. They nodded dumbly and ran to where some of the ponies had stopped in a milling cluster. They caught up two and swung on to their bare backs, moving away from the carnage without a backward glance. They would keep going until they caught up with what was left of the Timber People.

  ‘Des,’ Hisco said.

  Elliott turned and saw that Hercules Nix was stumbling through the pile of corpses and dead animals toward the hacienda. Elliott watched him narrowly. Had Nix gone mad? Nix was standing in the center of the courtyard, his head to one side in a listening position. Then it came up, and Nix thrust out an arm, pointing to the north.

  ‘There!’ he screeched. ‘There!’

  Now Elliott heard it too, the muted thunder of hoofs. He ran quickly up the wooden ladder to the lookout post on the wall. Two figures on horseback were moving fast up the far side of the river.

  ‘Angel!’ Elliott said. ‘Angel—and—’

  ‘Victoria!’ Nix shouted, and his voice was like a ghost in a deep well. ‘Vic-to-ri-aaaaaaaaaaa!’

  Elliott and Hisco ran back to where they had left Nix, and as they came near they heard a strange, broken, keening sound. They saw Hercules Nix walking around and around in a tight circle on the patio, stamping his feet like a spiteful child, spittle at the corners of his mouth. Each time he passed the wall of the house he smashed his fist against it. The metal claw was torn, the masking glove stripped off it. It looked obscene.

  ‘Nix!’ Elliott said, sharply, but Nix took no notice of him at all. Around and around he went and as he went, he smashed the broken steel hand on the wall, and mouthed something almost unintelligible.

  ‘Horrrrr!’ he growled, looking at the sky, the ground, the man in front of him. He got hold of Hisco, who pulled free. ‘Errrr I oh. Horrrrrrr!’

  ‘He wants a horse,’ Elliott said, suddenly understanding. ‘Everything I own for a horse!’

  He looked at Hercules Nix, and then at the hacienda. He had been inside it a great many times, awed by its casual riches. Gold, silverware, valuable things. Plenty of money, too, no doubt, as well as Nix’s collection of fine guns and pistols. A man could make a killing from what was inside. Greed lit his eyes like candlelight and he smiled his twisted smile.

  ‘You heard what the boss said,’ he snapped at Hisco. ‘Catch him up a horse!’

  ‘Uh?’ Hisco said. ‘A horse. For him?’ Nix looked as if he might have trouble walking.

  ‘Horrrrr!’ Nix roared, smashing aside a table with his broken steel claw. ‘Horrr!’ Then Hisco read the signals in Elliott’s face and he nodded.

  ‘Oh, sure,’ he said. ‘A horse!’

  He ran out to where the horses were standing ground hitched, their eyes rolling at the pervading stink of death. He had trouble getting the animal past the piled corpses in the gateway, but he managed it, and brought it to where Nix still made his mad circles. Nix looked up and his wild eyes focused. He snatched the reins out of Hisco’s hand, knocking the skull-faced man asprawl.

  ‘Horrrr!’ Nix said, clawing clumsily at the horn of the saddle with his useless artificial hand. Elliott stepped forward and gave him a boost, and without a look, Nix snatched the animal’s head around and jammed his spurs into its side. The two men watching saw that there was a wide gap in the northern side of the stockade—obviously the one through which Angel and Victoria Nix had ridden. Nix rocketed through it now, hitting a gallop by the time he had gone fifty yards. Des Elliott flicked a gob of Nix’s spittle off his grimy sleeve and looked at Hisco with a grinning leer.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘He offered everything he owned, didn’t he?’

  Hisco grinned back without need to answer, and the two of them went into the house. They stood in the ornate living room, putting a mental price on everything they could see: the fine collection of rare guns, the antique silver in its oak cabinet, the rich carpets and valuable furniture. They were still licking their lips over their booty when the long fuse that Frank Angel had lit as he and Victoria made their escape reached the explosives, and blew Hercules Nix’s hacienda to bits.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ‘Not far now,’ Angel said, trying for a grin.

  But it didn’t fit: he didn’t feel much like smiling as he pulled the horse to a stop at the crest of a long low hill. What he felt like was rolling into his blankets and sleeping around the clock, a bone-deep tiredness that made his long muscles ache, his eyes gritty, his mouth taste sour. He scanned the land to the south behind them. A fat black pillar of smoke climbed from the ruins of Hercules Nix’s stronghold. The hacienda, pivot of Nix’s kingdom, was destroyed, and with its destruction the whole valley would die. The river would cease to flow, the lake beside what had been the Comanche camp dry up, the swamp disappear. The wildlife and the vegetation would depart or perish. Perhaps one day, a thousand years from now, some roaming archaeologist would find the fossil of one of the ugly piranha, and rush back to whatever civilization existed then, proclaiming a new theory of evolution based on finding fish in the high plateaus of Texas. It wasn’t much to hang a grin on, but it would have to do.

  What of Nix—was he dead? There was no sign of the dust of pursuit. After the merciless destruction in the stockade, was there anyone left to pursue them? There was irony in the way that Nix’s stronghold had in the end been the instrument of his destruction. He had built it to be impregnable to every kind of attack except the one that had finally come about, his premise of inviolability removed by the simple reversal of position, the unexpected result of a hunted animal becoming the hunter.

  Bullfighters will tell you that apart from the normal dangers of their profession, the one they fear most is one little known to most spectators. No matter how long, how successful, how unbroken their string of killings, matadors share the nightmare that one day a bull will erupt from the toril who has been ‘educated.’ Matadors work on the premise that, all things being equal, the lidia will end with the predestined death of the bull, just as Nix had begun his hunt certain of how it would end, improvising only the means. Matadors fear that bull which has, without their knowledge, fought a man before. No matter how stringent the precautions of the breeders, no matter how careful the selection of his cuadrilla, sooner or later the matador is going to get a bu
ll who’s been run by some kid swinging a coat in a moonlit field. Lots of the kids get hurt, many more don’t. They have their fun and then hop back over the fence, head for the cantina to boast of their prowess. In a week they have forgotten the bull, but the bull has forgotten nothing. He learns very fast, and what he learns he remembers when he faces the matador. Which is why such an animal is feared. He does not fight by the rules. He ignores the cape. He goes without warning or mercy for the man.

  Hercules Nix had met such an animal. Instead of fighting by the rules, it had ignored them, and destroyed him as mercilessly as the rogue bull guts the torero.

  Masking his exhaustion, Angel glanced at Victoria Nix. Her face and clothes were as sweat-stained and dusty as his own, and deep in her eyes he could see the controlled fear still lingering. Until she knew for sure that Nix was dead it would remain there, and there was nothing Angel could do about it. After the carnage in the stockade, Nix ought to be dead: but that didn’t offer a guarantee that he was. Again, Angel scanned the land behind them. He had no way of knowing the full extent of the destruction he had effected. He only knew what he had done to bring it about.

  He had piled together the mines dug up from the inside defense perimeter, laying them at strategic points throughout the hacienda. He placed them for maximum compressive effect: between the stinking acid-filled batteries, inside the casing of the silent pump, on the shelved walls of the deep well. He found a big crate of dynamite in the machine room and linked these bundles to the circuit, placing them beneath the joints of supporting buttress of floor or ceiling, and at the corners of the walls where they would do the most damage. From all these he ran a long fuse to the gap which he had opened in the stockade beside the river. Two horses, ready-saddled, stood waiting, and as Angel ran across the stockade that one last time, he shouted Victoria’s name and she lit the slow-burning fuse. Angel had gauged it for about ten minutes but it took only eight for the fizzing knot of fire to reach the detonator and blow the hacienda and the men in it to Kingdom Come. Now Angel’s gaze traversed the blackened, scorched land he had fired earlier. It was empty, useless now: with the water system destroyed, it would remain barren. No Comanche tribe would ever use it for a camp again, no unarmed, naked men run through it seeking sanctuary that did not exist. Death itself was a just visitation upon what had been the kingdom of a madman.

  ‘Frank!’ Victoria said, all at once, her voice tight with fear. She was pointing at the land below and behind them and when he saw what she was pointing at, a long, soft sigh seeped from his lips. Dust rose in a thin spiral, a long way behind them. The pursuit had begun again, and if there was pursuit it meant that Nix was not dead. If he were dead, his bandits would not bother to carry out his revenge. They would care only for their own survival. Angel cursed himself for having abandoned Nix’s telescope in the stockade. It would have been useful to know the strength of the pursuit, but he had no intention of waiting until it was close enough for him to count them.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s get going.’

  She needed reassurance, but he wasn’t going to lie to her. The fawn-frightened look was back in her eyes for real now, and he reached over and touched her hand, gently. Her hair was all blown loose and hung down her back in auburn waves. Even grimy and a long way from home, she was a beautiful woman. She smiled, but her heart wasn’t in it.

  ‘Good girl,’ he told her. ‘You’ll be fine.’

  Then they headed down the long slope toward the north, toward the now-visible barrier of the thornbreaks ahead. In them lay the last remnant of Nix’s power, the guards at the Portal. They would not know what had happened at the other end of the valley, nor would they believe it unless they saw it. So there was no margin for error at all.

  ~*~

  The pursuer was Nix, and Nix alone.

  He thundered in pursuit of the fugitives without true consciousness of his own motivation, identity, or destination. The delicate links between his reason and his action centers were destroyed, the brain functioning like a misfiring engine, synapses gaping. The man pursuing Angel and Victoria Nix was insane.

  Die, die, they’ll all die, I’ll kill them, all of them, both! Slowly without mercy, they must die and they will die. They will die and I will laugh and they will see me laughing as they die. They? Two of them. Her. Especially her. The other one. Him, is it him? He’s the one. They have to die. It must be. They’ll die, all of them, they’ll all die, I’ll kill them, all of them.

  The thoughts ran through Nix’s broken mind like water, unconsciously impelled, without volition. He spurred his flagging horse unmercifully, not even aware that he had raked the animal’s body to bloody tatters with the wicked rowels of his silver spurs. It would not have made any difference had he known: the only thing that mattered to the man was pursuit, movement, revenge. Who, where, why, there were unimportant. They had destroyed everything. It was finished, all gone. There was nothing left except vengeance, and the fearful red thing in his brain goaded him on in quest of it. He thundered up the western side of the valley, the wind whipping away the spittle from his drooling lips. Tortured visions of what he would do when he caught his quarry danced like dervishes behind his eyes. Mad beyond redemption, Hercules Nix careered northward.

  Chapter Twenty

  The entrance to the Portal was a killing ground.

  The cabin stood back at the edge of the thornbreaks, and the area in front of it lay like a table, empty, denuded of every vestige of shrubbery. Nothing, not even a gopher, could have moved over it without being seen, and now Angel was grateful for the time he had spent surveying it earlier. He told Victoria he wanted to try to take the men in the barrack alive: he did not know what infernal devices Nix might have planted along the narrow trail to freedom. Now Victoria Nix rode out of the trees on his signal and moved up toward the hut. As she came into sight, a man came out, walking in a slouch toward her horse, his right hand trailing a shotgun. A cigarette drooped from his lips, and he looked at Victoria with a puzzled frown.

  ‘Miz Nix,’ he saluted. ‘What you doin’ up here on your ownsome?’

  ‘What is your name?’ Victoria said frostily, ignoring his question and regarding the man as if he were some loathsome new species of bug she’d found in her linen closet. He was no oil painting: his stubble was at least a week old, and his clothes looked as if he’d never changed them since the day he put them on.

  ‘Sweddlin, ma’am,’ he muttered, scuffing shabby boots. ‘Lee Sweddlin.’

  ‘Are you alone here? Where is everyone?’

  ‘They done took off to help the Ol’—beg your pardon, the boss, ma’am,’ Sweddlin said. ‘There’s just the two of us here, me an’ Sanson.’

  ‘Tell him to come out here.’

  ‘Uh, ma’am, we got orders not to—’

  ‘Do you defy me, sir?’ Victoria said frigidly, her eyebrows climbing an astonished inch. ‘Do you dare to defy me?’

  ‘Uh, ah, no, ma’am,’ Sweddlin said hastily. He raised his voice to a cracked shout. ‘Hey, Kit, c’mon out here, will ya?’

  The door of the shack opened and another man came out. He was meatily built, the body of an athlete gone to seed. A heavy paunch hung over his belt and like Sweddlin he looked as if he hadn’t shaved for a week.

  ‘I can see,’ he said, testily. ‘I can see.’

  ‘Good,’ Angel said behind him. ‘Then if you turn around real slow you’ll see this gun I’m pointing at you.’

  Sweddlin tensed slightly, staring at Victoria as if she had committed an unutterable blasphemy. She saw him think about using the shotgun still held at trail in his right hand.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t do that. We don’t want to kill you.’

  Sweddlin nodded and as if coming to a much-considered decision, let go of the shotgun, and slowly raised his hands. He wasn’t the type to buck odds. Not life-or-death odds, anyway. He’d stayed alive this long by knowing when not to fight, and he wasn’t about to spoil a perfect track record now.
Behind him Sanson nodded and spat into the dirt. But he raised his hands as well, turning slowly to face Angel.

  It was the work of only moments to disarm them, and of minutes to tell them what had happened in the valley. Angel used short, explicit words and brief graphic sentences. He told them how many men were dead for certain, and the names of those he knew. He told them how those men had died and why. He told them about the slaughter in the stockade, and what he had done to destroy it. He told it very convincingly and they believed him. Maybe they weren’t convinced by the details of his outline. Maybe what convinced them was that he was here, and that Victoria Nix was with him. Sweddlin and Sanson both knew that Nix never allowed her to leave the hacienda alone. Either Nix accompanied her personally, or she was shadowed by the deadly Oriental, Yat Sen. When Angel capped his story by showing them his belt-hidden badge, with its screaming eagle encircled by the legend Department of Justice, any fight they might have had in them drained out like bathwater. Sanson was foxier than his partner: he tried for a bargain.

  ‘Lissen, Angel,’ he said. ‘We go along, tell you how to get out, what’s in it for us?’

  ‘I turn you loose when we get clear,’ Angel said. ‘Forget I ever saw you.’

  ‘And if we don’t?’

  ‘I’d say that would be … inadvisable,’ Angel said, almost reflectively. ‘Because what I’d do would be to herd you two in front of me all the way through the breaks so that whatever happened, you’d be the first ones it happened to.’

  The two of them looked at him for a long, long moment.

  ‘You could be bluffin’,’ Sanson said.

  ‘That’s right.’