Blaze! Bad Medicine

by Michael Newton

  "I know, damn it. Don't rub it in."

  "Just saying. This could all turn out to be for nothing."

  "But at least I'll feel better," she said.

  And J.D. nodded, thinking glumly, If you're still alive.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Ellwood Brannon's nerves were bothering him now. He had begun to think they'd come too far, pursuing ghosts and wishful thinking, but he'd known that his superiors would have his hide if he turned back and led his troopers to Fort Royster empty-handed, without running down the woman and her sprouts. Finding them dead would be enough for Colonel Hungate. He could send a message off to Tucson, let his own boss bounce it on from there to Washington, and if it meant another war with the Apaches, well, so be it.

  Brannon was a virgin when it came to killing enemies of any color or persuasion. He'd been too young, barely, to see action in the Civil War, and since he'd come out from West Point to Arizona Territory, there'd been peace between white men and red. In truth, while certain officers he knew pretended to crave action, Brannon would have been well satisfied to pass his whole career without firing a shot in anger, without penning letters to some soldier's next of kin that their beloved son or brother had been killed.

  Now he was in the middle of it, more or less, whatever it turned out to be, and Brannon wondered whether he could put his training into practice when it counted. He'd made good marks on the pistol range, and with the standard carbine, even though lieutenants didn't carry them. His saber dueling was so-so, but the long knives were mostly made for fighting on horseback, and if it came to that, he figured an Apache bullet, lance, or arrow would put paid to him before he had a chance to swing his sword.

  "About four miles, Lieutenant," Sergeant Sholes called out to him, from Brannon's left.

  Brannon ignored him, trying to extrapolate their time. Trotting, a decent horse could move about eight miles per hour. At a canter, call it seventeen per hour. For a flat-out gallop, maybe twenty-five, but that used up a horse's strength and left it gasping if they found themselves engaged in sudden combat. No, Brannon believed the trotting pace he'd set was adequate, say half an hour until they reached the Casa Grande range.

  And then?

  Which canyon should they follow? Which pass should they try to scale?

  In silence, Brannon cursed himself. He hadn't brought a map, hadn't expected a pursuit in fact. He was completely unprepared and didn't have the first idea of what to do once they left level ground and had begun to climb.

  That kind of ignorance, he realized, could get him and his soldiers killed.

  * * *

  Itsá, the diyin, was considering exactly how to sacrifice his three white captives, when a lookout he had posted on a nearby mountain peak burst in, distracting him. The young man's name was Fox—ihoka in the ancient tongue—and it was based more on his pointed, vulpine features than his innate cleverness. That said, he was a dedicated warrior and his eyesight was above reproach.

  "White soldiers coming, Diyin," he warned Eagle.

  "How many?" the shaman asked.

  Fox raised both hands, five fingers on the right one splayed, just two protruding from the left. So, seven men in all. They would have rifles, maybe pistols too, and one of them, at least, would wear a sword. Eagle had seen enough soldiers, fighting and on parade, to know their rituals and garb.

  He had this squad outnumbered and maintained the critical advantage of surprise.

  "How long before they reach us?" he asked Fox.

  "A hand's width of the sun, maybe a little more, before they reach the foothills."

  "Time enough for us to prepare a greeting for them, then," Eagle replied, smiling.

  He started calling off the names of warriors, choosing nine out of his twelve. Eagle considered whether he should lead them personally, then decided that he did not fully trust Wolf with the captives if he, Eagle, placed them in Wolf's hands alone. Instead, he gave curt orders to his war chief, Cougar, to prepare an ambush for the bluecoats and make sure that none of them survived.

  "So shall it be, Diyin," Cougar replied, bowing his head.

  "And bring their scalps to me," the shaman added, almost as an afterthought.

  Instead of answering this time, Cougar motioned to those assigned with him to kill the soldiers, and then led them from the cave, moccasins whispering on weather-polished stone.

  His captives, speaking only English, had no clue of what was happening outside, or what Eagle had ordered for the soldiers when they reached his mountain stronghold. They sat staring at him from beyond the fire, the widowed farmer's woman glaring hatred at him, while her two chagáshé sniveled in their fear.

  Eagle decided that it could not hurt to taunt the woman, heighten her anxiety before the final sacrifice. Tradition held that Tobadzistsini liked his victims to be agitated, suffering, before their blood was spilled for him to sup. Emotion of that kind increased the power of the offering, as when a bold enemy warrior was dispatched by slow degrees, lending his strength to those who took it from him forcibly.

  "Soldiers have come for you," he said, watching her eyes widen. "But they have come too late to help you."

  "Why is that?" she asked.

  "Because my braves will make short work of them," Eagle replied. "And by the time more come, you and your small ones will be with our God of War."

  Chapter 9

  Climbing through the foothills of the Casa Grande Mountains naturally took more time than crossing open desert flats. J.D. and Kate never caught sight of the patrol they were pursuing, which was fine, as long as they had clear hoof prints to follow without splitting off from their northbound course. But while they met no one along the way, J.D. still had a sense of being watched, from somewhere higher up, hoping that he was wrong—or, at the very least, that their observers were not peering over rifle sights.

  "I feel it, too," Kate said, before he'd had a chance to mention anything.

  "Feel what?" he asked.

  "You know what. Like somebody's spying on us. Or did you feel something else?"

  It was a kind of magic trick she played on him sometimes, acting like she could read his mind. J.D. had no belief in such things, any more than gods and demons, but in fact, he would be lying if he said Kate wasn't right guessing his thoughts, more often than she missed the mark.

  "Okay, I feel it," he admitted. "But it could be nothing."

  "Could be something," she replied. "Apaches or the boys in blue."

  J.D. leaned back to scan the rising crags and peaks that loomed above him. Stacked beside some other mountains he had seen, the Casa Grandes weren't so big, but they afforded countless perches for a nest of snipers, and a fall from any one of them would finish him as surely as a bullet to the head or heart.

  But it might hurt a great deal more.

  "I doubt the cavalry came all this way to sit and stare back down at us," he said.

  "They could be resting, getting curious about how come we're trailing them."

  J.D. could poke holes in that argument all day, but nothing he might say mattered a damn until they found out who or what, if anything, was watching them from overhead. And in the meantime...

  "Feels like Indians to me," he said at last, not liking how it sounded.

  "Yeah," Kate said. "Me, too. I didn't want to be the first who said it, though."

  "Winchester ready?" he inquired.

  "Always."

  Meaning a live round in the chamber, underneath the rifle's hammer, and its tubular magazine loaded with fifteen more of the same .44-40 cartridges fired by their twin Colt Open-Top revolvers. Each of them had twenty-two shots on tap before reloading, and if they hadn't hit someone by then...well, it would be peculiar, to say the very least.

  And it would likely mean that both of them were dead.

  Another fifty yards, picking their way uphill over a field of mountain scree, when suddenly a shot rang out, echoing in among the higher peaks. J.D. and Kate both hunched their shoulders, reaching for th
eir rifles, ready to dismount, but then came more shots from above, no bullets following in their direction.

  "What the hell?" Kate blurted.

  "Soldiers," J.D. answered. "I hear Sharps carbines. Sounds like they found the raiders they were looking for."

  * * *

  Lieutenant Ellwood Brannon had begun to tire of climbing, feeling vaguely seasick from the way his gelding rocked and swayed along the narrow mountain trail. More than an hour had elapsed since they'd last seen a trace of hostile hoof prints, down below, and he was nearly willing to admit that they had lost their quarry in the mountain clefts and shadows.

  Now, another difficulty: getting down could be as dangerous as climbing up.

  Brannon raised his left hand to halt the squad and turned to Sergeant Sholes. "You think we've lost them, Sergeant."

  Sholes spat brown tobacco juice onto a nearby boulder's silent face and frowned. "It's hard to say, Sir. Redskins is a tricky bunch, and the Apaches, well, they's worst of all. A couple of 'em could be standin' twenty feet from us right now, and we could ride right past 'em without knowin' it."

  "That's reassuring, Sergeant."

  "I'm just tellin' you the way it is, Sir. No good sugar-coatin' it. These goddamned savages—"

  Sholes never finished whatever he meant to say. Just then, his lower jaw exploded with the wet sound of a cleaver shearing through a cantaloupe, spraying the sergeant's blood and shattered teeth in all directions. He was toppling to the ground, had nearly reached it, when the rifle shot stung Brannon's ears.

  A second shot rang out at once, drilling their standard bearer's chest and punching the baby-faced corporal backward, over the rump of his brindle mare. The horse, suddenly riderless, bolted and sideswiped Brannon's, pitching the lieutenant from his saddle before he had time to shout a warning to his four surviving troopers—not that any cry was necessary now, as gunfire echoed from all sides of them.

  Brannon struck hard, unyielding stone and lost his gray felt hat immediately, rolling off beyond reach on its brim. Struggling to all fours, Brannon wedged himself behind a boulder, drew his Colt Single Action Army revolver from its backwards-facing flap holster, and cocked its hammer with his thumb. The weapon's cylinder held six .45-caliber cartridges, although Brannon had been cautioned time and time again to leave an empty chamber underneath the firing pin. He trusted his reaction more than someone's hidebound rules, and now was glad to have the extra shot available before he had to fumble with reloading.

  Two more troopers fell as he sat watching, one unhorsed by accident, without a bullet wound, the other hit squarely between his shoulder blades as he began to gallop back downhill. It was a killing shot, designed to clip the target's spine and pierce his heart. The young private was dead before he hit the stony slope facedown.

  And that left Brannon with two soldiers still alive, one crawling from the place where he had fallen, grimacing over some kind of shoulder injury, the other riding hell-for-leather down the slope before at least two marksmen found him, bullets lifting him completely from his saddle, spinning him around in mid-air as he crumpled lifeless to the ground.

  I'm next, thought Brannon, fingers trembling where they clutched the curved grip of his Colt.

  * * *

  Cougar scanned the mountain slope by moonlight, as he listened to the last cavalry horses clattering downhill. Two of the seven soldiers still drew breath, one of them injured when he toppled from his animal, the other still a question mark in Cougar's mind. That one, the leader, had concealed himself behind a boulder, shielded from incoming fire. Unless his pistol had been shattered when he fell—unlikely, Cougar knew—he would be dangerous and might kill one or more of the Diyin's little war party before they dug him out and finished him.

  Now it was time to move, disarm the fallen soldiers, and remove their scalps as trophies of the hunt. It would be tricky, with at least one of the white eyes still in fighting form, and possibly a pair of them, but Cougar had his orders and he could not disobey.

  He called out to his snipers, issued crisp instructions, skillfully directing them to circle in around the dead soldiers, alert for any danger from the two still living. Each of Cougar's men was carrying a rifle or a shotgun, lifted from the dead hands of white men during their campaign to provoke another desert war. They might be running low on ammunition at the moment, but Cougar expected that to change when they'd collected all the weapons dropped by their most recent prey. It was too bad most of the army horses had escaped, but arms counted for more than animals in the campaign Eagle had planned.

  Cougar set his single-shot Sharps rifle down and drew his scalping knife, a Bowie with a twelve-inch blade honed to a razor's edge. He dared not rush the dead until the two surviving soldiers had been neutralized, but there was no great rush. It would take hours—days, perhaps—before a troop of reinforcements reached the mountain stronghold from Fort Royster. And by then, the cavalry would be too late.

  Cougar's handcrafted moccasins clung to the rocky slope as he began to cautiously descend. He knew the two surviving soldiers were off somewhere to his left, concealed by boulders, so he took his time, inching along, watching to see if any of his warriors reached them first.

  As if in answer to his thought, Cougar saw Dahszíné—"porcupine" in the old tongue, for his prickly temper—scuttling toward the spot where one trooper had sprawled from his horse and then crawled from the field, apparently nursing an injured shoulder. Moonlight glinted from the knife in Dahszíné's right hand. Before he reached the target crevice, though, an arm snaked out around a boulder higher up, gripping a pistol, and a shot brought Cougar's warrior down.

  "Chi wat!" Cougar spat out the harsh obscenity, as Dahszíné rolled down the mountainside, his arms outflung. He showed no signs of life remaining as he left a slick of blood on polished stone, then stopped dead when a jagged outcrop blocked his downward path. The head shot had been clean, precise, efficient.

  Cougar sheathed his scalping knife and reached back for his Sharps.

  The night's killing was not completed yet.

  * * *

  "We need to help them!" Kate whispered in the darkness, tugging against J.D.'s grip as he restrained her.

  "Think about it," he demanded. "What is there to gain, besides us joining them?"

  And he was right, she understood, feeling her rage slack off a fraction. On the slope above them there were no more living soldiers. Renegades had wiped them out, while losing only one man on their own side. Now the killers were collecting weapons, right down to the young lieutenant's sword, and trailing bloody scalps as they began to scale the mountainside, believing their night's work was done.

  "All right," Kate said, reluctantly. "But we still need to find the hostages. We can't ride back to Colonel Hungate at the fort with nothing but what we've seen here."

  "Agreed," J.D. replied, watching the last of the Apaches vanish into darkness. "But we have to take it easy, not just blunder in and sacrifice ourselves without a hope of getting out alive."

  "Blunder?" she bristled. "When in hell have you ever seen me—"

  "Figure of speech," he said, cutting her off. "Stop and think a second. You'll agree that sometimes you're...impetuous."

  "Try eager, and I'll meet you in the middle."

  "Maybe later. Right now, what we have to do is climb up there and find out where they're hiding with the prisoners. Oh, and avoid their lookouts, now they've tasted blood again."

  Kate drew her hunting knife and said, "No reason why we have to make a fuss."

  J.D. was frowning, didn't know if Kate could see it in the dark, or if she'd even care.

  "Make that the last resort," he said. "We know they're down one man, with seven left for sure. Beyond that, higher up, there could be twice as many, even more."

  "And our hair joins the others."

  "That's exactly what I'm hoping to avoid."

  "Suppose the prisoners are dead? Or what if they're not even here?"

  "If they're killing so
ldiers, I suspect we've found the right Apaches. As to living prisoners, we'll have to see what's up and make our choices then."

  "Fall back or punish them."

  "The only options I can think of," J.D. said.

  Then, silently, the pair of them began to climb.

  Chapter 10

  Rosalind Hoskins listened to the rage of gunfire from outside and down the mountain's slope, clutching her children close on either side. The shooting didn't last long, possibly ten minutes overall, and then she heard the raiders coming back. She'd hoped for U.S. soldiers, but by now she recognized the sound of moccasins on stone, distinct and separate from heavy boots.

  Still, she was not prepared for what she saw as her kidnappers filed into the cave. Five men carried the weapons taken from their enemies, some of them dripping blood from scalps tied to their belts by tufts of gore-streaked hair. The last two bore a corpse, the eighth man from their ambush party, shot at relatively close range through the head.

  At least that's one gone, she thought bitterly, and felt no urge to ask forgiveness from her Savior in the sky. These heathen killers were beyond His reach, condemned to everlasting fire below.

  Daphne was crying once again, distressed by all the blood and the limp body that his fellow raiders dropped beside the fire. Rosalind wondered if the others meant to eat him, but decided that was too much, even for Apaches.

  Or she hoped so, anyway.

  Although at least a few of her abductors spoke English, Rosalind did not ask them to tell her what had happened. It was all too obvious: if any of the soldiers had survived, they would be rushing toward the cave now, or the Indians would be pursuing those who got away. Since no troops were in evidence, and all of the Apaches were accounted for, she took for granted that the troopers must be dead.

  And what would happen next?

  As far as Rosalind could tell, nothing prevented her abductors from continuing with what they called their sacrifice of her children and herself. More soldiers would be coming sometime, someday, when those killed tonight failed to return, but that meant starting over with the search that led those to their deaths, at least another day wasted in transit, and she saw no reason to suppose she or her children would still be alive when help turned up at last.