He pulled a knife, cut off a swatch of bandanna, and plugged the exit wound. Wasn't pretty, but it should hold. The entry wound was so small it wasn't bleeding much. It just looked like a big pimple.
Charlie turned quickly, regaining his sense of mission. He retreived the empty shotgun, kneeled to swiftly reload his Colt, and edged around the perimeter of the house.
A man leaped from the second floor, landed hard. He was not a problem because he was aflame and ran around a bit, screaming, before he fell.
A second man landed, not in flames. He hit too hard and possibly broke his ankle. He pulled himself up and began to hobble off, and Charlie shot him twice.
He waited another few minutes.
No other men came out.
The fire spread, and the whole structure blazed. It was like some mad pagan ritual celebrating the presence of the war god on earth, with the bodies of the sacrificed now browning like bacon in the heat of the fire.
Charlie was driven back.
Finally he knew it was done, but for a last thing.
He reholstered the revolver, drew six shotgun shells out of his duster pocket, readjusted his hat, threaded the shells into the gun, jacked the bolt, and walked to the kennels.
The dogs, driven insane by the fire, screamed and howled and threw themselves bloodily against their fence for freedom.
Swiftly, Charlie killed them all.
Then he headed for the stable. There, too, the horses bucked and whinnied. He opened the stalls on most and let them rush out into the night. He calmed the remaining animal, saddled it eventually, though the job was somewhat more difficult for the broken rib, and rode out to join the boys in the prison.
Behind him, the flames blazed brightly in the night.
Earl kicked in the door of the Whipping House. He had leaned his Winchester.348 against the building, for this would be close-in work, revolver work. He had a gun in each hand.
He wanted Bigboy. Lord, how he wanted him.
Instead he found a guard with a Winchester.351 self-loader, who popped off three shots, high; Earl dropped him with a square shot to the middle of the body from the Heavy Duty. The super velocity.38 thumped a puff of dust off the man's chest, and he was dead before Earl could get to him.
He kicked in a door, found no one. He kicked in another, and saw two guards looking for targets outside. They spun, but only fast enough to die with the.38 high-velocities ripping through their chests instead of their backs.
He climbed the steps. He thumped up them, then stepped back. A man with a shotgun ducked out, thinking he had Earl pickled. But Earl fired with each gun and placed his shots an inch apart in the chest.
The man rolled, bouncing, spraying teeth, down the stairs to land at Earl's feet, but Earl didn't notice, for he had taken just a bit of a break to slide twelve new shells into his two hot and smoky weapons.
'Bigboy,' he shouted, 'Goddammit, I am here for you! You come fight me.'
But there was no answer.
Earl climbed the steps, but he knew that if there were guns on the upper floor of the old brick building, they'd be ready. So instead, he reached into his pouch and unscrewed the lid of a firebomb. He pulled the cord.
Nothing happened. As he was short on them, he didn't feel right dumping it. He tried to force the matches back down the tube, and of course they ignited.
'Oh, Christ,' he said, and if he didn't have such fast hands he would have barbecued himself to a char right there. But somehow in the two seconds that remained, he got the thing airborne down the hallway.
He heard the muffled pop as it detonated, and watched as the sudden glare reflected off the old brick walls. Presently a man in flames came running by him, but Earl paid him no mind. He could tell by the compact frame that the fellow could not have been Bigboy.
He stepped into the hallway, the end of which was bright aflame. The heat pulsated like the punches of a savvy fighter, but Earl turned sideways and cleared each room.
In the third one, he found old Fish.
It was the whipping room.
It was burning.
Fish hung, lips dried, head down, wrists broken from the twisted angle, his body in utter repose. The flesh was riven beyond any capacity to understand. The old man hung in a pool of his own blood, dark and jellified, mixed with waste. A cloud of flies buzzed about, taking small pieces of him for nourishment. Such squalor cannot be imagined, though Earl had seen as much in the Pacific when a Jap was cooked to death by the flamethrowers or turned inside out by mortar shells.
Earl had no key to the padlocks that locked Fish in his chains, and the heat was rising.
'Old man, I did come,' he said. 'I came as soon as I could, and I am sorry I was not sooner.'
The old man did not answer, of course. He had no last words of atonement or forgiveness, gave no pep talk or instructions. He was simply dead on chains, head pure weight slung forward and down, and the body could not be released for the simple dignity of burning supine; he would burn to ashes as he had died, hanging. Earl recognized it as Bigboy's work. No other man could have done such a thing.
'Bigboy!' he screamed, 'where are you, goddammit!'
There was no answer.
The flames blossomed powerfully, sending a burst of energy down the hallway. The floorboards shuddered. Sparks filled the air and so did smoke, and in seconds there'd be no getting out. Earl turned, to leave the old man hanging, knowing in seconds he'd be ashes. He never made it back to the Chinee girl and the high yeller of N'Awleens. He'd died, whipped slow, over time, by Bigboy.
Then he turned back, stupidly. Something strange yet powerful had occurred to him: no man should be consumed in fire while hanging in chains. Wasn't right, any way you look at it. It was dying a slave.
Earl seized up a chain, put the muzzle of the.38 close to it, and fired. He was peppered with pieces of metal as the bullet chewed through the chain link, and the old man fell forward. Earl caught him, set him down gently, then moved to the other chain and sheared it with the same.38 high-velocity. He lifted the old man and made it to the door, where a guard stood with a shotgun.
'You! You supposed to be dead.' 'Don't know where you got that idea,'
Earl said. The heat billowed powerfully, but the man opposing him was mad with rage, and Earl knew he was cooked. But then a shot came and hit the fellow square in the face and down he went.
Earl turned. There was no other man visible. Who had fired, God? But he made out the puncture hole in a window and knew from his memory of the orientation of the building that he lined up, three hundred or so yards off, with the compound tower. Jack O'Brian was on the job.
Still carrying the old man, Earl made it to the stairwell, as the part of the house behind him collapsed when the floor burned through, and the walls down there, without their internal support, gave way and caved in, so that the acrid dust of old brick mixed with the smoke and the sparks, making breathing a labor.
Earl set the old man's body down in a cool glade of trees some hundred yards or so from the blazing Whipping House. He knelt beside him. Of course he had no words, for words were not his specialty. He arranged the body in as neat a position as he could.
'I will make good on my promise to you,' he told the body. 'Except the part about the whores. But now I will burn this place to the ground, old man, and come the morning there won't be nothing left except ghosts and ashes. Semper Fi, old goat.'
Some spark or piece of airborne grit must have gotten into his eyes.
He knitted them in pain, and rose to continue the fight.
He ran across the yard, out of the light. But on the way he found one of the men he had shot coughing as he bled out, having crawled out of the building. Earl knelt.
'You!' the wounded man gasped, his words competing with the accordion groan of a sucking chest wound. 'You's daid.'
It was one of the boys from the boat who'd watched as Earl followed the block into the black water. 'I ain't, not a bit. Now tell me: Where the hell is that Bigboy?'
'Sir, I ain't seen him. He's alone with the old man, whipping on him.
Whipped him every night, five nights running. Whipped him bad. Don't want to face my maker with sin on my
