Wild Country

The chief, knowing his rhetoric, did not call attention to the final phrase, which, absolutely and positively, guarantees citizens their personal rights to keep and bear arms. Instead, he focused on the words 'well-regulated militia.' He convinced the good folks of McCook that they would display the perfect model of a well-regulated militia by storing their personal weapons in a city armory. Little McCook even had a few dry runs, hoorawed by local media, in which citizens got in line to receive their pistols, plinking rifles and birdguns long enough to handle and inspect them. McCook's brave experiment, and its holovision coverage, was a published invitation for plunder.

A border bandit named Saltillo assembled two dozen cimarrones and converged on McCook. Some came on horseback, some on hovercycles, and a half-dozen hardcases arrived hidden in a small van that supposedly carried Mexican diesel fuel for legal sale.

Of course, they overran the police station first. The value of the firearms kept there would have paid for the raid. But Saltillo had seen the old silver icons and the jeweled trappings in the church paid for, over the generations, by McCook's devout TexMex Catholics. He figured to hit the bank as well since the church itself would be such a quick knockover.

Saltillo lost one man at the police station but bagged the chief and over a hundred weapons. Cimarrones cleared the streets with rapid volleys and went for the bank next because it happened to be so near the police station. They took forty thousand dollars and three lives there, but they also took their time ransacking the place. Too much time, when the local priest was as thorough and as decisive as Father Quemada.

The good father had heard the worries of his people long before: had agreed to hide the deadly weapons of his parish — or rather, to look the other way when lockers were opened in the church meeting hall. Of McCook's three hundred people, 'perhaps thirty ran for the church when the shooting, started. Most of them intended only to pray for salvation.

Saltillo's men held target practice on the stained-glass windows to terrify the priest and his parishioners, then burst in on what they thought would be a huddled mass of victims. Some, in fact, were screaming and praying near the nave when the cimarrones stormed inside.

Saltillo and five of his bravos were shot dead just one pace inside the church by the damnedest concatenation of gunfire imaginable: pellet guns, five handguns, rifles of several calibers, and a sawed-off shotgun firing double- aught buckshot. Father Quemada's combat team was two men, several boys, a half-dozen women, and a pair of teenaged girls. Rumors of a man in black robes firing his own assault rifle were never verified, but it was said later that Father Quemada had the look of a man in need of confession.

Before Saltillo's remaining men fully realized the meaning of this eruption just ahead of them, they were met full face with hot metal blessings from the pure in heart. This was not the kind of greeting the cimarrones had counted on and leaving more of their people flopping in the dust, they lit a shuck for the border.

Three more of Saltillo's men got perforated during the hellish confusion of reversing hovercycles and a van loaded too heavily with stolen guns. By this time McCook's few stubborn Anglos with guns at home got them into play; sniping from cover, shaking with buck fever, steadying down, sniping again.

A few of Saltillo's band got away. McCook got the van and its guns back. Saltillo and the police chief got decent burials. No authority near Wild Country got very far, after that, with schemes for the wholesale removal of personal arms.

Now, Quantrill watched an ancient Volkswagen diesel pickup jounce down a dirt access road near the freeway. He noted and approved of the thick plastic armor bolted to its cab. It obscured part of the windows and it looked like hell, but it said the driver wouldn't be candy in a skirmish. Still, some people came to the region hoping that their claims to government land could be upheld by someone else, without they themselves being ready to operate as a well-regulated family militia. Some of those good people were lucky. Some were driven out by night- riders who may, or may not. have been on payrolls of other ranchers. Some of the newcomers were robbed, raped, tortured, killed by persons unknown.

At least one recent killing bore a clear message. According to a deputy's report, the dead man was found on the spread of a rancher. Perhaps he had been caught rustling a few calves, for he had been treated to an ancient Spanish custom reserved for rustlers: the death of the skins. Apparently while still alive, he was bound inside the fresh 'green' hide of a yearling steer and left there without further attention. A pitiless sun, and shrinkage of the hide, had done the rest.

The rancher, old Mulvihill Garner expressed great surprise when the iron-hard hide was found with its grisly contents. The hide bore the Garner brand. Could the old man have done it? Surely not, for old Mul Garner's arthritis kept him off the range. His strapping, hell-raising son, Jerome? But Jer spurned anything that smacked of Spanish influence and lacked his dad's knowledge of the old punishments. Well, somebody had done it, and people tempted to lift Garner sheep or cattle understood the message in the death of the skins.

Quantrill knew Jer Garner slightly, as a little dog knows a big dog. Twice, at weekend dances around Rocksprings, Jer had arranged to jostle Sandy Grange's dance partner. The first time Jer demanded an apology, got it, and decided that Quantrill had-failed a test. The second time had only been for good measure, to remind Sandy who was the biggest bull on the spread.

Ted Quantrill knew better than to misbehave at a public dance: Sandy had to live with folks thereabouts, even if he didn't. With much of Wild Country's control in the hands of ranchers, and with some of them happy to keep it wild, the region partly justified charges by northern critics. Northerners sneered that when you scratched the veneer of the new Southwest, you found the Old West just beneath, now a mix of high tech and whang leather. Some of the finest families in the Southwest kept that reputation going, claiming you could forge a better new world while keeping a bushel of tradition. Folks in the mold of a Kleberg, a Goodnight, or a Dahlman did what they could to maintain the mixture of old and new. And then, of course, there was Quantrill's destination today: the old Schreiner spread, nucleus of Wild Country Safari.

Chapter Ten

Quantrill alerted the old-girl with the buzzer as she neared the turnout to the north gate of Wild Country Safari; heard the whine of regenerators as she slowed her big rig expertly. In common courtesy, he climbed down and hit the macadam running so that she would not waste precious energy stopping and accelerating from rest. He turned away from her dusty wake, walked to the untended gatehouse, placed his left thumb against the printmatcher. Then he went inside and selected a surfer. Safari management did not let its help get stranded forty klicks from their work stations.

The enormous spread of Wild Country Safari had begun, a century before, as the 'Y O' Ranch, an arid region where the pioneering Schreiner family dug wells to water their stock. By the time Ted Quantrill was born, the Y O brand was famous — not so much for the blooded stock as for the wild game and endangered species that generations of Schreiners brought in. The list ran from addax to zebu; you could find oryx, tiny gemsbok, towering giraffe, shambling bison, and velvet-hided sable for photographs.

After the Sinolnd War, Schreiners bowed to necessity and leased the entire spread to LockLever. The giant corporation added nearby lands and now had a spread that covered parts of three counties. A nearby LOS tower sent narrowcast power into the spread, but it took only a little of that power to pump water from deep wells. Much more was needed to run the weird assortment of entertainments LockLever built, and all of it together was world- renowned as Wild Country Safari. LockLever's huge investment was paying off already.

Highrollers floated in a converted delta dirigible from DalWorth to a pad just over the hill from Faro; but they clattered and bounced the last few klicks by stagecoach.

Wearing a rented costume, you could easily forget that Faro's plank sidewalks and clapboard saloons were all parts of a careful reconstruction. You could win a pile at faro, monte, poker, craps, or roulette — though more often you lost a small bundle. You bathed, if at all, in a high-backed zinc tub. You slept, if at all, on a cornshuck mattress that rustled louder than coal down a chute, in a room with a pitcher and bowl. If you wore a sidearm, you submitted to a company peacebonder strap that shrilled a microwave alert if broken.

In the past year, more Americans had made enough money to visit the little sin city. This was one good sign