Crack in the Sky

The wide row of hard knuckles struck Conchita squarely across one eye and the bridge of her big nose. Titus watched her head snap back from her shoulders like a withered shaft of the corn he sheared with a huge scythe back on that Kentucky farm so many years ago. As the woman collapsed against the wall, smacking her head into the crude mud bricks, Ramirez slowly quartered around on Bass, grunting from somewhere within his barrel of a chest.

The soldier’s long blade shimmered in the candlelight as he held the weapon out in front of him and began to snarl in Mexican.

Just behind the lieutenant’s shoulder a knot of shadows congealed against the crude plank door; then a body collided with the door itself, smacking the planks against the mud wall as the man melted to the floor and in stepped a white-headed warrior. His long hair flowing about his shoulders like corn silk in that muted candlelight, McAfferty immediately whirled about, putting his back on the room as he inched inward—a tomahawk in one hand, his long skinning knife clutched in the other. Foot by foot he retreated, holding more Mexicans at bay there in the darkened doorway.

Both Bass and the lieutenant realized McAfferty had his back to them at the same moment.

Like a strip of night torn from a midnight sky itself, Ramirez whirled and brought up his dagger, yanking it into the air as he started to lunge for McAfferty.

And like sunlight glancing off the rushing surface of mountain creek water, Scratch exploded from the floor. Slinging his left arm around the soldier’s bull-thick neck, he plunged his skinning knife into the side of the barrel of a chest there below the arm raised to strike McAfferty.

With a piglike whimper of surprise, Ramirez jerked, muscles tensing as Bass felt his thin blade slide along a rib for an instant, then suddenly plunge in clear to the hilt.

He had it buried until it would sink no farther.

The soldier tried jerking away, tried flinging Bass to the side, but the American clung there like a bloated tick to the hump of the herd bull.

Stumbling to the side a step, the Mexican nonetheless swung his knife downward at McAfferty. Missed. Then yanked his huge knife back into the air to try it again.

Bass’s arm pistoned only enough to free his knife from the enemy’s chest before he jabbed its razor point between another pair of ribs, feeling the warmth ooze over the back of his hand as he twisted the skinning blade this time, working it side to side through the muscle, slashing it on into the man’s bellows.

Again from the corner of his eye Scratch watched that huge right arm swing up and down toward McAfferty —realizing too late that the lieutenant’s target was not the white-head. The Mexican was arching his knife back at the naked tormentor plastered on his back. Too late—

“Arrrghghgh!”

The pain grew hot as the huge flat blade plunged into the meat of his right thigh, close to the hip.

So much pain that Bass almost went faint, sensing his damp, sweaty grip loosening around the Mexican’s neck. Feeling his hand releasing the warm, slick handle of his skinning knife.

“Asa!” Titus cried out desperately as he watched the muscular Mexican yank the knife out of his leg and cock it into the air for a second plunge.

At his call McAfferty whirled in a crouch no more than three feet from the sergeant and immediately raked his left arm to the side before him. The dull oil-blued metal of the tomahawk blade slashed through the Mexican’s flesh, which gaped like a bloody mouth opening with bright-red berry juice the way Mexican women stain their own lips with the seductive red of the alegria, that honed blade cleaving the entire width of the man’s belly in that one smooth motion as the Mexican’s arm drove downward, completing his reflex.

Ramirez’s knife planted itself into Bass’s leg a second time before the big, hard-knuckled right hand tensed into a bird’s claw, releasing the weapon’s handle. He left it quivering in the meat of the American’s thigh.

“‘The bows of the mighty men are broken, and they that stumbled are girded with strength!’”

Feeling his supper smack itself against his tonsils with the icy pain, Bass slid backward, no longer able to hang on to the lieutenant’s neck. Scratch’s moist, sticky right hand opened and closed, empty now as he struck the cold earthen floor. His knife still hung in the Mexican’s chest as McAfferty whirled away, growling, cursing, spewing biblical invocations at his enemies who crowded against the doorway, working against themselves to get at the white-headed American.

“‘Whoso sheddeth a man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God made He man!’”

Asa lunged toward the shadows in the door as Bass sensed Ramirez begin to totter to the side, both his arms clutching his belly, where blood splattered his forearms, the first squirt of purplish-white gut puerting from the wound that had nearly cleaved the huge man in half.

Mumbling moistly around the blood that burbled from his lips, the Mexican lurched to the side, suddenly stiffening as he collapsed to his knees, his eyes opening wide, his chin sagging. Ramirez pitched forward onto his face across Conchita’s legs.

She began moaning in that slow, dull-witted, dazed, and wounded way of an animal … realizing a dead man pinned her legs to the floor, his warm blood gushing over her bare flesh, pooling on the ground around them, soaking into the pounded clay. But her guttural moans became unearthly shrieks of horror the moment she attempted to free her legs from their prison beneath Ramirez’s bloody, eviscerated body.

“Mr. Bass!” McAfferty cried as he backed another step into the room, one moccasin landing in the black puddle as the sergeant’s blood pooled near the center of the tiny crib. “’Lust not after her beauty in thine heart; neither let her take thee with her eyelids!’ Cover your nakedness before the eyes of this whore and come help me!”

How it hurt with a cold fire now to slowly drag that hot metal from his flesh, the whole of his leg from toe to hip throbbing with pain … just as two Mexicans leaped through the narrow doorway and McAfferty stepped back, a foot slipping in the dark puddle of the dead lieutenant’s blood.

In a smooth sweep Bass brought Ramirez’s knife up as he rocked onto his one good leg, jabbing forward the moment one of the soldiers cocked his arm over his head, knife in hand. Scratch caught the Mexican squarely in the left side of his chest, low. Dragging the big double-edged stiletto to the side, he felt the blade separate the muscle between two ribs, slash on through the tough muscle of the lung as the soldier recoiled in a jerk, attempting to pull away so violently, he struck the mud wall behind him. Dead, as he struck the floor already littered with another man’s blood.

Hearing the crack of metal against bone, Scratch whirled—finding McAfferty yanking the tomahawk out of the side of another soldier’s skull, letting the gurgling Mexican sink slowly to his knees before Asa flung the dead man back against the crude table where the pig-lard lamp spilled to the floor, snuffing itself out with a stifling stench of rancid bacon.

In the light of that one small candle, McAfferty spun for the last of the shadows in the door, flinging the knife an instant before pulling his pistol. He fired at the shadows, the sudden light blinding them all in the closeness of that tiny room.

“It’s time to find your pistol, Mr. Bass!”

His hands gumming with drying blood, his knees cold on the earthen floor, then suddenly warm as he crabbed through the Mexicans’ blood, Scratch searched the darkness for where his pistol had fallen in those frantic, fevered moments as the whore grappled with his belt, coat, and clothing. Beneath the flap to his capote he felt the short, hard barrel. Flinging back the thick blanket wool, Bass seized it with his left hand, dropping the knife from his right to fill it with the pistol butt as he palmed back the hammer with his left hand.

Brought it up just as another shadow burst from the darkness of the hallway. Firing at the black hole the figure made in the dim, flutting candlelight. How his eyes stung with that bright-yellow jet of flame spewing from the muzzle as the shadow hurtled back against the door, its wooden planks slamming against the mud wall with a hollow sound.

“Gather your damned clothes!”

Scratch couldn’t agree more. He scooped up his leggings and moccasins, stuffing everything inside his war shirt before he jabbed his arms inside his coat sleeves as McAfferty swept out of the darkness and whacked his pistol against the side of a soldier’s head the instant the Mexican leaped into the room.

Scratch clambered to his bare feet, trying to balance on that one good leg, flinging the wide black belt around