Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance

Chapter 3

Longarm managed to fling one hand over the ridge of corrugated tin running along the center top of the coach car and use it to keep himself from being hurled off the speeding train and having his skull and every other bone broken amongst the rocks lining the trail.

Now, to get control of the train before it hit the bridge…

He heard someone moaning and groaning, and saw Rio Hayes lying facedown over the tin ridge. The man was trying to gain his feet.

Something dark appeared on Longarm’s right, ahead of the train but moving toward Longarm fast. It was a tunnel carved into the side of the mountain.

Longarm, hunkered low atop the coach car, stared in awe—could he get this lucky?—as the dark tunnel mouth flew toward him and the day coach he lay prone upon, both boots dangling down over the side. The peak of the arching portal was only about four feet above the coach car roof.

Longarm looked at Rio Hayes and smiled.

Hayes had just gained his feet and grabbed another bowie knife from somewhere on his scruffy person, and had turned toward Longarm, a savage scowl that, coupled with his broken jaw hanging askew, made his entire face look horsey and crooked and even more demented than usual.

Hayes hadn’t seen the tunnel when Longarm had. But now he saw that gaping, black portal rushing toward him like a gigantic black bird from some hellish underworld intending to swoop him up in its stygian wings.

Hayes had about one second to widen his eyes in awe and dismay before the tunnel turned the world dark. About one eye wink later, following a clipped scream, Longarm heard a resounding, crunching thump!

Just like that, Rio Hayes was gone.

Turned to jelly against the side of the tunnel, over the black, arching entrance. There was a clattering to Longarm’s left, toward the train’s rear. He heard it beneath the raucous din of the train echoing deafeningly off the tunnel’s close, dark walls.

When the train caromed on out the tunnel’s other side and into the blindingly bright daylight, Longarm saw what appeared a ragged, bloody bag of bones jouncing along a roof several cars back. It skidded off to the car’s south side and slithered down over the roof and out of sight, leaving a wide smear of dark red blood behind it.

“Gone but not forgotten, Rio,” Longarm muttered through a grunt, heaving himself to his feet, “you son of a bitch.”

He stared forward, past the wood tender heaped with split pine and oak, to the black iron engine with its diamond-shaped stack spewing gray smoke that billowed in ghostly snakes behind. Beyond the smokestack, the rail bed was a thin swath of iron and rock leading arrow-straight through dark green walls of forest. It dropped perilously toward a distant, gray-blue fold in the dark ridges—a fold in which the broad, deep Horse Thief Gorge lay.

Longarm knew from having taken this line before that the grade soon got even steeper before bottoming out at the bridge over the gorge. Usually through here the engineer was clamping the brake shoes taut against all wheels, just creeping along, because he knew the bridge could only withstand a speed of less than twenty miles an hour. Any more than that, the force and pressure and vibration of the locomotive and trailing cars would rattle the whole thing apart.

As Longarm dropped quickly down the ladder to the vestibule, he judged they were traveling at least thirty miles an hour and were probably picking up an extra mile an hour with every few passing seconds. The wind rush over the train was enormous, blowing the lawman’s close-cropped, dark brown hair flat against his skull.

“How come we’re going so fast?” It was the girl the Mexican had been having his way with.

She was still naked and sitting with her back to the bloody front wall of the coach car, one arm crossed on her breasts. Having seen the other doxies inside the coach car, Longarm now realized this girl was likely with them. With her other hand, she was holding her blowing hair back from her face. She looked concerned but not horrified.

“That’s what I’m gonna find out!” Longarm yelled above the screeching and clattering of the wheels over the rail seams and the incessant whooshing of the wind.

He climbed up into the tender car and crawled over the neatly stacked wood, wincing at the sharp edges of the wood digging into his bare hands and scraping his knees. Ahead, he saw the fireman and the engineer both slumped inside the locomotive. The fireman lay on the floor across from the firebox that heated the boiler. The engineer was half standing, as though he were suspended by something.

Longarm continued crawling, glancing at the engineer and then out beyond the train to the gorge that he could see opening now before him, the bridge stretching a thin, silver-brown line across it. It was a mile away but it was coming up fast. The lawman knew enough about trains to know that even this narrow-gauge affair needed at least a hundred yards to stop after the brakes were fully applied, maybe more than that considering how fast the combination was barreling down a steep pass.

Longarm dropped over the bulkhead and into the locomotive, stepped over the stout boots of the overall-clad fireman, blood gushing out the side of the man’s head. He stepped over to the engineer, who had a similar hole as the fireman, in the same side of his head.

He saw now what had happened. The gang had shot the engineer and the brakemen before Hayes’s men had leaped onto the train…probably from a perch similar to Longarm’s.

They’d figured they could stop the train whenever they wanted by pulling the brake through chain from anywhere behind, in any of the cars. Only, they hadn’t counted on the engineer falling over the dead-release lever that disengaged the through chain, rendering it impossible to brake the train from anywhere but in the locomotive itself.

Longarm pulled the engineer off the lever and let him drop to the floor. He turned the lever back to the right, saw the long, wood-handled brake, which looked much like the brake on a wagon, and hauled back on it. After a few seconds, he felt the locomotive tremble as the wood-and-metal brake jaws clamped over the iron wheels of all the cars.

Only, the forward momentum was too great for the brakes. They wouldn’t hold. The lever leaped back upright, releasing the brake jaws and nearly tearing Longarm’s shoulders from their sockets.

“Shit!” the lawman shouted into the wind, grabbing the handle with both hands and hauling back and down on it once more.

Again, he felt the engine tremble beneath his boots. It sort of hiccupped, but the handle jerked upward despite Longarm virtually hanging on it the way the engineer had been hanging over the dead-release.

“Need some help?” The feminine voice had sounded from behind.

Longarm glanced over his shoulder to see the girl he’d left on the vestibule crawling over the wood stacked in the tender car. She’d thrown a thin, very low-cut, sleeveless pink dress on. The wind billowed it out in front, revealing her tender, sloping breasts, which jostled as she crawled, barefoot, across the wood.

Longarm continued to wrestle with the brake lever, encouraged by the hiccups he felt through the iron grate of the locomotive floor whenever he got the brake engaged, though he was having a devil of a time keeping it engaged. The girl climbed over the bulkhead, winced at the dead men lying around Longarm, and came over to where Longarm was clutching the lever with both hands and leaning far back toward the floor, grunting and sighing and cursing through gritted teeth.

Straight ahead, he saw the bridge and the canyon. It was sliding up on him fast as the train continued to barrel down the side of the pass, which was leveling out a little now though the train was still hammering along at forty or fifty miles an hour.

That was just too fast. He had to get the speed down to half that or they were all doomed.

The brakes screamed like a hundred terrified girls, but the jerking Longarm could feel meant they weren’t continuously engaged.

“Let me help!” the girl shouted above the wind.

She climbed on top of Longarm, her back to him, the brake handle between them. She propped her bare feet up on the front bulkhead, and pressed her body back and down against the brake handle and Longarm.

He could feel her round rump against his crotch. Her hair blew around his face in the wind. It smelled faintly like sage and chokecherries. Her dress blew up in the wind, exposing the long, creamy length of her legs clear to her hips.

The brakes screamed more shrilly than before. The engine shuddered violently as the jaws clamped down hard over all the iron wheels.

Longarm looked through the golden cloud of the girl’s blowing hair. The locomotive was nearly level with the bridge now, and it was still swooping toward them but not quite as quickly as before. To both sides, the trees were thinning out, exposing the clay-colored boulders of the ridge still angling down toward the gorge.

To the left of the rails, two gray coyotes watched the train from a stony ledge, ears raised curiously, one curveting as though it wanted to run but was too fascinated by the big iron, screeching contraption to hightail it just yet. Both brush wolves were wondering if the train would make it or pile up at the bottom of the gorge.

The locomotive jerked and shuddered. The brakes squealed so shrilly that Longarm thought his eardrums would pop. The girl screamed as she threw her head back against Longarm’s chest, grinding the heels of her feet into the bulkhead and pressing her supple body down harder against Longarm and the brake handle.

Longarm closed his eyes. He was about tapped out, the power in his body draining. His tense muscles were turning to putty.

Gradually, the shuddering continued until Longarm looked to both sides and saw nothing but clear, blue Colorado sky stretching from horizon to horizon. They were over the bridge. And they were probably not moving over fifteen miles an hour. Maybe less than that. The train was still hiccupping and the brakes were still screeching, but, by damn, they’d done it!

They’d gotten the train slowed. The bridge should hold.

“We’re over the middle of the canyon!” the girl cried.

Longarm kept his hands wrapped around the brake lever. He felt as though his knuckles were about to pop, his arms about to tear loose from their sockets. The girl’s hair in his face was a tonic, however. So, too, was her rump grinding against his balls.

When he felt the engine grind to a final halt, he looked to both sides. Red, rocky slopes rose around him, stippled with piñon pines and firs. He could smell the pine resin. It was like perfume. The locomotive panted like a dying dinosaur; the fire in its box hadn’t been stoked since the outlaws had killed the fireman. Now that its momentum had been broken, and it was stopped, it wouldn’t be going anywhere until it was fired up again.

“We made it,” the girl said in a sexy, husky voice, rolling off of Longarm, setting her feet on the floor and looking around with girlish delight. “We made it, mister. You did it. You saved us all!”

As though on cue, a great, victorious whoop rose from the passengers behind the tender car.

Longarm gained his feet, straightened. The brake remained now in the locked position. He squeezed his hands together, wincing as the blood oozed back into them, as the damaged tendons and muscles barked their complaints.

He looked at the girl beaming up at him. “Couldn’t have done it without you, miss,” he said, panting.

“Call me Matilda.”

He gave a weary half smile. “Call me Longarm.”

She leaped up and wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing her breasts against his chest, her lips against his mouth.

“Longarm,” she said, “when we get to Creede, you’re gonna get the biggest thank you that any girl has ever given a man!”