The Creed of Violence

TWENTY-SEVEN

JERTO AGREED TO carry John Lourdes's note back to the train. Doctor Stallings reviewed it with his officers and proceeded accordingly. The plan was to bring the trains on to the garrison, then wait for John Lourdes to signal. Son and father were to scout the secondary trackline to Tampico, spotting up the rails for further sabotage. Doctor Stallings walked the turnout and the engineer showed him where the fishplates and spikes had been removed. Doctor Stallings looked to his watch, to the south. He sat quietly on the locomotive steps waiting for John Lourdes to signal. In packs of two and three the guards asked Tuerto about the garrison that now stood in shadow on the hilltop. He would describe the scene and then point to the aperture of his camera and tell them it had all been captured there and prints could be had for a commission. Even the women, appalled by what they heard, clung to every whisper for the dead belonged to the government and that aroused unspoken hopes.

From a craggy plateau John Lourdes and Rawbone scouted the hills before them. A hundred miles beyond, the Gulf washed up on the beaches of Tampico.

"You can smell the salt air from here," said the father. Then bringing his horse about, called out, "Mr. Lourdes." He pointed. To the west of the train, tracers of dust were piling up across the benchland.

John Lourdes got out his binoculars. "It's not dragoons. And they're coming on like religion."

"They're going to hit the train."

The bandoleer of flares was slung over John Lourdes's neck. He shoved the binoculars back in his saddlebags. He got out the signal gun. The father rode up alongside him.

"Before you warn them. You know what I'm going to say. Tampico ... the oil fields. You don't need them back there. If they make it, well ... and the women are not your province. Tampico ... the oil fields." John Lourdes loaded a flare.

"You can fill notebooks till you fall over dead but what you need to write ... Justice Knox shouldn't have entrusted you with this. You're not the right man for it." His eyes were black and hard, the neck cords strained. "You wanted to get there, we can get there. It ends when you say it ends, right. There it is out there. The practical application of strategy means you stay indifferent and take advantage when advantage can be taken. Isn't that why you ended up here, why I ended up here? Answer me, Goddamn it."

ONE FLARE SIGNALED all was clear, two flares there was trouble and hold back. To that John Lourdes added a third option in his note. Three flares meant trouble, but come on quick. When Doctor Stallings, standing atop the tender, raised three fingers, Jack B ordered the trains out and weapons readied.

From the plateau John Lourdes could see banners of gray smoke against the haze and he knew the trains were on the move.

"You ... me ... and the truck!" shouted the father. "Alright ... I hope the BOI taught you how to board a moving train under fire."

The trains went through a gap in the hills. Small islands of dust with riders at the fore descended scrub ridges and rose up magically out of distant swales. Rurales with bandoleers crisscrossing their chests like ancient baldrics and filthy hats and straw sombreros, and they carried carbines and flintlocks and five-shot Colts and machetes and bows and arrows and their saddlebags and stirrups winged outward and the fronds of their hats bent back as they drove to flank the trains.

There were bursts of rifle smoke along the length of the cars and riders crumpled out of their saddles and horses crushed down upon their hooves and flipped over brokenly. Against a barren sky John Lourdes scanned that tableland with binoculars to see how and where fate might intervene for them to get back on the train.

As the lead train cleared a long shelf of battened stone, a mass of trampling shadows surged from hiding. The men in the coal car out front of the locomotive leaned up from their parapets and poured fire down into the clustered features of men close enough to touch.

A rurale with a leather breastplate and hair to his shoulders whipped his horse up alongside the rails and was cut down as he flung a stick of dynamite. It disappeared within the black hull and caromed off the casement with fuse hissing. Men scrambled to reach it but were too late.

The explosion rocked the coal car. Men were thrown over the rim. The black wheels lifted, then slammed down, missing the rails. The wheels sawed ties and scored earth and the plough-shaped pilot rammed the coal car housing and all that tonnage lifted and scythed across the engine tearing the stack and the menagerie of steel and steam was engulfed in smoke. A part of the frame housing tore across the connecting rods and they broke loose from the locomotive spearing the boiler and a gauge wheel in the cab blew into the chest of the engineer and drove his ribs right out through his back.

The locomotive surged and the coal car listed into a decline beside the tracks, only to be vaulted up again where it broadsided the engine. For a few moments this architecture of ruined metal and mangled steel plowed on at full speed and then the housing plates separated at the seams and there was a violent hiss and a rush of flame and the remains of train cars exploded into a volcano of dust and debris.

John Lourdes swept from the plateau and down a ravine with Rawbone in hard pursuit. Their horses struggled up a steep incline from where they could see through the settling smoke that the first train was a hissing mass strewn over the tracks.

The second train was a mile back and coming on fast. It was under heavy fire from a cavalry of poor wretches hunkered down in their saddles and firing over the outstretched heads of their mounts.

John Lourdes wiped the sweat and dust from his field glasses and surveyed the landscape again. If the train could get past the wreckage, he saw where the tracks traversed a rising battlement of hills and the train would have to slow drastically. He yelled to Rawbone and pointed to where they were to ride. The father shouted back, as his mount shouldered wildly, that the train would never get through. But the son had already spurred his horse toward where the walls of the canyon burned with daylight.

They came up out of a ravine. The ground before them was clouded with dust. They dashed past a howling band of outriders making for the train. They were in the midst of gunfire now, charging toward a shaly ridge with their weapons drawn. A pack of rurales swept off after them in pursuit. One of their mounts was shot from under him and the man was flung to the earth and his own compadres trampled over him with stunning disregard.

Rawbone had not come unprepared and he took from his shirt a grenade and flung it back at their pursuers. A rain of metal shards ended the pursuit. Men and mounts were torn asunder with ruthless efficiency. Belts of flesh and leather marked the earth where they once had been.

The great Mastodon thundered toward the smoking gauntlet that littered the tracks. Doctor Stallings stood in the locomotive with the engineer while Jack B was atop the tender hunched down as he fired and fielded orders. There were men in the cars trying to hold back the blood from their seeping wounds. There were men dead. There were riderless mounts with their wild manes charging alongside burning railcars. The dust and smoke from this nightmare frieze rose up out of the earth for miles.

The engineer looked to Doctor Stallings. "She won't get through," he said.

"Throttle it," came the order.

"We'll wreck."

"Throttle it."

"We'll wreck."

"Then we'll wreck."

The engineer did as he was ordered. They could feel the pure force of the speed as the huge wheels began to reverb against the rails. The hammering of the pistons driving steam through the valves grew to near deafening.

A horseman with a bow and arrow rode upon the locomotive's shadow. Tethered to the shaft was a lit stick of dynamite. Doctor Stallings turned and fired. The horseman was taken from the saddle just as the arrow left the bowstring. It rattled between the engine and the tender and exploded just beyond. The first car shook, windows shattered, men were thrown to the floor.

The distance between the train and those scorched and battered remains that formed a breastwork along the rails closed with fiendish speed. Doctor Stallings heard the engineer asking the Almighty to remember him in heaven seconds before hell arrived on impact.

Across that barren pan, above the rifle fire and the shouting and cries of the wounded, were the crushing grate and shrill of steel on steel unlike anything the mind could conjure sending a shock wave down the length of the couplings such that the women in the last car were flung over and atop each other.

Son and father reached the mouth of the canyon and were leading their mounts on foot up a screed hill face that looked down on the tracks. Like some foundried Atlas the Mastodon shouldered the brunt of the wreckage. The huge steamer rocked and shunted and slowed and the wheels locked and lost traction and were skidding uselessly. But when the wheels caught and the valves opened, driving the rods forward, the savaged hull of that coal car got screeched from the tracksthe train was through.

The engineer was pale and shaken. He looked to Doctor Stallings and nodded and Doctor Stallings leaned past him and pulled the train whistle. Across the plain a call of defiance.

The train was minutes from the ledge where John Lourdes leaned over and looked down at the tracks.

"We'll jump from here," he said.

Rawbone was behind him and glanced at the rails and saw if things went bad it was a chasm and the rocks and an inauspicious end.

"Mr. Lourdes," he said, "China looks closer."

The train passed through a cut in the rock. Jack B stood on the tender firing down at the last cadre of riders whose mounts had not failed them or fallen back in exhaustion. The train was close enough now John Lourdes could make out the flag inked into the muscles of that shooting arm.

The ground dropped and rose with outcroppings of rock, and the riders drove their mounts over this tortured masonry to the point of death. As the train pulled away one rurale on a raw and maneless beast got off an arrow before the forelegs buckled and the withers fell.

The arrow lifted and turned as John Lourdes leapt to a passenger car roof. It descended, picking up speed in a long whoosh as Rawbone followed suit, cursing the world all the way back to creation but making sure the one thing he didn't lose was his derby. The arrow embedded in the deckboards of a flatcar. The fuse to the dynamite lashed to the shaft hissed and sparkled as both men jumped the couplings from car to car where guards lay dead as the train hiked it up through that causeway along the rimrock.

They stood beside the truck exhausted. Dust streaked where it had caked to the sweat running down their faces and for a few moments they were neither son and father nor federal agent and common assassin, but two men swept up in the machinery of wholesale slaughter who had momentarily escaped with their lives.

The father put the barrel of his rifle to the barrel of the son's as if to acknowledge their surviving. Just then the spark of the fuse along the shaft of the arrow bottlenecked with all that packed graphite and blew the deck of the flatbed in front of them to pieces.