The Creed of Violence - Boston Teran [71]
Word was telegraphed, and with that a mandala of armed men was on the move. John Lourdes and Rawbone had dug up the small cache of weapons they'd hidden away. If they reached the city, their plan was to sell them to fund a run to the border.
They drove on through an expanding emptiness, the shadow of their rig running an ocean of creosote. Suddenly a spire rose burning skyward behind them.
"Mr. Lourdes, we've got the Fourth of July on us."
John Lourdes stopped the truck and came about in his seat. A trailing flare miles back, but before it died away another, well to the west, was fired into the air.
"We're being marked," said John Lourdes.
RAWBONE DROVE WHILE John Lourdes sat with flashlight and map, charting a new course of deceptions to cheat capture. But even in the dark the pursuit advanced, their flares marking the coal-black heavens, determined and absolute.
Son and father kept on through the black and wild night, hunted like nameless migrants, climbing up through lonely miles of pinon and chiseled rock. Along the battered remains of mining roads and mule trails, the truck managed the ascent like a slow and hulky beast toward vested cloudbanks. Along the crest they detonated the battened passage behind them to slow the pursuit. But even so, before dawn by a spring at the entrance to a stark plain they could see a retinue of lights traversing the darkened rock face in steady order. From there, a flare went up.
Son and father scanned the desert floor and in the country to their flank there came an answering flare, followed yet by a third atop the distant flats of a mesa. Their pursuers were closing in with the punitive resolve of some fabled deity.
While the father filled the water bags and gassed the truck from a drum, John Lourdes studied the map. But he saw they were beyond remedy now, so he tossed the map in that shallow waterway where it floated briefly before the ink ran, then paled, and the paper sank.
"It's here ... or there."
The father looked out to where a cresset light rose over a day's run of hammered dust bordered by windless foothills.
"Take your choice, Mr. Lourdes."
"I say we make them earn our blood."
They pushed hard into an emptiness where the dark burned away and the earth reddened and the air choked you dry. Rawbone was in the back, mounting the .50 caliber on its tripod. He had rigged a tarp over part of the truckbed. Removing his derby, he wrapped a bandana around his head. John Lourdes whistled and the father turned.
To the west, thin ripples of smoke. A flare arrowed out toward where the truck was running. From behind them another. On their far flank another. The flares were gridding them and so the son looked back at the father. Their faces were harrowed and stained with red dust. It would be soon.
The first of them wheeled toward the truck. Three riders pitched forward in their saddles. Hard cases reeking with intent. Rawbone edged around the .50 caliber so the barrel sat over the sideboard with its AMERICAN PARTHENON streaked by the red clay of the desert floor.
Rawbone opened fire. A hail of dust and blood. The nightmare faces of the unsuspecting men, the horses wrenching sideways as they fell. The truck sped away, leaving this spot of earth looking as if it had vomited up death.
Spumes of dust in a closing arc. A flare missiled at the truck, struck the engine hood. Sparks everywhere burning John Lourdes's face and arms. He swapt at them with a hand and hat as if they were a swarm of torched bees.
The gunfire intensified. The .50 caliber shell casings spattered and dinged across the steel chassis. The riders closed in one surge. They pressed their mounts and fired at the tires. The truck zigged and straightened, then swerved and sent up rolling walls of gritted red that left the riders blind.
A punishing mile and the lathered mounts began to wane. The riders kept on but were falling back. Rawbone could just make out the dusty figures of Doctor