saxophonic (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
saxophonic) wrote2021-08-10 09:46 pm
saxophonic) wrote2021-08-10 09:46 pm
Gunslinger AU Pt 3
More of this rough draft, rough WIP, I'm not even sure this will be Chapter 3, but chronologically this is what's next. What is pacing, anyway?
[Click here for previous chapter].
Unrated as per usual but there's violence ahead. 5.1k this time.
###
Joseph exhales warm and wet to fog up the glass of their binoculars, then wipes that condensation with his shirt sleeve. “Here,” he says, handing the newly cleaned pair to Caesar. “We’ve been watching them on and off for a few days now. Still no sign of Kars or any of the others.”
Caesar crawls on his belly toward the edge of the cliff, and Joseph joins him between the two hardy bushes clinging to the top of Widowmaker Bluffs, their scouting point over the relatively quiet Pillar Men camp below. This group has holed up in an old frontiersman’s cabin, and neither Joseph nor Caesar have seen anything unusual. Teams go out, teams come back in. Same numbers each time. People pass the hours drinking around the fire or hanging up laundered shirts on the cabin’s clothesline.
With a grunt, Caesar says, “Well, they’ve gotta be somewhere. We know all four of the original bastards are still alive and making the world a fouler place for it.”
“Somewhere doesn’t mean here.” Joseph shrugs. “We can either take these lowlifes now and relieve them of everything they’ve got, or we can leave the way we came without a shot fired. They haven’t spotted us yet.”
“Don’t tell me you want to run away now.” Caesar adjusts the binoculars with a twist of his hands. “Wait, I think I see something.”
“What is it?” When Caesar shushes him, Joseph adds, “You don’t use your ears to see.” He smirks when Caesar glares at him. “But really, what is it?”
After Caesar flicks his eyes down Joseph’s face, he resumes his study of the land below through the binoculars. “New group’s arriving in camp right now, a bunch of riders and a stagecoach. Stolen, no doubt.” Caesar whistles. “And driven by none other than Santana.” He hands the binoculars back to Joseph. “Not who I was hoping to shoot dead on this particular venture, but I’ll take whichever of those bastards I can get.”
Joseph accepts the binoculars. It takes a few seconds of searching through the scopes before he finds Santana’s long strawberry blond hair tumbling down his back as the man himself sits on the driver’s box of an enclosed stagecoach, just like Caesar said. In the afternoon sun, the varnished wooden coach beneath him throws sunlight as it rolls over the camp’s uneven ground. The curtains are drawn, but that doesn’t mean much. There’s at least one piece of luggage in the cargo area on top of the carriage and the rear boot cover looks like it’s barely buckled down. Whatever they’ve got in there, there’s a lot of it. Joseph hopes it isn’t the remains of whoever drove the coach before Santana. A damn mess, and a sorry sight, if it is.
Lowering the binoculars with one hand, Joseph props his head up with the other and looks at Caesar. “So how do you wanna do this? I assume you’ll want to take the lead.”
A pair of green eyes remain trained on the camp with the same intensity as a loaded gun. “You bet your ass I do.” Caesar’s nostrils flare, a small sign of burgeoning anger that Joseph has long known to mean, in no uncertain terms: get the fuck out of my way.
Nodding, Joseph says, “Alright, it’s yours. What’s the plan?”
Caesar’s focus slides to Joseph. The force of his gaze could knock the air from Joseph’s lungs. “Give me some time to think through the details, but I’ve got a general idea. New moon tonight, yeah?”
“Not quite a new moon, but it shouldn’t be too bright.” Joseph crawls back from the edge before he risks getting to his knees. “I’ll start wiping down the guns. Easy picking with a rifle from here.”
“No sniper rifle for this one. We go down and do this personally.” Caesar backs away from the cliffside, too. Once he stands, he brushes the dirt from his clothes. “I know you like them, but no spurs. I don’t want Santana to know we’re there until a knife’s at his throat or a bullet’s in his chest.”
With the arrival of one of Kars’ lieutenants, his mood has darkened significantly, like he’s back to that place he was before their old gang took him in as a child. Joseph still isn’t sure how to handle him when he gets this hungry for a fight, like he can hear the sound of war drums beating in time with his pulse and driving him onwards. His demeanor seems to scream for others to steer clear of Caesar or face destruction. Best Joseph’s managed to figure is to keep Caesar focused on whatever task is at hand while praying he comes back to himself on the other side. To Joseph’s relief, he usually does.
They trade off keeping watch on the Pillar Men and preparing themselves for the upcoming fight. After several days of canned meals and crackers, not that Joseph’s complaining about the luxury of food every day, it will be nice to set off someplace where they can take their meals hot. Though there’s something that sits right with Joseph about staring into the heart of a dancing fire on a cool night, listening to wet twigs snap and hiss while a meal warms through.
By the time the daylight’s hidden away and the slivered moon finds its place overhead, Caesar pats him on the shoulder. “How are things looking down there?”
“Quiet. Like they’re turning in for the night, maybe.”
A chorus of voices rises from the gulch in the beginning lines of a particularly notorious drinking song, and a bonfire before the cabin sends a plume of smoke stretching toward the sky. People climb out of the house, out of their tents, and a group unload a crate of beers from the wagon, which is descended upon almost immediately by the outlaws.
From his seat on the ground, Joseph looks up into Caesar’s face and finds one blond eyebrow raised. “Then again,” Joseph says. “Maybe not.”
“This is better than quiet, I think,” Caesar says. “In a few hours, they’ll all be drunk. Distracted.” Caesar squats down beside him. “Santana hasn’t left, has he?”
“No.” Joseph shakes his head once. “Of that, I’m sure.” He turns back to the party just getting started and watches a trio start to dance. “This must be in honor of their boss, or that stagecoach they snagged, or both.”
In Joseph’s periphery, Caesar nods. “If we play this right, we can sneak past the sentries—”
“If they’re posting sentries tonight.”
“—and rob `em blind. Even better if they’re all going in for the drinks. I don’t want them to know we hit their camp until they’re hungover and hurting in the morning.”
Someone throws a bottle of liquor into the fire, a wasteful act which shatters with a sudden, predictable flare. Joseph snorts. “So, just the sneaking and the thieving, then?” Caesar tilts his head to one side as he looks at Joseph in a silent prompt to explain himself. “Nothing for Santana, I mean. That’s awful forgiving of you.”
“He isn’t the one who—”
“I know.”
Caesar closes his mouth and regards him with another inscrutable look. They hold each other’s gaze as the party winds itself into full swing by the loudness of the singing and the laughter. “We’ll deal with him when we get to him.” He stands. Joseph stands with him. “Let’s finish clearing out and get everything into position. Find a place away from the camp for us to leave Sunflower and Tilly, but close enough the horses come when we call.”
With a facetious tilt of his hat, Joseph says, “Yes, boss.” Caesar rolls his eyes and turns away. “Right away, boss.”
Once they’ve packed up their camp and stamped out as much evidence as they have time to cover up, they ride their horses down and around the formation. Joseph scouted a thick patch of trees a few hundred yards away from the cabin where they could leave their horses. It’s perfect: secluded but not too removed, defensible but accessible. They dismount and arm up in the darkness, Joseph making sure to grab the set of three throwing knives he bought off that fence. A stealthy takedown of this hideout is a bright idea, when gunshots can echo their way across the gulch as easy as a breeze. He slings his bow and quiver over his shoulder, pats his mare on the neck, and looks to Caesar for confirmation.
Caesar leans his head in and murmurs something to Sunflower before stepping away from his gelding. He nods at Joseph. “Let’s go.”
Sneaking through the woods is easier without the clink of spurs to give himself away on a misstep. Joseph almost loses his footing on an upturned root, sending pebbles sliding down the slight slope in the ground. As luck would have it, they find their first sentry at that exact moment, a stumbling P-Man armed with a glass beer bottle in one hand and a rifle in the other. He pauses his swig to watch one of the rocks roll toward him. Joseph grits his teeth and crouches behind a bush, an old one that looks half-dead, and the half that is alive hasn’t quite filled itself in after spring’s arrival. Poorly hidden, he goes still and prays the lack of moonlight is enough to keep him out of trouble.
A few feet away, taking cover behind a tree trunk, Caesar stares at him like he wants to explode into a lecture over Joseph’s rookie mistake. Instead, he turns his back to Joseph, so Joseph turns his attention to the sentry.
“Huh,” the sentry says. His boot scuffs against the ground as he kicks at the pebble and misses. “Haha, damn.” The sentry shuffles further away from his camp, close enough to Joseph that he could land a throwing knife in the sentry’s windpipe without much force at all. Joseph reaches for his weapons with one hand and lifts the other to depress a branch out of his range of vision.
It snaps.
The sentry looks up from the pebble at his feet, and when he sees Joseph, his eyes go wide with recognition.
“Aw, hell,” Joseph says and whips out a throwing knife. He doesn’t get the chance to use it. Caesar’s already there, pouncing on the sentry from behind and cracking the butt of his revolver against the back of the man’s skull to knock him out cold. Then Caesar hooks his hands under the man’s arms, catching him before he crumples. His beer bottle falls to the ground and remains intact as it rolls away, spilling its contents in the dirt.
Caesar drags him into a healthier bush to hide the sentry’s unconscious body, then checks his pockets for anything of value. “Nice going,” Caesar whispers.
Joseph tucks the knife away. “How was I supposed to know it’d break?”
With a grunt of irritation, Caesar uses their old gang’s hand signals to motion Joseph forward. As they creep through the forest, Joseph takes better care to mind his surroundings this time. They relieve another sentry of his consciousness, Joseph sneaking up behind him and choking him until he goes limp in Joseph’s grasp. He lays this sentry down against the opposite side of a tree and out of sight from the cabin, then lifts no more than fifty cents from the man’s pockets before continuing on.
Once they reach the cabin, they’ve missed the bulk of the festivities by the looks of the men passed out around the remains of the fire. A handful have made it to their tents, and there’s bound to be more inside the house, but most seem to find the ground just fine for sleeping off the liquor. Joseph and Caesar stay low and keep their backs against the cabin.
Knocking his elbow against Joseph’s arm, Caesar silently grabs Joseph’s attention. He taps Joseph’s quiver, then motions toward another sentry patrolling around the far side of the camp. The order is clear: kill him.
Joseph shakes his head and retreats into the cover of the brush before sneaking around to the other side. He incapacitates the sentry like he did the other one before he returns to Caesar.
“I thought you said this was my lead,” Caesar whispers. He shoves at Joseph’s shoulder. “Don’t get soft on me now, Joseph.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Joseph lifts both hands up in surrender. “But I only have so many arrows.”
Squinting at him, Caesar frowns. He turns his head and spits on the ground. “Check out the wagon. I want whatever they’ve got stashed in there.”
Joseph nods. “And you?”
Caesar jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “I’ll take the house, then meet you by the wagon when I’m done. And if this goes belly up?” He leans in to grab Joseph by the front of his shirt, pulling closer than he needs to be at a whisper. “Kill as many of these bastards on your way out.” He releases Joseph with another shove. “Let’s do this.”
“Wait.” Joseph stops him and pulls out the three knives. “Here. Take them with you. Might come in handy in there, instead of out here.”
For a moment, Caesar stares at him hard, like he’s going to spit again and say no. Joseph rattles the hand offering the three weapons, and Caesar relents. “Alright. Now go.”
Joseph stays in a low crouch and keeps to the outskirts of the clearing. Though many of the snoring men around him may have found the bottom of whatever bottle they were drinking, there’s no reason to tempt fate. One of them might rouse themselves to crawl into their bedroll or take a piss, and waking to a stranger stalking through the heart of their camp is enough reason to shoot first and ask questions later. Joseph was telling Caesar the truth earlier, he really doesn’t have many arrows left in his quiver. And if he needs to shoot, he’d rather use them for hunting some game than killing Pillar Men who had the unfortunate luck of waking up at the wrong time.
Further past the sentry he knocked out earlier, Joseph finds the wagon parked beside a crowded hitching post full of horses. Near the end of the line, he recognizes the two Morgans, the bay and the sorrel with an interrupted strip, from when they pulled the wagon into the camp. It’s too bad they’ve been stripped of their bridles and harnesses. Whatever’s left in the coach may be too much for them to carry, and if they could take it all back to Poco, they might be able to fence the whole kit for a decent cut.
Two pairs of ears prick forward, stiff as peaks, as Joseph approaches them. He stays low and holds his hands out on either side of his waist and whispers to them in soothing tones until they relax. A few of the other mounts take notice, for better and for worse. Joseph avoids a well-muscled draft horse in the middle of the pack who pinches his muzzle at Joseph’s approach. There’s a mistrustful spark of intelligence in his dark, watchful eyes.
“Easy there, big fella,” Joseph says and slowly unties the horses, one by one. “Not here to hurt you, or your friends.” He dodges a snap of teeth. “Woah boy. I’ll bet you’re Santana’s, huh? Big bastard unwilling to go quietly into the night, like the others.”
The grey horse swishes his light tail and flattens his ears.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Joseph mutters to himself. He frees and turns off as many of the horses as will listen to him, except for Santana’s unruly brute, which won’t let him close enough. Probably for the best, too, as a horse like that would cause Joseph more trouble than he can manage.
He turns to consider the stagecoach. The piece of luggage from the top rack is gone, inside if Joseph had to hazard a guess, and the curtains in the cabin have been pulled to the side. Curiosity gets the better of him. He leaves the horses to peek through the window.
Empty, save for a lockbox Joseph nearly misses from its spot beneath the backward-facing seat. He tests the handle. Unlocked.
The door remains blessedly silent upon opening, but the coach squeaks in protest upon taking Joseph’s weight. He stops, his hand reaching for his sidearm in reflex, and listens for the sounds of people rousing from drunken dreams. Someone nearby grumbles in their sleep, possibly turning over. Nothing else stirs. Joseph exhales, then pulls the lockbox toward him. They must have forgotten to unload this amidst all the celebration. Why else would it be here, whatever it is? Or maybe it isn’t something valuable enough to be brought into the house. He glances at the cabin, a few of the windows on the ground and second floors lit by oil lamps, and wonders what’s taking Caesar so long.
Either way, he wants to get this box open. Joseph considers shutting the door to muffle the sound but shrugs and prizes the latch open with his knife. Inside, a few money clips await him, which he stuffs in his satchel, but the unusual necklace beneath the cash gives him pause. The chain looks too fine to hold the scarlet stone attached to it, something so large and oblong in shape that Joseph isn’t sure what kind of jewel it is. He picks it up and hefts it. A decent weight. The main gem sits in a gold setting, a trio of small emeralds flanking it like wings on either side.
“Where the hell did Santana find you?” Joseph murmurs, touching the smooth face of the red stone and finding his fingers slide over it like it’s covered in oil. It has to be the biggest gem he’s ever seen. Definitely the largest he’s ever stolen. He wraps it in his handkerchief and slips it into his satchel alongside the money clips.
Joseph glances around for Caesar upon his exit from the coach, ignoring the creak this time, and inspects the rear boot. It’s unlocked, and stocked with camp supplies, so he helps himself to as much as he can carry. He sets two bags full of food, alcohol, and medicinal supplies at his feet, then closes the cabin door to lean against it. Caesar’s still nowhere to be found.
“I don’t like this.” He crosses his arms and glares at the house, looking for any shadows moving in the windows. Nothing. “Fuck it.” Joseph grabs the bags, then his bow, and creeps toward the quiet cabin.
Up the porch steps, he moves as quiet as a cougar when he sets the goods by the front door. He knocks an arrow, then pushes the opened door further ajar. He swings his bow arm up, ready to fire. Only a room full of furniture greets him. Confused, and a little relieved, Joseph lowers his weapon as the door returns to it’s half-open equilibrium and looks down.
A member of the Pillar Men lies on the floor, dead.
There isn’t a sign of a struggle, which can only mean one thing. Joseph exhales. “Caesar.” He lifts his bow back into shooting position and frowns. This was supposed to be a robbery, not a bloodbath, no matter how deep the feud between their old gang and the P-men. He stalks from room to room, shifting his weight through each step to keep the sound of his boots to a minimum and deter the floorboards from creaking. Another pair of bodies beneath the cabin’s liquor-laden table brings Caesar’s count to three before Joseph heads up the stairs.
Joseph flinches at the creak of a door opening, mistaking it for a misstep on the stairs. Movement catches his eye, and he ducks a flying blade just in time. The throwing knife buries itself in the wooden floorboards on the ground level.
“Joseph!” Caesar hisses, lowering the other two knives. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Secured the goods from the stagecoach.” He shrugs. “Figure I’d come see what’s taking you so long.” He lowers his bow and gestures with one hand to the space around him. “Now I see why.”
Caesar turns away from him, an ugly sneer distorting his features. “It’s better than they deserve.” He pauses. “I still have to deal with Santana.”
“I’ll come with you.” Joseph advances to the next stair.
“You’re too loud for this.”
“You’ve already killed everyone else, right? And I’m already here.” He rises to another step, then another. “We find him, then we leave with their shit. They’ll never know it was us.” Joseph reaches the landing and nudges Caesar’s shoulder with his own. “Hey.”
Caesar looks at him. The hard edges of his expression soften, though the flare in his eyes remains. “Fine.” He jerks away before stealing down the hall. “He’ll be through here. Has to be.”
Joseph follows him into the shadows. One room remains closed. Caesar glances over his shoulder. Joseph nods. After a silent test of the handle, Caesar opens the door. They slip inside, quick and quiet, weapons ready to put a sleeping Santana out of his misery.
The bed is empty.
Cold steel presses against the back of Joseph's head. “You’re not as quiet as you think you are. And I am not as drunk as you assumed.” Santana’s voice rattles in the quiet. Caesar turns on him, too late. “Drop your weapons.”
Joseph releases his grip on the arrow and it slips to the floor. He spreads his arms apart slowly. Caesar meets his eyes, equal parts shocked and angry.
“Both of you.”
In a smooth gesture, Caesar drops the throwing knives and lets his arms hang at his sides.
“Good.” The gun at his head pulls away, but Joseph doesn’t hear the hammer click back into a disarmed position. “You’re going to tell me what I want to know, or I'll kill your friend here.”
Joseph swallows hard, feeling Caesar studying him in the dark bedroom. He exhales and starts running through their options for survival.
“Ask your questions,” Caesar says. His voice sounds rough, like he’d been whispering for too long. “There’s no guarantee I know anything useful. We’re just two nobodies.”
“Not just any nobodies.” Joseph stumbles back when a rough hand grabs at his shirt collar, yanking the fabric back from his neck. “As I suspected. You can’t get rid of that mark so easily, can you?” A swat of Santana’s hand across the back of Joseph’s head makes his vision double for a moment. He blinks the extra Caesar away. “Can you, Joestar?”
When Joseph doesn’t answer, Santana hits him again.
“I’m not a Joestar,” Caesar scoffs.
Santana considers him for a long moment. “Yes,” he says at last. “You are.” The silvery barrel of the gun appears in Joseph’s periphery. “You ran with them, didn’t you?” Though Caesar doesn’t answer, Santana laughs. “Yes, I remember you now. Last time I saw you, you were screaming for your mother. Your father.”
Joseph sees this for the opportunity it is, with Santana focused on goading Caesar, and keeps his eyes locked on Caesar’s face as he leans to one side, moving slower and quieter than he ever thought he could.
Caesar’s face twists. “Shut your mouth.”
“Tell me, Zeppeli, how many more men have you brought? It can’t be just the two of you, taking on all of us,” Santana says.
A finger twitches beside Caesar’s holster. “Maybe.”
“Impossible.” Santana sounds like he’s grinning. “There’s too many of us. You’ve led yourselves and your men to slaughter.” Undeniable gloating. “Just like your—”
Caesar draws on Santana, a blinding instant of gunpowder igniting where there once was nothing but air. Joseph doubles over, his ears ringing from the gun going off in close quarters. Behind him, Santana stumbles, making some kind of choked gurgle. Joseph seizes the opportunity to drive one elbow into Santana’s gut, twist his body up, then dislodge the gun in Santana’s hand with the heel of his other palm. It sails through the air, discharging with another ear-splitting bang when it hits the floor.
The silence in the aftermath doesn’t last.
“Joseph, can you stand? We have to go.” Caesar’s voice. He sounds so distorted. Joseph shakes his head and pushes himself up through the ringing between his ears. “Two gunshots, twice as many chances for people to wake up. Come on.” Caesar checks the window as Joseph collects their weapons from the ground, then steals Santana’s gun for good measure. Laying on the ground, struggling to breathe, he won’t need it.
He follows Caesar out the bedroom door. “What happened to ‘just sneak in and rob them’ like you said?”
“Did that. Then I got angry.” They round the stairs. “Masks.”
Joseph pulls his bandana into place. “Where are your supplies?”
“In my bag.” On the ground floor, alarmed voices spread through the camp as people wake each other up. “Yours?”
Grunting, Joseph slings his bow over his shoulder. “Front porch.” He pulls his gun. “Didn’t grab much, did you?”
“Small but valuable.” Caesar takes another peek out the window. “They’re confused. I think that they think we’re coming through the trees.” He turns away. “Ready? We might make it around the cabin before we’re spotted.”
“If that.” Joseph extends his hand palm-up to the door. “After you.”
Caesar’s head teeters from side to side as he mocks Joseph, “After you.” They find their positions, staggered side by side behind the door. “Run.” The door swings open and they sprint outside.
Joseph swoops down to grab the bags of supplies he left on the porch. He scans the camp and hisses to Caesar, “They spotted us!”
A yell and a gunshot send the camp scrambling.
“I’ve noticed!”
Their boots pound the wooden porch beneath them, and Joseph follows Caesar in vaulting over the railing. They dash around the cabin to take the same route they used sneaking in, when Caesar veers off.
“Where the hell are you going?”
“Insurance,” Caesar calls over his shoulder.
Joseph brings his gun up to give Caesar cover, watching for movement from the forest or either side of the cabin. It’s only a matter of time before the Pillar Men catch up to them. “What kind of insurance is worth sticking around here?” Someone rounds the corner. Joseph fires at them, sending the person diving back behind the wall.
A few fraught moments and Caesar’s done. He takes off for the woods, swinging his arm in an arc that urges Joseph to follow. Joseph races after him.
Several Pillar Men give chase. It’s an exercise in whiplash: keeping his head forward enough to watch where he’s going and keeping his sight trained behind him to deter pursuers with gunfire. During one glance back when he shoots the last of his rounds, his trigger clicking through empty chambers, a thick column of smoke rising through the trees catches Joseph’s attention.
“You set the place on fire?” Joseph calls to Caesar, hopeful he’s loud enough to project forward.
He must be, because Caesar turns and grins at him. “That should keep them busy!”
Shaking his head, Joseph leaps over the legs of the first sentry, still knocked out. He puts a hand to his mouth. Pinching two fingers together, he curls back his tongue and bends the pitch of his whistle to call their horses. They keep running. Joseph whistles after every few paces until he sees the familiar pair of horses dodging trees to get to them.
They holster their guns to swing into their saddles, easier for Caesar than for Joseph with one hand already full, then turn to canter back through the woods.
“We’ve had cleaner getaways,” Caesar says, but there’s no bite to his words.
Joseph looks over at Caesar’s grinning face, relieved that he’s returned to himself. “Yeah, but they’ll never know it was us!” Joseph calls. Clearing the treeline, their horses burst onto a well-used road. They hit it together at a gallop.
~~~
Kars takes in the wreckage of the camp under the midday sun. Chaos reigns as he and his two most trusted lieutenants arrive. No one in the camp possesses the presence of mind to greet them. Kars frowns. Santana should have been able to keep this place in top shape. Where is he?
“What happened here?” Esidisi gestures around them. “The cabin’s half-burned.” No sooner after he speaks the words does the cabin groan, the charred half of it collapsing to the ground in a plume of dust and ash.
Wham grunts in surprise as they approach the hitching posts. “Where are all the other horses? I just see Santana’s Abraxas.” The lone grey Percheron whinnies at them.
Kars dismounts first. “Find him.” He dismisses them with a flick of his hand. They fan on foot out to return order. While Kars makes his rounds in a show of strength and leadership to the men, a sentry emerges from the woods, rubbing the back of his head. He can’t be more than seventeen years old. His eyes go wide and jaw slack in disbelief at the sight of Kars.
“Boss!” He stumbles forward. “There was a team of assassins, boss!”
Esidisi appears in an instant, intercepting the boy before he could lay a hand on Kars. “Assassins? Bounty hunters? How many men? Who do they ride with? Or was it the law?” The sentry stammers under the barrage. Esidisi shakes him by the shoulders. “Speak plainly, boy.”
“I dunno but it weren’t the law. Only two of them,” the sentry says. “One hit me on the head.”
With a scoff, Esidisi releases the boy. “Report back to whoever’s in charge here when you remember something useful.”
Wham approaches them, frowning deeply and hands covered in ash. Kars knows what news he brings before he opens his mouth. “I found Santana.”
Esidisi says, “Bury him.”
“And something else.” Wham’s eyes flick between Kars and Esidisi. “You’re gonna want to see this.” After Kars nods, Wham leads them through the camp to the wreckage of the cabin. “Here. This is how we found him. Somehow, Santana wasn’t too badly burned in the fire. But it’s the floorboards that’s the real miracle.” He squats beside a heap of mostly burned wood littered with a few twisted scraps of furnishings, and points.
Santana left them a clue before he died, one last sacrifice for the gang: with his own blood, he drew a five-pointed star.
Kars grins. “Bring me that sentry.”
###
[Click here for next chapter].
[Click here for previous chapter].
Unrated as per usual but there's violence ahead. 5.1k this time.
###
Joseph exhales warm and wet to fog up the glass of their binoculars, then wipes that condensation with his shirt sleeve. “Here,” he says, handing the newly cleaned pair to Caesar. “We’ve been watching them on and off for a few days now. Still no sign of Kars or any of the others.”
Caesar crawls on his belly toward the edge of the cliff, and Joseph joins him between the two hardy bushes clinging to the top of Widowmaker Bluffs, their scouting point over the relatively quiet Pillar Men camp below. This group has holed up in an old frontiersman’s cabin, and neither Joseph nor Caesar have seen anything unusual. Teams go out, teams come back in. Same numbers each time. People pass the hours drinking around the fire or hanging up laundered shirts on the cabin’s clothesline.
With a grunt, Caesar says, “Well, they’ve gotta be somewhere. We know all four of the original bastards are still alive and making the world a fouler place for it.”
“Somewhere doesn’t mean here.” Joseph shrugs. “We can either take these lowlifes now and relieve them of everything they’ve got, or we can leave the way we came without a shot fired. They haven’t spotted us yet.”
“Don’t tell me you want to run away now.” Caesar adjusts the binoculars with a twist of his hands. “Wait, I think I see something.”
“What is it?” When Caesar shushes him, Joseph adds, “You don’t use your ears to see.” He smirks when Caesar glares at him. “But really, what is it?”
After Caesar flicks his eyes down Joseph’s face, he resumes his study of the land below through the binoculars. “New group’s arriving in camp right now, a bunch of riders and a stagecoach. Stolen, no doubt.” Caesar whistles. “And driven by none other than Santana.” He hands the binoculars back to Joseph. “Not who I was hoping to shoot dead on this particular venture, but I’ll take whichever of those bastards I can get.”
Joseph accepts the binoculars. It takes a few seconds of searching through the scopes before he finds Santana’s long strawberry blond hair tumbling down his back as the man himself sits on the driver’s box of an enclosed stagecoach, just like Caesar said. In the afternoon sun, the varnished wooden coach beneath him throws sunlight as it rolls over the camp’s uneven ground. The curtains are drawn, but that doesn’t mean much. There’s at least one piece of luggage in the cargo area on top of the carriage and the rear boot cover looks like it’s barely buckled down. Whatever they’ve got in there, there’s a lot of it. Joseph hopes it isn’t the remains of whoever drove the coach before Santana. A damn mess, and a sorry sight, if it is.
Lowering the binoculars with one hand, Joseph props his head up with the other and looks at Caesar. “So how do you wanna do this? I assume you’ll want to take the lead.”
A pair of green eyes remain trained on the camp with the same intensity as a loaded gun. “You bet your ass I do.” Caesar’s nostrils flare, a small sign of burgeoning anger that Joseph has long known to mean, in no uncertain terms: get the fuck out of my way.
Nodding, Joseph says, “Alright, it’s yours. What’s the plan?”
Caesar’s focus slides to Joseph. The force of his gaze could knock the air from Joseph’s lungs. “Give me some time to think through the details, but I’ve got a general idea. New moon tonight, yeah?”
“Not quite a new moon, but it shouldn’t be too bright.” Joseph crawls back from the edge before he risks getting to his knees. “I’ll start wiping down the guns. Easy picking with a rifle from here.”
“No sniper rifle for this one. We go down and do this personally.” Caesar backs away from the cliffside, too. Once he stands, he brushes the dirt from his clothes. “I know you like them, but no spurs. I don’t want Santana to know we’re there until a knife’s at his throat or a bullet’s in his chest.”
With the arrival of one of Kars’ lieutenants, his mood has darkened significantly, like he’s back to that place he was before their old gang took him in as a child. Joseph still isn’t sure how to handle him when he gets this hungry for a fight, like he can hear the sound of war drums beating in time with his pulse and driving him onwards. His demeanor seems to scream for others to steer clear of Caesar or face destruction. Best Joseph’s managed to figure is to keep Caesar focused on whatever task is at hand while praying he comes back to himself on the other side. To Joseph’s relief, he usually does.
They trade off keeping watch on the Pillar Men and preparing themselves for the upcoming fight. After several days of canned meals and crackers, not that Joseph’s complaining about the luxury of food every day, it will be nice to set off someplace where they can take their meals hot. Though there’s something that sits right with Joseph about staring into the heart of a dancing fire on a cool night, listening to wet twigs snap and hiss while a meal warms through.
By the time the daylight’s hidden away and the slivered moon finds its place overhead, Caesar pats him on the shoulder. “How are things looking down there?”
“Quiet. Like they’re turning in for the night, maybe.”
A chorus of voices rises from the gulch in the beginning lines of a particularly notorious drinking song, and a bonfire before the cabin sends a plume of smoke stretching toward the sky. People climb out of the house, out of their tents, and a group unload a crate of beers from the wagon, which is descended upon almost immediately by the outlaws.
From his seat on the ground, Joseph looks up into Caesar’s face and finds one blond eyebrow raised. “Then again,” Joseph says. “Maybe not.”
“This is better than quiet, I think,” Caesar says. “In a few hours, they’ll all be drunk. Distracted.” Caesar squats down beside him. “Santana hasn’t left, has he?”
“No.” Joseph shakes his head once. “Of that, I’m sure.” He turns back to the party just getting started and watches a trio start to dance. “This must be in honor of their boss, or that stagecoach they snagged, or both.”
In Joseph’s periphery, Caesar nods. “If we play this right, we can sneak past the sentries—”
“If they’re posting sentries tonight.”
“—and rob `em blind. Even better if they’re all going in for the drinks. I don’t want them to know we hit their camp until they’re hungover and hurting in the morning.”
Someone throws a bottle of liquor into the fire, a wasteful act which shatters with a sudden, predictable flare. Joseph snorts. “So, just the sneaking and the thieving, then?” Caesar tilts his head to one side as he looks at Joseph in a silent prompt to explain himself. “Nothing for Santana, I mean. That’s awful forgiving of you.”
“He isn’t the one who—”
“I know.”
Caesar closes his mouth and regards him with another inscrutable look. They hold each other’s gaze as the party winds itself into full swing by the loudness of the singing and the laughter. “We’ll deal with him when we get to him.” He stands. Joseph stands with him. “Let’s finish clearing out and get everything into position. Find a place away from the camp for us to leave Sunflower and Tilly, but close enough the horses come when we call.”
With a facetious tilt of his hat, Joseph says, “Yes, boss.” Caesar rolls his eyes and turns away. “Right away, boss.”
Once they’ve packed up their camp and stamped out as much evidence as they have time to cover up, they ride their horses down and around the formation. Joseph scouted a thick patch of trees a few hundred yards away from the cabin where they could leave their horses. It’s perfect: secluded but not too removed, defensible but accessible. They dismount and arm up in the darkness, Joseph making sure to grab the set of three throwing knives he bought off that fence. A stealthy takedown of this hideout is a bright idea, when gunshots can echo their way across the gulch as easy as a breeze. He slings his bow and quiver over his shoulder, pats his mare on the neck, and looks to Caesar for confirmation.
Caesar leans his head in and murmurs something to Sunflower before stepping away from his gelding. He nods at Joseph. “Let’s go.”
Sneaking through the woods is easier without the clink of spurs to give himself away on a misstep. Joseph almost loses his footing on an upturned root, sending pebbles sliding down the slight slope in the ground. As luck would have it, they find their first sentry at that exact moment, a stumbling P-Man armed with a glass beer bottle in one hand and a rifle in the other. He pauses his swig to watch one of the rocks roll toward him. Joseph grits his teeth and crouches behind a bush, an old one that looks half-dead, and the half that is alive hasn’t quite filled itself in after spring’s arrival. Poorly hidden, he goes still and prays the lack of moonlight is enough to keep him out of trouble.
A few feet away, taking cover behind a tree trunk, Caesar stares at him like he wants to explode into a lecture over Joseph’s rookie mistake. Instead, he turns his back to Joseph, so Joseph turns his attention to the sentry.
“Huh,” the sentry says. His boot scuffs against the ground as he kicks at the pebble and misses. “Haha, damn.” The sentry shuffles further away from his camp, close enough to Joseph that he could land a throwing knife in the sentry’s windpipe without much force at all. Joseph reaches for his weapons with one hand and lifts the other to depress a branch out of his range of vision.
It snaps.
The sentry looks up from the pebble at his feet, and when he sees Joseph, his eyes go wide with recognition.
“Aw, hell,” Joseph says and whips out a throwing knife. He doesn’t get the chance to use it. Caesar’s already there, pouncing on the sentry from behind and cracking the butt of his revolver against the back of the man’s skull to knock him out cold. Then Caesar hooks his hands under the man’s arms, catching him before he crumples. His beer bottle falls to the ground and remains intact as it rolls away, spilling its contents in the dirt.
Caesar drags him into a healthier bush to hide the sentry’s unconscious body, then checks his pockets for anything of value. “Nice going,” Caesar whispers.
Joseph tucks the knife away. “How was I supposed to know it’d break?”
With a grunt of irritation, Caesar uses their old gang’s hand signals to motion Joseph forward. As they creep through the forest, Joseph takes better care to mind his surroundings this time. They relieve another sentry of his consciousness, Joseph sneaking up behind him and choking him until he goes limp in Joseph’s grasp. He lays this sentry down against the opposite side of a tree and out of sight from the cabin, then lifts no more than fifty cents from the man’s pockets before continuing on.
Once they reach the cabin, they’ve missed the bulk of the festivities by the looks of the men passed out around the remains of the fire. A handful have made it to their tents, and there’s bound to be more inside the house, but most seem to find the ground just fine for sleeping off the liquor. Joseph and Caesar stay low and keep their backs against the cabin.
Knocking his elbow against Joseph’s arm, Caesar silently grabs Joseph’s attention. He taps Joseph’s quiver, then motions toward another sentry patrolling around the far side of the camp. The order is clear: kill him.
Joseph shakes his head and retreats into the cover of the brush before sneaking around to the other side. He incapacitates the sentry like he did the other one before he returns to Caesar.
“I thought you said this was my lead,” Caesar whispers. He shoves at Joseph’s shoulder. “Don’t get soft on me now, Joseph.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Joseph lifts both hands up in surrender. “But I only have so many arrows.”
Squinting at him, Caesar frowns. He turns his head and spits on the ground. “Check out the wagon. I want whatever they’ve got stashed in there.”
Joseph nods. “And you?”
Caesar jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “I’ll take the house, then meet you by the wagon when I’m done. And if this goes belly up?” He leans in to grab Joseph by the front of his shirt, pulling closer than he needs to be at a whisper. “Kill as many of these bastards on your way out.” He releases Joseph with another shove. “Let’s do this.”
“Wait.” Joseph stops him and pulls out the three knives. “Here. Take them with you. Might come in handy in there, instead of out here.”
For a moment, Caesar stares at him hard, like he’s going to spit again and say no. Joseph rattles the hand offering the three weapons, and Caesar relents. “Alright. Now go.”
Joseph stays in a low crouch and keeps to the outskirts of the clearing. Though many of the snoring men around him may have found the bottom of whatever bottle they were drinking, there’s no reason to tempt fate. One of them might rouse themselves to crawl into their bedroll or take a piss, and waking to a stranger stalking through the heart of their camp is enough reason to shoot first and ask questions later. Joseph was telling Caesar the truth earlier, he really doesn’t have many arrows left in his quiver. And if he needs to shoot, he’d rather use them for hunting some game than killing Pillar Men who had the unfortunate luck of waking up at the wrong time.
Further past the sentry he knocked out earlier, Joseph finds the wagon parked beside a crowded hitching post full of horses. Near the end of the line, he recognizes the two Morgans, the bay and the sorrel with an interrupted strip, from when they pulled the wagon into the camp. It’s too bad they’ve been stripped of their bridles and harnesses. Whatever’s left in the coach may be too much for them to carry, and if they could take it all back to Poco, they might be able to fence the whole kit for a decent cut.
Two pairs of ears prick forward, stiff as peaks, as Joseph approaches them. He stays low and holds his hands out on either side of his waist and whispers to them in soothing tones until they relax. A few of the other mounts take notice, for better and for worse. Joseph avoids a well-muscled draft horse in the middle of the pack who pinches his muzzle at Joseph’s approach. There’s a mistrustful spark of intelligence in his dark, watchful eyes.
“Easy there, big fella,” Joseph says and slowly unties the horses, one by one. “Not here to hurt you, or your friends.” He dodges a snap of teeth. “Woah boy. I’ll bet you’re Santana’s, huh? Big bastard unwilling to go quietly into the night, like the others.”
The grey horse swishes his light tail and flattens his ears.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Joseph mutters to himself. He frees and turns off as many of the horses as will listen to him, except for Santana’s unruly brute, which won’t let him close enough. Probably for the best, too, as a horse like that would cause Joseph more trouble than he can manage.
He turns to consider the stagecoach. The piece of luggage from the top rack is gone, inside if Joseph had to hazard a guess, and the curtains in the cabin have been pulled to the side. Curiosity gets the better of him. He leaves the horses to peek through the window.
Empty, save for a lockbox Joseph nearly misses from its spot beneath the backward-facing seat. He tests the handle. Unlocked.
The door remains blessedly silent upon opening, but the coach squeaks in protest upon taking Joseph’s weight. He stops, his hand reaching for his sidearm in reflex, and listens for the sounds of people rousing from drunken dreams. Someone nearby grumbles in their sleep, possibly turning over. Nothing else stirs. Joseph exhales, then pulls the lockbox toward him. They must have forgotten to unload this amidst all the celebration. Why else would it be here, whatever it is? Or maybe it isn’t something valuable enough to be brought into the house. He glances at the cabin, a few of the windows on the ground and second floors lit by oil lamps, and wonders what’s taking Caesar so long.
Either way, he wants to get this box open. Joseph considers shutting the door to muffle the sound but shrugs and prizes the latch open with his knife. Inside, a few money clips await him, which he stuffs in his satchel, but the unusual necklace beneath the cash gives him pause. The chain looks too fine to hold the scarlet stone attached to it, something so large and oblong in shape that Joseph isn’t sure what kind of jewel it is. He picks it up and hefts it. A decent weight. The main gem sits in a gold setting, a trio of small emeralds flanking it like wings on either side.
“Where the hell did Santana find you?” Joseph murmurs, touching the smooth face of the red stone and finding his fingers slide over it like it’s covered in oil. It has to be the biggest gem he’s ever seen. Definitely the largest he’s ever stolen. He wraps it in his handkerchief and slips it into his satchel alongside the money clips.
Joseph glances around for Caesar upon his exit from the coach, ignoring the creak this time, and inspects the rear boot. It’s unlocked, and stocked with camp supplies, so he helps himself to as much as he can carry. He sets two bags full of food, alcohol, and medicinal supplies at his feet, then closes the cabin door to lean against it. Caesar’s still nowhere to be found.
“I don’t like this.” He crosses his arms and glares at the house, looking for any shadows moving in the windows. Nothing. “Fuck it.” Joseph grabs the bags, then his bow, and creeps toward the quiet cabin.
Up the porch steps, he moves as quiet as a cougar when he sets the goods by the front door. He knocks an arrow, then pushes the opened door further ajar. He swings his bow arm up, ready to fire. Only a room full of furniture greets him. Confused, and a little relieved, Joseph lowers his weapon as the door returns to it’s half-open equilibrium and looks down.
A member of the Pillar Men lies on the floor, dead.
There isn’t a sign of a struggle, which can only mean one thing. Joseph exhales. “Caesar.” He lifts his bow back into shooting position and frowns. This was supposed to be a robbery, not a bloodbath, no matter how deep the feud between their old gang and the P-men. He stalks from room to room, shifting his weight through each step to keep the sound of his boots to a minimum and deter the floorboards from creaking. Another pair of bodies beneath the cabin’s liquor-laden table brings Caesar’s count to three before Joseph heads up the stairs.
Joseph flinches at the creak of a door opening, mistaking it for a misstep on the stairs. Movement catches his eye, and he ducks a flying blade just in time. The throwing knife buries itself in the wooden floorboards on the ground level.
“Joseph!” Caesar hisses, lowering the other two knives. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Secured the goods from the stagecoach.” He shrugs. “Figure I’d come see what’s taking you so long.” He lowers his bow and gestures with one hand to the space around him. “Now I see why.”
Caesar turns away from him, an ugly sneer distorting his features. “It’s better than they deserve.” He pauses. “I still have to deal with Santana.”
“I’ll come with you.” Joseph advances to the next stair.
“You’re too loud for this.”
“You’ve already killed everyone else, right? And I’m already here.” He rises to another step, then another. “We find him, then we leave with their shit. They’ll never know it was us.” Joseph reaches the landing and nudges Caesar’s shoulder with his own. “Hey.”
Caesar looks at him. The hard edges of his expression soften, though the flare in his eyes remains. “Fine.” He jerks away before stealing down the hall. “He’ll be through here. Has to be.”
Joseph follows him into the shadows. One room remains closed. Caesar glances over his shoulder. Joseph nods. After a silent test of the handle, Caesar opens the door. They slip inside, quick and quiet, weapons ready to put a sleeping Santana out of his misery.
The bed is empty.
Cold steel presses against the back of Joseph's head. “You’re not as quiet as you think you are. And I am not as drunk as you assumed.” Santana’s voice rattles in the quiet. Caesar turns on him, too late. “Drop your weapons.”
Joseph releases his grip on the arrow and it slips to the floor. He spreads his arms apart slowly. Caesar meets his eyes, equal parts shocked and angry.
“Both of you.”
In a smooth gesture, Caesar drops the throwing knives and lets his arms hang at his sides.
“Good.” The gun at his head pulls away, but Joseph doesn’t hear the hammer click back into a disarmed position. “You’re going to tell me what I want to know, or I'll kill your friend here.”
Joseph swallows hard, feeling Caesar studying him in the dark bedroom. He exhales and starts running through their options for survival.
“Ask your questions,” Caesar says. His voice sounds rough, like he’d been whispering for too long. “There’s no guarantee I know anything useful. We’re just two nobodies.”
“Not just any nobodies.” Joseph stumbles back when a rough hand grabs at his shirt collar, yanking the fabric back from his neck. “As I suspected. You can’t get rid of that mark so easily, can you?” A swat of Santana’s hand across the back of Joseph’s head makes his vision double for a moment. He blinks the extra Caesar away. “Can you, Joestar?”
When Joseph doesn’t answer, Santana hits him again.
“I’m not a Joestar,” Caesar scoffs.
Santana considers him for a long moment. “Yes,” he says at last. “You are.” The silvery barrel of the gun appears in Joseph’s periphery. “You ran with them, didn’t you?” Though Caesar doesn’t answer, Santana laughs. “Yes, I remember you now. Last time I saw you, you were screaming for your mother. Your father.”
Joseph sees this for the opportunity it is, with Santana focused on goading Caesar, and keeps his eyes locked on Caesar’s face as he leans to one side, moving slower and quieter than he ever thought he could.
Caesar’s face twists. “Shut your mouth.”
“Tell me, Zeppeli, how many more men have you brought? It can’t be just the two of you, taking on all of us,” Santana says.
A finger twitches beside Caesar’s holster. “Maybe.”
“Impossible.” Santana sounds like he’s grinning. “There’s too many of us. You’ve led yourselves and your men to slaughter.” Undeniable gloating. “Just like your—”
Caesar draws on Santana, a blinding instant of gunpowder igniting where there once was nothing but air. Joseph doubles over, his ears ringing from the gun going off in close quarters. Behind him, Santana stumbles, making some kind of choked gurgle. Joseph seizes the opportunity to drive one elbow into Santana’s gut, twist his body up, then dislodge the gun in Santana’s hand with the heel of his other palm. It sails through the air, discharging with another ear-splitting bang when it hits the floor.
The silence in the aftermath doesn’t last.
“Joseph, can you stand? We have to go.” Caesar’s voice. He sounds so distorted. Joseph shakes his head and pushes himself up through the ringing between his ears. “Two gunshots, twice as many chances for people to wake up. Come on.” Caesar checks the window as Joseph collects their weapons from the ground, then steals Santana’s gun for good measure. Laying on the ground, struggling to breathe, he won’t need it.
He follows Caesar out the bedroom door. “What happened to ‘just sneak in and rob them’ like you said?”
“Did that. Then I got angry.” They round the stairs. “Masks.”
Joseph pulls his bandana into place. “Where are your supplies?”
“In my bag.” On the ground floor, alarmed voices spread through the camp as people wake each other up. “Yours?”
Grunting, Joseph slings his bow over his shoulder. “Front porch.” He pulls his gun. “Didn’t grab much, did you?”
“Small but valuable.” Caesar takes another peek out the window. “They’re confused. I think that they think we’re coming through the trees.” He turns away. “Ready? We might make it around the cabin before we’re spotted.”
“If that.” Joseph extends his hand palm-up to the door. “After you.”
Caesar’s head teeters from side to side as he mocks Joseph, “After you.” They find their positions, staggered side by side behind the door. “Run.” The door swings open and they sprint outside.
Joseph swoops down to grab the bags of supplies he left on the porch. He scans the camp and hisses to Caesar, “They spotted us!”
A yell and a gunshot send the camp scrambling.
“I’ve noticed!”
Their boots pound the wooden porch beneath them, and Joseph follows Caesar in vaulting over the railing. They dash around the cabin to take the same route they used sneaking in, when Caesar veers off.
“Where the hell are you going?”
“Insurance,” Caesar calls over his shoulder.
Joseph brings his gun up to give Caesar cover, watching for movement from the forest or either side of the cabin. It’s only a matter of time before the Pillar Men catch up to them. “What kind of insurance is worth sticking around here?” Someone rounds the corner. Joseph fires at them, sending the person diving back behind the wall.
A few fraught moments and Caesar’s done. He takes off for the woods, swinging his arm in an arc that urges Joseph to follow. Joseph races after him.
Several Pillar Men give chase. It’s an exercise in whiplash: keeping his head forward enough to watch where he’s going and keeping his sight trained behind him to deter pursuers with gunfire. During one glance back when he shoots the last of his rounds, his trigger clicking through empty chambers, a thick column of smoke rising through the trees catches Joseph’s attention.
“You set the place on fire?” Joseph calls to Caesar, hopeful he’s loud enough to project forward.
He must be, because Caesar turns and grins at him. “That should keep them busy!”
Shaking his head, Joseph leaps over the legs of the first sentry, still knocked out. He puts a hand to his mouth. Pinching two fingers together, he curls back his tongue and bends the pitch of his whistle to call their horses. They keep running. Joseph whistles after every few paces until he sees the familiar pair of horses dodging trees to get to them.
They holster their guns to swing into their saddles, easier for Caesar than for Joseph with one hand already full, then turn to canter back through the woods.
“We’ve had cleaner getaways,” Caesar says, but there’s no bite to his words.
Joseph looks over at Caesar’s grinning face, relieved that he’s returned to himself. “Yeah, but they’ll never know it was us!” Joseph calls. Clearing the treeline, their horses burst onto a well-used road. They hit it together at a gallop.
~~~
Kars takes in the wreckage of the camp under the midday sun. Chaos reigns as he and his two most trusted lieutenants arrive. No one in the camp possesses the presence of mind to greet them. Kars frowns. Santana should have been able to keep this place in top shape. Where is he?
“What happened here?” Esidisi gestures around them. “The cabin’s half-burned.” No sooner after he speaks the words does the cabin groan, the charred half of it collapsing to the ground in a plume of dust and ash.
Wham grunts in surprise as they approach the hitching posts. “Where are all the other horses? I just see Santana’s Abraxas.” The lone grey Percheron whinnies at them.
Kars dismounts first. “Find him.” He dismisses them with a flick of his hand. They fan on foot out to return order. While Kars makes his rounds in a show of strength and leadership to the men, a sentry emerges from the woods, rubbing the back of his head. He can’t be more than seventeen years old. His eyes go wide and jaw slack in disbelief at the sight of Kars.
“Boss!” He stumbles forward. “There was a team of assassins, boss!”
Esidisi appears in an instant, intercepting the boy before he could lay a hand on Kars. “Assassins? Bounty hunters? How many men? Who do they ride with? Or was it the law?” The sentry stammers under the barrage. Esidisi shakes him by the shoulders. “Speak plainly, boy.”
“I dunno but it weren’t the law. Only two of them,” the sentry says. “One hit me on the head.”
With a scoff, Esidisi releases the boy. “Report back to whoever’s in charge here when you remember something useful.”
Wham approaches them, frowning deeply and hands covered in ash. Kars knows what news he brings before he opens his mouth. “I found Santana.”
Esidisi says, “Bury him.”
“And something else.” Wham’s eyes flick between Kars and Esidisi. “You’re gonna want to see this.” After Kars nods, Wham leads them through the camp to the wreckage of the cabin. “Here. This is how we found him. Somehow, Santana wasn’t too badly burned in the fire. But it’s the floorboards that’s the real miracle.” He squats beside a heap of mostly burned wood littered with a few twisted scraps of furnishings, and points.
Santana left them a clue before he died, one last sacrifice for the gang: with his own blood, he drew a five-pointed star.
Kars grins. “Bring me that sentry.”
###
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