Zepp, J J Page 23

  “You can bet on it.” I said. “Which means there’s no time to lose. Did you get the jobs done that I asked?”

  “All of them.”

  “Good, then lets get the light show at the church sorted out and meet back here in ten minutes. We’ve got a lot to do.”

  Me, Nate and Hooley marched up A Street where the church was lit by at least twice as many flares at before. I was pissed at Ray and as we walked I clenched and unclenched my fists, forcing myself to relax. If Ray had been in front of me right then I’d probably have knocked him cold, but the last thing we needed was to start fighting amongst ourselves.

  By the time we reached the church I’d calmed down but the same couldn’t be said for Nate who was spitting venom.

  “Ray McCool! Get your goddamn ass out here preacher man! I’ve had as much as I’m gonna take of your bullshit. Come out and take the ass kickin’ you got coming.”

  To Ray’s credit, he didn’t back down but stepped out of his church with his bible clutched under his arm.

  “How many goddamn times I told you about those flares?” Nate demanded.

  “Keep your voice down,” Ray said. “There are people at worship here. And I won’t hear blasphemy spoken on consecrated ground.”

  “Better close your goddamn ears then dipshit, cause I’ve had it up to here with your goddamn bulldoody!”

  “I thought we agreed about the flares,” I said.

  “Oh hark, I hear a lost soul in the wilderness,” Ray said, not looking at me but cupping a hand to his ear.

  “Fuck it,” Nate said, “I’m putting them out.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” Ray said.

  “Try and stop me,” Nate said pulling out the first torch and trampling it underfoot.

  “Look Ray,” I said, “Surely you must realize that these flares can be seen for miles in the dark. If the Dead Men…”

  “The Dead Men won’t be a problem,” Ray said. “They gave me their word.”

  I knew then, if I didn’t before, that there was no reasoning with Ray McCool. Even so, I said, “We’re having a meeting down at the town hall in five minutes to talk about how to deal with this situation.”

  “I’ll be tending my flock,” Ray said, “The good shepherd takes care of his flock.” He turned to go, but then spotted Hooley standing in the darkness. “You found Jesus, son?” Ray asked.

  “Can’t say as I have, padre,” Hooley said, “But if I do, I’ll be sure to let him know you asked after him.”

  Ray turned on his heel and went back into his church.

  After we’d extinguished the torches we went back to the town hall. As we entered I spotted Alice and called out to her.

  Alice looked towards us and her face lit up. “Jed, she said, “Jed is that really you?” She ran towards Hooley and he opened his arms to receive her. But Alice ran straight past him, fell to her knees and embraced her son.

  “Now there’s appreciation for you,” Hooley said.

  “Appreciate my ass,” Alice said over her shoulder.

  “What I do?”

  “What you do?” Alice said, getting to her feet, “How about you disappeared with Jed Junior three months ago and I ain’t seen hide nor hair of you since?”

  “I couldn’t find you!” Hooley said.

  “Of course you couldn’t. Not with your head stuck so far up your own ass.”

  “Ah honey, can’t we just kiss and make up?”

  “Kiss and make up? It may have escaped your attention Jed Hoolihan, but we’ve been divorced five years now.”

  “Well, that doesn’t mean we can’t still be married.”

  We left them squabbling and headed upstairs for our meeting. The quorum this time was just Yonder, Nate, Cal and myself.

  “Let’s keep things informal,” Yonder said. “Chris, I had the trench dug like you asked, the supplies moved from the mine depot and the grocery store, and the path cleared through the tunnel. So maybe you and Nate should run us through what you have in mind.”

  “Nate?”

  “You go.” Nate was talking to me again but that didn’t mean he was entirely willing to let bygones be bygones.

  “Right,” I said. “Way I see it is this. We have to assume the Dead Men are coming back. In fact after Ray’s little act of charity at the jailhouse, we know they’ll be back. We don’t know when, but I’m guessing Bear will be itching for revenge, so it will be soon.

  “The other thing we don’t know is how many men they’ll be bringing. They lost a lot of men back in Tulsa, including their entire leadership. Virgil Pratt and his four captains were either killed or zombified back at the prison, so right now the Dead Men are likely to be factionalized, probably a few power struggles going on to see who gets to be leader. Clear, so far?”

  They all nodded.

  “Okay, so how many men are they likely to throw at us? Well, what message is Bear likely to have taken back? A tiny town, a town divided, mainly women and children, very few weapons, easy pickings. They’ll be thinking they can take us with twenty men. But even if they bring fifty, I’m confident we can take them down, especially with the element of surprise and that Browning on the back of Hooley’s pickup.”

  “Who’s Hooley?” Cal asked.

  “Crazy son of a bitch,” Nate said. “But probably a good man to have around in a fight. You’ll meet him later.”

  “Let’s talk strategy now. The plan Nate and I put together relies on three things, surprise, firepower and an escape route. Let’s talk about each of these in turn. The element of surprise cuts both ways. We want to surprise them, and we will, with the firepower we’ve got. But we can’t have them surprising us, so we’ll need to put a lookout up on that hill. Cal, that gets to be you.”

  “ Ah man,” Cal said, “I’ll miss all the action.”

  “If and when we have to move, we’re going to rely on speed, and with that leg of yours…”

  “Besides,” Nate said, “I picked you up a sweet Remington bolt action rifle in Whelan, with a scope and everything. Once the shooting starts, you can pick them off from there.”

  “Now that puts a different complexion on it,” Cal said, and smiled.

  “So Cal will act as our early warning system…”

  “Question?”

  “Cal.”

  “We’re assuming they’ll be coming from route 83, what if they come from behind the hill?”

  “You ever seen them fellers far from their Harleys?” Nate said.

  “Good point,” Cal said, “One other thing, how will I signal you?”

  “We got us a couple of two-way radios.”

  “You fellers thought of everything,” Cal grinned.

  “Let’s hope so. Okay, next part of the plan, we bring everyone in here, into the town hall. See any problem with that Yonder?

  “Some folks won’t like leaving their homes, but other than Ray’s people, no.”

  “What’s the deal with Ray’s people?”

  “They won’t come in.”

  “Do they realize what could happen to them?”

  Yonder shrugged, “Ray won’t let anyone talk to them.”

  “We’ve got to try though. Can I leave it with you?”

  “I’ll give it a shot,” Yonder said.

  “Okay so, with or without Ray’s people, we move everyone in here. The minute we get the signal from Cal, we move everyone, other than our shooters, into the Kimberly saloon, through the tunnel, the mine depot and into the mineshaft. I was hoping to walk the tracks, find a way through, just in case we need it, but it looks like we may be out of time.”

  “No need to walk the tracks,” Cal said, “Getting through is easy. There’s five tracks, marked one to five. At each junction there’s a number painted on the rock face, showing which track you’re on, so as long as you follow the same number all the way through you can’t get lost. Track number two comes out on the north face, track three west, the other two kind of loop around joining them all together.”


  “Thanks, Cal. That’s really useful. So we get everyone to track one, then if we need to move we split to track two at the first junction and follow it through.”

  “That will do ya,” Cal said.

  “Any suggestions on who we can get to lead the troops through?”

  “June Dickens,” Yonder said, “She used to be a school teacher, takes no shit from anyone.”

  “Fine. Last but not least we’ll have to decide who’s going to be in the shooting party. I originally thought twenty shooters, but that was always going to be a push. With Hooley’s Browning on board I figure we’ll get by with ten. We’ll need to find anyone who’s handled a firearm. No kids though, even if they were the high school skeet champion.”

  “Well there’s us four for starters, and I’ll bet Alice has handled a gun before.” Yonder said.

  “Count Cal out, he’ll be on the hill. There’s us three and Alice and of course Hooley. That makes five, we need five more.”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem,” Nate said. “This is Texas, after all.”

  fourteen

  We broke up the meeting and Nate, Yonder and I went out to check on the preparations. Cal wanted to come too, but Yonder persuaded him to rest his leg.

  In front of the town hall, Yonder had supervised the digging of the shallow trench I’d asked for. It was six inches deep and ran the length of the town hall. The trench was now filled with nails, bolts and other bits of scrap metal that had been brought from the mine store. Nearby, stood twenty bags of chemical fertilizer liberated from the grocery store.

  While I was kneeling down to inspect Yonder’s handiwork, Giuseppe trotted up, stopped a few feet away and looked at me reproachfully. “Here boy,” I said, and after thinking about it for a moment he walked forward, licked my ear and lifted his leg. I moved just quickly enough to prevent my boots getting wet.

  Next, we visited the office in the Kimberly saloon that gave access to the trapdoor and the tunnel beyond. Yonder showed us where two small holes had been punched through the floorboards. Two strands of fishing line had been run through the holes and attached to the underside of the mat.

  Nate now went through the trapdoor and closed it.

  “Okay, pull,” said Yonder and the mat flopped forward into place, hiding the trap. I folded the mat back again and told Nate to pull. As before, the mat fell neatly back into place.

  “Good work, Yonder,” I said, and she shot me a smile.

  We opened the trapdoor again descended the stairs to the boudoir and from there through the bureau and down the tunnel. At the end the old staircase had been demolished and a stepladder stood in its stead. We climbed the steps into the small room, then slid the secret panel back and were in Silver Jim’s office.

  “Excellent work,” I told Yonder, and she positively beamed.

  I didn’t expect any attack to happen that night but still I thought it would be a good idea to post a watch. Nate, Hooley and I each took a two-hour shift on the upper porch of the Kimberly Saloon. I pulled the four-to-six and sat with my new AK in my lap and Giuseppe by my side.

  As I looked down on the sleeping town I was reminded of my early morning training runs in New York City, which was kind of ironic because back then I’d usually been preparing for a fight. Here I was again, up before dawn, getting ready for battle. I was sure that the fight would come this day and if it did, I knew we were ready as we could be. A lot could still go wrong of course but it wouldn’t be because of something we hadn’t thought of.

  Whatever happened, I knew that one way or another, I’d soon be leaving this place and it filled me with a peculiar melancholy. I felt strangely at home here, amongst these people I barely knew, and I prayed that they, that all of us, would be okay.

  As the sun cast its first light over the horizon, I saw Nate and Yonder cross the street and enter the Kimberly Saloon. I got up from my seat and went down to meet them.

  fifteen

  By seven o’clock Cal was in position at his observation post on Pagan Hill, Yonder had hustled everyone into the town hall, and Hooley had mounted his Browning machine gun on a makeshift stand on the Kimberly’s upper porch. Fertilizer had been spread into the trench outside and the four sticks of dynamite had been placed with fuse wires running to the grocery store, directly to the right of the town hall.

  Yonder made her last ditch attempt at convincing Ray to bring his people into the stockade, and was flatly refused and sent back with the message that they wanted no part in the massacre of innocent people, especially one instigated by a papist.

  There were forty-two of us all told, Hooley and Jed Junior included. Yonder ran a poll of anyone with experience handling firearms and we ended up with twelve hands raised, selected eight of them and Hooley ran them through the basics of loading and firing the various weapons.

  I made a call to Cal at about ten to eight, as much to check that the radio was working than for any other reason. “Hotter than July up here already,” Cal reported, “but not a whole lot going on.”

  I promised Cal that I’d send someone to relieve him at eleven and ended the call. Almost, immediately Cal was on the line again.

  “Chris, you still there?”

  “Yeah, Cal?”

  “We got riders comin’”

  “How many?”

  “Hard to tell, lot of dust out there. Wait one sec.”

  The line went dead. “Chris?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Counted twenty eight riders.”

  “Okay, Cal. Keep your head down.”

  “Will do.”

  I got Yonder to send Jean Dickens on her way, guiding the townsfolk to safety, while I walked out onto the lawn and signaled to Hooley, on the Kimberly’s upper porch. Hooley had concealed himself behind a screen, and gave me a grin and a thumbs-up.

  “Nate, you ready,” I called out, and Nate’s answer came from the shrubbery separating the grocery store from the town hall.

  “Ready as rover,” Nate said.

  “They’re coming,” I said speaking to both of them, “twenty eight, according to Cal. Could have been worse.”

  I went back into the town hall, pulling the door shut behind me and locking it with a chain and padlock. Then I climbed the stairs to the upper floor where five of our shooters were in position. I was pleased to see that Yonder had briefed them and that they had already closed the shutters.

  “Now remember,” I said, “the minute you hear the explosion, you push these shutters open and start firing, until then, stay well clear of the windows.”

  I could now hear the sound of the approaching bikers, a low-pitched growl, getting ever closer. I’d punched a small hole through the shutter and had a good, if limited, view of the street. Out there I could see the two Harleys we’d taken from the Dead Men on their previous visit, and I hoped the lure would work, that they’d stop in front of the town hall to check them out. The sound of the motorcycles was louder now, and I knew they’d entered the town.

  In the next moment I saw them make the turn into A Street, riding four abreast, Bear and his lanky friend in the front row. They saw the Harleys and stopped. One of the bikers came round to Bear and they got into a conversation. Bear was pointing to the town hall building, then to the church up ahead. The other biker was nodding and gesturing.

  I took a deep breath, threw back the shutters and shouted, “Hey Bear, welcome back to Pagan.”

  That stopped their conversation, but Bear didn’t seem to realize where the voice was coming from. “Who’s that?” he shouted.

  “Over here, dipshit” I yelled, waving my arms.

  Now he spotted me and his face broke into a big grin. “So there you are,” he said. “I was beginning to think you dug yourself a hole somewhere. Pretty soon you’ll be wishing you had.”

  Some of the bikers from the back were pulling around to get a look at what was happening. Most of them were now in the killing zone and I was wondering why the hell Nate hadn’t lit the fuse when I saw the th
in flame start to snake its way across the lawn. It was important now that I kept their attention focused on me.

  “You talk pretty good for a guy who got his ass whipped by a poodle. You tell your boys that? How my itty bitty little poodle bit your hand and how you cried for your mamma?”

  “It wasn’t a poodle,” Bear said, half turning towards his men, “It was a big, mean dog. Could have been half wolf.”

  “Poodle,” I insisted.

  “Wasn’t,” Bear said, sounding like a first grader. “It was…oh, you’re gonna pay now motherfucker!” He started to bring the rifle round from behind his back, as the fuse reached the first stick of dynamite. I braced myself for the blast, moving away from the window and pushing my back against the wall. But the explosion never came.

  “Show yourself motherfucker,” Bear shouted and fired off a burst. “Show yourself, for I’ll come in there and drag your cowardly ass…”

  And then, from my left, I heard the clatter of Hooley’s Browning machine gun. “Yee ha!” Hooley screamed, “Come get some!”

  I stepped into the window and fired off a burst but there was really no need. The bikers were closely grouped and from Hooley’s elevated position, the belt-fed Browning exacted a heavy toll. The Dead Men were simply cut to pieces by the machine gun fire. They danced and fell like marionettes in some bizarre puppet show. A few of the Harleys were hit, and their gas tanks ruptured adding to the confusion.

  Some of those furthest away managed to peel off and head back out the way they’d come. I hoped Nate had managed to loop around and lay out the tire spikes. Then I heard a collision and shots fired and I knew that he had.

  Belatedly, the dynamite planted in the trench out front ignited and a massive blast rocked the building, cutting down any bikers still standing. It was all over in minutes and none of my shooters had even had to fire their weapons.

  “Yee ha!” I heard Hooley shout again, and this time those of us in the town hall joined in. There were cheers and hugs and high fives and tears of relief.