Free The Guns of Santa Sangre by Eric Red Page B

another pile, black with dried blood, so the victims had been stripped after they were killed. Tucker gauged there were maybe eight to ten sets of human remains. Two of the skulls were very small and delicate, a child and an infant, both crushed in like porcelain dolls. A stuffed teddy bear Tucker guessed belonged to one of the children sat slumped over on a wooden table, its black button eyes blank as if erased by what it had witnessed. He saw a heap of emptied suitcases and carpetbags piled in the corner by the small stove. The luggage had been rifled through, valuables filched, robbed. The work of bandits, likely, from the looks of things, but what kind of bandits would do this to people defied comprehension. Then again, Tucker didn’t know these parts, and maybe these looters had showed up after whomever had done the killing. A dead, half-smoked cigar sat on a rusted metal horseshoe ashtray, probably still burning when the killers came. Tucker picked up the stogie, put it in his mouth, and lit it. The smoke drifted out of his lips, and helped wash away the carrion stink of the place as he looked around.  
    Fix kicked at a buzzard waddling in.
    “Awww God, they killed kids, poor little kids didn’t do nothin’.”  
    Alerted by the distress in Bodie’s voice, Tucker slid his eyes over to see the towering Swede crouching under the low roof, his cement-block face crumpled in a distraught expression, huge hands holding the tattered, blood-drenched lace and frill homemade dress of a little girl now just gruesome rags in his thick fingers. The cloth slipped through his hands, dropping with an empty sound on the sodden dirt. Tucker watched the despondent Bodie run his hand in dismay through his hair, clenching and unclenching his repeater rifle in the other until his knuckles grew big and white as pebbles. This was the worst thing any of them had ever seen. The leader felt it too, the same rage they all did, and knew as his friends did that if they came face to face with those responsible, the gunfighters would kill them real slow, shoot them apart piece by piece and watch them die screaming in their own blood and shit all day long. Then they’d cut their heads off and put them on sticks. They’d done it before.
    “Those was bad kills,” Fix said.
    “Them people was skinned alive,” muttered Tucker.
    Bodie shook his head. “Goddamn massacre. Never seen nothing like it. Ever.“  
    “You figure it was the same sumbitches in this town we’re going up against?” Fix worked his jaw.
    Tucker nodded. “Reckon.”
    “Scalphunters?” Fix spat.
    “Nope.” Tucker shook his head, fingering his beard. He indicated the messy mops of grisly matted pelt on some of the faceless skulls. “They’d have took the hair.”  
    “Right.”
    Bodie shrugged. “Coyotes, then? Rabid mebbe?”  
    “Open your eyes, Bodie. Look.” Fix bristled at the other gunfighter’s stupidity. “They’s hung from the rafters.”
    Tucker glowered. “Pulled apart limb from limb while they were alive, too, from the looks of things.” He hunkered down by the piles of arm bones pulled off the dangling skeletons and grimaced at the teeth marks gnawed to the marrow. “And eaten.”
    “Eaten?” Bodie squirmed squeamishly.
    Fix stared impassively. “Nobody should die like that.”
    Taking off his hat, shaken to the core, the wiry little gunfighter went outside for air. The other two gunslingers remained, legs weak, as if the empty eye sockets and grinning teeth of los deparacedos , the disappeared ones, wished them to bear witness a few moments longer.  
    “Who would do something like this?” Tucker whispered mostly to himself.
    “It was them, senors .” The girl stood in the doorway, her arms crossed, her honest gaze grim.
    “This was what come to your town?” Fix asked from outside.
    “ Si .”  
    Bodie whistled.  
    “Then lady, you got some big problems,” Tucker grunted.
    “That’s why I have you,” the peasant answered, a