Edge: Apache Death

Seven braves scrambled up on to the roof and threw themselves at the gunnery detail, who had no time to snatch up their rifles or draw revolvers. Edge picked off three with the Winchester, then another a moment after the brave had slashed the throat of a trooper. An army boot smashed into the groin of an Apache and then became separated from the leg as a tomahawk hacked through the ankle. The trooper's scream was curtailed by a knife in the heart and his murder died as Edge sent a bullet into the brave's heart. The last trooper was locked in a deadly wrestling match with two braves and managed to turn the knife of one and drive it into the Apache's belly. An instant before the other brave could bury his tomahawk into the exposed skull of the trooper, Edge's Winchester cracked again, smashing the wrist of the hand clutching the weapon. The trooper snatched up the axe and swung it with all his strength, burying the entire blade into the Indian's stomach and shoving the blood dripping body across the roof and over the edge.

"Thanks!" the soldier said, drawing in a large breath. It was his last. The arrow came up from the compound and entered the back of his neck, the point emerging through his mouth like a metal tongue speckled with blood. Then the blood gushed, like crimson vomit, in a powerful arc that reached across the roof to spray on to Edges face and chest.

"Just thanks would have been enough," Edge muttered with distaste as he wiped the warm stickiness from his lips and started to turn to survey the main battle arena.

He saw perhaps fifty braves advancing upon two men, and a boy who had emerged from the cookhouse doorway, the men holding their hands high above their heads, the boy pathetically waving a stick with a once-white, blood-stained handkerchief tied to it. He heard Cochise' bark an order. He raised his Winchester and fixed the chief in the sight. Then another figure staggered into his line of fire and he recognized Lorna Fawcett. She was naked and carrying something in her hands: something which dripped blood into dust already spattered with red. It was her own right breast, still linked to her body by a flap of skin. An arrow thudded into the gaping wound and she fell, giving Edge a clear line of fire at Cochise.

But the shot he heard was not his own and the Apache chief continued his advance as Edge felt a rearing pain at the back of his neck. "Christ, I've bought it," he said as he pitched forward and the sun went out.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

DEATH and smoke were an acrid stench that was sucked down his throat and into his lungs, causing his stomach to rebel with a dry retching that thrust him back into consciousness. The sun was high, beating down upon him unmercifully and he was sure if had burned a hole in the back of his head. But when he cracked open his eyes and saw the sprawled bodies of the troopers and Apaches spread around the Gatling Gun he recalled the shot and the pain. His fingertips delved beneath the long black hair at his neck and felt the rough texture of encrusted blood tracing the course of a three-inch long furrow.

Then he stopped the exploration and remained utterly immobile as he heard a sound, distant and unidentifiable at first. But as it became louder he realized that a wagon was approaching, slowly with its springs creaking and its shaft horses tiring under a heavy load. He raised his head then, gritting against the pain, and looked across the compound within the fort. It was littered with more than a hundred bodies, troopers, civilians and Apaches alike, which had long ago ceased to gush blood; interspersed with the already bloating carcasses of Indian ponies. All had died violently, many agonizingly, but none more than the two men and small boy who had been suspended by their thumbs beneath the wall staging and had fires lit beneath them. It was the odor from their blackened bodies which had wafted across the death-strewn compound to wake the man called Edge. He grimaced at the sight and looked out through the incinerated gates of the fort and down the main street of Rainbow, over the bodies of many scores of Apaches to where the wagon was approaching. It was a flatbed, with just one man sitting on the box and behind him was a cargo concealed by a canvas sheet. Not a big cargo in terms of bulk, but vast in value, Edge realized, as the wagon rolled in through the fort entrance and he recognized Wyatt Drucker.

The face of the big rancher was set in an expression of stark horror, the lines of which seemed to deepen as each new facet of the violent, battle was revealed to him. He steered the team of four horses with the reins held in one hand while the other was curled around the breech of the Englishman's Winchester.