Edge: Ten Grand

“My son.  My son Filipe is dead. You have killed him.”

Matador made a face.  “It is a pity.  I like to kill my rivals myself.  Maria is mine.”

As the charge from the blunderbuss cut the girl’s father in half, Maria’s body was suddenly naked with the downward rip of Matador’s fingers.  She screamed and it was the signal for an orgy of killing and rape as men and children and old women were blasted into death before the bandits pounced upon the girls, ripping the nightwear from their bodies and driving them to the ground.

Some of the girls screamed and fought vainly against the hysterical lust of the men while others submitted frigidly to the attack.  Hands smashed into faces to demand an end to resistance and those bandits who had to wait their turn yelled encouragement at the others who sweated upon their victims, thrusting their lust into unwilling bodies.

One man, incensed by the constant screaming of a twelve-year-old girl drew his revolver and fired it into her open mouth.

From one of the houses emerged a man, his left arm shot away at the shoulder, dragging up a heavy rifle with his good hand.  His horror-filled eyes roved the square, fastened upon the spread-legged figure of his daughter as a second raper was about to straddle her. He knew he would only be able to get off one shot and he took aim, praying to heaven for an accurate bullet. It was answered. The shot hit the girl in the side of the head, releasing her from further agony a moment before her father went down in a hail of revolver fire from the furious bandits.

Their sexual lust spent, the bandits were engulfed by another kind of desire. Matador again provided the signal, rising from Maria and whipping out his Colts in a two handed draw, crossing his forearms and drilling a hole down through each of her firm, young breasts. Torres slashed open the throat of his girl just as he reached climax and Miguel sliced off both breasts of another girl with a forward and backward flash of a saber. Other bandits contented themselves with emptying their rifles and revolvers into naked flesh.

The stillness after the carnage was suddenly filled with the heavy, exhausted breathing of the satiated bandits as they surveyed the scene before them.  But Matador allowed them only seconds in which to recover.

“Food and tequila,” he shouted. “Then we ride for Hoyos.”

The square burst into movement again as the bandits went on the run back into the hovels that comprised the greater part of the village.  There was, no shooting this time because the men found nothing at which to shoot.  Instead, the houses exploded with the sound of hurried, careless search as the marauders sought supplies.  And soon, as Matador watched from his position in the square’s center, they emerged with the little they had found. Only the four who had chosen to raid the tiny cantina had difficulty in carrying what they had—many bottles of tequila and dark red wine.

From the hayloft in the barn, Luis Aviles looked down upon the looters and their dead victims, his eyes shining with excitement and his lips parted in a smile of relish. The loft was Luis’ home and had been for many years, ever since he had first come to San Murias.  It smelled of hay and horse-dung and of Luis himself, for as he grew older he became less fastidious about his personal cleanliness and Luis was very old.  As near as he could calculate, he was seventy. He was small and slightly built, with a wizened face burned almost black by the sun.  It was a dull face, with small, matt black eyes and an unexpressive mouth, framed by surprisingly thick black hair, fringed over the forehead. A face that surveyed his world of the hayloft and the cantina where he earned a pittance of pesos for sweeping the floor with a constant expression of sourness. Only when his feeble brain recalled the events of the past did his face become animated and he needed a strong cue to set his recollections into motion. The scene below him, as he peered through a knot hole in the front of the barn, was an ideal memory aid for it was a repetition of many such raids in which he had been involved.

He had seen the whole thing, from the stealthy arrival of Matador and his bandits—the forced entry into the houses, the shooting of those villagers who had no sexual attraction for the attackers, the rapes and murder of the girls and now the looting.  He had watched every moment and every move, his mind participating via his greedy eyes in the events he knew his body would never again enjoy.  His admiration for Matador knew no bounds. For Luis Aviles had ridden with many bandit groups, but never had he seen before an attack carried out with such skill and disregard for human life.