The Bells of El Diablo Read Online Free Page A

cylinder.
    “Shit!” The man tossed the pistol away and came running, his cape buffeting about his torso.
    James looked around for a weapon. He saw only his knife handle sticking up from the dead captain’s chest, around a broad, dark stain on his tunic. James ran over, pulled the knife out of the dead flesh with a slight crunching, sucking sound, then turned to what appeared to be the last of the Union soldiers.
    He was James’s height, with long, gold-blond hair and an eye patch. Probably James’s age or thereabouts. Not too many old men remained in either military. If the battles hadn’t gotten them, disease likely had. James couldn’t see many details of the man approaching him, except for the snarl on the broad mouth mantled by a mustache that appeared a slightly darker shade of blond than his hair.
    He stopped about ten feet away, breathing hard, as was James. An eerie silence had descended in the wake of the battle. There were only the wet gurgling sounds of the water lapping against the pylons. A cool breeze had risen, shunting a drizzling rain.
    It felt refreshing against James’s naked body still partly clad in the sticky river mud.
    The enemy soldier, his lieutenant’s bars showing faintly on the shoulders of his dark blue tunic, cursed, curling his upper lip distastefully, and reached down to draw a bone-handled knife from the well of his right boot.
    “Good with a gun—are you, Reb?” he said. “Let’s see how you do against a butcher knife!”
    He bolted forward, and James thrust his own blade up just in time to deflect the Union lieutenant’s ten-inchblade from his own naked belly. The man, snarling and cursing like an outraged mountain lion, drove forward. The move caught James off guard, and he felt himself thrust up against the bridge’s downstream side, the rails pressing against the backs of his legs. His right arm was straight up before him, knife gripped in his clenched fist, and hooked around the blue-belly’s own knife arm. The man showed his teeth as he growled, turning his head and thrusting his black eye patch toward James as though it, too, were a weapon.
    James felt the bridge rails gouging into his ankles, bending his knees. He was leaning too far back, and a quick glance to one side showed him the dully gleaming creek twenty feet below, opening like a dark glove.
    He was going over!
    Loosing a raucous Rebel yell that seemed to cut the night wide open, he gave one powerful thrust with his knife, ramming half the blade into the Union officer’s upper left chest. Then he and the blue-belly were tumbling over the rails, grunting and snarling as they continued to struggle in midair before the water came up to slap them both like a giant fist.
    James felt the cool liquid envelop him. Sideways, spinning slowly, he dropped into the mud at the creek’s bottom, feeling the hairy tentacles of weeds wrapping their slimy fingers around his legs, torso, and neck. The acrid water slithered down his throat, and he heard himself convulse as he choked back a retch, keeping his mouth closed.
    Plunging down hard with his left foot, he thrust himself up off the muddy bottom and, with his knife still clenched in his fist, flailed wildly for the surface.He brushed against something yielding and clad in coarse, soaked cloth. When he opened his eyes, he saw the gritted teeth and the black eye patch of the snarling, fearless Union officer. The man swung his knife crossways, and James tilted his head back just in time so that his enemy’s steel blade only made a thin, hot cut across his throat. Another inch closer, and his blood would be geysering from severed arteries in his neck.
    James grunted savagely, feeling his lips stretch back from his teeth, and thrust up and forward with his own knife. At the same time that he buried his blade in the officer’s chest, near where he’d stabbed him the first time, the blue-belly’s lone eye thrust toward him—wide and blue and filled with a chilling golden