The Secret Files of Lucky Ford: The Butcher and the Black Tide, Part 1 of 13

Barely a day after surviving the horrors of Vesuvius, Lucky Ford is up to his neck in trouble once again. Now, he finds himself lost in southern Spain, on the hunt for an old friend and the madman who has him captive.

The Butcher and the Black Tide is the second story in Season 1 of The Secret Files of Lucky Ford. It directly follows the first mission, The Dragon, the Wolf, and the Maiden, and every part contains spoilers. If you haven’t read Dragon yet, start with Part 1 before reading any further below.

If you’re all caught up, buckle up!

The Butcher and the Black Tide is now available as a Kindle ebook, in paperback, and as a DRM-free ebook.

Content Warnings: Violence, Death, Gun Violence, Gore, Mild Swearing

MONDAY MORNING, JULY 12, 1943
AN UNKNOWN VALLEY
THE SIERRA ESPUÑA MOUNTAINS, SPAIN

Lucky Ford was in a gunfight, but all he needed was a knife.

His ‘chute had wrapped him up like a silk-and-canvas octopus, dangling him six feet off the forest floor. He was a sitting duck, kicking and swinging, waiting for the rifles pruning dry branches all around him to finally find their mark. The gray ashen haze that choked the light out of the sky made the shooters impossible to spot. Lucky had no idea who was out there, but their shots were getting way too close for comfort, and he needed to get out of this damn tree.

Lucky knew the jump had gone sideways the second he was clear of The Express. The brownstone Sierra Espuña peaks were blanketed in the thick volcanic fog still erupting from Vesuvius. The broken mountain had vomited cubic miles of ash skyward. A sulfurous wind then swept it across the Mediterranean until it blanketed all of Spain. Radio reports spotted it falling as far north as Belgium, and turning the sands of the Sahara gray. In the States, the eastern horizon was stained blood red, and from Asia, the western.

The Express had been forced to come in low, above the fog but below the igneous thunderheads that shook the upper atmosphere. They'd flown by dead reckoning, because all they could see from the air had been the tops of the tallest Spanish poplars that speared through the swirling gray stew filling the valley.

Outside the plane, hot, wild winds immediately separated Lucky’s small squad and flung him into a canopy, snarling his 'chute through its upper branches and leaving him swinging helpless in the black breeze. Seconds later, the rifles started barking.

This valley was the one spot in twenty miles that the Colonel's intel had assured them that none of the Romanian's patrols would ever go, but someone was there, and they were mad. Something had gotten their goat, and they'd responded with volleys of gunfire and shouted curses. It was a hell of a mess to plunge into, but if these jokers' plan was for misfired bullets and salty language to get Lucky into surrendering or dying, they had sorely miscalculated.

Surrender was not an option when your name was Lucky Ford, and death seemed like an equally unattractive prospect.

Somewhere, out in the thick fog, Lucky's two squad mates were just as lost and blind as he was. Even nine hundred miles away, the ash of the bleeding volcano blocked out the sun and stained the Mediterranean dark as ink. The scientists in Tennessee and the historians at the Library had compared notes and were predicting that the eruption wouldn't reach its peak for three more days, by which time the rest of Europe would be blacked out by drifting cinder clouds.

There had been no sunrise in Spain that morning.

The supersonic snap of a bullet missing him by just a few feet jolted Lucky out of his musings. He grasped again for his shoulder sheath, and again he found it empty; its brass button had ripped open when he crashed through the branches, dumping the knife into the swirling gray beneath his dangling boots, just like the rest of his gear.

The rifle fire suddenly increased in intensity, but none came his way. Whoever these shooters were, they’d found something, or someone, that was a more attractive target than an unseen stranger swinging in a tree. The brief reprieve gave him a second to listen. The reports were distinct as bolt-action rifles. That meant that, with the rate of fire he was hearing, there were scores of bad guys, all fidgety and firing at ghosts in the gray.

It was time to move, to get free of his bindings.

Lucky still had his old Colt 1911 and that old workhorse could cut canvas like butter. But he couldn't risk drawing those shots back his way. Getting the shooters' attention wasn't worth it, not yet.

He was lost in enemy territory, blind and alone, hunted by an unknown enemy in unknown numbers. His mission was off to a bang-up start.

Bucket was out in the gray, too, alone and under fire. He hadn't told Lucky why he'd volunteered to drop into Spain on this mission, but Lucky could tell just by looking at him on the flight over. The young sergeant was wracked with guilt over Willie Dutton's death in the depths of Vesuvius just a day before. Bucket had hand-picked Dutton for his demolitions assistant, and now he was dead.

When the cannibalistic murderer Isaak Gerhardt and the perverse scientist Doktor Metzger had captured Lucky and the other officials, Dutton and others had paid the price. The Nazis monsters had injected him with a serum that doubled the size of his organs in seconds and ended his life in agony. Only a last-ditch rescue kept any of them alive, but it came too late for Dutton, or to prevent Bucket from watching him get torn apart from the inside out.

The entire flight had been silent as the grave, save for Miller's briefing. Bucket hadn't made any of his smart-mouth remarks since, not even any of his usual wisdom about growing up Black and poor on the streets of Brooklyn. Instead he hid behind his Coke-bottle glasses and chewed on the end of an unlit cigarette, finding the floor to be the only interesting thing on the plane.

Miller, as always, was a mystery. He had volunteered for this mission before Lucky knew how he was going to get himself into Spain. In a military agency as organized and ordered as the Office for the Cataloging of Unusual Occurrences, Miller was a complete enigma. No one who had anything to say about it had ever seen the man without his gas mask, just those icy blue eyes staring out from behind its lenses. Lucky wasn't sure Miller even held a rank, but he had encyclopedic knowledge of a mission and region that they'd come up with a plan for on the fly.

Come to think of it, Lucky didn't even know Miller's first name.

The odd man lived in solo quarters that were colder than an ice house and never removed his gas mask or single-piece airtight suit, a suit that cost more than a brand new Sherman tank. All that, and Lucky had actually felt Miller’s slow, calm heartbeat reverberate through razor-edged Nazi steel. Once he’d pulled the kraut blade out, all Miller was worried about was the freezing air hissing out of his perforated chest.

Lucky had a lot of questions for Miller, but right now, with bullets flying all around through the ashfall, his most pressing was:

'Where the hell are you?'

More rifle fire echoed between the dry poplar trunks. A wild shot thunked into the tree above Lucky’s head, sending a sprinkle of bark down onto his shoulders. He kicked his feet and but couldn’t do any more than swing helplessly, wondering just how he'd gotten through so many insane situations in the last three days. He’d survived Nazi cannibals, lightning bombs, mutant rat attacks, and a volcanic eruption. It would not look good to end up getting done in by a tree.

Lucky's combat career had kicked off with a plane crash that left half the men he had known since he'd joined the 82nd Airborne dead. The rest of them fought their way through an Italian anti-aircraft battery only to have their sergeant cremated before their eyes, courtesy of a freakish Brotherhood SS officer and his Ion-Agitation grenade. The kraut bastards would later use a daisy chain of I-A bombs to shatter the foundations of Vesuvius and cause the eruption that blackened the sea and sky for hundreds of miles and killed hundreds of thousands of Italians in one earth rending explosion.

Ashes fell around Lucky like snowflakes, morbidly reminding him of that traitorous bastard from his original squad, Jonesy. The crazy things they’d encountered, from gremlins to I-A bombs, had snapped Jordan Jones’ brain right in half. When they’d found Sergeant Burke dead, flash-fried by strange energies, Jonesy’d responded by smashing his desiccated corpse into a drifting cloud of cinders. Lucky’d responded in the only way he knew how, and Jonesy hit the ground before the cremated flakes of Sarge did.

After that, in a hopeless, murderous rage, Jonesy attempted to defect. The nutcase chose the wrong krauts to approach, because the last Lucky saw of him, he was dragged screaming into the back of a jet black tank by the Vargulf Korps. Lucky then watched those Nazi fanatics, men twisted by horrible chemicals and excruciating surgeries into cannibalistic beasts, literally tear through each of his men, one by one, before coming for him.

When they cornered him, Lucky did the only thing he could think of: he prayed. In what he’d expected to be last seconds of his life, he couldn't find words to call on anyone. Instead, instinctual fear and anger overtook him. He lashed out with one good sucker punch that somehow connected with the pack leader’s cheekbone.

During his attempted supplications, Lucky’d wrapped the chain of his father’s cross around his knuckles. It was the sheriff’s silver that had saved his life, and his own gut.

The instant that gleaming metal made contact with Vargulf’s flesh, the foul chemicals coursing through it explosively ignited. That creature, Isaak Gerhardt, transformed, was left with a waxy pink cross branded a quarter-inch-deep into his left cheek. The flames eating through the Nazi’s face bought Lucky enough time for the Colonel, Neff, and the rest of the Office to arrive and drive the krauts away.

Gerhardt and his Vargulf escaped the Office's silver-tipped bullets that day, but they also took Lucky's last friend left from the 82nd, 'Grease' Benolli, the best point man and bar-brawl-backup Lucky'd ever known. All he could do was watch the Vargulf drag Grease away, screaming and bleeding, his right leg torn off.

Lucky’d thought him dead. It was better than considering any other fate for him. Or that Lucky would let a friend be taken.

The documents Lucky’d captured during his escape from Vesuvius the next day had shown many things, secrets the Nazis had killed and died for. One was a list of prisoners that the Vargulf had sold to a man they called 'the Romanian.' By all accounts, he was a killer and experimental surgeon on par with Doktor Metzger, the madman behind the cannibal Vargulf. The Romanian was a monster, and he had Grease, and he had Jonesy.

Loyalty had brought Lucky to the ash-smothered valleys of southern Spain. Loyalty to Grease, so that he would not have to suffer another instant.

At the same time, Lucky could not let a Nazi sympathizer turned full-on traitor and murderer be the only member of his squad to survive unscathed. Lucky did not know what he intended to do with Jonesy, but he was sure he'd figure out something before they got to that point. Lucky wanted whatever that was to be called justice.

A snap in the brush below again brought Lucky back to the present. He looked down, into the swirling ashfall. He figured he was six, maybe ten feet in the air, but he really couldn't tell. For all he knew, staring into that opaque gray fog, he might be dangling ten yards or six inches above the forest floor.

Voices yelled again in the distance. They weren't shouting in Spanish, but the language was similar. The rifle fire continued, but no bullets had come Lucky's way in several minutes.

Another twig popped. Lucky drew the Colt. Even in the muted light, the pistol looked like it had seen better days. It had belonged to Sergeant Burke, and he had given it to Lucky right before he’d died. Quietly as he could, Lucky worked the slide to chamber a round, locking the hammer back as he did so.

Lucky's time in the Grant County Sheriff's Department had taught him to never draw his sidearm unless he meant to use it. Whoever these guys with the rifles were, they were in for it. Once Lucky's gun was out, he'd be putting American firearms engineering to work. His aim would be steady; his shooting hand was carved from granite.

A shape materialized from the concealing ash, dark and gray, low to the ground. Lucky leveled the pistol, tracking it while he gently swung back and forth. He could hear it breathing now, low and heavy.

Panting.

It stalked forward until it was almost directly below Lucky. It was not human. Flashes of his friends ripped apart by the Vargulf Korps echoed in his mind. His throat, his guts, he chest tightened like a drum head. The thing below him looked up, and Lucky locked his pistol sights right between its black eyes.

“Ha,” he chuckled before he bit his tongue. The throbbing pressure in his body bled away. If he hadn’t been trying to hide from the unseen riflemen, he’d have laughed until his throat was hoarse and his head ached.

The scruffiest dog Lucky had ever seen was studying him from the forest floor, its gray and brown head cocked to the side, curious about the stupid guy who had gotten himself stuck in a tree. It sat on its haunches, looking up at Lucky, panting with its tongue out. The hanging ash barely covered the dog’s tail. Lucky realized his feet were barely a yard off the ground. He smiled sheepishly and holstered his Colt.

“You see my knife down there, boy?” Lucky jokingly whispered to the friendly-looking hound.

As soon as he opened his mouth, Lucky knew he'd made a mistake.

The dog's friendly and curious look disappeared, replaced instantly by bared yellow fangs. A low growl rumbled from its throat as it popped up to its feet. It was the size of a small horse, all scraggly hair and teeth. The look in its beady black eyes had gone from playful puppy to ravenous wolf. The dog was more than big enough to jump up and take any chunk out of Lucky it thought looked tasty.

“Oh hell,” Lucky hissed, scrambling to re-draw his pistol. “Good boy, just keep quiet...”

One bark from this dog was all the men stalking the woods needed to pinpoint their fire on Lucky.

The dog kept snarling, its yellow fangs bared and gnashing. It looked like it had been swimming through mud before running a marathon, with brown and gray hair pointing every direction, matted and cowlicked with filth. It never took its black eyes off Lucky, and the deep, low growl in its throat never subsided. This dog was going to get him killed.

Lucky leveled the old Colt at the growling animal. The dog wasn't leaving him any options. His only choice was to silence it, then shoot himself free and make a break for it. He'd be alerting his unknown pursuers, but on his own schedule, at least.

Lucky's aim wavered. He'd killed men in war. He'd beaten people senseless and broken noses, arms, and ribs with his hands. He'd left scars that would never heal and put just as many men in the ground as he'd put in the hospital. But this was just a dog. It didn't know who was fighting, or why they were here.

Hell, Lucky didn’t know who was fighting.

“Crap...” he whispered. He steeled his nerves, remembering why he was there. Grease was depending on him, and some dog couldn't get in the way of that. Lucky took a sharp breath and settled the snarling animal back between his sights.

“Ye'd shoot Basil, boy-o?” a voice asked from behind him. The man’s thick Irish accent was almost lyrical. Lucky struggled to twist around in his swinging parachute harness. Over his shoulder, he watched the stranger step out of the ashfall.

“Let's put the heater down and talk it out.” The man sounded genial, but Lucky could see a gun trained on his back. When Lucky didn’t respond, the man snapped: “Wasn't a request, lad.”

As he spoke, a dozen figures materialized from the gray around him. These men stayed mute, their faces blended into bodies rendered formless by layered burlap cloaks checkered with patches. Each clutched his own ancient old bolt-action rifle, barrels and bayonets riddled with rust. They wore tarnished French trench helmets from the Great War, the horse mane-looking crest on top easily recognizable. When they tightened their circle, Lucky realized they were wearing primitive gas masks, little more than canvas sacks with a pair of cellulose eyepieces.

The circled men watched him dangle. Their perimeter undulated, they could not stand still. Their bodies lurched and twitched like an electric current was running through them. The sight was eerie, as if a score of living, shuddering rag dolls had appeared from the fog carrying decades-old weapons of wars long lost.

The Irishman strolled around so that Lucky could see him face-to-face, never letting his shotgun’s aim drift. He let it linger on Lucky while he reached into a pocket. The huge hound sat, then leaned back with its front paws in the air. Its demeanor instantly flipped from psychopathic warhound to eager puppy, tail wagging and tongue lolling. The Irishman revealed a chunk of beef jerky in his palm, which he held out for the dog to nibble.

“That's a good puppy, Basil. Ye found us our lout, didn't ye?” the Irishman quietly mumbled to the huge hound while he scratched it behind its ears. The canvas-masked soldiers looked at each other while he babied the dog, but none dared say a word. The Irishman patted the dog one last one time then stood up straight to give Lucky a once-over. Lucky returned the favor.

The Irishman was a solid man, built more like a bar-brawling factory worker rather than a long-march soldier. His face seemed good-natured at first, but his skin was weathered beyond his years, as if he had spent too long in places men were never meant to be.

Whatever he wore was too eclectic to be considered a uniform. His forest green beret was cocked to the side, clashing with his faded blue military jacket and the bronzed throat guard and chest plate he wore like a Napoleonic musketeer. His hair was jet black and thick with curls, and his mustache was too long to be regulation in any armed force.

The double-slung bandoleers crossing his chest were heavy with shotgun shells and rifle bullets for the strange gun he kept trained on Lucky’s chest. It was a kraut gun, what they called a drilling, a three-barreled monstrosity made up of two wide-bore scatterguns atop a rifle heavy enough to turn a buffalo inside-out.

“Awright, boy-o,” the Irishman said as he moved his finger to the gun's second trigger, the one that'd give Lucky a face-full of double-barrel buckshot: “Ye going to put down that pistol, or am I to put ye down?”

Lucky stared down the barrels of the Irishman's drilling, unable to stop himself from wondering how this man and his sack-faced soldiers had found him. Not even the OCUO knew Lucky was there.

Only four other people had known about this off-books mission, and Lucky trusted each of them with his life. Colonel Halistone had helped him plan the operation in secret, and the other three were Miller and Bucket, who were also lost somewhere in the fog, and Flight Lieutenant Seacombe, the Angel, who'd taken off without the tower's clearance in order to fly the three of them to Spain. In a circle that close, the only possibility left to explain the Irishman's presence was coincidence.

“I already asked ye to drop the shooter once, boy-o,” the Irishman said, “And I'm too banjanxed to ask a second time.”

From what Lucky knew, getting captured in the Romanian's territory would be a fate worse than three loud, quick blasts to the face. Still, he couldn’t do anything for Grease if he were dead. He lowered his aim and let the pistol slip from his fingers. The Colt 1911 barely made a sound as it hit the ground, cushioned by inches of soft fallen ash.

“I know, 'tis hard to let go, friend, so know I'm obliged to ye for doin' it,” the Irishman said as he lowered his gun. “I know ye be here to help ye mate. A cause greater than ye'self, I can appreciate that. But ye see, me cause in this shite-hole is a bit more selfish. I'm bein' paid an exorbitant fee to kill ye friend, so puttin' a bullet in ‘im is a thing I fully intend on doin'.”

That story didn’t make any sense to Lucky. This guy was there to kill Grease? As far as he knew, Grease was crippled and already captured, bought and paid for by the Romanian.

“Once I take a contract, consider the job already done,” the Irishman continued. “Ye could say it's what I'm known fer. What I'm tryin' to say is that ye mate's fate is no longer in question. The only thing in question anymore is ye.”

Lucky clenched his jaw and kept his trap shut, about the only gesture of defiance available to him.

“I know ye Office boys must have some interest in what Hellbörg's doing in these woods, but ye really should have stayed out of me business. And business, boy-o, is business. No one gets between Murphy O'Laughlin and his contract, and ye boys know that. I've left ye lot alone since that mess in Florida, and ye've left me alone. Check ye files, I know ye got one on me, just look for the thick one under 'O'. Check it, I work for ye as often as I work for anyone else.”

Lucky already knew one thing about O'Laughlin: he loved to hear himself talk. One rule of interrogations: once you get one word out of a suspect, you can get the rest. O’Laughlin’d spouted about fifteen-hundred so far. It’d be easy enough to get him singing like a canary.

“You know about the Office?” Lucky asked.

“Ye askin' questions is not the game we're playin', boy-o,” O'Laughlin said, leaning to his left to take a look at the brand new rank patch on Lucky's left shoulder, a red number '2' that marked him an Official Second Class, the first, and lowest, rank in the OCUO.

“Oh, a new lad, I see, that's how ye don't know me mug. Well, new lad, ye bosses and I have a dirty past. I have done some manky nixers for them, and against, but at the end of the day, it's all business. And the last thing ye people want with me is somethin' personal,” O'Laughlin said. He chuckled, then added: “So personally, I want whatever ye know about this lug runnin' around in these woods, and I want it as fast as ye can spit out the words.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Lucky answered, only telling him the truth because he truly knew nothing. O'Laughlin couldn't get him give to up Grease since he had no idea what was going on.

Had Grease escaped into the woods under the cover of the ash? He'd only been captured three days and was missing a leg, how could he have caused enough trouble in that time to warrant a manhunt by a mercenary assassin?

“Me motto is 'Murphy O'Laughlin always gets paid,' and for me to get paid up, ye friend needs to get laid out, simple as that. His fate is certain, regardless of what ye choose to do.” O'Laughlin put his hand on Basil's giant furry head and scratched him behind the ears again. He said:

“Now from what I see, ye have ye'self but tree fates at this point. One: ye dodder about, at which point I'll just blast ye right in the bollocks and leave ye to dangle and bleed.”

The muzzle of his weapon drifted too close to Lucky's jewels for his comfort.

“Two: if ye fib and turn me business arseways, I'll hand ye over to these blokes, and they be smoke-crazy. They'll take ye to the Romanian and he'll nip ye up and knit ye into someone new.”

The masked men behind him twitched in anticipation.

“And there's tree, me favorite: ye help me and I let ye go, free as a bluebird, leaving me with no issues with the Office next time I be looking for work. What'll it be, new lad?”

“I'm not going to help you find him,” Lucky answered quietly. O'Laughlin sighed, shaking his head. He lowered his shotgun a bit, adjusting his aim from Lucky's face to his crotch.

“At least ye not lying to me, boy-o,” he said, actually sounding a little sad. “This is bloody well going to kink up me relationship with ye bosses. Ye want to see what me gun can do that much?”

The varnished stock of his triple-barreled gun had the name 'Heather' elaborately etched into the hardwood.

“I don't know anything about Grease,” Lucky answered. He could feel sweat dripping down his forehead, becoming gritty as the feathery flakes of falling ash stuck to it and dissolved into a black silt. “And I wouldn't tell you, even if I did.”

“Hold up there, lad,” he said, lifting the drilling’s muzzle away from Lucky's crotch and laying her across his shoulders. “Who's this Grease bugger, now?”

“You're not here for Benolli?” Lucky asked. If this guy wasn't after Grease, who did he think Lucky was here to help?

“Well this is bloody embarrassin',” O'Laughlin chuckled. Basil cocked his head to take a curious look at his master, while the masked men surrounding them shuddered and shifted in confusion.

“Ye an American, aren't ye? And new. That means one thing to me, boy-o. It means ye not after me contract. Thus, ye not making a problem for me business.” He spit into the dusty ash swirling around his feet, then brought the gun to his shoulder. “Close ye eyes.”

Lucky barely had time to look away before two blasts popped off in less than a second. The buckshot sheared through each of the canvas straps and dropped him to the forest floor like a sack of crap, sending up a choking cloud on impact.

Basil glared down at Lucky, splayed out and coughing on the ground. The dog was even bigger and dirtier up close, the size of an eight-cylinder Hemi, with a growl like one, too. O'Laughlin popped the drilling's break-action open and tossed the two empty red shells from the breach into an ash drift. He replaced them with fresh rounds and slammed the gun shut. The gun lingered in Lucky's direction for a second, but then the Irish mercenary smiled and threw her over his left shoulder. He reached out to Lucky with his right hand.

“Come now, lad, we can be professional about all this,” he said. Lucky took his offered hand and was hauled to his feet. O'Laughlin smiled and tried to brush the fresh coat of volcanic ash from Lucky's shoulders and back like he was an old friend coming in from the cold on a snowy day. It took a few futile swipes for him to realize it was already ground in. He shrugged and stepped back to study Lucky, saying:

“They're certainly making ye new lads a might bit shrimpier these days, aren't they?”

“Who are you looking for out here?” Lucky asked, spitting out a mouthful of grit and ignoring the Irishman's jibe. O'Laughlin's wide grin faded. He wasn't in any hurry to get back to business after he'd realized his snafu.

“Hellbörg's sliding me a pallet of gold bullion to bump off a certain local blackguard who's been ‘arassing ‘im. Got word ‘e may be hiding out in this valley, so I got me water up when Basil caught a sniff. Imagine ‘ow surprised I was to find a Yank official. Stuck up a tree, no less.”

“And you're going to let me go?” Lucky asked, not really sure what the man's angle was.

“Oh, yes, of course. Like I said, I ‘ave the utmost respect for ye Office boys. Besides, I do what I get ‘ired for, no freebies. I can only assume ye ‘ere to rescue one of Hellbörg's guests. Me only job is to ‘unt down the damn Gallo Rojo,” O’Laughlin explained.

Lucky knew a little Spanish, but not enough to impress anyone who knew more than him. Gallo Rojo... the red something.

“Besides lad, security's their contract,” O'Laughlin said, pointing to the shaking soldiers around them. O'Laughlin said something to the faceless twitchers too quick for Lucky to catch. It could've been French, or maybe Italian. It wasn't Spanish, but definitely close.

“Come along, Basil. We've some bird-’unting to do,” O'Laughlin said. He snapped his fingers and the massive hound stood. The soldiers made a hole in their circle, and the Irishman and his dog strolled through. They were quickly swallowed by the thick gray fog.

“Sorry, boy-o, just business...” he called back. His voice echoed off the bare trunks.

The masked men closed the circle behind O'Laughlin. They began to whisper amongst themselves, their weapons always pointed at Lucky. The discussion lasted for several minutes before one of the men barked, silencing the rest. He'd chosen their prisoner's fate for them.

At his signal, the twelve soldiers around Lucky raised their ancient rifles. He recognized French, German, even Russian weapons, all at least twenty years old. Their bayonets were bent and rusted, wooden stocks warped and splintering. Lucky wouldn't have been surprised if any one of their weapons blew up in their hands the next time it was fired.

The faceless leader stepped forward. His voice was raspy and muffled beneath his canvas mask, and he spoke in the same language O'Laughlin had just used, the same as the curses Lucky had heard shouted between potshots in the forest. The man's head ticked to the left as he spoke. He was gesturing with his rifle, indicating that they wanted Lucky on his knees.

“Like hell I will,” Lucky growled. He knew what would happen next if he obliged them.

The twitching man snapped forward, driving his rifle butt into Lucky’s gut. Lucky staggered and fell to a knee, wheezing.

The circle of twitchers moved in closer, surrounding him almost shoulder to shoulder. Two corroded rifle bolts him rack back and slam forward behind him.

Something cold and hollow rose in Lucky’s chest. Was this how it would happen? He'd missed death by an inch over and over again; his time had to be up soon.

A boot in his back shoved him forward, and he fell onto his hands. They sunk a good four inches into the volcanic soot, and that hollow cold thing evaporated. His right palm clasped a familiar shape. It was steel, eight and a half inches long, weighed about two and a half pounds, and had eight .45 ACP rounds ready to drill into whoever he'd loose them at.

The soldier who was giving all the orders didn't notice his prisoner's hand move, and Lucky took up his old Colt, careful to keep it concealed beneath the ash. He grabbed up a handful of ash with his other hand, ready to fling it into the air. Lucky knew couldn't get them all, but he could cause a hell of a distraction, enough to make a break for it. He tensed up, ready to explode into action.

“Get down!” someone shouted through the fog. It wasn't Bucket or Miller, but since it was in English, Lucky knew it was for him.

Lucky dropped to his stomach as two blindingly bright maroon fireballs hissed over his head.

The fireballs each slammed into one of the masked soldiers, exploding on impact and showering their dusty burlap cloaks with intense flame. Red stars burst outward, engulfing another soldier. The three men burned and screamed, flailing in the gloom. The orange flames destroyed whatever night vision Lucky had mustered, but he could hear the nine survivors popping off panicked shots into the woods while they yelled their incomprehensible curses. He scampered away through the ash on his hands and knees, taking cover behind the tree he had just been dangling from.

Lucky leveled his Colt, ready to assist his rescuer. The burning men collapsed, screams finally silent but flames crackling. The remaining soldiers bunched together, edging warily from the corpses.

Two more fireballs lanced into the knot of soldiers, this time from the opposite side of the clearing. Another pair of men caught fire and began shrieking. The huddle shoved them away to die alone before the flames could spread to anyone else’s cloak.

The barking leader coughed more orders, and the survivors split up, leaving enough space between them that the crimson stars couldn't burn them all at once. Their twitches had become terrified convulsions, throwing off whatever accuracy their wild shots might've had. They sent a barrage of rounds tearing through the underbrush, but Lucky knew their attacker would have already displaced.

A panicked scream, cut off by a pained gurgle, spun the faceless squad around once more. One of their number stood swaying and silent. Lucky heard the wet rasp of a sharp blade dragging across brittle bone before the soldier collapsed to the forest floor and raised an ashen cloud. Behind him, a shadowy figure stood alone, long daggers clasped in each hand. Both blades dripped raw crimson onto the ground. A long red coat flapped in the sudden breeze

“O Galo Vermelho!” the masked leader yelled as he brought his rifle to bear on the figure.

The masked men had all but forgotten Lucky in the chaos of the fireball attack, but now he reminded them of his presence with a barrage of full-metal-jacketed rounds.

Lucky braced himself against the tree and fired three times, stitching up the leader with one to the arm and two to the chest. The masked men froze in place, shocked, watching the ash rise in a cloud where he’d crumpled to the ground.

Lucky bolted. Two of the men tried to block his path, but their bodies were emaciated, skeletal, and one stiff push was enough to send both of them sprawling ass over tea kettle. He sprinted toward his rescuer, firing the Colt over his shoulder while hurtling burning bodies. His last five shots bucked high, though one managed to connect, easily punching through a soldier's antique helmet to drop him into the roiling soot.

The remaining men snapped into action. They started firing madly after Lucky, sending bullets whizzing past his ears and at his mysterious rescuer. The crimson warrior took no notice of the barrage, he simply raised both daggers and began blasting into the rabble of terrified soldiers. Lucky dove for cover near him, realizing that he wasn't holding daggers at all but a pair of Webley revolvers with long bayonets hooked to their barrels.

The twelve rounds that he unloaded from the powerful British pistols flew true, dropping four more masked men.

The sound of gunfire echoed off the trees for a moment, then all was quiet.

An errant wind whisked away the ash the commotion had raised, letting a ray of sunshine through the choked poplars. Lucky slowly stood up next to the hooded warrior.

Two very confused men stood twitching across the killing ground, surrounded by ten of their comrades dead by bullet, blade, and flame. They stared at the fresh corpses, the armored warrior next to Lucky, then finally at each other before scrambling to reload their rifles. Lucky looked to the hooded man beside him for a hint of his next plan of attack.

“Now what?” Lucky asked. His Colt was empty and his knife and rifle were lost in the jump, leaving him with no weapons or ideas to work with.

The warrior shrugged, then levered the break-action on his Webleys open and ejected the spent brass onto the ground. The enemy soldiers were dumbfounded. They slowly leveled their rifles at the strange pair, the official and the wraith.

“That is all,” the warrior explained. He dropped the empty revolvers to the ground. Both weapons landed on their bloody bayonet points, quivering upright in the ash and dirt. His voice was muffled but echoed at the same time. The words that came out offered no hint of accent, age, or emotion, as if he was an automaton.

The two masked men each took a wary step forward, wavering rifles leveled.

“What?” Lucky hissed at the man beside him, as confused as their surviving enemies. This killing machine had spontaneously given up? Lucky looked over at him and almost jumped out of his boots.

Beneath his crimson hood, the man was decked out the plate steel armor of a medieval knight, topped off by a hinged helmet with a long, pointed visor. His face looked like the beak of a steel bird. Lucky could see the glitter of eyes through thin slits in the steel, but nothing else. The warrior's scraped and dented metal chest plate carried scars of many battles, making his sudden surrender that much more confounding.

“No más,” the warrior told the two men, his masked voice warbling with tinny reverberations. He held his empty hands out for them to see, then raised them above his head.

The soldiers stopped a few feet away, too far to lunge at without catchng a bullet. Neither spoke. The one aiming at Lucky slid his finger down around the trigger of the oldest gun Lucky'd ever seen outside a museum. Lucky stared down that rusted, twisted barrel, and thought about Grease.

He and Lucky were the only ones left from their squad. Without Lucky, there'd be no one left to look for Grease, and without Grease, Lucky'd have no one left from before his world went insane.

The canvas-masked soldier glared down the bent sights of his decrepit rifle. He'd seen ten of his comrades killed in the last five minutes: he was not going to take any chances on these prisoners. His twitching ceased. His bullet would land right between Lucky's eyes.

The twitching man's Mosin-Nagant rifle had been manufactured in the Izhevsk Arsenal in western Russia almost forty years before, and it had been over twenty years since the battered weapon had been properly cleaned and maintained. It had fought its way through the first World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Spanish Civil War, only to end up in the hands of a faceless mercenary on the payroll of the Romanian, Dorin Hellbörg.

The lacquer on its fixtures had worn off years before Lucky was born, and the rust on the barrel was even older than that. Splits ran deep through its sweat-stained butt stock. For some reason, the cracks in the old wood and its pitted rust spots concerned Lucky more than the finger tightening on the trigger.

The other masked man had lined up on Lucky's would-be rescuer in the same way, his Italian Carcano rifle aimed at the unarmored spot where helmet met chest plate.

Lucky could hear the warped metal creak as the man put pressure on the trigger, but all Lucky watched were the cracks in the wood. They looked as big as canyons, big enough to fall into.

To his right, the helmeted man blurred into motion and a shot rang out next to Lucky's ear. He couldn't sit there and get Old Yeller'd either. He surged at his would-be executioner, ducking under the barrel and grabbing at the rifle with both hands. The twitching man panicked, pulling the trigger. Lucky squeezed his eyes shut, ready for red, and then for black. The shot was deafening.

With that final shot, the rifle's long and storied career as a taker of lives was complete. The bullet jammed inside the rust-warped receiver at such an angle that it misfired into the trigger assembly, causing the decrepit gun to explode like a glass bottle left out on a winter night. The rusted bolt blasted free of the breach and rocketed into its owner's face at a quarter-mile-a-second. The burning metal tore through his canvas gas mask like it wasn't even there.

Lucky fell backwards into the ash, holding the front half of a rifle in his hands. The masked man stood above him, quivering. His hands had been shredded by shattered wood and metal but he still held them out like he was gripping the disintegrated gun. Blood seeped through his canvas mask before he finally collapsed into a cloud of upturned ash.

It took Lucky several seconds to put together what had happened, and several more to reassure himself that it really had. When he finally allowed himself to breathe, the rush of oxygen, volcanically-tainted as it was, almost left him splayed limp across the ground. He threw the remains of the ruined rifle aside and took a few more deliberate breaths to gather himself.

His luck. Again.

To Lucky's left, his rescuer's hands were no longer in the air. His left arm was extended straight ahead while his right was crossed over his chest and clamped onto his shoulder. A calm swirl of smoke drifted out of his open cuff and around his empty hand.

The masked man before him was laid out: he had been knocked off his feet by a barrage of buckshot that had shredded bloody and deep into his neck and chest.

The rescuer shook the last of the gun smoke from his sleeve as he picked up his discarded revolvers. A hidden pocket in the inner folds of his coat yielded a pair of speed-loaders, and he injected a dozen fresh rounds into his Webleys.

This joker wasn't even out of ammo when he surrendered.

“Who the hell are you?” Lucky demanded. He was still shaking. The dead man at his feet twitched again.

“I'm the one they're after, Americano,” the warrior answered.

“You're the Gallo Rojo?” Lucky asked. O'Laughlin's target, a man whose head was worth enough gold to buy a city.

“It is the name the people gave me,” he said, tapping a gloved finger against his helmet's pointed visor. He whispered, “It is the beak.”

“Gallo,” Lucky said slowly, finally remembering what it meant, “The Red Rooster.”

Saying it out loud didn't make any less absurd. The Gallo Rojo nodded, as if he agreed with Lucky's unspoken assessment, then holstered the bayonet-equipped revolvers. He flipped open his coat, revealing two armpit holsters bolted to his chest plate. These held a second set of powerful pistols whose barrels looked easily an inch across each.

The Gallo Rojo worked their break-actions open and inserted a massive shell into each. The red fireballs that had incinerated so many of the masked soldiers had come from flare guns. The Navy used them to launch magnesium signal flares that burn at thousands of degrees and explode into multiple stars in the air. They were perfect for alerting rescuers to an SOS a dozen miles away or for getting deadly flames to jump between dry burlap coats and canvas masks.

“We must move,” the Gallo Rojo said, holstering his flare guns. “The Irishman will come running. It is said I am worth three hundred bars of Romanian gold to him.”

“Give me a minute,” Lucky said. He got to his feet and scrambled to the tree he had been tangled in. His pack had ripped open when he'd gotten snagged so his gear was scattered around its roots, buried just under the ash. Lucky grabbed what he could find: his ammo belt with four magazines for the Colt and two for his Garand, though there was no rifle in sight, a compass, and his silver-edged combat knife. Now that he didn’t need it, of course it was easy to find.

Lucky had just started sift through the deeper ash drifts when he heard Basil. The massive dog's baying was unmistakable. His lungs were as big as fireplace bellows, and his bark could shake tree trunks for miles.

The Gallo Rojo froze at the sound. He'd rolled his left sleeve up, revealing a leather bracer that completely covered his forearm. He'd been reloading a single-shot shotgun that was mounted on his wrist. The gun's trigger assembly was hooked to wires which ran up his arm to what had to be a hidden firing mechanism on his shoulder.

The Gallo Rojo whipped the spent shell out of the gun and loaded a fresh one, then yanked his sleeve back down.

“Your minute is over, Americano,” he whispered. He was ready for action once again. “We will lose the dog in my forest.”

With that, the Gallo Rojo sprinted into the ashfall.

“Wait!” Lucky yelled at his twirling red coat tails, “I've still got friends out here!”

“We will find them!” he yelled over his shoulder, “I find everything here!”

The mysterious warrior disappeared into the falling soot, and, with hunters on his heels and nowhere else to go, Lucky followed.

Like what you read? Buy me a beer or @ me about it.

Copyright © 2023 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Dudu Torres. Spanish translations by Caitlin Gilmore.