THE DEFENDERS EYED THEIR watches. Almost noon. Minute hands crept toward the President’s deadline. Seconds ticked. The sun hung close and hot, sucking the sweat from their skin. An eerie lull surrounded them, only the katydids thrumming, the tinny whines of gun-pummeled eardrums.
Maybe they gone home already.
The hell they have.
Dead if they don’t.
At noon on the mark, when the hands of every watch upon the parapets took aim at the sun, a single cow horn blew from the green darkness of the mountainside, low and wailsome, like the herald of some barbarian horde.
The mountain erupted.
A GATLING GUN RAKED the front line of trenches at Crooked Creek Gap, firing from a high and wicked spur where no one expected such a weapon. The fusillade turned men out of their positions or kept them nailed in place, clinging to cover.
Bad Tony and the reporter weren’t there. During the lull, Tony had moved them to a bunker of mossy fieldstones hidden inside a large rhododendron thicket, a cloud of pinkish white blooms. Just before noon, someone had brought Bad Tony a long single-shot rifle, an enormous gun with a rabbit-ear hammer and long brass telescopic sight. It lay on its canvas scabbard next to the machine gun. The reporter didn’t know arms, but the rifle looked like something designed to kill bison or elephants or Ford motorcars.
Beneath them, men were pouring out of their trenches, retreating, many of them limping or bleeding, dragging friends or comrades. Others had wedged themselves into tight nooks or log barricades, hunkering low, rising now and again to return fire. No one had reckoned on the miners hauling a heavy gun up to such a high vantage.
The reporter looked at Bad Tony, who lay hunched behind his Browning machine gun, breathing through his nose. He didn’t look surprised, nor had he fired a single round.
“What are you waiting for?”
Tony ignored him. He was squinting down the sights, chewing the inside of his lip, gently stroking the spot where the stray splinter had impaled his cheek. A bloody little scab. The reporter looked to the boys farther back in their crude bunker, sitting ready with cartridge belts and ammunition boxes. They shrugged.
The reporter looked back to the trenches. It was a rout. The men in the forward lines were too exposed. A whistle blew and they poured out of their trenches en masse, heading for secondary emplacements they’d dug during the night, ducking and scrambling as they went, their canteens and ammo pouches and field glasses flying wild on leather slings as a great banshee’s wail rose from the trees behind them.
A swarm of Rednecks broke from cover, charging up the draw in bandolier-slung overalls and chore jackets and mismatched uniforms. They overran the newly abandoned trenches with hardly a shot, rearing back to howl and trill, crazed with victory. The reporter couldn’t believe how close they were, close enough to throw a rock.
Then he realized why Tony had waited.
“GOT-DAMMIT!” YELLED CROCK. “THEY got a MG hid up in that slick!”
Star-shaped flashes racketed from the muzzle of the hidden gun, shivering the blossoms of the thicket, sending rounds straight into the miners in the trench. Several men went down in a flash, their blood puffed pink in the sunlight.
Crock elevated the gun on the enemy position but the barrels spun empty. Frank was still waiting on another magazine from the ammo boys, who were hurriedly reloading the hundred-round brass clips from the boxes in their laps, feeding in the cartridges by hand. Crock looked at Frank and then to the boys behind him. He reached out and snatched a magazine from one of their fists.
“How many?”
“Not fifty.”
“Better than nothing.”
Crock rose up to his full height to jam the clip into the top of the gun—normally Frank’s job. Down across the field, the machine gun had ceased firing, as if finished with the miners who lay dead or squirming in the long belly of the trench. There came a single high crack, different from the others, and a red slash exploded beneath the big man’s jaw, spewing hot across Frank’s face. Then he was on the ground with Crock, trying to hold back the blood spurting from the ragged side of his neck.
It was going everywhere, bright and slick, pumping between his fingers, scattering like fire ants. Like trying to hold back a spring, a river. Crock reached up and grabbed hold of the back of Frank’s neck and pulled him close, trying to speak over the blood bubbling at the corners of his mouth.
“What is it, Crock? Tell me, brother. Tell me.”
The big Marine coughed and choked, trying to get something out, but it was all blood and sputum. He squeezed Frank close, palming the back of his head, driving them forehead to forehead. His words foamed red on his lips.
He died with a jolt, as if his spirit had cracked free of his skin.
Frank rammed his head into the man’s chest and roared.
“DAVY CROCKETT,” SAID BAD Tony. He slipped the long buffalo rifle back into its canvas scabbard. “There’s a name don’t none of them deserve.”
The reporter looked down at the bloodied, smoking trench. He wondered how many corpses were being carried down the back sides of these ridges, spread out in schoolyards or field tents. How many body parts gathered up from bomb craters, piled into ponchos or sleeping blankets. Across the mountain, across miles of battle lines, he could hear the gunfire still going strong. Hundreds of rounds per minute. Thousands per hour. Tens of thousands.
He looked at Tony. “You think this is the Second Civil War?”
Bad Tony looked up at the crackling sky, as if watching for the rumored bombers to arrive, their vast wings clouding the sun.
“If it ain’t, it’s putting on one hell of a show.”