Luis Came Back

This is an entry into this week's Friday Challenge. This week? Come up with a thousand words to tell the story behind the picture.

It was someone's sick idea of a joke, calling Luis "Lucky." I think maybe it was Raul.

The man was already missing an eye and a hand when he signed on with us. He didn't say much about his family for the longest time; it was only after Raul got him good and drunk that we found out they had died in a fire--the same fire that had scarred his back, and taken his eye and his hand.

You would think that a man with only one hand wouldn't make a very good soldier, but Luis did okay. Our assignment was to wipe out the bandit packs near the American border, and it was hard to turn anyone away if they could fight. Luis could fight. Instead of taking the time to reload during a battle, he actually carried two extra pistols. He was vicious, and fearless, always the first one over the wall.

Then we went up against the the bandits in Nogales, and "Lucky" Luis took a bullet in his good arm. Now he was totally useless.

Back at camp, he started drinking. Hard. He let slip that it was bandits that burned his farm and his family. He kept shouting about vengeance, and how he was going to get it no matter what it took. He had heard of this doctor in the mountains, Doctor Brouha, who could almost bring a dead man back to life, and he was going to go and see him.

Everyone had heard of Doctor Brouha, of course, but no one went to see him. Well...no one sane, anyway. They said half the men who went to see him died, and the other half never came back.

Lucky Luis came back.

Three weeks after he set out on foot, with one useless arm and a hook for a hand, he came back into the camp.

He had a new eye and new arms. The eye was a brass tube that stuck out of his skull and moved around like a snail's eyestalk. And his arms...they weren't human arms. They were black metal, with a ball where the elbow would be.

Luis could fire a big rifle like a derringer, haul crates like a horse, and shoot a fly off a horse's tail at fifty paces. "The eye," he told me. "It lets me see up close. Doctor Brouha did good."

The rest of us weren't quite so sure.

A month later, Luis got "lucky" again. The cannonball missed him by inches, but threw him twenty feet.

The bloody mangled thing on the stretcher was barely human. I could see teeth through cheeks and shattered ribs sticking out of his chest, but the black metal arms were still shiny, and that one good eye found mine. "D...D...Doc..." he wheezed.

"Doctor Brouha," I said. The eye closed. I picked two walking wounded to carry the stretcher; they wouldn't be any good for fighting for a couple of weeks, anyway.

The two soldiers came back two weeks later. They said the last they saw, Doctor Brouha was standing over Luis with a saw in his hand. He would lean down to whisper "do you want it bad enough?" in his ear, again and again, until Luis screamed "YES!" through his shattered face. Then the doctor stood up with a smile and went to cut off a leg. That's when they left.

Luis came back a month later.

At least, it wore Luis' bandana, and it stood in his old spot in formation. But it didn't look like Luis. It was all metal, all shiny black. It now had two of the brass eyes on stalks, and it fought like a demon. It was faster than a horse, never ate, never slept.

And it never talked.

We wondered if there was even any of Lucky Luis left inside.

It wiped out the gringos in Sonora all by itself, before we even got close enough to see who was shooting.

The Captain worked out a way to take out the bandit fort at Huachuca. We had to sneak down the hill, to the back of the fort, while the rest of the men pretended to attack the front. Lucky Luis was with us, so we knew we would win; it would probably tear down the whole wall for us.

We slipped and skidded down the muddy hill, and lined up for the attack, the metal man leading the way.

A section of the wall fell towards us, revealing a squad of men, a burning torch, and a loaded cannon. The first shot scattered us, and we all tried to run back up the hill to get away from the second one.

The metal man wasn't running. It was looking at what used to be Raul, the prankster who had given him his nickname. It was looking at us running in terror, slipping and sliding through the muck and not getting out of the line of fire fast enough.

And then he started running, too. The wrong way.

Even as fast as he was, he couldn't get there before they loaded up the cannonball. But he ran right up to the barrel of the cannon as they brought the torch down. He plugged it with his own body--blocked it off with Doctor Brouha's shiny black metal. The explosion wiped out the cannon crew, knocked down the wall behind them, and wiped out enough of the troops on the other side of the wall that we took the fort with ease.

We gathered up the dead, and found most of the pieces of metal that had been Lucky Luis. When we looked inside the metal bucket that had once stood atop the black shoulders, there was nothing, not even a skull.

We buried him next to Raul.