And Kill Them All by J. Lee Butts

tear streamed down his leathery, stubble-covered cheek. He wiped the droplet away on the sleeve of his shirt. I’d never witnessed such an open display of emotion from my best friend before. Never. His momentary loss of control had a profound and powerful effect on me.
    Couldn’t do much of anything but say, “Don’t have a single idea, Boz. Just don’t know.” I hemmed and hawed around some, then clumsily added, “Appears pretty certain he wasn’t anywheres around these parts. Must’ve had more pressing business elsewhere.”
    Boz toed at the dirt again and shook his head in sad resignation.
    I tried to smooth the situation over a bit in the only way I knew how. “Figure the best thing we can do for these poor folks is get them in the ground quick as possible. See to it they’re covered up where nothing can get at ’em. Don’t you think?”
    Boz rubbed a reddened eye with a scruffy knuckle and tried not to look at me when he croaked, “Yeah, I know, Lucius. You’re right as rain. Hot as it is, and as hot as it’s gonna get ’fore dark finally comes, these poor people gonna be getting mighty rank,” Almost as an afterthought, he coughed, stared at Heaven again, then added, “Gonna be all swole up ’fore a body can spit. Putrefied quicker than double-geared lightning.”
    Squint-eyed, I nodded. No point debating the brutal truth of the situation. I turned my back to the wagon and its contents and stared at the river.
    Remember thinking, sweet Jesus give me strength in this time of unparalleled horror and uncommon butchery.

9
    â€œSNAPPING AND BITING LIKE A RABID DOG.”
    BOZ AND ME stood barefoot in the lazy, fetid trickle of Devils River. Pants legs rolled up to bone-white knees, both of us sloshed water over forearms soaked all the way to the elbows with dried gore. Burial of the five bullet-shattered bodies had proven more difficult and taken longer than either of us had anticipated.
    Rather than attempting to dig individual holes in the sunbaked, near impenetrable earth, we’d been forced to scratch out a single, shallow grave barely large enough to accommodate the entire massacred clan. The excavation took two hours of backbreaking, debilitating labor. We spelled each other in that grueling effort, using the only shovel to be found amidst the blood-soaked wreckage left behind by merciless killers.
    Worst part of the nightmarish enterprise was carrying, or dragging, the still-seeping corpses of the children and their parents for placement inside the crude riverbank tomb. During the grisly interment, it took the total of our concentrated, gulping effort to keep Paco Matehuala’s early morning coffee and breakfast tacos from coming back up in a rush of bitter, pukey, stomach-churning bile.
    The gruesome task proved especially problematic during that period when we worked to cover the pathetic bodies of the dead kids with several blood-encrusted, rigid, scab-like blankets retrieved from the wagon. When finally satisfied with our best possible efforts, we threw dirt over the sad corpses like reluctant family members forced into a surprising and deplorable undertaking. Finished off the soul-wrenching job with a layer of all the rocks we could retrieve within fifty feet of the rude burying. Then we decorated the grave with as many blooming cactus plants as I could wrench from the clutches of a reluctant, covetous earth.
    Sweat drenched and soaked in gore, Boz had squatted at the foot of the completed tomb. Crestfallen, my friend scratched in the loose dirt with a cottonwood twig and wiped leaky eyes on a filthy shirt-sleeve. He shook his shaggy head and muttered, “They murdered the children. And just a bit earlier this mornin’ we ’uz rememberin’ ole Jasper Pike and how he’d done as much for his own pitiful family.”
    â€œI know, Boz.” What else could I say?
    â€œMusta been some kinda omen,