44. Only the Last Ones Standing Will Leave

Ervey launched himself even as the man on the loudspeaker was still making his announcement.

"Ya! Only the last ones standing will leave here!" the man said.

Ervey was the first man to reach the pile. He quickly snatched up the first object that met Lilo's requirement of a sharp edge. It was a meter and a half-long wrought iron bar, triangular-shaped with one bladed edge. Short pieces of barbed wire were still attached to it, as if the guards had hurriedly cut it out of a fence. Ervey gave it a test swing. The men running behind him jumped back and tried to go around him.

"Ervey, keep them from getting to the pile!" Lilo shouted.

Ervey started swinging hard in all directions and turned toward where he heard Lilo's voice. Lilo made eye contact with him but kept running hard to the pile at a spot perpendicular to where Ervey stood. He reached it at the same time other men did, but instead of bending over to pick up something he kicked dirt into the faces of the men opposite him. Some of the men caught dirt in their eyes and stopped to try and recover, causing a brief pile up. In the split second this gave him, Lilo quickly scanned the pile and picked up a long prybar and immediately began to swing it to clear a wide swath over the pile of objects still on the ground.

In the spaces where Ervey and Lilo were not holding off the crowd, men reached down and picked up what they could and retreated. Some disappeared back into the crowd and others were swarmed by other men who fought them for their weapon.
Not everybody rushed to the pile. Some men froze in shock. Others ran around looking for an escape. Others went over to the guards and tried to plead for their lives. It was a pointless and disastrous course of action. The men who did not move or ran about in panic quickly fell prey to the men who immediately set out to improve their chances of survival by whacking the easy targets around them. The men that approached the guards or the gate were shot point blank.

In a matter of seconds, the crowd was halved. The fighting abated momentarily. Men with weapons walked about measuring each other, most of them alone but some working in pairs. Some men still did not have any weapon at all and were frantically running from one menace to another.

Ervey and Lilo kept swinging their weapons and blocking access to the pile.

"Mulateño!" a man shouted.

Lilo had already seen him and altered his swing to let him through. The man reached down and picked up a large rock and an ax and moved over to a part of the pile that Ervey and Lilo had left exposed. There he caught a man bending over to pick up something and hit him at the top of his spine with the rock. Thwack! The man went down over several would-be weapons. Immediately the Mulateño raised his ax and made the crowd move back.

"Mulateño! Also a Mulateño!" shouted the fat Mulateño Ervey had been eyeing before the melee. Ervey turned and let the man in. He already had a weapon. It was a long heavy mallet. He held it with one hand at the bottom of the handle and the other close to the hammerhead. He turned his back to Ervey and began making his way to another other exposed part of the pile with the mallet raised high above his head, his shirt soaked through with sweat and splattered with blood and grey mucus-like matter.

"Another one. I want another one to get close!" shouted the fat Mulateño.

Although the area the four Mulateños were trying to cover was too large for them to keep every desperate man in the corral at bay, the strategy of keeping the crowd away from the weapons pile proved effective. The crowd's reaction was to back away from those who had weapons and were using them, and the Mulateños certainly represented a red hot point in the chaos. This caused the crowd to compress away from them and forced the deadly fighting to take place at very close range with the victims and attackers getting only a quick glimpse of the violence they met and meted out. As the crowed began to thin, however, the focus began to turn back to the pile.

Several long minutes into the fighting, the crowd had withered down to the few men who were either good at it or had so far found a formula that let them stay alive. The corral was strewn with men laying on the ground, some of them still writhing from their death blow. Every man that was standing now had a weapon and stood within reach of another one without having to get to the pile the Mulateños were standing over.

"Hey, those four are working together!" a tall heavy set man holding a metal pipe yelled, "if we let them keep at it, they'll finish us all off."

"Sí, güey," a shorter, older man standing next to him said, "for  us to live we have to get them."

"Let's surround them!" a man shouted from the opposite side of the corral.

The Mulateños looked at each other. They quickly saw they were outnumbered eight to four.

"Two and two, pronto!" said the Mulateño that had been standing next to the gate all night.

"Me and the gordo," said Lilo, "over there!"

He took the lead, and the fat Mulateño scrambled after him. Ervey and the other Mulateño went the opposite direction.

"Not the big one that just spoke," he said to Ervey under his breath, "he'll be last."