Some may have been as bad, but nobody was worse than MS-13. Salvadorans from Los Angeles, originally, but over time they’d spread, exported, colonized, let others in. Worked with the cartels, some of them. Salvadoran, Mexican, Guatemalan … nationalities didn’t matter as much when the big thing you had in common was the ability to bury your humanity so deep you could never find it again, leaving it to rot with the worms. When you could do what they did without feeling anything more than that it had to be done. That this was what it took to get business taken care of. No different than guys who clocked in at the meat plants. They all had two eyes, two ears, and a mouth, same as the pigs and cows, but were still the ones holding the chainsaws.
The Sinaloa guy was stripped to his boxer shorts, then stretched out flat on the ground as somebody stood on each arm to keep him there. The Skull started by taking off his hands. As somebody else moved in with a propane torch to cauterize the stumps, he picked up the hands and flicked the blood from them into the dirt as he carried them over to Santa Muerte. They hacked off his feet next and made offerings of those, too. The men weighting him down stepped off to let the guy roam at will because how far could he get now, down to four stumpy limbs, nothing but charred nubs at the ends.
They seemed to find it entertaining. Nothing funnier than watching a guy in that condition try to flop away.
The Skull opened a big wooden box then, pulling out every kind of knife there was: military knives, hunting knives, fish knives, kitchen cutlery. He took his time, sticking one in and leaving it in place like a plug, because pulling the blade out would free the wound to bleed, and the Skull didn’t want that. Soft tissue, areas that wouldn’t be immediately fatal—those were his targets, and he found them one by one.
There seemed no end to it, a harder thing to watch than the amputations because of the calm, casual progression, the guy on the receiving end mindlessly trying to wallow away every time another blade skewered him, until he could no longer manage even that much, and could only lie there and take it, more and more bristling like a porcupine. The only way Enrique was certain he was still alive was because of how the handles rose and fell with each ragged breath. Every now and then, his whole carcass shuddered.
Enrique wouldn’t have thought so until now, but he found this ordeal worse to contemplate than coming apart at the joints. He had more soft tissue than anybody here, enough to keep the Skull busy for hours.
He watched when he could, turned away when he couldn’t. But he never left the window. This is what it takes to be glad to die.
Sebastián, though, had checked out a long time ago, sliding down the wall and holding himself together with both arms wrapped around his knees. Maybe it was easier to watch when it was on video. Bas could always pretend it was special effects in a movie. All he had to do was turn off the sound.
Sound was the giveaway, he’d explained once, how you knew when something was real and when it was staged. Terrified people, dying people, people in agony, made sounds that nobody could get to under any other circumstances. Once you’d heard the difference, there could be no confusing the two.
Just as there were sights you couldn’t unsee, there were sounds you couldn’t unhear, and this poor fucker out there had made them all.
So when they finished it, the Skull tugging a wicked looking military knife free of the guy’s groin and using it to saw off his head, the sound was more a part of it than anything Enrique could see. The angle was bad, too many bristling knife handles in the way. But he could hear it, that soul-shredding crescendo of mortality the guy had been holding in reserve.
Enrique didn’t know when it happened, only that at some point Nietzsche’s old warning came to mind: If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you. This was the feeling he got every time the Skull looked up from his work and peered straight at him in the window, as if making sure Enrique was still watching.
Good. You need to pay attention, the Skull seemed to be saying. I know it’s rough, but this is what it takes to get where we’re going.
* * *
He lost track of time, didn’t know if it was an hour after the slaughter or an hour before sunrise. All he knew was that he was lying on the floor next to Sofia, their arms hooked around each other’s at the elbow. He remembered seeing somewhere that otters slept this way, holding hands so they wouldn’t drift apart on the river. If he had a next life coming, that was how he wanted to be reborn. Come back as an otter, sweet-faced and sleek and holding hands while he slept, and life would be simple.
“We should have never gone to Matamoros,” Sofia said to him in the dark. “You and me, we should have voted Bas down. We should never have agreed to go to that ranch.” She moved her head closer and kept her voice low, everything just between them. “It had us then. It reached out from the past and took us.”
That was how it felt, yeah. They’d raised their heads high enough to be noticed by the dreadful thing that claimed this land, and it decided it wanted them. It opened its jaws to gobble them up and the cartel guys were its teeth.
“I was going to tell you earlier, when we were there, but I didn’t want the place listening to me, you know?” she said. “Hearing about what happened at that ranch was my first memory. The first one I can pin down.”
So much worse was going on around them, but this still hurt him straight to the heart. “That’s awful.”
“I was three,” she went on. “Something like that, kidnapping, human sacrifice, you don’t understand it when you’re that little. And you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t ever have to understand it. At the time, it was more about the effect it had on my mother, and me seeing how she reacted. Not just to what they’d found, but what they hadn’t, too, because there was talk of them maybe taking kids that never did turn up.”
Lying there, he wished for an arm of iron that they could never break if they came in to drag Sofia away.
“I didn’t understand it, but my mother did. I could see how much it scared her. How afraid she was for me. That there were people out there who would do these things. That’s what came through. And I could tell, she was afraid she couldn’t protect me, not from people like that. Because they had the devil behind them. Once that settled in, I don’t know if I ever felt totally safe again.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and meant it for everything he hadn’t been able to do for her, then or now.
“I should have never stopped believing in the devil.”
* * *
The next afternoon, at the height of the heat of the day, they came for Sebastián.
At first, weirdly enough, it was just an order, almost deferential compared to their usual methods, threat behind it but no force. When he didn’t want any part of it, only then did things get rough, Bas taking a knee to the groin so hard it brought up his meager lunch. The bones went out of his legs, the fear so overwhelming every muscle went loose.
Sofia was screaming, reaching for Bas as they dragged him across the floor. It took both of Enrique’s arms in wraparound to hold her back. Had it been just him and Bas, he would’ve done it, rushed them, made these savages shoot them both, let them bleed out quick from twenty bullet wounds apiece. But with Sofia here, he couldn’t bring himself to do it, not as long as they didn’t want her yet, and he hated himself for being like the rest of the docile herd, buying into the desperation: that as long as there was time, there was hope.
When they got Sebastián out the door, they surprised everybody by coming back for one more. Miguel Cardenas this time, the country balladeer who’d written one narco ballad too many, in his filthy white shirt and black pants with the silver studs down the sides. With him, there was no deference at all, the cartel team back to their usual routine of brutality first, orders later. Once he got over the shock, he begged all the way out the door.
You could follow their path outside by the sobbing. After Sofia hunkered on the floor with her hands squashed over her ears, Enrique forced himself to the window and saw two guy
s waiting near Santa Muerte, holding sledgehammers like firing squad riflemen waiting for the order to aim.
Both, as it turned out, were for Cardenas. They took out his knees first, and after he was down they smashed his elbows, then went to work on his hands and feet. They left him plenty alive, just nothing to crawl with, fight with, grab with, resist with. They reduced it all to pulp and compound fractures.
At the first couple of blows, Sebastián buckled to the ground as if he’d been hit too, going fetal as the hammers rose and fell. When the guys swinging the iron backed off, the Skull took over, squatting next to Sebastián, doing no worse than laying a hand on his shoulder, but Bas flinched anyway.
This was beyond figuring out, as long as he couldn’t hear what the Skull was saying—and there was a conversation going on. One minute, two minutes, three. He wasn’t treating Bas cruelly, only patting him on the shoulder a couple of times, as if telling him, There, there, it’ll be all right.
Then the Skull had somebody bring his box of knives and it looked to be last night all over again. Until he took one for himself and gave another to Sebastián. He pointed at Cardenas and his pulverized joints, lying on his back and howling at the sky.
Enrique clutched the bars over the window as Bas began shaking his head, no no no no. The Skull went first, sinking his first knife to the hilt into Cardenas’ thigh, then glaring at Sebastián: Your turn.
When he couldn’t do it, the Skull’s voice got louder, yelling now, discernible.
“You don’t hate him? You don’t hate his music, everything a hack like him stands for?” the Skull shouted. “Come on, man, you’re ten times the singer he is. Let it out! You sing about hate all the time! Is that just an act? What good is the hate if you don’t let it out!”
Sebastián gave Cardenas a half-hearted poke, sufficient to scratch the skin, but not good enough. The Skull badgered and threatened, then told him he’d better do it right this time or maybe Santa Muerte would get one of his eyes. He didn’t need both eyes to sing. Didn’t need either of them, for that matter.
It snapped him. Bas wailed from the ground and with a sob plunged the knife into Cardenas’ belly.
Back and forth then. One for you, one for me. It came easier each time, Bas sticking in every subsequent blade with less hesitation and more resolve. This is what it takes to crawl away. It was like watching a little more of him going dead inside each round.
Ten or twelve knives later, the Skull called a break to confer, voices too low to hear again. He had somebody bring another wooden box—like a small, low crate—and hefted something out of it, treating it with obvious care. Enrique couldn’t tell what it was, only that it looked flat and heavy and as black as outer space. It was lost from view as the Skull put it on the ground and the two of them hunched over it.
Minutes of this, while every so often, Cardenas wailed and moaned and tried to move in some way that his smashed parts wouldn’t allow.
Until it was back to the knives. Just the Skull this time, looming over Sebastián in a posture of challenge, authority. Bas kept trying to back away but was too cracked to get anywhere, head hanging at the end of a neck gone limp as he used up the last of whatever he had in him to say no. Not that. Please no. Every time he did, the Skull merged another knife with some part of Miguel Cardenas.
“I can do this all day!” the Skull told him. “You gonna let that happen? Gonna let me keep doing this until I run out of knives? All you got to do is cut him once. It would be an act of mercy.”
And that was how you broke somebody for good: made him do a thing like this.
“You tell me no one more time, the next thing you get to do is pick which one of your people you get to watch me gut in front of you. Your choice.”
Took one piece of his soul at a time.
Bas must have quietly acquiesced. The Skull handed him a knife, one of the big, mean looking ones, maybe the same go-to blade he’d used to finish things last night. And the finish was the same. From this angle, Enrique couldn’t see much, Sebastián in a kneeling position, his elbow pumping back and forth in a sawing motion. Two hideous screams. One ended quickly, the other one kept going. And going.
That was the impressive thing about Bas. He could hold a note for a long time.
Way past what for most people would be the breaking point.
* * *
It was hours before he could talk, another hour after that before anything intelligible came out. Until then, it was just Bas in a corner, huddled up like a whipped dog, catatonic sometimes, shaking when he wasn’t, eyes focused on nothing. Sofia held him, rocked him, reported that he felt like he’d crawled out of a cold river. Morgan and Olaf hung close, ready to help if they could, but they couldn’t.
“He wanted to know,” Bas said, halting every few words, “about the last album.”
La máscara detrás de la cara, that would’ve been. The Mask Behind the Face.
“What about it?”
“He wanted to know where it came from.”
Enrique had to let this sink in, double-check to make sure Bas had it right. Even if it explained why they’d returned him alive, Enrique still couldn’t believe it had come down to this: that they’d been taken by a fan who wanted to get close to the band.
“I didn’t understand what he meant. I couldn’t follow him. I didn’t know what to tell him.” Sebastián seemed unable to stop replaying everything in his mind, or stop shaking his head. “He made me look at a rock. He kept making me look at the rock. I couldn’t see what he wanted me to. But he wouldn’t let me look away from the rock.”
It was about all they got out of him.
Things were quiet for the evening and the rest of the night, sitting in the dark with los muertos, the other dead. A whole new heavy black mood had settled in. Forced to butcher each other—this was an escalation nobody had seen coming, and now that it was here, how was anyone supposed to look at the person next to him without imagining which of them might end up forced to hold the knives?
None of them had overheard what Bas had said—it was too soft to hear unless you were right next to him—and Enrique wasn’t going to tell the rest to ease their minds. Go on, keep trusting one another, you’re still in this together, because if it happens again, it’ll only be me or Sofia holding the knife. Yeah, that would go over great.
Just Olaf, just Morgan. He told them.
The rest? Let them live with it, the same fear they’d spent their lives inflicting on their neighbors. This is what it takes to start paying for your sins.
He listened in the dark as Padre Thiago ministered to the ones who decided they’d lived as wolves long enough and it was time to be lambs again. Time to let a priest pray over them, deliver them of the cruel devils that had taken them over to make them do such terrible things. If they were going to God soon, they wanted to go clean and pure and forgiven.
And there it was—the reason he’d never had much use for God. If he had to believe in a god at all, he wanted one who would really hold you to your life’s choices.
* * *
When they came for him the next morning Enrique was ready for it, the only one in the room who didn’t retreat to the far wall like the others. They were so used to it, these guys with their guns and their yelling, they didn’t know what to make of him, that somebody would sit in the floor waiting for whatever came next. His passivity unnerved them, all eight guys peeking at each other like they didn’t trust it and didn’t know what to do next, afraid they were being suckered into the struggle of their lives.
“I’ll go,” Enrique said. “No big deal. When did fighting it ever work for anybody? I’ll go.”
They took him alone, him and nobody else. They escorted him around the side of the church, three days since he’d felt the ground beneath his boots and the open sky and the direct searing heat of the sun. At the end of it, the Skull was waiting, and behind him, that colossal likeness of Santa Muerte with her scythe, grim against the cloudless blue and gritting her iv
ory teeth at the horizon. Everything else looked baked to shades of brown.
Somebody shoved a foot into the back of one knee to drop him to the earth. He knew better than to get up. The guards backed off to give them space.
“I figured it was either you or Sebastián,” the Skull told him. “Drummers, they’re the heart, they’re not usually the visionaries. They feel the pulse of the earth. They don’t see through time. So it had to be you or him. And it wasn’t him.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah you do. You’re just playing stupid.”
From here, close up, it was like seeing this guy for the first time. He was more than a living skull now. Skulls didn’t have eyebrows. Skulls didn’t have lips. Enrique could see the way his skin moved over his actual bones, could discern the numbers and words, patterns and pictures, inked into his skin. He looked close to emaciated, either by genetics or by choice, or maybe he was an example of function creating form. He had only as much as a reaper needed, and no more.
“You keep playing stupid, I’ll treat you like you’re stupid. You’ll make me do something to smarten you up. Is that what you want?”
“I want to be gone from here. Me and mine. That’s what I want.”
The Skull nodded as if this were one of many possibilities. “It could happen.”
Three little words, so much hope. It could happen. But probably an illusion.
“Sebastián may be the one at the front of the stage, but he does what you tell him to. He’s only got as much to work with as you give him. You’re the architect of what you three do,” the Skull said. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
“It’s more complicated than that. But you’re not wrong.”
“I get it. You need him and he needs you. You, you’re not the kind of guy who’ll ever be at the front of the stage. You don’t have the look. But you got something better. You got the brains. You got the vision.”
It was one of the more backhanded compliments anyone had given him. But under the circumstances? He’d take it.
Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 3 Page 20