by Jeff Kirkham
The five men at the gate lowered their rifles as the three older men stepped forward and offered their hands. Noah went the rounds, shaking hands with the three men and the other five men who had covered him with their rifles not moments before. Each handshake was a minor contest of strength; one man cranking down on the other man’s hand just enough to let him know “I work for a living too.”
“Are we to understand that you’re fighting Mexicans over in Artesia?” the oldest of the three started off the conversation. Noah didn’t love the implied racism of the comment. While they all called the Southwest home, Noah was the only man who actually lived in the borderlands. He considered himself part Mexican and more than half the people he knew were Mexicans.
“Sir, we’re fighting a force made up of Mexican cartel and some Mexican army that they captured last week.” Noah emphasized the word “cartel,” but he doubted anything he said at this point would change their perception: as far as the Texans were concerned, the Mexicans had invaded America.
“And you want us to come kill those Mexicans at the big refinery over in Artesia?”
“Yessir.” Noah left it at that.
“We’re not much good for combat operations. Most of us served, but war is a young man’s game,” the oldest guy said, sharing his thoughts out loud. “But I understand that long-shooters are doing most of the work against the Mexicans. Is that right?”
“Correct,” Noah replied. “We need to destroy the fuel storage at Artesia. We believe the cartel took the refinery because they need gas. If we cut off their gas supply, we hope they’ll go home.”
The three old men nodded, taking their time. Thinking it through.
“We’ll talk about it amongst ourselves. We might be able to do a bit better than rifles. Wait here.”
The three turned and ambled back toward the farmhouse. The five went back to pointing their rifles at Noah.
Damned Texans. Noah smiled.
Chapter 30
Tavo Castillo
WalMart Supercenter, W Clark Drive and 26th Street, Artesia, New Mexico
Tavo picked out the guy running with the Texas flag and steadied his breathing.
Boom!
The blast of his SCAR Heavy rippled through Tavo’s gut. The sound was muted by his earmuffs and a dozen other gunshots erupting around him, but the concussion shared a tiny fraction of the death being dealt. The Texan instantly disappeared into the grass.
Like rats in the corn, the people fled the town of Artesia, New Mexico.
Tavo didn’t see the man fall, his sight picture through the 3x ACOG scope bobbed with the recoil. But he no longer saw the Texas flag, just a panic-stricken, helter-skelter mass of men, women and children fleeing across a mile-wide field between the edge of Artesia and the WalMart Supercenter. Tavo had positioned his men on the roof with large caliber rifles and he joined them in order to make sure it was done properly.
If he was going to keep the refinery, the town would have to be erased, and he couldn’t let the people bleed off into the desert. The townsfolk of Artesia had already proven they would persecute his soldiers to the last man. There’d been something undeniably vengeful about the attacks from the townspeople. They hadn’t been shooting at the refinery just to get the troops to leave—they were projecting hatred toward him and his men.
Hatred begets hatred, Tavo thought as he lined up on another man in the killing field.
Why would a man choose to carry a Texas state flag as he fled his home? These Americans were taking this fight personally, finding some strange vindication in the sacrifice of their petty lives.
So be it…
Alejandro had organized a six truck, ten tank detail to raze the town. The tanks mowed down any resistance with their M240 machine guns. Enemy snipers were obliterated with either the Ma Deuce or the main gun on the Abrams, depending on their cover. The refinery trucks came behind the armor and sprayed the homes and buildings with kerosene. Once the phalanx cleared each block, a team set it all on fire.
Luckily for Tavo, the wind blew from the south that morning so the smell of burning bodies drifted toward Roswell instead of doubling back on the refinery. A hundred years of Western settlers’ dreams were being incinerated like so many stalks of dried corn.
Boom!
Tavo took the top off a brown-haired woman’s head and her inertia carried her forward flat on her face into a hillock of dried grass. Her body actually bounced before coming to a final rest. There was no way Tavo could let the women disappear into the desert to support the men. This was no Red Dawn, where he hoped to occupy and pacify the town. Tavo needed that refinery, secure and unopposed. For two miles around the Pecos River Refinery, he would let no man or woman step without being cut down. His fields of fire had to be absolutely clear. He’d even ordered a bulldozer to go in behind the wall of flame that consumed the town and knock anything down higher than a meter.
Boom!
Tavo’s SCAR Heavy ripped a young mother away from her daughter, leaving the little girl running in circles, wailing. Tavo didn’t shoot the child. He’d ordered his men to let the children go. The more children that wandered the desert, the better. Most of them would die of thirst in a day or two anyway, but hopefully, some of the insurgents would put down their guns and care for them instead of putting holes in his refinery.
The bodies had begun to add up in the field. No one had even the slightest chance of crossing the no-man’s-land between the town of Artesia and the open desert unless Tavo’s men permitted it. Every adult pouring out of the sixteen block section of town would be killed. Tavo figured there were four hundred dead townspeople and another fifty or sixty kids mulling around. Tavo guessed the town of Artesia had a population of around 10,000 people. Seeing the four hundred or so dead in this field, Tavo wondered what 10,000 bodies actually looked like, scattered on the ground, with their possessions blowing in the stubble.
From what he could see from atop the WalMart Supercenter, it didn’t seem like something that confession might cover. Yes, he had heard a thousand times before how the cleansing blood of Christ would remove even the darkest sin.
“Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow…” or something to that effect.
A voice deep in his soul rumbled, inchoate. But Tavo thought maybe he understood the gist of the rumbling: don’t believe it, asshole.
It’d been a long, long day—reducing a small town to rubble and its residents to corpses. Men and women had sweated and toiled in the New Mexican sun for over a hundred years to raise up the town of Artesia, and it had required some effort to raze it from the surface of the earth.
It seemed fitting. Even with bullets and flame, obliterating a billion hours of human energy should require at least a bit of toil. It made Tavo think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With a single bomb, Americans had flattened those cities. It seemed like a sacrilege to Tavo—to put to death so much life force with so little effort. At least he and his men were completely exhausted after a day of mass murder. The night now came and wrapped around them, inviting unwanted reflection.
Ka-whump! The storage tank beside Tavo boomed with a deep thunk, followed by the sound of oil sluicing into the sand at high pressure. A full fifteen seconds later, the sound of a gunshot reached him, a woof in the wind.
“Hijo de puta!” Tavo screamed at the stars. Alejandro came running out of the dark.
“Estas bien, Tavo?”
“Where did that come from?” Tavo levered the headlamp around his neck and located the hole in the side of the massive storage tank. The edges of torn steel splayed outward instead of inward.
“Madre,” Alejandro swore. “That’s a .50 BMG round—and it must’ve tumbled because it impacted sideways. This bullet came a long, long way, Tavo. Maybe three miles or more. The hole’s big enough that the pressure inside the tank bent the sheeting back. I don’t think we can pound a stake into this one, Canoso,” Alejandro stated the obvious. The hole was as big as a baseball and the s
tream of gas shot out six feet from the tank before curving down to earth.
Woof. Woof…Woof. Woof.
The big gun—or guns—thrummed from the edges of the night, like meteors sent by an angry god.
“Order your stupid hijos de putas to turn off their flashlights. Now!” he hissed at Alejandro. “We’re giving them targets. Do it now!”
Tavo hoped that was the problem. He hoped those men, lying on the desert floor with revenge storming in their guts didn’t have night vision goggles. If they did, they could shoot all night at the refinery, no matter how blacked-out.
Woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof…
Tavo closed his eyes in grief. The perfect percussion of the fire could mean only one thing: some malignant son of a bitch was shooting at them with a large caliber machine gun. Probably the M2 Browning.
Even with only the vaguest idea where the refinery was on the horizon, a good M2 gunner could plunge hundreds of rounds into the facility. Fifty-caliber hunks of lead and copper would rain down upon them until the sons of bitches ran out of ammunition or until his men found the muzzle flashes and exterminated the gunner. Of course, the insurgents could stop shooting when Tavo’s soldiers got within a mile or so and displace. Then they would start all over again. Hypothetically, the insurgents could do this forever. They could shoot with their machine guns for three miles away until the refinery had so many gushing holes that Tavo’s men would struggle to sponge up even a bucket of gas.
Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind, Tavo heard the words on the dry wind, punctuated by the Ma Deuce machine gun.
You kill an American town, you set a different kind of monster in motion—the kind of monster whose hunger can never be satisfied. The kind of monster that feeds on rage.
A new beast roamed the desert, Tavo realized, and that beast licked up the brain matter of the heads Tavo had split in half. The beast fed upon the anguish of children, wandering and tear-streaked. That beast would hunt Tavo anywhere within two hundred miles of this place of fire and death. He had awakened the spirit of the filthy men who long ago settled this blighted land.
The tortured, solitary souls who dragged their hapless women into this desert a hundred years ago had also brought an anger so acrid that it nested into their cells and passed itself down from generation to generation. While polite American society enjoyed their modern luxuries, the beast had hidden, barely below the surface, like a demon not-dead but almost forgotten.
Now with civility blowing away like ash, and with corpses festering in the thousands, the beast had stirred, and now it would feed.
The kind of man shooting at Tavo had waited for dark to bring vengeance. This kind of man would rather die a million gruesome deaths than to allow the murder of women to go unanswered. Even as their flashlights blacked out around the refinery, Tavo knew in his heart that it was lost, if not tomorrow, then the next day.
They would be forced to abandon hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel, glistening like amber promise in the bowels of the storage tanks. The land of eastern New Mexico and West Texas had been poisoned, as if someone had dropped a sarin gas on the region. Hate permeated the soil and clung to Tavo’s clothing like a toxin.
In the dark of the New Mexico night, the stars blazing overhead, Tavo was forced to admit it: he had misjudged the Americans. He’d accepted a modern caricature of them as spoiled children. He’d forgotten that the blood of their forefathers would rise up in them and take hold.
The children of this land would revert to who they had been born to be. Old ways would spring up in the gaps left behind by Facebook and Fox & Friends. These were the children of the children of the great-great grandfathers who had been driven out of Europe because they couldn’t get along with other people. They were the prisoners, the bondservants, the religious zealots. They were the rebels and the Protestants. They were the cast-offs as Europe gentrified—the broken pieces in the assemblage of human machinery that would become modern England and France, Ireland and Denmark. These were the great, great, great grandchildren of people who could not get with the fucking program.
Tavo had thought to conquer them; and as fifty-caliber projectiles hammered into the iron skins of his fuel storage tanks from farther away than the human eye could even see, Gustavo Castillo felt the coming storm, the wages of his iniquity.
“Actual to Alejandro,” Tavo spoke into the radio in the top pocket of his six hundred dollar plate carrier vest. Not a single drop of blood or bit of dirt marred the multi-cam. He’d killed scores, maybe hundreds of people, and his clothing was still spotless.
“Go for Alejandro.”
“We leave tomorrow morning. Fill every tanker truck with gas. Do it tonight, before they dump it all on the ground.”
The radio went silent for a moment. Alejandro, undoubtedly needed a moment to absorb the implications of their defeat. “Good copy, Actual. Fill all tankers with gas and be ready to exfil in the morning. Alejandro out.”
The gas from the Artesia refinery would get them as far as Northern Arizona. To reach any farther, Tavo would have to unleash another kind of war. In truth, he’d probably already done so the moment he’d taken off the brown-haired woman’s head with his SCAR.
Twenty HEMTT tanker trucks and fifty Abrams tanks lined up for fuel in the dark. Even blacked-out, Tavo could see the twinkling of dash lights and the red glow of low-viz lights stretching over a kilometer.
The shimmering lights of the column reminded Tavo of a massive, rumbling snake—a modern incarnation of Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent god of the Aztecs. Being Catholic, Tavo hadn’t taken much stock in native Mexican mythology, but the immortal serpent god took up a home in his troubled thoughts.
While the tanks and tanker trucks lined up, clouds devoured the nighttime canopy of stars. The black night echoed Tavo’s mood. He felt like the head of the Aztec serpent, ever hunting and ever famished. He held limitless power in his hands, but he possessed a great weakness—a hunger that never slept.
He lost himself in the macabre image: the winding snake, the black night, the endless desert; the bursts of rifle fire as insurgents pierced his refinery with lead. The plumed serpent tensed its muscles and fortified its resolve. It would stop at nothing, consuming anyone and anything in its path.
This wasn’t the first appearance of the serpent in Tavo’s life. With it, he had clawed his way off of the streets of Guadalajara. It had wolfed down the bodies of the drug dealers whose territories Tavo had consumed. It had bled his wife’s family to attain social cover and anonymity. But for the last decade, the serpent had slept while Tavo digested his prey. He had slowly forgotten the single-minded appetite for supremacy that hibernated within him.
Now, on this soulless night, the serpent awoke in him. Like the monster within the Americans, the serpent would stop at nothing. It would feed and never capitulate. The mighty Quetzalcoatl would consume this land until the snows of the distant north marked the edge of its domain.
The mantle of brute fate descended on Tavo and all else fell away. The insurgents, like biting fleas, would be swept away by his tail. The hunger for gas, like a birthright granted, would be satisfied by his ruthless will. His daughter, like a wayward demigod, would be brought to heel.
Now fortified by the power of his dark will and the hunger of the serpent inside him, Tavo stormed toward his Humvee. “South, toward the fuel,” the serpent demanded.
In Mexico—in the shadow of fate—his daughter would meet her father for the first time.
Chapter 31
Noah Miller
Near the WalMart Supercenter, W Clark Drive and 26th Street, Artesia, New Mexico
“All the promises that I've broken,
All the times I've let them down,
You know them, like yesterday.
Still I hold the pain that makes me drown,
Still I cradle the guilt wove in the crown.”
The Crusader
The reek of cooked flesh poisoned the midday heat. Not a breath o
f wind stirred, yet Noah smelled the bodies of women and children, turned under and consumed by the flames that had reduced the town of Artesia into concrete rubble and black, human paste. Like a plate of eggs cooked on high heat for hours, thousands of human beings had been rendered into oily char—their dreams, their passions, their love, scorched from the earth by the sister-evil that had erased his family.
And Noah was to blame for both.
He looked out over the field of the dead, the colorless sun beating down from directly above. He resisted the urge to count them. He let go of that all-too-human compulsion to count the cost and regain control over his crushing remorse.
So-and-so many lives sacrificed in exchange for so-and-so many lives saved in the coming war. They died for a cause…
Bullshit. He would not diminish them—these people who were massacred—to satisfy his mental masturbation.
He had no idea how many dead lay across the weed-choked fields around the WalMart Supercenter. He only knew that they were men, women and children. Hundreds of them. Their beloved belongings swirled around them in the wind, like fragments of their past lives still flitting around their souls, unsure where to go next.
Noah despised himself. He hated how easy it was for him to bend the world to his will. He wallowed in the truth: how little thought he had given to the cost others would pay. This wasn’t the first time he had strolled in with his glowing blonde hair and ruddy good looks, and sprinkled perfumed confidence into a scheme that, at best, should’ve warranted grave consideration.
He literally hadn’t spared a single thought for what the cartel would do to the town of Artesia if the Texans and their fifty caliber rifles destroyed the refinery. It simply hadn’t crossed his mind.