Apocalyptic Beginnings Box Set

by M. D. Massey

  Afraid to answer, I kept it simple, just said, “No.”

  He leaned in farther, just inches from my face. His breath was unpleasant, like scrambled eggs and onions. He said, “Well, I have. Been through tours of duty in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I seen stuff I wish I could unsee: bodies blown apart by bombs and grenades, heads blown off, a few decapitations. But never seen no cannibalism. I’m hearing there are human bite marks on some of the corpses out there in the desert. Everything else just reminds me of the war: decapitated bodies, corpses in pieces. Now, you’re the journalist. You, the FBI, the CIA and the detectives are supposed to figure out what the hell happened out there. You go do your job, all right?”

  He waved his gun in the direction I had been headed. “Down about another half mile, you’ll see a parking area we set up for the press. You go on down there and park. From that point, you’re free to roam around, see what you can figure out.”

  I thanked him and pulled back onto the road.

  Weird they weren’t protecting the crime scene from free exploration by journalists. I was glad I got there early—before all the news vultures totally corrupted the evidence.

  The parking area was just a flat, dusty piece of desert off a wide shoulder of the road. Reminded me of parking lots for county fairs—stretches of open land temporarily set aside as magnets to suck in as many ticket-buying customers as possible. I thought back to a county fair I had attended when I was a little kid. It rained so hard, it turned the demolition derby track into a mud pit and the parking lot into a field with running streams. We sat under a tin roof, eating corn dogs and funnel cake dusted with powdered sugar, washing it all down with cups of soda the size of buckets, listening to the rain ping and splash on the roof above us. Hours passed until we were finally able to hike back to our car and drive it through the long, wet grass out onto the road. I remembered feeling a mixture of excitement over the fair food and fear in the pit of my stomach that we’d never get back home.

  I experienced much the same swirl of emotions as I pulled into the temporary parking lot out in the desert. Thrill of the hunt embarking on a mysterious news story. Plus blades of terror that the adventure might kill me.

  The parking area was tightly patrolled by armed soldiers. A young military guy with such a baby face, he seemed barely old enough to have graduated high school, asked for my ID. I produced it, and he told me where to park. Hmmm…just like the county fair, but with real weapons and no brochures.

  I asked where the bodies were discovered. The soldier waved his finger in a circle. “All around here. Take your pick. Just head on out in any direction.”

  Helicopters continued to circle overhead. The sky was alive with their sound, blades pounding the air like dinosaur-era birds.

  I stepped from my car, locked it and headed out into the desert.

  It wasn’t long until I came upon bodies. I reminded myself: strawberry jam, spaghetti, gelatinous candy worms, robotic flies—just think about that to get through seeing the bodies. I concentrated on taking photos and jotting down notes. As the analytical part of my brain took over, the nausea in the pit of my stomach calmed.

  What was I looking at? A mass murder or individual events by different perpetrators?

  As I leaned over and focused my camera, the decapitated head of a young Mexican girl looked up at me. She might have been staring at the helicopters, beseeching the metallic angels to rescue her or take her soul to Heaven. The look in those eyes: frightened beyond redemption, pleading, coming face-to-face with something out of her worst nightmares. Her hair was divided into braids. One braid was still held together by a little pink bow.

  A few yards away, I found what looked like her body. The second piece of a human puzzle that would interlock if correctly arranged. I turned and vomited onto the dusty landscape.

  When I recovered, I found myself staring at another body right next to the little girl’s—this one not decapitated, but missing chunks of flesh and muscle. A gaping hole where a cheek had been, teeth protruding as though offering a demented smile; blood leaking from a torn patch on the neck. This was an old woman, maybe the girl’s grandmother. She had been hidden by a tumbleweed the size of a car that went skittering off into the desert as the wind picked up.

  I snapped pictures. I had no answer for this. Had drug gangs sliced and diced these people, decapitated some of them? Had human coyotes brought these Mexicans into the desert, carelessly pushing them beyond their limits until they collapsed and were feasted upon by wild animals? Only forensics experts could figure it out, revealing the dark heart of those who had done this.

  I moved on, indenturing my camera to be my eyes. There was an infant—baby boy, half his face gone. A grandmother with gray hair and her forehead gone, chunks missing from her bloodied arms.

  Hours later, I trekked back out of the desert. In the parking area, I flashed my press ID to the soldiers and hopped back into my car. Tearing down the road as fast as I could without getting pulled over by the cops for speeding, I headed to the next village over. Radio reports were describing mass panic over there, stories of crazed human-sized animals having attacked in the night.

  The first thing I noticed as I approached the village was the hysteria. Villagers were gathered together, talking, waving their arms to demonstrate things. Their gestures were imbued with a wild frenzy. There were also a few adults who sat motionless on the ground, looking totally lost. An old man stared blankly. A few women and a young man wept. Children did what children always do: acted out whatever they had witnessed in games, trying to make sense of their world.

  I drove cautiously into the settlement. The poverty here was intense and pervasive. Shacks provided minimal shelter. Roofs, many made of metal, were disintegrating. Stucco had fallen from walls, lying on the ground in chunks. There were houses and trailers, sometimes a section of house built onto a trailer, a ramshackle attempt at expansion.

  The villagers eyed me suspiciously as I drove down their road. Eventually, I arrived at a kind of town square: basically a bone-dry strip of land at the far end of the encampment where a group of people had gathered to talk. Dust flew up into the air as people milled around, kicking at the dirt with boots, flip-flops, whatever they had slipped into before stepping outside or simply with bare feet.

  As I parked, a group of men with five o’clock shadow on their faces and hunting rifles in their hands, jacked up on paranoia as though it were a hormone circulating through their bloodstreams, marched over to my car. These men wore boots and grease-stained jeans and flannel shirts. There was a gleam in all their eyes, as though spoiling for a fight. They aimed to defend their turf.

  I stepped out of my car. My ID already in my hands, I lifted my arms up and showed them my journalist credentials.

  They backed off a bit. With these guys, I knew I needed to become part of their pack to gain admittance to the story I was chasing.

  I ventured the first words. “I’m a reporter. I’m hoping to help you with whatever happened here last night. I’ve heard rumors that people were attacked by something vicious last night.” I took a chance on something more: “I don’t see any police presence here, but there’s a ton of militarized police out in the desert right next to your border with the U.S. Helicopters. SWAT teams from both the U.S. and Mexico. Do you know why no one’s out here?”

  One of the men looked me square in the eye. “Police don’t come here unless they’re aiming to arrest one of us. We’re not valued by the authorities much.”

  He turned his back and waved for me to follow. We walked down the dusty road that ran through the village, entering a white stucco shack with an old washing machine and a rusted car in the front yard. To brighten things up: a few rainbow-colored pinwheels stuck into a cactus garden, spinning in the wind.

  The guy leading the way pushed open a splintered front door, once painted turquoise, now covered in turquoise chips.

  As we stepped into the house, he yelled, “Hey, Ros-aaaa, we got a reporter here. Yo
u should talk to him.”

  An old woman swept aside a bed-sheet curtain to enter the dim, greasy kitchen where we stood. Her shoulders were hunched over; her gray hair had been pulled back into a loosely organized bun. She peered at us through cataract-laced eyes.

  Shuffling over to a green-and-white-speckled Formica table, Rosa sat down. She motioned for us to join her.

  I sat down next to her on a seat covered with cracked green plastic, its foam insides busting through. A couple of the guys remained standing, guns at the ready should anything go wrong.

  In a confidential tone, I said, “Last night and early this morning, I was out in the desert on both sides of the border: in both the United States and Mexico. I saw horrible things, inhuman things.” I paused, swallowed, tried to gauge how much the old woman already knew and how much she could handle. Gazing into her clouded eyes, I continued, “There are decapitated bodies and bodies with chunks of flesh torn out.”

  Rosa didn’t blink. She squeezed a long, fragile sigh from congested lungs. “I know. It is the chupacabras. They are back.”

  Not expecting her to name the thing that had happened, I simply asked, “Chupacabras?”

  In an annoyed tone, she replied with a question, “You have never heard of these before?”

  I shook my head no.

  Rosa explained, “The chupacabras have been tormenting our village for decades. They’re large, standing at least as high as a man. They have black, empty eyes that suck the willpower from their victims. Spikes run along the backs of their bodies, from their heads all the way down to the ends of their tails. They smell foul, enough to gag you. They descend on villages like something out of the pits of Hell. What they do is pure evil. They suck the blood out of livestock. Five years ago, they slaughtered most of the goats in our village. Bled them dry and devoured parts of them. We nearly starved.”

  I asked her, “Do you feel this has happened again? The same way?”

  Rosa answered, “Yes. Except they’ve moved beyond livestock to humans. They have no conscience. If you want to see what happened, let my boys take you and show you.” Then she stood up, tottered across the room and disappeared behind the bed-sheet curtain.

  So the men behind me were brothers. Rosa must have given her permission, as the matriarch of the family, for them to share village secrets with me.

  The guy who had led the way in pointed his gun at me, told me to step outside.

  The sunlight blinded me after the greasy dimness of the house.

  Introductions were brief: Jesús Fernando, Ángel Rafael, and David Arturo. Their last name: Núñez Ortega.

  Jesús was the leader, directing the way with his gun. Lean body, sad brown eyes, whiskered cheeks. Ángel and David were shorter, just as lean and unshaved, muscles carved by hard work beneath rugged sun-baked skin.

  As we stepped onto the village road, I noticed children and goats hanging around front yards and porches, supervised by adults. Most front doors were closed. A few were open.

  Three doors down from the Núñez Ortega family, we turned into a dirt driveway lined with battered, rusted cars, hulks from a generation past. The building itself was another shack, white paint peeling from wooden boards. The door, once red, was now a concoction of desert dust, black grease and faded red pigment.

  The three brothers pulled rags from their pockets and tied them around their nose and mouth. As we entered the house, I became overcome by the rancid, horrible smell. I dashed outside, threw up over the side of the porch. While I gulped the fresh air outside and tried to recover, Ángel came outside, handed me a stained handkerchief. He said, “Hey, sissy boy, use this.” He smiled, revealing a bunch of missing teeth; then regained his serious, worried expression.

  Tying the scarf around my nose and mouth, I realized it was permeated with the rancid smell of tobacco and bacteria, but nothing as bad as inside that house.

  Jesús waited in the kitchen. Dirty dishes had been abandoned in the sink, left to rot in soaking water, bubbles now turned to ugly brown froth. A dim yellow bulb hanging from a chain over the table provided the only light other than the vague ghost of daylight filtering in through wispy plaid curtains. The kitchen table, like the one in the Núñez Ortega home, was Formica, beat-up vintage from the fifties, this one yellow-and-white speckled, chips missing at the corners, steel frame tarnished. This flat surface, this simple table: the perfect symbol for Mexican poverty. Subsistence life in the dust bowl, family meals eked out of a barren soil, shared on furniture tossed away by the U.S.A. Family dreams discussed over the breaking of bread about how best to escape across a treacherous border into the land of dreams and plenty where people can toss out Formica tables with abandon.

  There were uneaten meals on the table. People had left in a hurry.

  Except for two who had not made it out alive.

  The bedroom off the kitchen was a box of horrors. Blood smeared on the walls. Two little girls in tattered pink nightgowns covered in blood, holes where their stomachs had been. Eviscerated. Flies buzzed around the girls’ eyes which had become locked into wide-open expressions of terror.

  The girls reminded me of Sophie, a couple of years older, probably twins. Tears rolled down my cheeks. In a trembling voice I struggled to master, I asked if I could take photographs as part of the investigation.

  Jesús shook his head yes. He added, “Don’t mention it to my mother or anyone else in the older generation, though. They believe photographs steal the souls from those who are photographed. We’ve suffered enough grief. Don’t make our elders fear that those who died are now without their souls.”

  Feeling like a debased paparazzi, I snapped lots of pictures. I tried to turn off my brain, just become one with the camera and capture the story.

  After I had taken photos from every possible angle, we left, soles of our boots echoing against the wooden boards of the abandoned house. I asked why the place hadn’t been closed off as a crime scene.

  Ángel said, “We didn’t contact anyone. The police here are in cahoots with the drug gangs. We don’t want that kind of help. If you can get the story out in the U.S., maybe we’ll get the help we need. Till then, we bury our own dead.”

  Stepping outside, I realized the street had grown quiet. Everyone had gone indoors. The only sounds were helicopters off in the distance and a few ravens calling out against a cloudless blue sky. Even the clouds had fled.

  Next, Jesús took us to a trailer home, threadbare curtains hanging in the windows. We went around back. There, the same horrible things had been done to goats that had been done to the twin girls: stomachs ripped open, flesh slashed and ripped into shreds.

  That day still haunts my dreams. House after house, yard after yard, seven locations in total, all eligible crime scenes, humans and animals slaughtered in unimaginable ways.

  At sunset, I drove out from the village. The sky had been decorated with gold and pink, perfect princess colors for a baby girl’s nursery, as though the painter had known nothing of the horrors below. Darkness threatened to rise all along the horizon, shadows creeping along the distant mountains.

  I stopped at a ramshackle store with a blinking Liquor sign in front, grabbed a bottle of el Jimador Blanco tequila before continuing on to find a place to stay the night.

  It was actually quite easy to find sleeping quarters in Reynosa. Lots of hotels, including a number of Holiday Inns. I picked one of those. After the extreme poverty I’d seen, it jarred me a bit to have instant access to a fitness center, pool and hut tub, Internet and cable TV, not to mention a restaurant inside the hotel where one could get authentic Mexican food for breakfast, lunch and dinner, room service if requested. I checked in, was handed the key to a comfortable room.

  Sitting down at my laptop to import photographs and write the story I would send to Alice for The Magnifying Glass, I opened the bottle of tequila, poured some into a shrink-wrapped plastic glass that came with the hotel room. Tossing back shots, I stared at the haunting images coming out of my cam
era.

  The photographs of the two little girls disturbed me the most. I promised to call Claire and Sophie sometime the next day before my little girl’s bedtime. I tapped a message into my cell phone: Hey, Claire. Pretty tough scene down here. Long hours. I’ll try to call you and Sophie tomorrow before her bedtime. Love you!

  A couple of minutes later, a reply: Love you, too. I was actually asleep. Long day. Sophie ran me ragged. High-energy kid.

  I smiled. And typed: Sleep well. Love you to the moon and back.

  My phone pinged. Love you more.

  The texts lifted my spirits a bit. Two hours later, I finished the article and sent it off to Alice; then drank tequila until a cottony buzz obliterated some of the bloody images floating through my brain. What the hell had killed and eviscerated all those people and animals?

  Stumbling over to the bed, I collapsed onto the top quilt and slept there until the alarm on my cell phone woke me. 7:00 AM. Checked my phone for messages. Damn. Four messages from Alice and I had slept through all of them. The final one: OK, then. You’re sleeping or something? Cable news will be running with your story first thing in the morning. We’re publishing it in The Magnifying Glass of course, but it’s bigger than us. Congratulations. You nabbed a big one.

  My head throbbed. My stomach lurched. Horrific memories of the eviscerated, bloody bodies flashed through the tequila soup of my brain, along with images of chupacabras sucking the willpower from people with their empty black eyes. Behind every legend there’s usually an element of truth. Today, I hoped to discover some of that truth in the desert along the U.S.-Mexico border.

  I flipped on cable news. Bad weather. Floods in some states. Droughts in other states. Then Governor Strickland, once again, had center stage. Wearing his signature cowboy hat, shaking his jowls and glaring into the camera with his beady brown eyes, he was at full rant. “The President absolutely refuses to protect our fine upstanding citizens in the U. S. of A. He and all his elitist buddies, so many high-powered liberals in Hollywood and the tech industry, are working day and night to help Africa. Africa! The land of Ebola and terrorism. Why are they working so hard to help Africans while neglecting people in their own country? I’ll tell you why. Our government’s filled with infiltrators and saboteurs. They’re setting things up for our enemies to attack us. With the porous borders they’ve created, anything can get through: illegals, Ebola, weapons, anything…”