“Are you out of your goddamn mind? I barely killed one of these crazy fuckers, and in case you failed to notice, I managed to get myself evicted from a perfectly good skin-suit doing it. How the hell am I supposed to take on three?”
“Actually, that brings me to correction the second,” Lilith said, pursing her perfect lips a moment before continuing. “I’m afraid in light of recent events, we’re no longer merely targeting those three.”
“Come again?”
“What I’m saying, Collector, is it’s been decreed that you’re to kill all nine.”
5.
When I kicked open the flimsy screen door that marked the entrance to the dingy, nameless bar, the doorframe parallelogrammed a moment, its joints squealing in protest. My shadow projected against a field of sunset-orange as I stepped across the threshold. Then the rusted hinge caught and slammed it shut behind me with a nail-on-chalkboard creak.
A bracket hung above the door, the kind you’d hang a bell off of to announce the arrival of new customers. But all that hung from it was a frayed piece of twine, knotted at both ends. The topmost knot was a frizzy-haired bun jutting through the bracket. The twine was kinked above the bottom knot — thanks, I’d imagine, to the erstwhile bell — so that it hung off to one side, the idle strands poking through the bunny-hole to form the knot and feathering down to nothing just below. It put me in mind of a strung-up voodoo doll. I wondered if somewhere in the world there was a full-sized hanged man to match.
The absence of a bell didn’t matter much. The door itself announced me fine. But even if it hadn’t, the three men inside the bar — for they were all men, and all burly, stress-jumpy, and armed, shooting pool beneath a ceiling fan that shook, palsied, as it spun — would no doubt have noticed me. This was their bar, after all, or, at least, their employer’s, and to own the truth, it wasn’t even a real bar. A careful observer would note that no one ever came or went from the property but for they and their cohorts, and the neon Open sign might well have been dead when they purchased it, for all the use it got. The bar itself sat empty and unused — no old-timers thousand-yarding the bottoms of their glasses, no dolled-up women preened and plucked and perched atop the barstools in front of it, eyeing their lipstick in the soot-streaked, dirt-specked Sauza mirror mounted crooked on the wall. The men here were not interested in the women or the drink that any bar worth frequenting promised, or at least heartily suggested. What they were interested in was underneath. A system of tunnels, leading deep into the desert in four directions from this squat adobe structure plopped smack in the middle of hot dry nowhere, each popping out a mile or two past the sad, desperate mud-caked trickle that is the Rio Grande. See, this glorified tent of mud and rough-hewn beams sat smack in the middle of a small, landlocked peninsula of Mexico that jutted northward into Texas thanks to the meandering line of the river that marked their border, which meant that the United States lay just north and east and west from where I stood. The men inside the bar were here to see the tunnels leading there were well-protected — and the local officials who stopped by well-bribed — so they’d stay open to serve as pipeline for the parade of drugs, guns, and strung-out little girls the Xolotl Cartel provided to the fat wallets and bottomless appetites of their American neighbors.
Come to think of it, it might have made more sense to possess one of the aforementioned local officials. Then maybe they wouldn’t be looking at me so bug-eyed for showing up unannounced. Eyes wide in purple-gray hollows. Sallow skin, sickly-hued and grease-shiny from lack of sleep, pulled taut across their cheeks and their wifebeater-bared shoulders. Muscle-corded arms rigid at their sides, fingers splayed and twitching as each in turn calculated the odds of getting to their piece before I could put them down.
Oh, did I not mention I was carrying an assault rifle? Well, I was. Which might explain these fellas’ wiggins.
It was a Mexican-Army-issue FX-05 Xiuhcoatl carbine, which made sense, on account of my new meat-suit being Mexican Army, though he and I were in civilian clothes at the moment on account of I’m not completely stupid. He was a dark-skinned, wiry thirty-something man with hard eyes, a black bottle-brush mustache, and a jagged scar that traced his cheekbone from right eye to age-lined dimple. Given all he’d seen in his years at the front lines of the drug war, it’s hard to believe that dimple came from smiling. His gun was a boxy, industrial, matte-black carbon-fiber motherfucker with thirty rounds in its magazine, and though it was capable of going fully automatic, at present it was set to three-round bursts. If it weren’t, and I were forced to pull the trigger, the magazine would likely be empty before the first shell casing hit the ground, and these lovely gentlemen would wind up a fine paste. Since I needed them alive, three rounds a pop was as much stopping power as I was willing to risk, and even still, I was aiming for their knees.
These men were not Brethren. But I had reason to believe they might know where I could find one. And that reason’s name was Lilith.
“Take a look at this,” she said to me back on that beach in Guam, producing a paper from God-knows-where. It’s disconcerting, I’ll tell you, spending one’s days with beings whose physical form is simply a projection of how they wish to look. From where I’m sitting, Lilith doesn’t look a day over thirty, her flawless porcelain skin on ravishing display thanks to a bikini so small that if it were made of postage stamps, it wouldn’t get a four-page letter around the block. And yet she’s been around since the dawn of time, since Paradise was a for-serious place and not a pitch to sell time-shares, and somewhere on her person, she’d secreted an entire fucking newspaper. Best to not ask where, says I. Point is, out it came just after she said I’d have to make with all the Brethren-killing as if she’d been just waiting for the moment, and when she saw me squinting by the pale light of the rising moon as I tried to read it, she snapped her fingers and conjured a steady orange flame. It gave off no heat, and despite the ocean breeze it never flickered, so my guess was, it wasn’t a magic trick so much as showing off. A flame appeared because Lilith elected to project one, not because she’d conjured fire.
Come to think of it, that’s a way cooler magic trick than if she’d simply conjured fire.
The paper was a copy of the Houston Chronicle, dated three days prior. The top story was about yet another bloody border-town body dump, courtesy of the Mexican drug war. You know the kind; we’ve all read about them. Heads and hands removed. Bodies left someplace public, in this case, the busy north-south route of US Highway 83, where it jags eastward along the border, to send a message. No witnesses. No IDs on the vics. Gruesome, senseless, and unfortunately these days, a dime a dozen.
I scanned past it, looking for whatever it was Lilith wanted me to find. But when I made to flip the page, she shook her head. “No, that’s the one,” she said.
I skimmed. Missed the point. Four columns on the front page — complete with lurid shots of tarp-draped bodies and pavement stained red-brown — and another eight or so pic-free buried in the middle of the “A” section. I combed through a second time, Lilith watching lips pursed. Then I folded it over in frustration and said, “This thing’s five thousand words long, Lily, how about you just give me the bullets? Starting with why the hell I should give a shit about a bunch of rival dirt-bag drug-runners slaughtering each other?”
“Well, for one,” she said, clearly annoyed I hadn’t deduced what she wanted me to, “those victims weren’t gun-thugs or drug-runners. Their clothes were tattered, filthy. They weren’t armed. And what little’s left of them suggests malnourishment and poor health-care, likely stretching back to birth. They were illegal immigrants, who’d probably paid a pretty penny for the privilege of being smuggled safely across the border, likely utilizing the same pipeline as the cartels, sure, but that alone is not enough to make them a target to a rival cartel. For two, you’ll note the bodies were discovered on the US side of the border. Any cartel smart enough to stay in business is too smart to drag the US military into their fight with so brazen and
foolhardy a move as that; to a one, their high-profile body dumps have all taken place south of the Rio Grande. And for three, those heads and hands? They weren’t sawed off to prevent identification, though I’m sure that’s what the perpetrator wanted anyone who happened by them to think. They were gnawed off. Eaten, perhaps. As, my friends among the Fallen tell me, were their hearts, though that fact didn’t make the paper. Purposefully withheld, I’m sure, by authorities too foolish to realize the perpetrator or perpetrators of this horrific act are beyond the reach of their justice system, not to mention beyond their ken.”
I fell silent a moment, listening to the waves roll in, while I digested what she told me. When I finally spoke, it was to say, “Whatever did this ate their fucking heads?”
“Maybe,” she said. “But I doubt it. The flesh and bone would provide little by way of sustenance for a creature subsisting on the life-force of living beings, though I will admit that cheek meat, well-braised, is quite delicious. Brain, heart, and blood are all far better. Eyes, too. Spinal column will do in a pinch. So my guess is, the hearts were consumed fresh, and the heads removed so that the brains might be eaten at the perpetrator’s leisure. Though skulls are difficult to break open, they are quite well-suited as storage vessels for the gray matter inside, and cellared properly, they will keep.”
“Jesus,” I said, more to myself than to her. Her utter lack of revulsion at the topic of eating human heads and hearts chilled me as thoroughly as the gruesome acts themselves. Yet another reminder that, despite her appearances, Lilith was pretty fucking far from human.
“Mind your tongue, Collector.” As if I’m the one whose utterances offended.
“I’m just saying. There’s gotta be someone else who can do this.”
Lilith sighed. “There’s a war on, Collector. Each of us is being asked to do our part. I would have thought ridding humankind of these creatures who’ve been feeding off the living for centuries would appeal to that pesky conscience of yours. You’ll be eliminating untold evil, preventing no shortage of human suffering. I won’t deny the assignment is high-risk, but even if I could convince the powers that be to reconsider, what are the chances your next task would prove so palatable? This is your chance to make a difference in the world, to fight the good fight for a change. See it as the gift it is, would you? For once, just be a good little soldier, and do what you’re told.”
She was right. I knew she was. But that didn’t mean I had to like it.
“So this thing,” I asked hesitantly, wanting yet not wanting to know the answer, “is it one of the members of the Brethren the Fallen moved against?”
“You mean does it know you’re coming? No. Its very existence is, at present, my own conjecture, pieced together based upon the evidence at hand. And I’ve only the vaguest of notions where you might find it. But I am certain that I’m right. And if I am, this is one of several that dropped off hell’s radar centuries ago; gone mad and feral, we’d assumed, since until recently we had no idea they could die. It seemed to me you might have better luck in hunting a quarry unsuspecting of your approach. The first time out, at least.”
“Okay, then, how do I find this as yet hypothetical quarry?”
Lilith nodded toward the newspaper once more. “There’s another story in that issue I’ve reason to believe is connected to the bodies found on 83.”
“What’s that?”
“Check the police blotter.”
This one was easier to spot. Seems at three AM the morning prior to the paper’s release, a known lieutenant of the Xolotl Cartel by the name of Javier Guerrera who currently sat at seventh on Mexico’s Most Wanted List wandered blood-soaked and panicked into a police station in McAllen, Texas, babbling nonsense and insisting he be locked up. Local PD kindly obliged. Guerrera now awaited extradition, said the piece, at the Willacy Detention Center in Raymondville, Texas — the largest detention center in the country for illegal immigrants, which also functions as a high-security prison for the most dangerous and recidivistic of border-breaching offenders.
Beside the blurb ran two pictures, one taken from his Wanted profile, and the other a mug shot taken upon his arrest. In the former, his hair was black as Texas crude. In the latter, it was white from root to tip, though the man beneath the shock of white couldn’t have been more than twenty-seven.
It made me wonder what he’d seen, and where exactly he’d seen it.
So to Raymondville I went.
The mission was a delicate one. They don’t let people wander willy-nilly into a maximum-security prison, so my preferred method of possessing a recently dead meat-suit wasn’t gonna cut it. Guerrera was in isolation on account of his position in the Xolotl Cartel — both to ensure his safety prior to extradition, and to guard against those who might wish to break him out. So to get to him I needed access. I needed credentials. I needed a ride no one would dare question if he asked to speak to Guerrera.
I figured the warden would do just fine.
Distance isn’t a factor when body-hopping. To leap from one vessel to another, my kind must travel through the Nothingness of the In-Between, which is both infinite and membrane thin. So to us, the trip’s the same whether it’s five feet or five thousand miles.
What we do need is a target, a person in mind. Something to stretch our consciousness toward, and latch onto once we find it. And I’m not talking, like, conjure an image of George Clooney in your head and blammo — you’re there. You need a location to fix on as well, or no dice.
Which is why, once the sun came up over Guam and I stumbled, stomach churning and head throbbing, from the beach, my board shorts grit-sticky from booze-sweat and sand, I popped five damn dollars into a payphone and gave ol’ Willacy a ring, and asked to speak to the man in charge.
They don’t call him the warden, as it turns out, because to their mind, Willacy isn’t a prison. It’s a “privately managed detention facility,” and he’s the goddamned CEO. I wonder if the inmates — or “detainees,” or “involuntary guests,” or whatever the hell they call them — would agree. Maybe they could register their nomenclature-based complaints on their comment cards once their stay was finished.
We never call things what we mean anymore. The obtuse language somehow makes the sharp edges and harsh angles of life easier to swallow. A candy-coated shard of jagged glass that’s sweet on the public’s tongue before it tears apart their insides. A pat on the back with one hand while the other steals our wallets or our souls. And people are all too willing to let it happen, because any insulation from the big and scary that surrounds them is welcome, no matter how obvious a lie it proves to be.
Whatever they call the guy, they were understandably reluctant to patch me through to him, at least until I mentioned I had information on a planned break-out for one of their inmates. The corporate shill manning the phone — who called himself a “public liaison” when he answered — didn’t sound like he believed me. Maybe if I called it an “unplanned departure,” he would have. Instead I offered up a name — Javier Guerrera. And a time — midnight local.
Amazing what name-dropping a Xolotl Cartel lieutenant will do. Because if there’s one thing a big, soulless corporation recognizes, it’s another big, soulless corporation. And make no mistake, the only thing keeping the Xolotl Cartel off the Fortune 500 is the nature of the products they peddle.
The warden answered without so much as identifying himself, instead barking a gruff, “Who is this? Where are you calling from?” And I’m pretty sure, given the lag time before I was connected, there were a dozen or so people listening in on the call, some no doubt intent on tracing its source.
Let ’em, I thought. Ain’t a security camera around with a sight-line on this payphone, and in the unlikely event they manage to track down the kid whose body I’m tooling around in, all the way in little old Guam, anything he tells ’em is gonna make him sound all cuckoo crazypants.
Instead of answering him, I bleated: “Oh, God — they’re here!” and droppe
d the receiver. And then, mentally fixing on the voice I’d just heard on the other end of the receiver, in some bland office in some bland facility in a broad, flat patch of brown and gray just off Route 77 in Texas, I threw myself at him with all I had.
For a moment, there was a tinny, echoing nothing — like dropping off from anesthesia — and next thing I knew, I was in a tipped-over faux-leather office chair, tasseled loafers aimed soles-to-ceiling, and the back of my head smarting something fierce from where it smacked against the institutional vinyl tile floor. Been happening more and more of late — the body-hopping was getting easier, the force previously required now enough to knock folks back. Even the subsequent meat-suit nausea hasn’t been so bad, I think. But as soon as the thought arced across my mind, Mr. CEO here’s stomach revolted, and I barely made it to the dented metal trash bin beside his desk before his lunch of enchiladas came up.
It was just past 7am in Guam when I dropped my quarters into the payphone. That made it 4pm or so Texas-time. Sunlight slanted oven-hot through vinyl-blinded windows. Beyond them, ten enormous pill-shaped Kevlar tents studded the three football-fields of fence-looped gray dirt in two rows of five, with paved paths bleached pale gray linking them together like a circuit board. At the outside end of every oblong structure, nearest the perimeter fence, was a small paved yard — some empty, some milling with brown-skinned men. If there were women, they weren’t housed within sight of my new meat-suit’s office, which appeared to be housed in a low-slung building of more quotidian design than the tents outside — less funky marshmallow prison, more dull-as-dirt industrial park.
I couldn’t help but notice it was surrounded by razor-wire just the same.
Ortiz. Larry Ortiz, so said the nameplate on his desk, at any rate. If I had to guess, I’d say the Ortiz was to appease the critics of the facility, who claimed its very existence was racially motivated — and the Larry was to appease the white-faced white-hairs who kept on funding it and didn’t want anybody “too ethnic,” in their parlance, to be in charge. A portly man in a too-tight dress shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, and iron-creased jeans. The lone picture on his desk showed two smiling kids, a smiling wife, and a round, graying, florid man in a Stetson and cowboy boots, a chambray shirt and jeans.
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