Sacrifices

by Jamie Schultz

  The three of them piled into the front seat—the only seat, actually. “An El Camino?” Genevieve asked. “You find this in a museum?”

  Stash ignored her. A couple more guys jumped into the back, and Spoon took off, following what had now become a shitty, impromptu convoy of sorts, like something out of The Road Warrior.

  The lead car picked up speed, and the three behind leaped forward after it. A middle-aged woman covered her ears and went inside her house. Genevieve scribbled out a drawing for Stash, put a drop of her blood on it, and dragged the jagged metal of the pen clip across the back of his hand. He glanced down but didn’t say anything, and she finished the working. “Keep it in your left pocket,” she said.

  After a couple of blocks, Genevieve saw the remains of the drawing Anna had photographed. The four big symbols toward the middle had been scratched out, and the perimeter was marked with streaks of what looked like dried blood. The convoy rolled past at about forty miles an hour. Amazingly, nobody had started shooting yet. Somehow Genevieve had got it in her head that the men in the cars ahead would be blasting away, blowing holes in everything standing, but not a single shot had been fired so far.

  This is crazy. Children could get shot. Old people. Anybody. Even these stupid fucking kids. After the awful scene at Sobell’s, she’d seen enough gun violence to last her a lifetime. This was going to be ugly and bloody. There had to be a way to stop it, Genevieve thought, but nothing came to mind.

  A single sharp crack of gunfire sounded up ahead.

  * * *

  The first shot bloomed into dozens as Rogelio Moreno burst into the house. Startled, Anna dropped her fork and jumped to her feet. Abas stood also, unsteady on his feet, worry etched in the lines of his face.

  “What’s happening, Rogelio?” he asked.

  Moreno ran for the small living room. He shoved the couch aside and began pulling at floorboards. “They broke the wards,” he said. “They’re coming. The Flats, the Eighteeners. Others. The kids are holding ’em, but . . .” He shook his head. The floorboards came up and he threw them aside, where they clattered against the wall. He reached in the hole and pulled out guns. A couple of AK-47s, Anna guessed, just about as illegal as it was possible to get short of a rocket launcher.

  “Bullets won’t stop this,” Abas said, even as the shooting outside picked up in intensity. How far away were they? A block? More?

  “Then tell me what will,” Moreno said, slamming a clip home.

  “I can stop this. It . . . it will cost.”

  “Burn the bones, I don’t care. Dead fuckin’ relatives never did me no good anyway.”

  “Dead relatives aren’t enough. This will be worse.”

  A window blew out with a crash, sending glass all over the kitchen. Right where Anna had been standing.

  “Yeah. Fine,” Moreno said.

  Abas, surprisingly, turned to Anna. “Go to the bedroom closet. There’s a leather satchel. Bring it to me. Now, before people die.”

  This is none of my business, Anna thought, but she’d put herself here, and she didn’t want more dead on her conscience. She moved, even as the priest began removing objects from the pockets of his robe.

  The satchel took no time to find, and she paused as she picked it up. Was the relic in here? She could be gone with it in moments.

  And people will die.

  She couldn’t help it, though—she opened the bag. Inside, taped to the leather, were bristly things lined up in rows, as well as small vials of blood. Each had been labeled, and when she saw the words LI’L FREAK written in looping letters, she understood. Not bristles, she realized. Locks of hair.

  She closed the bag and rushed back to the living room. The table had already been pushed to the wall by the couches, the rug rolled back to reveal a circle carved in the battered pine boards of the floor. White wood shone against the wear and dirt and age of the rest of the floor—the carving was new, relatively.

  Moreno pulled off his shirt, and Anna gasped. His chest, back, and shoulders were a webwork of wounds. Dozens of thin cuts, scabbed over, traced a gruesome, incomprehensible path over his torso. Magic, and worse than the normal kind, which seldom required more than a few drops.

  Moreno lowered himself to the floor, arranging himself in the circle with an assuredness that told Anna he’d done this many times before. The cuts, no doubt, had come from other sessions of the kind. There would be more now. Anna felt a stirring excitement, almost sexual in nature, at the thought. That’s not me, either, she thought. She wanted to throw up.

  The priest had produced a skeletal hand from somewhere—his robe, he keeps it in his fucking robe—and he laid it on the floor at Moreno’s head.

  “The satchel,” he said.

  Anna handed it to him. He pulled the contents out with a hurried precision, placing locks of hair and drops of blood in various locations on Moreno’s body. Then he got out a knife. Not a pocketknife or one of those oversize survival knives, the KA-BAR things Nail liked, but an actual dagger, double-edged, inscribed along its length with crap Genevieve would probably have recognized.

  At the first slash, Anna turned away. Not out of revulsion but the opposite—a fascination, a hunger had surged inside her at the sight of blood, and the part of her still capable of good sense didn’t want to feed it.

  Wait. Isn’t this what I’m here for? The bones, the priest—to think now that this wasn’t all tied in with Sobell’s goal was too much of a stretch to be credible anymore. She sure as shit couldn’t figure out what was going on here, but she knew people who might.

  She turned back to the grisly scene, trying not to revel in it, and got out her phone. The priest was bent over Moreno’s body, tracing bloody lines that to Anna’s eyes looked far more than skin deep. Sweat dripped off the end of his nose as his incantation rose and fell. He wasn’t paying her the slightest attention.

  She took four pictures before realizing that video was really the way to go here. The drawing was only part of the story. The motions and the chant told the rest. Genevieve might be able to make sense of them, and if not, she’d find somebody else. She started recording.

  Gunshots sounded outside. Somebody yelled.

  Moreno bucked as if struck, his head snapping to one side. He grunted in pain. The priest chanted louder. Invisible blows seemed to rain down on Moreno’s body—Anna could see his flesh pucker and ripple at the points of impact. The grunts became screams. Bone cracked. Something invisible slammed into Moreno’s forehead, and his head bounced off the floor. Purple-black bruises began appearing over his torso and arms.

  Anna was torn. Half of her felt sick and horrified, and the other half wanted to watch with avid excitement while Moreno was pounded into mush. With difficulty, she squelched the latter.

  She put her phone away.

  “You have to stop this,” she said. “You’re killing him.”

  The priest didn’t look up, but he did interrupt his chanting. “Look at him. He’s not restrained. He’s here because he wants to be—it’s all we can do now. You should go.” He resumed chanting without a breath after the word “go.”

  Anna stood, helplessly watching.

  * * *

  Genevieve craned her neck as she tried to see what the hell was going on ahead. There had been that single shot, then a fusillade, and then a big maroon car had barreled out of a side street and plowed into the lead car. Gant Street might not have been expecting this, but somebody had been prepared.

  Stash stuck his torso out the window as the convoy came to a halt. “What the fuck? Move!” he shouted, to no effect. Genevieve couldn’t see much from here, but she could see enough to know that the accident with the red car had blocked most of the street. Tires squealed, but the wreck ahead didn’t move. One of the cars started backing up to try to go around, but the others vomited out their passengers as more than a dozen men decided to bring th
e fight on foot.

  Stash and Spoon both got out. Genevieve followed, cursing under her breath.

  They made it up to the wreck, keeping low. The driver of the red car was dead, his body riddled with bullets, but he’d made a hell of a mess blocking the road.

  Just a kid, Genevieve thought as she glimpsed his face. Jesus, they’re all just kids. Another barrage of shots sounded, and Stash pulled her down behind the wreck. Most of the men crouched here, temporarily cowed.

  “Where they at?” Stash asked, in nobody’s particular direction.

  “Back there,” one of the younger kids said, waving something that looked like a low-rent Uzi toward a couple of cars parked in front of a little shack of a house. It was just past the intersection—Genevieve could hit it with a thrown rock. Bullet holes peppered the cars and the front of the building, but as Genevieve popped her head up to get a better look, two guys took shots at her. She flattened herself to the ground, heart pounding in her ears, an inane thought echoing in her head: nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result. Where had she heard that? she wondered as she pressed her face to the dirt. Churchill said it, she thought. Fuck that guy. She felt like puking.

  “How many?” Stash asked.

  “Four, for now.”

  “Four,” he said, gasping. “We can take four.”

  “What are you thinking?” Genevieve asked.

  “We rush ’em when I say ‘go.’”

  “That’s insane,” Genevieve said, but the guys around her were nodding. “This isn’t fucking Normandy.”

  But Stash was already assigning roles. This group to go down the alley and around. This group to throw down a barrage of covering fire. This last group—six guys, with Stash himself at the lead—to charge. He grinned at Genevieve. “Hope that shit you gave me works.”

  “Don’t do this,” she said.

  He waved at the guys to go. A group of five split off, heading down the alley. More shots were fired, missing their targets.

  Stash pressed back against the car’s tire, waiting. His face was flushed, eyes bright with excitement. He was going to die here, or somebody else was, and there wasn’t a goddamn thing Genevieve could do about it.

  Forget it. Who gives a shit? They’re gangsters. This is what they do. The words were hollow, a useless screen that couldn’t shield her from the awfulness of what was about to happen.

  Stash moved to a crouch. A moment later, he leaped to the top of the car, screaming and firing his gun. His guys were right with him, and the air ruptured with the sounds of gunfire. Genevieve covered her ears.

  The men charged.

  Genevieve wanted no part of this, wanted to get far away—the priest was beyond help if he was here, and surely they’d find another way to help Anna even if he was. Surely. It was time to get the hell out of here, and she would, just as soon as she could banish the memory of Belial’s room in the prison, of ditching Anna in a dungeon with a ravening monster on the loose. I gotta go. I can’t ditch her again. I gotta go.

  She got to her knees but couldn’t seem to make herself get up and run. Instead, she watched the horrible, inevitable collision.

  Stash was fearless. He leaped to the hood of the Locos’ car with bullets flying, with two of his men down with holes in them, a scream on his lips, fire blazing from his hand. One of the men—kids—whatever—behind the car stood, gun leveled at Stash, and Genevieve winced.

  She couldn’t tell what happened. The gun misfired, or it was out of bullets, or maybe the kid holding it just choked, but the kid held it not six feet from Stash in the heat of battle and nothing happened.

  Luck.

  Stash unleashed hell on the poor, stupid kid. The first bullet snapped the kid’s head back. Genevieve couldn’t tell where the second hit, and she was grateful when the kid’s body fell behind the car and she couldn’t see what happened as Stash and his men pumped bullets into the corpse.

  She really was going to throw up.

  One of the Locos was getting away, had legged it even as Stash charged, and now the other bangers let out a war whoop, leaped the corpses of their enemy, and started after him.

  There was motion where Genevieve hadn’t expected it, and her mouth dropped open in shock as she saw the unthinkable: the kid, the one Stash had blasted in the face, the one who had been shot maybe a dozen times at zero range, stood up. Another of the dead men behind the car stood with him, then the third. Their faces were dirty but unbloodied, stilled with a cold, ready rage.

  She screamed something. A warning, probably, but even she wasn’t sure. It didn’t matter anyway, not over the noise.

  The three men cut into Stash’s running platoon from behind. This time, the kid’s gun didn’t misfire. Two men dropped, a third, a fourth.

  Stash and the other two survivors spun around. Even from here, Genevieve could see their eyes widen with horror.

  They ran. The kids ran after them.

  Numb from the sensory and emotional overload of everything she had witnessed, Genevieve backed away.

  Chapter 18

  The screen door banged off the house as a couple of young bangers rushed into Moreno’s house.

  “We smoked ’em!” one of the kids shouted before faltering in the doorway.

  Moreno was on the couch, semiconscious, a blanket wrapped around his body. His eyelids fluttered, and a black bruise centered over his left eye had spread over a third of his forehead. He shivered violently as the priest wiped his brow with a wet cloth.

  Anna stood by his feet, biting her nails and wishing for a cigarette. The priest had stopped his ritual when Moreno went into convulsions, bloody foam erupting from his mouth. The shaking had stopped immediately. Anna and the priest had then helped Moreno to the couch—the priest taking a moment to throw the rug back over the circle—and covered him. The shooting ceased not long after. Now Anna desperately wanted to get out of here, but she also desperately wanted answers. She thought she was beginning to understand some things, but she needed to be sure.

  “Oh, shit,” the kid said. “What happened? Is he okay?”

  “He’ll be fine,” the priest said, though Anna thought she read less certainty in his eyes than his words. “The fighting is over?”

  “Yeah! It was awesome. Ziggy got shot in the fuckin’ head, man, and he just got up and threw down. I never seen nothin’ like it.”

  “Is anyone hurt?”

  The kid froze. “I . . . I don’t know. I came straight here.”

  “Go. Tend to your wounded and your dead, if any.” The priest gave him a kindly smile. “We’ll still be here when you finish. Rogelio will want to speak with you.”

  The kid’s brow furrowed with worry as he looked at the man on the couch.

  “Go,” the priest said again. “There’s nothing you can do here.”

  After a lingering look at Moreno, the kid ducked out, taking the other one with him.

  “We need to get him to a hospital,” Anna said.

  “No. He belongs here,” the priest said, sudden steel in his voice. “I mean,” he added in a softer tone, “if we stray from here, they will kill him. The others.”

  “Then we should call a doctor,” Anna said.

  “They don’t make house calls these days,” the priest said. “Rogelio will pull through. He just needs to rest.” This time the uncertainty in his eyes made Anna wonder if he was reassuring himself.

  “Give me a break.” She got out her phone and dialed a number from memory. It started ringing.

  “What are you doing?” the priest asked.

  “Calling a doctor. I know people, okay? Guy’s an unemployable drunk, but he knows his shit.”

  The priest nodded his acceptance.

  Voice mail answered. As always, Anna didn’t give a name—just an address, and a short description. In this case, “Took a bad
beating. Maybe seizures?” She hung up. With luck, she’d get a text message in a few minutes saying he was on the way. Or, hell, maybe he didn’t come down here just like everybody else, and she’d get nothing at all.

  Moreno’s breathing seemed steadier than before, and his shivering had abated. He was still slick with sweat and he looked like somebody’d worked him over with a tire iron, but Anna allowed herself to hope. He was healing, not slipping into a coma.

  “What the fuck are you doing here, priest?” she asked. His presence, his activity, had been bothering her since she’d seen the guy, a little, but now the pervasive strangeness of it boiled over. “This your charity work, or what?”

  “I’m not a priest,” Abas said. “You should go.”

  “You don’t belong here.”

  “You don’t belong here. You’re not family. You’re not blood.”

  He’d said the words before—the same words, like a different sort of incantation than the kind he used when conjuring. He threw them at her like they would ward her off, like they were his personal words of protection. It was odd—he was likely the only white guy in five blocks, and he was lecturing her like he belonged here.

  “And you are?” she prompted, pointing with her chin at Moreno’s unconscious form. “This is how you treat your family? Your blood?”

  Abas looked down at Moreno, and Anna thought she could see his eyes glisten, an incipient tear swelling at his lower eyelid. “‘Take now thy son, thine only son, Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah.’”

  It was either the Bible or Shakespeare, Anna supposed. She’d never had much patience for either. “I can help you,” she said. “This doesn’t have to be on your shoulders. Or his.”

  “Would you get a glass of water?” Abas asked, still looking at Moreno’s face.

  She got up. This was some kind of bullshit, but arguing with the man wasn’t getting her anywhere. She found a clean glass in the kitchen and filled it with tap water. Her phone buzzed—a text message from a strange number. It read On my way. So that was one less thing to worry about.