Maybe she is dead, thought Angus. If she was, her body was not, for it still moved as if she would never tire.
Angus stepped back from her and stared down the rows of cages. What growled and clawed within many of them were not what the Mexican handlers had put there. This entire load had been one of the best he had seen; very attractive girls and young women who would have fetched him top dollar. Looking around the interior, Angus had no idea what had happened.
“Goddamnit!” shouted Angus. “What the hell is going on! My whole damned load is fucked!”
“Get us out of here, please,” said a woman’s voice.
Reluctant, but without a choice, Angus turned sideways and side-stepped down to the front end of the tanker, the frenzied creatures slamming the cages each time he passed in front of them.
Acting afraid was a sure way to lose respect, especially in front of a woman. No woman could or ever would scare him. Even a diseased one.
He was wearing a gas mask. Untouchable.
He reached the prisoner who had spoken. She sat, her legs drawn up with her head as low as she could manage. She stared downward so that Angus could not see her eyes.
“Why are you on the floor?” asked Angus. “Stand up.”
“I can’t,” she said. “The one beside me sprayed me, and I got a headache.”
“Sprayed you with what?”
“The red mist from her eyes,” said the girl. “Please,” she whispered. “Let me out of here.” She looked up finally, and Angus saw her eyes were a deep red, almost with their own illumination.
She finally stood, but pressed herself into the side of her cage opposite the next cage over.
“What happened in here?” asked Angus, relieved she spoke English. He spoke broken Spanish – enough to communicate with his cartel connections. Many of them spoke decent English, so he never had the need to learn. He was often surprised at how much English the girls they got him knew. Likely because many of them came from border towns and villages, and it helped to have some English skills.
“I could not see,” she said. “I am pregnant. Please, let me out of here, away from these … these things!”
“Why are your eyes red?” he asked.
“Are they?” she said. “I do not know. I felt dizzy a few hours ago after I was sprayed by her, but I do not know why. Please, I hear things within my head. I must leave this place.”
Beside her, another of the straight-haired creatures stood, clearly not normal, but not as ravaged as the woman in the second cage near the hatch. She appeared almost identical in condition to the woman he had found in the first cage.
“What did you hear?” asked Angus, his voice muffled through his mask.
“They complained of pains in their heads, some of them,” she said. “Terrible pains.”
“Down here!” shouted another woman from the rear of the tanker.
“Por favor!” shouted another voice. “Afuera, por favor! Afuera! Afuera!”
“She wants out,” said the woman in the cage before Angus. “Please, before we all get … changed. Hurry.”
Angus shook his head. “You sure you’re not sick? Like I said, your eyes are red.”
“I was dizzy before, but I’m okay. Please, senor, I am pregnant. Something could be wrong with my baby. I’m bigger than when I was put here.”
Angus looked at her belly. Indeed, she did appear larger. She hardly showed when she was put in the cage, for he inspected each piece of merchandise. Now her swollen stomach appeared at least twice the size.
He removed a key from his pocket and said, “In a few moments. I have to deal with these others before I can get you girls out of here.”
He walked to the rear to inspect the other two women who apparently had not changed like most of the others. These three were the only ones remaining out of his entire haul that could speak. Of these prisoners, two of them were pregnant.
Good. At least he would still have the income from the babies. The rest was a total loss. He would demand his money back from the Fuentes Cartel men who had captured them. Clearly, there had been an epidemic spreading through the villages where they snatched the girls.
The cartel had fucked him with faulty merchandise, and they had likely known what they were selling him in advance. Something this contagious could not just spring up out of nowhere.
As he moved to the rear, the creatures, without exception, slammed against their cages, and pink vapor emitted from their eyes as though pumped from a fog machine.
Suddenly, the three women who had, moments before, been speaking to him, collapsed to the bottom of their cages, unconscious.
This was a mess. They were clearly rabid, but he could not shoot them within their cages, for the rounds might penetrate and puncture the outer cooling cavity. He would need a different approach.
Angus scooted sideways back down the aisle, doing his best to ignore the snarling creatures slamming into their cages as he passed, save for a few of them.
As he passed the front cage, he saw the creature there was now standing, facing the front. Her head turned as he stepped by.
A chill ran down his spine. He was not afraid of anything, so Angus was not sure why. After what he had been through in his childhood, no woman, no matter her condition, would ever frighten him again.
He got down the steps and went into a shed beside the barn. He pulled a machete from a hook on the back wall and leaving the door open, he returned to the tanker and climbed inside.
Angus stopped to check his oxygen supply. He had another five minutes or so. That would be enough for the task at hand. His keys in one hand and the machete in the other, he again slid down the center aisle and walked to the last cage containing a hissing, clawing crazy, and unlocked the padlock. He lifted it out and triggered the mechanism that raised the sliding cage door.
He then moved backward down the aisle fast, reaching the ladder and climbing down, never allowing his eyes to leave the creature who shambled toward him.
Angus stepped back from the trailer, his machete raised. The thing reached the end of the cylinder and tumbled out of the back, her head hitting the sandy, desert floor.
She did not stay down long, and in fact, never stopped moving. She was back on her feet as Angus again stepped back, the machete high in the air.
“Alto!” he shouted, but the demented woman kept coming. No more chances. He raised the machete and brought it down on top of her head with all his might, cracking through the top of her skull and splitting her face in two, down to the middle of the nose.
Instead of a spray of red blood pumping from the enormous gash, a reddish-black muck oozed out of the wound as she dropped like a stone to the low brush and sand.
Angus stared at her for a moment. He kicked her arm. Nothing. Watching her for another few seconds before he was sure, he nodded. She was dead.
He went back into the trailer and opened another cage.
Same procedure over and over again. The process took longer than he expected, and he used up two more cylinders of oxygen before the task was complete.
Of the three survivors, the one that wasn’t pregnant had perfectly normal eyes. The other two both had red eyes. Both of them swore their stomachs had grown since being placed in the cages.
It was too much to think about. All of it was too much. He’d just killed nineteen of his twenty-four girls, and it was just a matter of pure luck that two of them had been pregnant.
The barn had been empty on his most recent run. There were no babies and only his trustees remained. That is why he insisted on a full load on his most recent trip into Mexico. Now another run would be required long before he had intended.
He would not be paying for most of the girls he brought back. He would photograph the condition of these girls and the cartel would see things his way or lose his future business – which was very lucrative.
When he opened the three cages containing the only viable stock, the girls awoke with just a shake. Groggily they stood
and obeyed him when he ordered them to move toward the open end of the trailer, then to climb slowly down the steps.
When he got inside the barn, the stench was horrific. The same snarling he had experienced inside the tanker also echoed through the stillness of the barn, and it could only originate from one place.
The nursery.
Though he had no babies at the moment, Angus kept two trustees at all times for when babies came; he had to have women he trusted to take charge of them. A woman with her own baby would always be a slave to her maternal instinct to flee in order to protect her child.
Ordinary women, that is.
My fucking bitch of a mother would’ve sold me in a heartbeat at the right price, he thought, bitterly.
The nursery cell was located in the southeast corner of the barn, at the opposite end from the door. He quickly opened the three cells closest to the entrance. He did not want this merchandise close to whatever now occupied the nursery.
*****
As he walked the length of the barn toward the nursery, he held his Tisas .45 caliber in his hand. It was a precision-made handgun with a Turkish walnut grip and blued steel. It fired true, and one bullet was usually enough to do what needed to be done.
For the moment, he held it down by his side as he walked, not in any hurry to reach the last cell.
Angus knew there would be no more runs to Mexico. That became clear the moment he realized something was wrong in the barn, too. No, it was not just limited to the girls he had brought from Mexico in the tanker. Whatever this disease was, it wasn’t so easy now to chalk it up to careless vaccination standards and extreme poverty.
His trustees, Lissette and Estela, had been in excellent health.
As he approached the cage he felt bile and vomit coming up from his stomach, and he did not fight it. He bent forward and threw up onto the floor, wiping his mouth on his shirt sleeve.
Estela stood at the bars, shriek-screaming with gray, addled skin, the thin, black veins so tightly patterned that they seemed to obscure the very facial features beneath them.
The cell bars were wide enough here – very much like a typical prison enclosure – that her arms could easily fit between them, and she now clawed at the air as Angus moved closer. He held his gun in the firing position as he moved in, cursing his shaking hand.
At Estela’s feet were human remains. The blue dress that Lissette, a young 20-year-old that Angus had enjoyed fucking at least twice a week, lay in tatters and blood-soaked on the concrete floor. Estela had strewn parts of her body everywhere, for reasons that Angus did not know.
Lissette’s severed left arm and hand lay within one of the bassinettes, the interior stained with dried blood. Her right foot, almost gnawed down to bone, stuck out of the sink basin. The once pretty girl’s shattered head was nearly unrecognizable as such; only the matted, long black hair identified it.
It lay smashed and broken, now just a crushed shell with a face. That face was turned toward Angus, and where the eyes had been were now black holes through which he was sure Hell could be seen if one were to peer into them deeply enough.
Angus’ eyes moved past the snarling creature in front of him, scanning the floor of the cell. He thought he could identify bits of brain matter among the rest of the gore. The torso and trunk remained intact, smashed against the back corner of the cage, facing away from him.
He was glad. A dead body only amused him when he had done the killing. A murder this messy was never an option. This building was his place of business, and if a girl needed to bleed, he would take them outside and gut them in a more controlled, more easily cleanable spot, such as in the shade of his killing tree. Many had met their ends beneath the sprawling oak. It was a favorite spot.
Lissette’s only dress lay in tattered shreds on the floor, each ripped piece soaked with the blood of its former wearer. Anger welled up inside him, and his eyes returned to his former trustee.
Estela stood there, her mouth and teeth gnashing together as she reached toward him, singularly focused. Angus suddenly shoved the gun into his pants and reached out, grabbing her right arm with both hands and twisting it as hard as he could, snapping the bone clean.
She did not seem to notice. She continued reaching for him with her other arm, but this time Angus pushed it hard to the left, bending it back until it was flat against the cage at full extension.
The violent crack that met his ears resulted in the bone tearing through the vein-riddled flesh, leaving her with two useless, dangling appendages.
No blood from the wound. What did leak out looked more like motor oil, and smelled like shit and vomit.
His manipulation of her arm had knocked Estela slightly backward, but the shattered humerus caught on the cell bars, leaving her hanging there, gnashing and snarling like nothing had changed.
Angus raised the gun and held it toward her, walking forward. He moved so that the end of the barrel was within six inches of the creature now pressed against the iron bars, her pink eyes staring, no semblance of life remaining in them.
Pink eyes, he thought.
He looked back down the row of cells. He could not see the women from his location, but of the three, two of them had red eyes. The other appeared perfectly normal.
Glancing back at Estela, he lowered the gun and returned to the other end of the barn. “You feel alright?” he asked.
“We are prisoners, but we are alive,” said the one who had appealed for help first inside the tanker. “It’s better than being in that damned metal hell.”
“This is your new hell,” he said. “I’m bringing the others in.”
“Not them!” shouted the woman. “Please, not those things!”
“Shut the fuck up!” said Angus. “I’ll put them well away from you. Keep your fuckin’ mouth going and I’ll put you in with one of ‘em.”
The two who spoke English turned away from him. The one that did not still seemed to get the point.
From the wall, he retrieved the extension pole with the slip ring on the end. He used this when his captives fought him too hard, scratching at him with their nails. It rarely happened after he got them settled and they realized they needed to be on his good side. If trouble was to be had, it was with the new purchases.
Putting his gas mask back on, Angus climbed the steps and entered the tanker.
When he approached the first strange creature, she looked at him and stood from her sitting position. Her crimson eyes stared into his, but she did not charge forward and she did not press herself into the back of the tanker.
He extended the pole and loosened the thick neck strap. Turning the strap sideways, he fed it into the cell and snapped it quickly down over her head, cinching it tight around her neck by sliding the handle toward him.
She simply stared at him, her mouth moving side-to-side. Angus pushed her backward with the pole and leaned down to slide the key into the lock. He triggered the latch, and the spring-loaded door slid upward.
“Come on out of there now,” he said. He guided her toward the open gate and when she was through, he pushed her toward the rear of the trailer and pushed the end of the handle the rest of the way through the bars until it was clear of the cage.
He then walked her toward the opening, jerking the rod backward with each step he took. When he reached the end, he carefully climbed down the steps, holding on to the stick with one hand for the moment.
The red-eyed thing surprised him then; she leapt from the open trailer, right at him, her body slamming into his and driving him into the dirt. He was taken by complete surprise but was able to scramble away and get to his feet, his hand immediately pulling out the .45.
She came at him fast, her arms outstretched, and for the first time, her mouth open wide as she jerkily charged him.
He fired, the bullet blowing a black hole through her chest, and she flew backward, the neck strap and pole whipped from side to side, barely missing his eye.
She was back on her feet so fast th
at Angus hardly had time to raise the gun again. He got it up when she was three feet away and closing.
Boom! Boom! He fired twice more and this time the top of her head shattered and she crumpled to the ground immediately.
He watched her, hyperventilating at the adrenaline charge that rocked his metabolism. Her red eyes faded to black and all movement ceased.
Angus stared at her for a long time. He wondered if the others he had put in cells would change the same way. He wanted none of it. Not if that was how it was going to go. It was too much. Too exhausting. And pointless. Nobody would want these women. They had no monetary value with their strange, red eyes.
Maybe the babies, he thought. I’ll wait for them to be born and see what happens.
The government would get the epidemic under control soon. It would definitely be the first order of business.
Angus was more careful with the second red-eyed girl. He used a rope along with the neck restraint and tied her off to the trailer before getting her out. When he was ready and she was down, he just used his knife to cut the rope.
As he promised, he tucked her away in the cell three down from the nursery, but a strange thing occurred when he led her inside.
She stared toward the women in their individual cages, her red eyes increasing in intensity. As she passed, the two females with the red eyes similar to hers said, “Open cage,” together. In perfect unison.
The Spanish speaking girl – the one without red eyes – said nothing. She cowered in her cell facing away from the monster that Angus had decided to keep.
For the moment.
*****
Watching the evening news, it became obvious that the epidemic was everywhere. Nearly every channel showed live images of insane people who looked exactly like his former charges, attacking and biting people. These attacks were not halfhearted efforts; the aggression with which they attacked their fellow human beings was as cannibalistic as the man who had been eating the woman at the border.
Dead Hunger VII_The Reign of Isis Page 22