by Pen
“You start eating now, you’ll blow up like a hydrogen balloon before we even get where we’re going,” Battery reminds her, lifting his shades to peer down into his pocket at her hidden form.
“You have any idea how hungry you get when you have to expel every bit of excess from your body down to the fucking microgram?” she spits.
My boss, Libertad Gutierrez-Nixon, otherwise known as Size Zero, is a metahuman with a power most international supermodels would kill for, which is why it makes sense that she used to be one. Turns out that while bulimia can help certain girls stay “tiny,” if Liberty pukes enough, she can get downright microscopic, while losing none of her natural strength. All she has to do to get back to normal is gorge on a buffet of proteins, carbs and a few hits of sugar. I can’t help wondering if she kept on eating, would she just get regular old fat or transform into a terrifying giant? So far, she’s got enough self-control to stop snacking when she hits peak voluptuosity.
“Fine,” Battery grunts, picking a chunk of pollo asado out of one of his tacos and hand- feeding it to her like he’s got a pet mouse or small bird in his pocket.
“Gracias, fuckface,” Liberty says once she’s snacked, wiping her lips against the inner lining of his vest. “We need to get moving.”
* * *
No one tries to stop us on our way through El Reino. Why the hell would they? Even with our respective physical bulks, even with my massive backpack with its quiverful of interchangeable prosthetics, weapons and ammo, we blend in here, supervillainous variations on a meta-criminal theme. Everyone in town is here because they’re supposed to be; too bad, too broken, too damaged, mean and wrong to intermingle with the normies on the far side of the wall. And they know it as well as the people who locked ‘em all up. Hell, I’m not even the only thug carrying arms, and I spot at least half a dozen other unlucky fucks like me with mechanized replacement parts that would qualify as weapons of light-to-medium destruction. Beyond all that, it’s a lot like any other Central American tourist trap—and trust me, we are not the only unregistered visitors on the premises—with desperate men, women, and yes, even kids hawking all manner of licit, illicit and downright otherworldly goods and services, tugging at our arms and pantlegs as we pass. More than once I swat away a grubby mitt trying to rifle through my pockets or explore my backpack for the goodies stored within.
“That’s it right there,” Liberty pipes up, her pipsqueak squawk almost drowned out by the noises of the teeming El Reino streets. “That’s where we’ll find Santiago.”
I have to squint to see the teeny finger she’s pointing with, then follow it with my eyeline to the crumbling but well-guarded edifice about a half mile away, its spiky bell tower poking like a fuck-you finger into the sky above the zocalo in the exact center of town. It figures Guatemala’s answer to Pablo Escobar would make his HQ a fortress in the middle of a giant prison. The fact that he’s using a literal cathedral to do the devil’s work is just one of those bluntly poetic ironies, a metaphor more by accident than design.
Santiago Escalante used to have my job, or a job like the one I’m auditioning for anyway. A grunt in the Abaroa Cartel army who grew to be a trusted lieutenant, until the uniform got too tight and the dog collar started to itch and he split to do his own thing, poaching goons, guns, contact lists and other assets on his way to building a powerful competitor right on Mexico’s back doorstep. He was strong enough and smart enough that Libertad’s old man, and then her uncle, let him alone to do his thing as long as his business didn’t cut too hard into theirs. But ever since Libertad took out Uncle Oscar, she’s been cleaning house like a 1950s suburban mom on an amphetamine jag, and the time has come for Santiago to get featherdusted out of his hard-to-reach corner.
There’s a framework of scaffolding around the outside of the cathedral, like it’s under renovation, but the razorwire that loops around it all, and the machine-gun toting hardasses walking the boards and hanging off the structure tell a different story. This is just another layer of security for Escalante and his operation.
“So, how do we sneak past all that?” I ask, and if I didn’t know it was a dumb question already, Liberty makes sure I do right quick.
“Sneak? What, you only check yourself out in funhouse mirrors, Big Ugly? You think you’re some kind of fucking ninja?” I think she laughs, but at her current size it sounds more like the stranger-danger bark of a dyspeptic Chihuahua. “I’ll take care of the sneaking, ese. You boys handle the death and distraction.”
* * *
I’d like to say it was easy getting used to having a mini-gun where my right arm used to be. I’d like to say it fit like a glove. I’d like to say having the pre-digital brain-implanted tech to operate said gun jammed under the metal plate in my skull by a cantankerous ex-Nazi scientist/war criminal was no more painful than a root canal.
But I’m a shit liar.
The fact is, between the war wounds, the upgrades, and the physical demands of the new gig, I am in near-constant pain. So while I am apprenticing under the top mercenary hench to a Mexican cartel villainess, I’m nurturing a new sidekick of my own: the most powerful opiates money can by, with or without a prescription. For the average John Doe or G.I. Jane, a constant flow of fentanyl at heroic dosage levels would have them flat on their ass in a soporific stupor. Or in a self-induced coma. Or hell, probably even dead. But how I’m wired, so long as I don’t mix in too much alcohol, I pretty much just feel like my old pre-war self; except for the added bonus that my perma-high’s got me floating at an altitude somewhere above Lando Calrissian’s cloud city of Bespin, I give less than two shits about pretty much everything, and it’d take something bigger than a Nagasaki nukedrop to rattle my nerves. And it’s not like I’m some strung-out junkie either; this stuff gives me energy to burn, keeps me alert, awake, more alive than I’ve felt in my whole worthless life. Top of the world, ma, 24/7. Or at least until my supply runs low.
All this to say that blowing the shit out of a congregation’s-worth of cartel shitbags with .30-cal rounds at 2000 per minute is exactly as it fun as it sounds like it would be. Chalky brick explodes into dust, stained glass shatters, wooden catwalks splinter and scaffolding collapses while the men come tumbling after. Shouts of anxious surprise and gruff commands to return fire quickly melt into screams of agony and terror. Blood sprays the church walls and then the big bullets punch the walls away, all that debris raining down on anyone unlucky enough to survive the initial onslaught. After the mostly bloodless anticlimax of Desert Storm, I finally feel like I’m in my element, doing what I was born to do: unleash maximum hell on a bunch of dumb sons-of-bitches with the poor misfortune of being between my boss and what she wants, and on the wrong side of me.
The preceding sequence of events has been brought to you by Denial: Putting the D in PTSD since pretty much the dawn of war.
I mean, a lot of it does happen—the exploding bricks and collapsing scaffolding and angry frightened outbursts and return fire and even some incidental bloodshed, but it’s not because I’m suddenly the world’s biggest badass just ‘cause I got high enough to let someone turn me into a human machine gun. The fact is, as a Gulf War soldier, there just weren’t that many opportunities to engage the enemy, much less go full-auto on ‘em. And when the time came, I did like so many greenhorn soldiers getting their first taste of combat—I fired high. Because for some of us, even when we’re staring death in the eye, it’s no cakewalk to pull the trigger on a guy, regardless of whether you’ve already decided he’s a worthless piece of shit. What’s that quote from Eastwood in Unforgiven? “It’s a helluva thing, killing a man. Take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.” And that’s from a guy who killed everything in his path. It just happens that in this particular case, firing high with a mini-gun does enough damage that it looks more or less exactly like I’m pulling my weight on this gig.
“Nice work, henchman!” Battery shouts, and I give him my best kill-happy grin like I’m the stone
-cold psycho he needs me to be right now.
While I’m heedlessly pouring lead into the hot afternoon sky, with a few scattered bastards clinging to parapets and cowering on the roof and struggling to shoot back, Battery jogs over to a nearby utility pole and scrambles up the rungs. At the top, he reaches up sweet as you please and yanks two electrical cables free, sending a shower of sparks into the dusty street and definitely causing a neighborhood brownout. He places one live wire between his teeth as he uses the other to swing down toward the cathedral like he’s fuckin’ Captain Blood. He lands on a section on the east side of the building that’s managed to avoid all my heavy lead so far, grabs hold of one of the metal support struts and lights the whole thing up like Feliz Navidad, Mexico City-style. As white lightning dances around the entire cathedral exterior, men pop off like jumping beans, falling several stories to quick fortunate death or career-ending injury. I pick off the last few with my remaining rounds and try to decide which weapon in my arsenal to switch to for the next phase of battle. Battery gives me the thumbs up as he kicks his way in through one of the few unbroken windows.
“Fucking spectacular, man!”
* * *
I slice through the thick wooden front doors of the cathedral and kick them from their hinges, the sawblade on my right arm whining like the world’s angriest dental drill. Inside, the place is fixed up just how you’d expect for a billionaire cartel kingpin who’s treating his incarceration more like a temporary political exile from his God-given kingdom. Luxurious past the point of gaudiness, the sacred defiled by the profane, with tapestries of tiger and bear-skin hung over the walls and windows, pool and foosball tables in one side chapel and a solid gold dining room table and chairs in the other; the altar in the main chapel is laden with stacks of cash like the skyline of a model city, watched over by a black velvet painting of a half-naked Madonna—the pop singer not the Holy Mother; though judging by the halo, it could be she’s supposed to be both.
Also there’s sleeping thugs everywhere, sprawled in the pews, spilling from the confessionals, curled on the floor. No wonder this place has been so easy to hit; this is the laziest, sorriest bunch of soft-souled atrophied weenuses I’ve ever had the pleasure of tearing into, and I beat up an entire University of Texas fraternity once. I go to poke the nearest one awake with my saw-arm and I realize his eyes are open, staring lifelessly up at the Sistine Chapel knockoff painted on the ceiling, dead as he’ll ever be. I think maybe I took out all these guys without even knowing while shooting the place to holy hell, but even with their final expressions of terrified surprise, there ain’t a visible mark on any of ’em. Except the trickle of blood out of that one’s ear, and this one’s tear duct, and that other one’s left nostril. Then I realize, while me and Battery were outside doing our thing, Size Zero was handling business on her end, zipping through here and popping in and out of unsuspecting skulls, a lethal gnat with a deadline.
Fact is this job does come with some time constraints. The whole reason we had to move up our timeline and hit Escalante today is the boss learned that the Guatemalan government’s planning to relocate this asshole to a less “accommodating” facility close to Guatemala City. To that end, they’re sending in federal troops, accompanied by Mexico’s favorite legacy superdude, Fantasmo Guerrero, a masked wrestler/vigilante who’s been kicking crime and corruption’s ass on behalf of his people in one form or another since at least World War II (I assume it’s not the same individual across all those decades, unless he really is a “ghost warrior“). Not to mention the fact that there’s a right wing paramilitary group made up of concerned citizens as well as victims and survivors of Escalante’s years-long reign of terror; they call themselves Los Castigadores and they’ve publicly vowed to make sure Santiago never makes it from one prison to the next, government be damned. So yeah, we could have a whole lot of company just about any time. Why Libertad didn’t bring more guys on this job is beyond me.
I’m sitting around thinking these happy thoughts and trying to remember not to scratch my ass or balls with my saw-blade arm when one of the dead guys up near the altar sits up and shakes his head, showering blood from the hole in his forehead like a lawn sprinkler.
“Cojeme!” he mutters.
Fuck me, indeed.
He’s too far away for me to cut him down quick and anyway my reaction time’s slowed by the fact that he’s not supposed to be able to sit up, speak or do much of anything considering there’s a tiny dribble of what I’m pretty sure is brain matter coming out of his extra head-hole. He looks up at the Madonna painting and mutters some more words, prayers instead of curses this time judging by how he crosses himself and kisses the crucifix around his neck after. As I make my way toward him, he pats his pockets until he finds what he’s looking for, pulling out a small chromed item that resembles a double-barreled derringer pistol. I pause, waiting for him to notice me, wondering if that little peashooter could even do any damage to my thick hide at this distance. But he doesn’t seem to notice me yet, and anyway he’s too busy loading his little gun. From another pocket, he extracts a vial of something bright, cloudy and mercurial, a swirl of pinks and oranges and lemon-lime. He cracks the tiny weapon open and slots the vial inside, then jams the barrels under his nostrils. Guess he’s gonna do my job for me. He squeezes the trigger with nary a microsecond’s hesitation and his head snaps back, but his skull remains intact, and while there is a trickle of blood from his nose mixed with a driplet of the viscous stuff he just shot up there, he is anything but dead. In fact, he seems to be getting better by the second. Better . . . and maybe bigger?
He pops to his feet so fast it’s like someone’s edited a few frames from reality and starts coming toward me like he’s known I was there all along. His eyes are as cloudy as the shit he just dosed himself with, Milky Way eyes, wide and dark and swirling with pale color. I can’t tell if he’s looking at me or through me, and for a ridiculous second I think I can just step aside and he’ll waltz right by on his way to some can’t-miss party the Universe just invited him to. But I just back noisily into the pew behind me and he adjusts his unrelenting stride, hands reaching for me, brittle yellow fingernails growing more claw-like as he comes.
Then it hits me—I have a saw-arm.
I fire up the blade with a thought and slash at him a little half-heartedly, freaked out enough to want to kill him away from me but equally afraid to do any real damage to the poor schmuck. He reaches up and actually grabs the sawblade with one leathery paw, letting it cut into his palm even as he wags the taloned pointer finger of his free hand in my face is if to chide me with a Tsk-tsk or Nuh-uh-uh. The blade grinds to a halt when it reaches bone and he doesn’t even seem fazed that the flesh of his hand has just been carved away like turkey breast. His skeleton grip tightens and he twists the entire saw, sending a searing shock of pain through the nerveports and all the way up my arm into my brain. Even the fentanyl can’t dampen that agony, and I do a mental self-check to remember which pocket of my fatigue pants I stashed the backup dosages. The plug-ugly fuck grabs me by the chest hair that Battery suggested I shave off before going into the field, a suggestion I shrugged off because I assumed my gay comrade-in-arms was somehow coming onto me. As wolf-claws sink into my flesh I learn an important lesson in the value of henchman mentorship.
He yanks my saw free and tosses it aside like he’s disarming a small child brandishing a butter knife. He’s pulling me toward his open mouth and I swear his canines are growing; in fact, his whole mouth and nose seems to be extending towards me like a snout. Apparently I’m about to be eaten by a high-as-fuck werewolf, no full moon in sight. But I don’t get truly freaked out until he starts putting on a lightshow.
All of a sudden, blue sparks are shooting around inside the fillings in his feral teeth, and his eyes seem to glow from within. His whole body convulses, meaning his grip on me just gets tighter and hurts even more, and even I can feel the pulsing current running through his body; in my panic the source
of it doesn’t even occur to me until well after those glowing eyes have popped out and exploded all over me and the manbeast collapses in a heap of charred flesh and burnt fur.
“Y’know,” Battery says, with that charming-as-fuck shit-eating grin that probably does him pretty well with the fellas. “You wanna make it as a hench, you’re gonna need to start saving my ass every once in awhile.”
“Your black ass is beyond saving, buddy.”
He smiles even wider, if that’s possible. “Truer words, mi amigo. Truer words . . .”
* * *
Battery flash-fries the remaining corpses in the main chapel just to make sure none of ’em get any ideas about waking up and getting their undead werebeast on, then we start our recon, wondering all the while just where our tiny boss has disappeared to.
As we wander the eerily quiet cathedral, the only sound the strains of live music from some street musicians entertaining the gathered gawkers outside in the square, I get that jumpy every shadow’s hiding something feeling like a teenaged kid in an abandoned building. I feel the throbbing in my arm and chest from the wereguy’s attack and between that and the nerves, I figure now’s as good a time as any for my next fentanyl dose. I slap the patch right over the bleeding wounds on my chest, figuring it can double as a bandage and maybe find its way into my system even quicker than usual.
A piercing whine hits our ears out of nowhere and nearly doubles us over, followed by a quake-like vibration that rocks the floor beneath our feet to the roof above our heads.
Once he manages to shake off the surprise and the ringing in his ears, Battery asks, “You remember anything in the blueprints about this place having a basement?”
“I don’t even remember anything about seein’ any blueprints,” I shoot back, reaching into my arsenal for the flamethrower arm attachment.