The jaguar increased her pace. Sancho reappeared, along with his troop, a red flash threading through the tree trunks. The dogs exchanged barks but didn’t approach, as if they couldn’t find Osiel but knew he was near.
Butterflies rose in clouds across the sunlight shafts piercing the canopy and warming the air.
The Oz stopped, stared at the butterflies as if counting them. The jaguar spun, snarling, teeth bared as if something had bitten her hindquarters. Sancho yelped before running away, whining, with his troop.
A warning.
Manny slipped the AR 15 from his shoulder. Carlos, following his lead, filled his hands with firepower as he scanned the undergrowth. The German didn’t notice anything until he almost tripped over the jaguar, which had settled into a low crouch, nostrils flared, ears flattened. His eyes rolled as if following the spiral on his forehead. Max ignored the butterflies and focused on a dense thicket of thorny brush, darker than the deepest forest shadows.
Manny looked almost human, having left half the paint covering his body on the trail they’d blazed. He seemed camouflaged for cover against the sky of a perfect day.
The flight of thorns, whistling through the air after an initial snap, slammed into his face and body in an instant, transforming him into another species of animal, a cross between a porcupine and a flopping fish tossed to the ground. Gagging, he stared through needle-blinded eyes at the night settling over him.
Carlos fired, too high, in random directions, not yet focused on the danger. At least he’d taken cover and kept his bursts short.
The Oz ripped off his shirt. His tattooed skulls and skeletons became swirls of smoke racing over his torso. Another flight of thorns shot from the thicket, hit him. But Osiel’s cloud of whirling ink swallowed the attack.
Max didn’t understand. A trick of light, he assumed. The thorns simply missed.
But he didn’t want to see any more games played between light and the bones etched on Osiel’s body.
The Beast filled the attack’s silence with memories of screams. It searched for the scent of prey, found only rotting vegetation and shit.
Manny, his throat punctured and the red of his blood filling in the spaces where blue metallic paint had worn off, found the trigger and a target on which to unleash a clip into the thicket.
Impossible. It was as if Manny had been used like his own weapon, aimed and fired as his life expired.
Max looked to the Oz, who had gone down on both knees. His face held a bluish tint, but Max was sure that was caused by flashing weapons fire. Yet another trick of the light. Perhaps the great Oz was having a heart attack, or choking on a thorn lodged in this throat.
Tree bark and brush flew as bullets thumped into something solid with satisfying frequency.
Old jungle tricks. Could hurling nests of angry wasps be far behind? Max bolted to the Oz’s side. Not to save him, but to kill him before someone else did the job, or he died without being murdered.
The jaguar leapt at movement, vanished.
Something large came out of the thicket, heading straight for Osiel. Max met it head on, bumped his forehead against a hard, massive, moving wall as his hands slipped on greasy limbs trying for a grip.
A nightmare fallen into the day.
The Beast, with something tangible but unknowable in reach, went mad.
The demon flowed through Max in a crimson river, carrying him off in the surge of its pent-up frustration. He moved like a spider, darting, weaving, lashing out at the same time with feet and hands in a flurry of snapping blows. A cloak came off, then a necklace made of bones. A satisfying crack split the air. But there was no cry of pain.
The Beast filled his head with its need, and he cut his fingers tearing and clawing at the head, huge and armored, until jewels flew like startled birds, brilliant colors sparkling as they passed through shafts of sunlight.
A beak scraped his shoulder. Claws grasped his thigh.
A skull face flashed through his mind.
Someone screamed from the thicket as Carlos at last found the right target, earning a volley of thorns which hit the ash tree he was using as cover.
The German had found Manny’s obsidian knife and was holding its blade flat against his chest as he lay curled on the ground. Max thought he was preparing to slit his own throat rather than allow himself to be captured by their attackers.
The Beast pushed Max closer to his opponent, who moved like a bear of a man beneath the lashed wood and leather of his costume. Perhaps a boar of a man, since he smelled like pig shit. Certainly conditioned to take a beating. Max wanted to find the vulnerable points of throat, joints and crotch, but the Beast continued to tear at anything that fell to hand. Parts of the disguise came away in strips and mats, others cracked or broke.
Blood blinded Max. His own. The Beast hesitated, distracted by temptation. Max kept fighting, reaching, searching for vulnerabilities, until he had a grip with both hands on the formidable helmet mask. He twisted, pulled, pushed, expecting straps, or a neck, to break. Feathers and fur scraping against his face wiped enough blood from his eyes for him to recognize that the mask had been designed to mimic a screaming eagle. Another mask taunted him from deep in the eagle’s open beak, covering the wearer’s true face: a nest of fangs and teeth.
It almost looked real.
The lower point of the open beak jabbed at Max’s throat. A fetid sewer stench choked him.
The Beast dove into the pit of the mask’s mouth with Max’s arm, challenging the maw while searching a beating heart. Max scrambled for surer footing, wrestling with his enemy for control. His opponent’s weight kept him off balance, just as the stone-hard mass of his body deadened the impact of Max’s blows. He might have been fighting a living statue. Or pile of mud.
The Beast leapt and Max found himself with legs wrapped around the man’s waist. His opponent spun and bucked, a mad bull trying to throw Max off. Max’s legs wouldn’t reach all the way around for him to lock his ankles, which he found odd. Troubling. Unnatural.
Trying to lock a grip on the mask from both inside and out, Max thought the teeth snapped at his fingers. The Beast recoiled.
But the Beast’s aggression created an opening, and before the other fighter could ram Max into the earth or against a tree or rock, Max found another set of holds on the mask and, using his strength, weight and the momentum from leaping off of his opponent, he twisted and wrenched the false face off.
Max fell on his back, helmet mask in his hands. It had made a sound like a rotting log splitting under an axe when tearing loose.
The Beast scrambled forward to catch the falling body of its enemy, almost tasting blood. But none spilled out. Pulling off layers of disguise with bloody fingers, Max and the Beast found only antlers, horns and teeth clustered in unnatural proximity to each other in clumps of mud, decomposing meat, and animal droppings. Thorn-filled branches from the thicket unraveled from its collapsing limbs.
They ravaged the disguise until Max was left standing with only the wreckage of a costume at his feet.
His jeans and shirt were ripped and bloodied. Even he could taste the stench coming off of him.
Another flight of thorns sang through the air, and Max fell over Osiel, knocking him off of his knees and into the dirt. The thorns flew by overhead. Carlos kept up a steady rate of fire, stopping long after Max knew there wouldn’t be anyone else coming out of the thicket and no more thorns flying through the air.
He had to scream for Carlos to stop the barrage, knocking Manny’s AR 15 and supply of clips away from him.
When he turned back to the Oz, his target had gotten back to his feet. He was prying the knife from the German’s hands as Max stopped beside him.
Osiel straightened, knife in hand. “My rivals,” he said, gaze flitting for something on which to settle. “They know I’m near my death and want to close the way home to me. Thank you for saving me.”
Max put his fingers over Osiel’s hand holding the knife. “I’m no
t saving you. I’m fulfilling the terms of the contract.”
A smile flickered across the Oz’s face, but he couldn’t manage the strength to laugh, as he’d done before. Back bent, knees trembling, a few tattoo lines broken as if flesh had been drained of ink, the Oz was visibly diminished, a flame dwindling to ember.
“Now?” Max asked.
“Just a little bit more,” Osiel asked. His eyes stopped moving and his chest heaved as he chased his breath.
The jaguar had returned, her flanks raked, a wound at the back of her skull bleeding. But a scarlet snout served as a trophy for what she’d given back.
The Beast, still snapping at the emptiness of its latest attempt to feast, writhed with jealousy before curling into a tight and heavy ball of rage in Max’s belly. Once again, it had fallen for illusion.
If the thing inside him could have wept, Max believed he might have cried in their mutual frustration.
The Oz turned to follow the jaguar. Max closed the grip he had on the Oz’s wrist. Osiel gave up the obsidian knife without a struggle.
Carlos came up to Max, a few thorns still stuck in his face and right arm. But he held himself straight, chest puffed out, weapon ready. Max could feel the pride coming off of him like heat from a racing engine. He’d survived where Manny hadn’t.
They took off after Osiel. Max didn’t bother checking on the moaning German.
It was nearly another full day’s travel without a sign of a trail until they reached the crucifixes set up across a raised and narrow break in canyon walls. The jaguar veered away from the sight. Osiel stopped and smiled, thin and faint.
By then, the German had caught up to them, though he’d found and taken something that made him prone to fits of giggling when he wasn’t staring at shadows or into crevices. Manny’s spiral mark blazed like a patch of sunny blue sky on his forehead.
They stopped by a stream running down a gulley, in full view of the crosses before them. The hanging bodies were ragged and old; the birds had stopped picking at the carcasses.
Osiel wanted to go off on another solitary harvesting trip and refused let Max accompany him. Max held him by the shoulder until the great Oz sat, head bowed. They took water from the stream, though the metallic aftertaste made it hard to drink for too long. The water did stop the bleeding when used to clean wounds, and even seemed, at least to Max’s eye, to begin mending cuts and gouges.
He missed the taste of blood.
The jaguar gave herself a brief roll in the water, then zig-zagged up the slope, but turned back from the boundary established by the crosses. She paced back and forth before them, shaking her head and switching her tale with frantic energy. Osiel tried to put his hands on the animal, but she backed away, cowed but flashing rage in silent displays of her killing teeth before finally spinning and bolting into the woods.
The Beast made sure Max knew it understood the cat’s distaste for all that she’d gone through. Just as Osiel had given Max a taste of his own frustration.
Rising from the ashes of Max’s last refusal, the Oz came to him again, pointed at the knife Max had wedged between his belt and jeans.
Max shook his head, stopped. Osiel’s eyes were looking at someplace else, through the other side of the stone blade Max would never see. He recognized hunger, but didn’t feel threatened. Even the Beast relented, though uneasily.
Max surrendered the weapon.
The Oz jabbed the obsidian knife in the direction of the crucifixes and started to say something, but stopped, lowered his arm slightly. His knees buckled, but he remained on his feet. Wiping tears from his eyes, he waved them forward with the flat side of the blade.
They climbed to the crosses and the remains of three bodies tied to the cross bar. Flies lingered on exposed bones.
Gathered behind the crosses, on the slope descending to the valley beyond, three men sat, They were outfitted for wilderness travel and appeared by their beards and the wear on their gear to have missed civilization for at least a month.
The white man and the black man wore camouflage matched to the terrain and military grade, late-issue boots. Between them, they carried all the necessary equipment for a long-range reconnaissance in hostile territory. Both short and wiry. They gazed at Max with the blank expressions of soldiers waiting to kill or die. By the ease with which they sat, Max knew they’d practiced the first option, well and often. They were the kind of men he often had to get through to reach his targets. They were the kind of men civilians never recognized.
The third looked to be their guide through the mountains, a local serrano in worn clothing patched with leather and lined and trimmed with bits of fur. He stared hard at Osiel, rose to one knee, bowed his head.
Osiel put his hand on the man’s head, gently.
Max checked for weapons, caught the fresh thorns stuck in their gear and clothing, as well as cuts, scratches, deeper wounds on exposed skin. They two military men had been grabbed and raked just like Max. The few scabs and raw scars told him they’d had the hardest part of their journey over the past week.
“Our friends,” Osiel said.
The mountain man offered the Oz a bottle of tequila from his satchel without looking up. His hand shook the bottle’s worm into a dance.
The other two men took combat knifes from boot sheaths, though neither assumed an attack stance.
The Beast took a step forward before Max knew he’d moved.
The men smiled, suddenly, and with a radiant joy that hurt Max with its purity. He sank into a crouch thinking Osiel never wanted to be killed. The contract had been a trap, perhaps rooted in vengeance for a killing Max had long-forgotten, or as means of displaying his power over his employers to the locals. Or perhaps his employers, weary of covering for him, had set him up.
He was used to dealing with these kinds of twisting tales. Whatever the reason, he was insulted by their belief that they could attack him with just knives. They hadn’t even bothered to get up. And all Osiel had was the silly obsidian blade.
Carlos clicked off the safeties on his guns, but Max waved him off. An instant later, he wondered if Carlos was also involved in the betrayal.
He’d seen that before, as well. More blood for him.
The Beast refused to rise to the challenge, suspicious of illusions. “A gift,” the black man, shifting the knife into a reverse grip. Max didn’t understand the move, or their refusal to stand. “From the Blood of Killers,” the other man said, also reversing his grip.
They stabbed themselves in the throat, each with a single savage thrust, and fell back gushing blood. Max was on them before they died and finished the work, throwing aside the knives and using his teeth.
The serrano whimpered. Carlos grunted.
When he was done, Max looked up to see Osiel sitting with his back against one of the crosses, the bottle between his outstretched legs nearly empty. The German had wrapped himself around the base of another cross and was dozing in his own vomit. Carlos stood with his back to what lay ahead, looking at the way they’d come. His guns were on the ground, abandoned.
The plots and betrayals had remained figments of his imagination. Which only meant he’d have to wait a little while longer to fulfill the contract.
The mountain man sat behind Max with his legs crossed, watching the valley. The man blinked rapidly, irregularly, sending out signals Max could not understand.
The Beast whined, still not satisfied. Just like with Osiel’s women and the ambush.
Max wiped blood from his eyes with a piece of torn camouflage cloth, feeling the same way. He left the blood on his face, hands and clothes. He was tired of cleaning up. He waved away a few flies.
“I won’t be right until you’re dead,” he told the Oz.
“Don’t dismiss their sacrifice,” Osiel said. “Blood was necessary to open this last door, as it was the first. They were devoted to you. They and their kind believe in the path on which you walk. Giving themselves to you like this sanctifies their brothers’ purpose.
”
Another thing Max didn’t understand or care about.
The Oz took a deep breath as his gaze swept over the valley. A tremor shook his body, but an instant later he was calm. Both eyes were bloody. He remembered Osiel had taken him here for his death. He took in the terrain, searching for the killing ground.
Forest filled the valley, rising and falling over the uneven floor as if covering the bodies of giants murdered and left to rot in the wild. Taking the binoculars from one of the dead men, Max saw through the veil of vegetation to the stonework beneath and even breaking through the canopy of trees. He recognized a pattern in the rolling landscape: square, rectangular and circular shapes raised to varying heights, as well as lines defining paths and geometric figures. The greenery, highlighted by earth and shadow, encompassed the ancient site of ruins.
“Tourists try to come out here sometimes, looking for holy things,” Osiel said, suddenly sweeping a hand across the landscape. The snap had returned to his words. The rest had been good for him. Or maybe the knife. “But they don’t know where to look, how to walk the secret paths. You won’t find this place on any government list of sacred sites. Puto gringos don’t make it, with their sneakers worth enough to feed a family for months and their empty questions about gods and spirits. Gods and spirits are dead. If they weren’t, men like you would come and kill them.”
Flies buzzed in Max’s ears. He spoke over them, saying, “Yes.”
He saw Osiel stretched over a mossy block of stone, replaying the ritual death of his ancestors. The obsidian knife was back and wet in one hand, and there was blood, and the heat of a fresh heart in his other hand.
The vision didn’t belong to him. The Beast showed no interest in dreams, whatever their source.
Osiel pounded the earth with the bottle as he laughed. “That’s what I want to hear. Honesty. Is that so much to ask for? You really would kill the gods if you had the chance.”
A Blood of Killers Page 45