A Blood of Killers

by Gerard Houarner

  “Yes,” Max said. He threw the binoculars away and tore a clean swatch of camouflage cloth from a shirt and wiped his face and mouth of blood. He was tired of swatting flies.

  “Have you ever killed a god?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t believe in gods. Of course. But I’ll give you the chance. First we must cross over to the other side.” He offered the tequila bottle to Max.

  “I don’t drink.” He finished wiping his hands and clothes, tossed the cloth away. The incessant buzzing lessened.

  “You don’t need to drink the tequila. Pour it out. Or let him finish it,” Osiel said, indicating Carlos with a jab of the bottle.

  Carlos turned away from the jungle, glanced at the bodies on the ground and hanging from crosses. He went to the cross and took the bottle from Osiel, stared hard at the ruins, finished the bottle in one swallow.

  Osiel stood and grabbed it before the worm slid into Carlos’ mouth.

  “You,” he said to Max, “you have to eat the worm.”

  Max accepted the bottle, balancing Osiel’s life and death. He missed Manny. Carlos was too serious. He wasn’t going to make it back, and neither was the German. Once the blood started flowing and the Beast had a bead on how to find its fill, there’d have to be more sacrifices. Was the old serrano going to be enough to verify Max’s kill? Max didn’t think so. He’d run away soon enough, anyway. But when no one but Max returned from the wilderness, that might be all the confirmation observers would need to believe his employers were worthy of their business.

  The chunk of meat slid into his mouth. Small seeds, tasting like sage and lemon and reminding him of coriander, stayed on his tongue as he swallowed the worm. The empty bottle felt good in his hand, a tool that needed only jagged edges to become truly useful. The Beast pressed Max for Osiel. He threw the bottle into the valley. It landed somewhere with a dull clunk.

  The German moaned. Carlos took a deep breath, held it.

  Osiel went to the base of the middle cross and pulled something out from the rocks piled against the wood. “You take your road, I’ll take mine,” he said, briefly holding up his prize. “Teonandcatl. The flesh of the gods.”

  Max couldn’t make anything out of the flat, spongy mass in Osiel’s hand. But his heartbeat picked up, as if he was still trekking through the woods and climbing mountains. His vision blurred slightly, though no worse than when he’d caught blows to the back of his skull in fights.

  Carlos let his breath out, saying, “Bello embustero.”

  Osiel ate what he’d picked. “We’re crossing the threshold. The flesh of gods, the blood of men, opens the way.” Osiel closed his eyes and whispered in Max’s head: Soon.

  The Beast, feeling the walls of its simple reality closing in more tightly, desperately rallied for a final eruption of outrage. The demon pressed Max to attack Osiel now. Max growled, low and deep in his throat, a warning and a promise. He tried to take a step, but his knees betrayed him and he had to concentrate to stay upright.

  He felt like a child, in Calcutta, learning how to run all over again.

  “Does Ololiuqui greet you? Does Coaxihuitl find a home in the crevices of your heart and curl into your empty places?” Osiel opened his eyes, spread his arms wide to the valley.

  “Beautiful liar,” Carlos said, turning to Max. “Bello embustero. There’s snake plant in the worm and the tequila. Peyote. He’s taken mushroom.”

  “No lies,” Osiel said, dismissing Carlos with an upraised finger. “The way home.”

  The green of the valley peeled away like skin over the surrounding mountainsides, then vanished into the electric blue sky in a whirlwind of tumbling branches and fluttering leaves. Stone ruins lay like naked bones on an autopsy table. A square pyramid rose in steps, cracked and out of plumb. Weedy ground cover filled, walled-in squares and pathways. Other structures, their geometries ruptured, lay scattered across the valley floor in a model of broken order. Massive statuary in the shape of gigantic heads and leering, block-form figures lay trapped in the earth’s grasp, chipped and tilted like captured, wounded warriors waiting to be sacrificed.

  Light blinded Max, as harsh and sudden as a flashcrash grenade. He blinked, eyes tearing, and through the pain watched the pyramid rise, straighten, fill out into a blazing structure in red, blue, green and yellow, with massive stairs leading up to two small structures at its zenith. Serpent walls formed the pyramid’s foundation, with successive levels decorated with geometric patterns, jaguar and eagle reliefs, and narrative friezes depicting warriors defeating an army, taking captives, offering them to a king, and cutting their hearts out in sacrifice.

  A feeling troubled Max, until he thought it might be what prey felt when they reached the safety of their burrow.

  Statuary shook free from the earth’s grasp and stood, tall and proud, gazing over gardens and terraces, platforms ornamented with rows of shields and knives, canals filled with glittering water and pools at the feet of circular monuments.

  Max gasped for breath, having forgotten to breathe, and when he looked at the valley again he expected everything he’d seen to have disappeared.

  But the place in which Osiel had come to find his death remained whole and ready for blood.

  Lies. Illusion. Hallucinogenic silk spun by a tequila worm. The Beast would have none of it.

  Max sensed his time had finally arrived. He’d never put off a kill for so long, didn’t think he could ever do so again. Only for the great and powerful Oz.

  The serrano made a sound like a baby’s cry, and Osiel tossed a small bag in his direction, which landed with a clink at his feet. The man picked up his payment and ran away, leaving behind his own backpack, as well as weapons and equipment that would have fetched a good price, even bloodstained.

  Carlos whistled, low and soft, then descended into the valley, savagely ripping off his clothes as if his skin was burning. The German lifted his head and screamed. He scrambled to get up, falling several times as his legs gave out, once grabbing hold of the corpse tied to the cross before realizing what he’d done and letting go, only to collapse once more.

  Osiel reached him before the German had a chance to take more than two steps. He held out a mushroom in his palm. The German stared at Osiel, at the mushroom, flinched at the sight of the valley. He snatched the mushroom and crammed it into his mouth.

  Osiel laughed and patted him on the head.

  On their way down, with Carlos already far ahead and splashing in the pool while the German trailed a short distance behind them, a dog on a mystical leash, Osiel slowly shed his clothes. His tattoos seemed bolder, darker, as if their lines had been refreshed. The skulls in his flesh matched the glyphs decorating the walls of one of the smaller structures. Skeletons seemed to dance under the bright sun.

  “Have you ever wondered what happens to you after you die?” the Oz asked.

  ‘No.”

  “Come on. You’re lying.”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “You don’t care.”

  “That’s right.”

  The Oz hopped on one foot as he removed a boot. He paused to kick off the other. “You may regret that lack of concern.”

  “I doubt it.”

  Osiel shook his head. “Have you ever killed a woman while she was giving birth?”

  “I may have.” The Beast was not in the mood to give him the taste of that particular kind of kill, even if it could have separated the flavor from all the rest.

  “Just wondering how those ghosts found you back there. Aren’t you afraid of ghosts?”

  “There are no ghosts.”

  “You’ll be surprised.”

  “Not me. You, when we finally get this business done and there’s no more room for talk.”

  “When I speak, it is to the day of all judgment when the secrets in our hearts are revealed. I will not be surprised, and neither will God.”

  Max appraised the scars over Osiel’s genitalia, free and flapping in rhythm with Osiel�
�s gait. They looked like the signature of his handiwork, if he’d ever left anyone alive when he’d finished.

  They came down to the valley floor and into the fragrant air of gardens filled with aromatic herbs, bush sage, lion’s tail, and marigolds. Beds of ground cover dotted with red, pink, white and purple flowers covered their feet, while banks of sunflowers swayed as if caught in the slight breeze of their passage.

  Hummingbirds flew before and after them. Clouds of butterflies, their black-veined golden wings shining, swept by overhead. There was still blood in the air.

  They picked up Manny from the pool, with Max having to descend the steps to the sunken grove and pull him out by the arm. When they’d returned to ground level, the German had also stripped down. He was dancing at the entrance to a squat, rectangular structure. Vines sprouting red, tube-like flowers partially covered the bands of bone reliefs on the walls. As Max took hold of the German and sent him half-flying, half-stumbling in Osiel’s direction, the hint of movement drew his attention back to the bone house.

  He crept inside, glancing back once. Osiel stood watching him, with Manny and the German on either side. He nodded, smiled, waved him on.

  He wasn’t all that eager for Max to fulfill the contract.

  Again, Max felt a trap closing in on him. But the sense of danger was faint, perhaps an echo from his childhood in the Calcutta streets, when he’d squeezed into tight, dark places to escape danger.

  Indirect lighting allowed the gloom to gather in comers like curtains protecting the sides of a stage. The air was musty, as if the room wouldn’t let go of its secrets. He couldn’t hear his own heartbeat or the sound of his breathing.

  Dry bone dust made him want to sneeze.

  His foot found an old helmet, still polished, a piece that might have come from a museum display of old conquistadores. The helmet clattered across the stone floor, shattering the silence and making his muscles twitch, before knocking into a series of stone tablets, both circular and in a variety of rectangular shapes, leaning against the far wall. Above the tablets, masks in jade, gold, turquoise and quetzal feathers spread into the darkness, their eye holes as deep as the ones through which Osiel had watched him the first time they met.

  Name us.

  Simple words, spoken inside his head.

  He nearly dismissed them as another of Osiel’s trick, but the words were different. Carried not in a single voice, but by a chorus reverberating with the power of countless individual lives bound by a common song of pain, or at least by the memory of that melody.

  The Beast, deep in the crevices of Max’s empty places, jumped as if Max had screamed at the demon to rise.

  The doorway receded further into the plaza, which darkened as if clouds had suddenly blown into the valley. He took a step but seemed no nearer to the exit.

  The chamber’s corners drew Max’s attention. Faces formed out of ripples in the night, like masks thrust out from between stage curtains. Osiel’s sisters.

  They licked their lips. Arms, long and slender, wove a sinuous invitation for him to fall into their embrace.

  His skin remembered their hands, their fingers, both drawing him near and driving him away as he’d devoured their pleasure and their bodies. Their taste returned to his tongue, as fresh as when he’d raised his head from feasting on them.

  Skull face ghosts floated out of another corner’s darkness. Max shuffled away, the scratches they’d given him earlier burning again. But he stopped as his shoulder hit a wall of frigid air.

  Crossing that boundary felt wrong. He might as well have put a gun to his head and pulled a trigger.

  “There’s nothing here,” Max said. His words hardly carried, as if the structure’s geometry had compressed the air into a dense cloud around him.

  His ears began ringing. He took another step toward the entrance. “Nothing can kill me,” he said, letting long strides rather than an outright run take him out.

  A ripple of laughter slithered after him, as if he’d made a joke, or a play on words. Stone grated on stone from the piled tablets. A mask of hummingbird feathers slid off the back wall.

  The darkness on either side of him receded, revealing a layer of bones along the walls of the room piled to the ceiling, crowned by a rack of skulls staring down at him. He’d walked into an ossuary.

  What will happen when you love?

  Illusion. The worm talking to him, again. Yes, he remembered.

  Not the first time. Of course. He’d been trapped by the Russians once. Captured. They’d used poison to make him talk. Russians liked poison. Tried to make him afraid of the dark, and of noises. Waved knives and surgical instruments in front of him. Cut him. Probed his flesh.

  Not something he’d ever wanted to recall. Part of the price of his work.

  The Beast had not done well with illusions back then, either. Max laughed.

  He’d laughed back then, too.

  When he stopped laughing, he was outside in the bright sun, surrounded once more by flowers and birds and the pageantry of a lost, dead city. He felt as if he’d slipped a little too deeply into the eternal moment in which he traveled.

  “Did you leave an offering?” Osiel asked, with the slightest of smiles, when Max reached him.

  “I left what I didn’t need.”

  “It doesn’t take much to please the gods,” Osiel said, with a bow of the head.

  They made their way to the pyramid. At the foot of the stairs, by one of the carved serpent heads positioned at both the bottom and top of the steps, Osiel showed Max the obsidian knife

  “Now,” Max said.

  “The high ground. Be ready.”

  “I am.”

  The Oz grunted. He put a foot up on the first, tall step and muttered, “I wish you’d get rid of those rags and surrender to the spirit of the moment.”

  The Oz climbed with Carlos on one side, taking in the valley in long, lingering passes, as if it was going to be the last thing he’d ever see. The German at his other flank tripped every few steps as he lunged after invisible objects that seemed to float forever just beyond his reach. Osiel had to haul him back when he strayed from the steps to crawl along the pyramid wall. He looked back at Max, shook his head.

  Max thought of what he was about to do and agreed with Osiel’s unspoken observation. In this country, he should take advantage of available freedoms before higher powers pulled him back on his path. He shed his clothes and eagerly followed his prey the last few steps to death.

  A grooved, worn stone table lay between the two small structures atop the pyramid, at the center of a ring of jars made of the same stone as the altar. Carlos came out of his daze as the Oz led the German to the table. Carlos helped lay the German down, stepped away as Osiel raised the obsidian blade.

  Max exhaled as the Oz cut German’s throat and butchered his body with surgical precision. The Oz was stronger than he looked, no matter how sharp the knife might have been. He made his way through the German’s chest to retrieve the heart without much trouble, and placed the organ in one of the jars.

  Manny’s spiral sign faded from the German’s forehead.

  The Beast, at last, stirred at the scent of blood and the sound of breaking bones and tearing flesh. No illusions. Truth.

  Carlos slid the body off the altar and tossed it down the stairs before Max could reach him.

  Feeling robbed, Max was torn between tossing his bodyguard after the body and beating the life out of him. Carlos ignored him, held his hand out to Osiel.

  A part of Max understood he was losing control of himself and the situation. But wasn’t he supposed to be free, now, to do what he’d been hired to do? To do what he was best at doing?

  The Oz tossed the knife to Carlos.

  Max flared with anger. The Beast, creeping gingerly back into a world it did not understand, found something to hang on to. Rage. The knife belonged to the Beast. It was hungry. Truth would feed it.

  Carlos held the knifepoint out, toward Max, who prepar
ed to receive Carlos’ thrust.

  But like the men who’d called themselves the Blood of Killers, Carlos turned the blade on himself, plunged the knife into his throat.

  And as he’d done with those men, Max jumped on the fallen man and tore the rest of his throat out, dug with his fingers and teeth, pounded bone with fists until they broke, ripped and cracked the human shell as life drained away and shock closed down organs in rapid succession.

  Only the tapping on his shoulder pulled Max out of his blind and furious feeding. The touch sent a familiar electric shock through him, and brought him back to the moment he shared with the man he’d promised to kill.

  “The heart,” Osiel said, pointing to a nearby jar. “In that one, please.” The Beast, revived by blood, jumped for Osiel.

  Perhaps it had been the touch. Or the Oz’s closeness to his own death. Whatever the reason, the Beast had found Osiel again. Tracked his scent of piss and tequila and sharp acids spiking through his brain. Understood it was free of civilization, for the moment. The finer points of contractual need were elusive. It had waited long enough; the Beast was going to kill the Oz.

  Max missed the Beast’s simple certainties.

  Max picked up the knife. So easy. Osiel was walking away, heading for one of the enclosed structures, the skull emblazoned between his shoulder blades inviting a death stroke.

  But to have danced this far and miss the final step made Max uncomfortable. The killing was too simple. Not quite right. After all the sacrifices he’d made for the sake of the contract and his protectors, he’d developed a new and subtler hunger—getting the job done right. The ceremonies in which he’d participated and the realities he’d experienced demanded the fulfilment of Osiel’s implied promise for a spectacular death, something richer than anything Max and his simple needs could ever deliver for himself. If he couldn’t wait, he should have killed Osiel at the villa and saved himself the trouble of the dangerous journey.

  He let the Beast run, but resisted surrendering himself completely to the demon’s rage. To his surprise, his tactic worked. Then he remembered, he was living in Osiel’s moment. And the worm was in him. The Beast was what it was, but Max felt himself to be a little more than anything he’d ever been or would be, again.