A Blood of Killers

by Gerard Houarner

  At last, with the effort it might have taken to crawl from a plane crash, he managed to push himself up from altar. His legs dangled over the platform’s edge, his feet just beyond reaching the pyramid floor.

  The position reminded him of being a child, and of something else, a more recent experience, which he didn’t want to remember.

  He slipped off the altar, then held on with both hands as blood rushed through his body and his legs trembled from weakness.

  The worm must have had more of a bite than he’d anticipated.

  La Santisima had withdrawn to the stone hut from which she’d emerged. She was barely visible, a woman’s form in grey darkness against the deeper night crowded beneath the structure’s roof.

  Max tried to remember what she looked like, but only her taste—like arsenic—and the feel of her riding his cock remained. There was something about skeletons, and also statues, but again, he had no reason to remember the effects of hallucinogens. He preferred leaving those kinds of experiences to the Russians, who seemed to enjoy them.

  But there was an inconsistency. A small problem.

  He frowned. The woman never should have survived if he and the Beast had taken her. Why was she still standing?

  “You will forget your life here as you have everyplace else,” La Santisima said.

  And talking?

  “Until love plants a seed in your heart, and it grows inside you like a terrible cancer.”

  Then she was gone. Max was alone at the top of the pyramid in a valley taking a beating from a merciless sun.

  The heat bore down on the back of Max’s neck, and the light brightened until it became a blinding beacon signaling the way home. Max shut his eyes, but the light pierced the thin skin and fragile bone of his head to fill his mind with searing brilliance. This had happened to him recently. Why, he couldn’t recall.

  He put a hand up to shade his eyes, with no effect. His skin prickled, seemed to crisp and pop. A low, monotonous drone that might have been a light plane’s engine made him turn his head looking for the source of the noise.

  Was his pick-up arriving?

  Max pushed himself away from the altar. The stairs. He had to get down. Recover Osiel’s body. Bring home proof of the kill. That seemed the logical thing to do.

  He took a step down. Fell.

  Floated.

  Like a dead, dried out leaf ripped by the wind from its branch.

  Max emerged from the light walking past a line of crosses, Osiel’s body draped over his shoulders. In his left hand, he held the man’s head by the hair.

  In his right, the obsidian knife.

  He didn’t bother looking up at the corpses on the crosses, the remains of bodies nearby, the valley or the pyramid and its surrounding complex of structures. All of that was in the past. Irrelevant.

  Osiel felt surprisingly light. He must have left a good portion of the man’s insides behind. Fingerprints, even DNA testing would confirm the kill. But it was a good thing he’d thought to take the head. That was valid enough for a first impression.

  An odd compulsion made him stop at the stream below the crosses, set down his burdens, and bathe. He didn’t understand why he needed to be concerned with his bloody appearance or minor wounds, but after he was done, he did feel stronger. His wounds, he noticed while washing, were not all minor. Hours later, they’d mostly vanished, though scars were plentiful.

  It was dusk when Max again became aware of his surroundings. He’d lost himself in the drudgery of the hike back to settled country. The sun had long ago set behind the mountains, but night had not yet closed off the world. He thought he needed to make a camp, probably up in a tree to avoid scavengers looking to challenge him for Osiel’s body. But instead, another compulsion drove him to follow a small flight of butterflies to a canyon wall, where a hummingbird sat above an orchid growing out of soft, damp earth.

  He ate the flower, though he thought he might be poisoning himself. But the Beast didn’t protest, remaining comfortably sedate inside, like a child being carried by its mother, so he had to be wrong. The Beast would never allow itself to be hurt.

  He didn’t understand what good the single flower would do for him, and he began searching for edible roots, fruits, mushrooms. The hunter in him already saw what he could use to set a few traps and perhaps catch meat for the morning.

  He found excitement in the prospect of a little hunting.

  But when he settled back into thinking again, he was walking through thick forest with a glowing jaguar tracking him ten meters off his left flank.

  Max thought of tossing Osiel’s head at it. Sacrifice. Somehow the word seemed important. He’d still have the body, for DNA testing. Or maybe he was supposed to leave the body behind.

  Before he could decide, the jaguar stood before him. Max put down both the body and the head and showed the cat the obsidian knife. The jaguar opened her jaws and shook her head, waving jade teeth at him.

  The Beast did not rise to the challenge, and Max began to wonder if he was still hallucinating. Would his knife pass through this animal’s hide? Would her fangs dose him with burning pleasure?

  Max grunted. Where had those ideas come from?

  The jaguar was on him with one step and a jump. Osiel’s head rolled into a dense thicket of thorn bush. Max landed on Osiel’s corpse. The jaguar’s paws, pressing down on his chest and right arm, pinned him to the ground. Her glow was intense so close up to her, and Max didn’t like the fact that he was more concerned—but not afraid—of the light coming from her than the animal’s claws and teeth.

  That kind of reaction didn’t make sense.

  The jaguar licked Max, her rough tongue scratching skin and reminding him he still had wounds underneath healed flesh.

  Butterflies flew out of her throat. Her breath smelled of marigolds and sage. A dog barked, far off.

  Sancho.

  He didn’t understand why he’d think of such a stupid name with a jaguar in his face. He closed his eyes to think, to plead with the Beast to rise, to find strength in his spent body.

  When he opened them, it was day. Morning. He was flat on his back on a bed of marigold leaves in the ruins of Osiel’s villa. He felt rested, even refreshed.

  Someone was singing. A child laughed. People, nearby. But not many. He smelled the bodies.

  The Beast sniffed at the blood smeared across Max’s back, and on his left hand, but found nothing of interest in Osiel’s old, familiar blood. Still sated from its last meal, the Beast was content to remain hidden under the cover of its host.

  Carlos. Manny. The German. Weren’t they supposed to be nearby, covering his back, giving him support?

  But he was alone. And naked.

  He remembered a festival. Vaguely. Someone slipped him a hallucinogenic. The Russians. They were always playing with poisons. The Beast’s bloated sense of satisfaction told Max whoever had tried taking advantage of them had paid the price for the attack.

  He’d gotten the job done. The details were vague, but he knew he’d killed his target as instructed, in the manner satisfying all conditions of the contract. Here he was, naked, alone, and bloody, as proof.

  There was also the head. And the body. Somewhere. He remembered dragging Osiel back.

  He was still groggy from sleeping, he supposed. He must have needed a lot of rest. He felt slow-witted, stupid. A sense of forgetfulness plagued him.

  Smoke got him to sit up. A fire was climbing the catafalque. Osiel’s funeral.

  Osiel’s body, his head. The rest of his proof. Going up in flames.

  Max stood. Still no sign of his team. He assumed they’d been killed. Occupational hazard. Operatives assigned to him rarely survived. He preferred working alone.

  He picked up an obsidian knife half buried in ash. The edge still tasted of blood. He might be naked in potentially hostile territory, but at least he was armed. The Beast remained unconcerned.

  He headed for the catafalque.

  Vermin swarmed over
the festival grounds, digging into the remains of pan de muerto and sugar coffins with ants swarming over the candy cadavers peering out of them. Cats darted back and forth in a frenzy of hunting that sparked the Beast’s interest momentarily. Market stalls and vehicles lay in ruins. Skeletal puppets dangled, limbs akimbo, from their broken displays. Mummer masks and skeleton heads stood in mute lines like soldiers ready to march to battle. A few birds sang while chickens wandered, pecking at the ground, oblivious to the carcasses of fowl and goats and pigs. Fragments of casual conversation drifted in and out of hearing. Someone played a guitar. Only the dogs were missing.

  Children emerged from cover, skeletons painted on their pants and shirts. Max grew uneasy, and froze when they danced around him in a rough circle, singing in a language he’d never heard before. Another band of children ran up and threw clothes at him, hard, as if he was the target in a carnival game. He feinted a grab for a nearby girl, but she only danced away, laughing. When the children were done with their play, they scattered. He was relieved when they were gone.

  Max picked through the clothes and found jeans and a T-shirt, as well as sandals, that fit him. He also found a large, stiff, reptilian scale that shimmered with odd colors in the light, a feathered mask with eye holes he couldn’t make himself look through, and a ping-pong ball sized eye bead that was sticky to the touch. He smashed the mask and bead, and threw the scale away.

  The mothers and fathers of the children who’d come to him stood back and let him pass through the encampment without challenge. They had the look of survivors, and scavengers. Something had been taken away from them, and they still hadn’t found a replacement for the lost center of their lives. It seemed they did not have enough with each other, or their children.

  A contingent of five elders did emerge as he approached the catafalque. With fire running up the edifice of banners and biting into the hollow heart of the wooden tower, the five—two women in black and three men in vests and jeans and boots—stood in Max’s way.

  He showed them the knife. He didn’t want to kill them and then have to search for another change of clean clothes so he could return to civilization and deliver the report of the mission’s success to his employers.

  The two women, one nearly bald and the other with her silver-grey hair tied neatly into a bun, approached him with open hands. When they were well within his killing arc, they crouched and sniffed his crotch like a pair of friendly dogs welcoming a stranger. In a few seconds, they were done. They turned, cackling, to yell at the men in Spanish, and then in the same unrecognizable language the children had used.

  A band of younger women watching from a distance screeched with laughter.

  The woman with little hair turned to Max, patted the hand holding the blade, and said in a heavy accent, “You’ll have interesting children.”

  The old men came next, bearing their years proudly, with Indian strength in their chest and limbs. The oldest of them squinted up at Max’s face and waved a hand, reduced to three clawed fingers, for him to bend down closer. With the tips of his rigid, boney fingers, he opened Max’s mouth and sniffed his breath. A nod of the head and a wave from him made the committee of elders step aside. Faint cheering broke out in the camp, though no one rushed forward to congratulate Max or the elders on whatever had just happened.

  Max went to the tower and watched it burn. The smell of roasting flesh confirmed Osiel’s body, or something once human, had been laid to rest at its top.

  It wasn’t until the tower collapsed in on itself with a subdued crack, sending plumes of dust and smoke into the air, that Max’s head finally cleared. He felt as if he’d been stuck in dream and had finally awakened. The Beast sensed a change, as well, and stretched itself out through his body as if trying on an old coat for size.

  “A fine job preparing Osiel for the next life,” said one of the old men from the committee of elders gathered behind him. “Flayed so close he was already nearly all bone.”

  The others concurred with a collective squawking Max couldn’t understand. But he hoped their respect would make its way back to his employers, who might remember to spare him any more jobs he’d survive to barely remember.

  On the way back across the festival grounds, heading for a jeep sitting far from the other vehicles, he passed an intricate floor plan dug into a shallow pit. A layer of quicksilver reflected his face as he stared down from the edge. His eyes seemed darker than they should be, like the eyeholes of a mask. A sudden ripple turned the expressionless set of his lips into a smile. He kicked dirt tinted with red cinnabar over the mirrored surface, covering the corruption of his face.

  The jeep worked. It might have been the same one he’d taken to Osiel’s house. He couldn’t remember. Didn’t care.

  He drove back to the airstrip to wait for the next plane out. A bee stung him, out of nowhere, for no reason. At least he didn’t remember just how fucked up the job had been. There was mercy in blood washing away memory.

  The Beast, with a short, sharp click like one bone tapping on another, agreed.

  THE MAN WHO WOULDN’T DIE

  Giyab took the bullet in the heart. It was a clean kill. Simple. Efficient. And Max had the rest of the evening to satisfy himself and the Beast with what was going to be offered for auction tomorrow. Certainly, there’d be no other form of entertainment in the dry, hot Gulf city that was so tentatively constructing a new-world edifice over ancient foundations.

  The slaves would be missed, but not by anyone who mattered to Max.

  Mr. Jung might even, in his attempt at humor, compliment Max for his mercy in rescuing the kidnapped women from their future tormentors, who might have done much less than he would do to them, but for far longer. And then he’d give Max the name of someone else who needed to be killed.

  “I can’t die,” the man had said, before Max shot him.

  The challenge, spoken so softly, with so little fire that it hadn’t roused the Beast from its slumber, seemed to Max to mock Mr. Jung and the people he and Max’s other handlers represented.

  Max put another bullet in Giyab’s heart. Then he followed the scent of his other prey, locked downstairs in the old stone cellar where their screams would not be heard through the walls, over the merchants’ calls from the sook.

  At last, the Beast’s interest was captured. Max rode its rage and hunger to his own satisfaction.

  “When will you finish the job?” Mr. Jung asked as Max sat down at the café table The smell of camel shit and engine exhaust was heavy in the late morning air, already cooking to a stench.

  “Which one?” Max refused a pour of mint tea. He didn’t want to wash the taste left by his pleasures from his mouth.

  “Giyab.”

  “He’s done.”

  “I know his wares are. But the cleaners didn’t find his body.”

  “Someone else took it. Not my problem. You should hire better local help.”

  “The locals are quite adept. We recruit them for our European operations. Your assignment was spotted heading up the coast. It appears he’s taken a leave from his business interests in this city. Analysis predicts he’s facilitating an Afghanistan shipment.”

  “I shot him through the heart. Twice.”

  “Perhaps that was your mistake. He has none.” Mr. Jung left, suddenly, quickly.

  Max poured a cup of tea, thinking he needed to clear his palate for another mystery. Everything had been going so well. It had been a while since complications troubled his work. And this job had seemed so simple, beneath his level of skill. Because of the merchandise involved, he’d thought Mr. Jung had tossed it in his direction as a reward for his recent run of smoothly handled assignments. Now, he had a feeling there’d been a trick involved, and that it was going to be one of those jobs. Unpleasant. Even difficult. A source of irritation for him and for the Beast within him.

  Dealing with his demon’s frustrations always cost him.

  He drained the tea and set off once more on the trail of his q
uarry.

  There were camels but no vehicles in the encampment, tucked away against the side of an escarpment well off the usual desert routes. Just Giyab and a half-dozen guards, Bedouin who looked like they rarely set foot in villages, much less cities. When he looked into their eyes as he killed them, Max saw that they were too much in love with the desert’s emptiness to tolerate spending much time in busy places full of the noise of civilization’s wants and needs.

  Perhaps that’s why they hadn’t seen him coming.

  He caught Giyab by surprise, still sleeping. He was shocked, himself, to find the man still alive.

  Two quick knocks to the temple subdued the target and gave Max the time to check the chest area. Perhaps there’d been a new kind of body armor involved, something that mimicked skin, perhaps even designed to bleed. The artifice had to have been extraordinarily sophisticated to fool the Beast, which had not been aroused by any hint of deceit.

  Two scars marked the entry wounds of Max’s shells. He passed his hand over them, as a human lover might caress the skin of a forbidden desire. He put his head down, tasted the flesh. Giyab twitched, struggled. Max pinned his arms, sucked at the scar.

  Yes. Traces of gunpowder and seared meat, blood and bone. He’d shot the man. The bullets had to have struck home. And yet, here he was, alive, alert, eyes gleaming by lamp light as he took in his assassin.

  “I can’t die,” Giyab said, this time with the hint of a smile.

  He pulled a dagger from his bedding, but Max easily deflected the strike to his ribs. He used the blade to cut Giyab’s throat, then let the Beast drink from the spillage.

  Breathing stopped. The heart failed. The blood, more acidic than Max was accustomed to, stopped flowing.

  The man was as dead as Max had ever known anyone to be. The Beast tore at the throat’s flesh, sampled the meat, for good measure. It, too, was satisfied that its prey was dead.

  Max flicked the switch on the signal transmitter and left the camp for the cleaners.