AZTECHS

by Lucius Shepard

  Childers only reaction was to nod.

  “The men you’ll be workin’ with…Crespo’s team. Any problems there?”

  “None.”

  “Okay. See you later tonight.”

  “Don’t you want to know how Crespo died?”

  Sammy usually displayed an indifferent attitude to life and death, so this question seemed against type. Childers’ expression had barely changed during our brief interview, but now I could have sworn I detected a glimmer of outrage at my indifference. “I assumed it was the drugs,” I told him.

  “His neck was broken.” Childers scratched the tiny chevrons on his cheek with a forefinger as big as a corn dog. “Nice and neat.”

  Sammy killing Sammy was how I figured it, because the only person capable of kevorking a drugged mesomorphic maniac like Crespo would be another drugged mesomorphic maniac. But Sammy killing Sammy outside the pit wasn’t that common, and Crespo had been a renowned pitfighter, an icon to his brothers-in-dope. “Any ideas who?” I asked.

  Childers shook his head with the ponderous slowness of a statue just coming to life. “Some dangerous motherfucker.”

  “As dangerous as you?”

  “You never know.”

  “See you tonight,” I said, and cleared the screen.

  PART TWO

  I sucked on the tequila, considering the possibility of hiring another Sammy or two, but I decided that more muscle might stir up the Carbonells. I checked my watch. Seven-twenty-two. Nearly Guadalupe time. I fumbled in my jacket pocket, dug out a blue gelatin capsule I’d held back from Papa and swallowed it with a sip of beer. As I waited for the blue to take effect, I gave thought to what Papa had said about Guadalupe. I’d never doubted that she was using me to further her career. In the land of a million channels, she was a rising star, and through me, she had access to stories with which she fleshed out her weekly show, two hours of border news interspersed with sex, much of it featuring yours truly and Srta. Guadalupe Bernal. I had hopes that our relationship might evolve past the level of a business association, and it was this that caused Papa to believe I was being chumped. But in my limited appreciation of life, chumped or not, I was almost completely fulfilled to be the owner of a security service and the semi-famous saddle pard of the Border Rose.

  By eight o’clock I was surfing a bright blue wave of psychotropic love sweet love, and my natural horniness had been elevated to the level of moonstruck monkey. At eight sharp the metal door at the center of the club rattled upward, and the heated glow of El Rayo filled in all the shadows, casting red gleams along the countertop and blazing in the mirror. Then a little seismic shudder, the curtain of fire vanished, and Lupe came striding into the Mexican side of the club, her camera scooting along at her heels, a steel six-legged cross between a lizard and a bug about the size of a chihuahua, the technology courtesy of AZTECHS. The fire returned, framing her like Our Lady of Guadalupe as she came toward me. Tall and slender and pale, she had on white slacks and a silky red open-collared blouse embroidered with black roses. The door rattled down, returning Cruzados to its customary dimness—she appeared to glow against the backdrop.

  She settled on the stool next to mine, the coils of her perfume slithering around me, and gave me a quick wet kiss. Her face was made up for the show. Shellacked crimson lips and eyes transformed into dark butterfly wings with brushed-on shadow; but I could see down to the Iberian geometry of broad cheekbones and narrow chin and strong nose. She leaned into me and whispered, “Can we get private, baby? I need a new tape to intercut with the opening.”

  We walked along a corridor that angled off from the main room and found an unoccupied roomette. Black walls, black couch with chrome trim, offset lighting. The Marquis de Sade would have been happy there. We undressed hurriedly and made love while the camera skittered about the walls above us, beside us, poised like a praying mantis, beaming jewels of light onto our skin. Usually Lupe liked me to talk shit to her, give her a slow, coarsely self-referential fuck, but tonight’s show would likely be picked up by other shows, and so we kept it classy, just sighs and whispers as we went heartbeat-to-heartbeat from the center of the carnal border nighttime trance life, borderless between people, between nations, part of the radio holeo video feelio fuckio stream of images dancing along that red snakebelly line that linked ocean to ocean. I was stained all the way through with Lupe. Her breath was my breath, and we were swimming upstream in the red midnight, offering our all to the vast cable syndrome. I felt those images coursing along my skin, like a hundred thousand cats-per-second rubbing against me, and afterward, lying quietly while Lupe restored her makeup, perched on the edge of the couch beside me, I could still feel them moving ghostlike around us.

  “Frankie,” she said, and the camera-bug-lizard turned its snoutlike lens housing toward her. “Play the opening.”

  A holographic shot of Lupe in her white slacks and red blouse appeared in the center of the room against a background of sage, sand, and cactus, and her diminished voice began to speak:

  Twenty-three years ago somebody erected a sign in the desert. Out in the middle of nowhere, 150, 160 miles due east from Hermosillo on the Pacific coast. Just a plain wooden sign, billboard-sized, bearing three words neatly lettered in black paint:

  REALITY STOPS HERE

  “Start intercutting the sex here,” Lupe told Frankie. “Alternate between me’n Eddie and shots of me on the desert.”

  There was no apparent reason for a sign—it marked no road, no building, no watercourse, no natural formation of any significance. The place where it stood was at the heart of a trackless waste of cactus and sand and scorpions. The first person known to have seen it was a snake hunter in a jeep who claimed to have shot it full of holes, but when someone checked it out a few days later, they found it undamaged. That story seemed to piss people off, or at the least to offer an irresistible challenge; they took to vandalizing the sign on a regular basis, driving in from Hermosillo, from the border, and eventually from places as far away as Monterrey and San Luis Potosi. After each incident the sign would reappear good as new, sometimes within a few hours of being burned or chainsawed or shotgunned, with no evidence left to indicate who had done the repairs.

  “Now I want to hear the heavy breathing,” Lupe said; she glanced at me and smiled. “Nice moves, Eddie. You take somethin’ tonight?”

  “Just a blue,” I said.

  “Oh.” She gave me a poochy look. “You must love me a lot, huh?”

  “Don’t break the mood,” I told her. “I’m happy.”

  The consensus came to be that the sign must be some sort of hoax—the phrase REALITY STOPS HERE had the ring of art school bullshit. However, this viewpoint absorbed a major hit when a scientist from the university in Mexico City, made curious by reports of the sign’s magical invulnerability, dynamited it and, along with a handful of assistants and a battery of cameras, staked out the area. Twelve hours later the sign was back. Though they swore they hadn’t fallen asleep, neither the scientist nor his assistants could recall how this had happened; nor was the film they shot of much help. The cameras had recorded eleven hours fifty-nine minutes and fifty-four seconds of the wreckage lying undisturbed; this was followed by a static-filled gap of six seconds duration. When the static ceased, the sign was as before, and the wreckage had vanished.

  “Okay,” said Lupe. “Start strobing the sex.”

  Thereafter the area for miles around the sign came to be thought of as a kind of desert Bermuda Triangle. Disappearances and apparitions were reported, supernatural legends were spawned. Except for crazies and the odd researcher, people stayed clear of the region. Then, ten years after the sign had first been sighted, it vanished. However, the spot where it had stood did not remain vacant for long. It was replaced several days later by a stone head some three and a half stories tall, rendered in the style of the Aztecs and representing the emperor overthrown centuries before by the conquistadors, Montezuma. Lying on its side, pitted and crumbling, it look
ed from a distance to be the relic of a dead culture; but when seen close at hand, it became clear that this was not a fragment of an ancient statue, but the logo of some thoroughly modern organization.

  AZTECHS.

  A shot of the great stone head replaced Lupe’s face. Its eyes were television screens, and across them drifted fleeting images of the natural world. Birds in flight, coyotes skulking, a serpent unwinding across hardpan, elephants fording a river…

  “Let’s drop the image of the sex into the head’s eye screens.” said Lupe. “Then close in on one of the screens during the next section.” She glanced at me over her shoulder. “Nice, huh?”

  “Very,” I said.

  When the AZTECHS shops began to appear all along the border, selling revolutionary technology at cut-rate prices, using the stone head as their logo, the mystery seemed to be solved. But one part of the mystery remained unrevealed…

  Lupe began to relate the story of how an American military AI, who had since taken to calling itself Montezuma, had succeeded in downloading a copy of itself into a Mexican storage unit, wiping out its original, and establishing a virtual kingdom in the deep desert, guaranteeing its survival by means of contracts between its then-secret business entity, the AZTECHS Corporation, and multinational conglomerates all over the world—contracts that, if breached, would have catastrophic results for the global economy. As Frankie caused the holographic image to shift into increasingly tighter displays of the stone head, its broad face and thick-lipped mouth seeming to express a mournful calm, I watched Lupe and me getting nasty in the left eye screen. I had a few insecurities about the relationship. We had a powerful physical attraction for one another, but sex was a currency between us. Like Papa said, Lupe was playing me, and I was playing her, using my celebrity to create new business opportunities. Despite knowing all this was true, despite being okay with it, I was still upset by what he had said, and I tried to find some sign in our performance that Lupe and I were about more than business, that hidden in the squirming imagery flickering across the eye screen were the telltales of a deeper attraction—not because I hoped for this so much (so I told myself), but simply because I wanted to prove Papa wrong.

  “When you do the fade,” Lupe said to Frankie, “pull it back and let ’em hear me come.”

  The image of the stone head dwindled to the tune of Lupe’s moans and outcries. She stood and gazed at me with an expression of exaggerated concern. “What’s the matter, Eddie? You look sad.”

  “Nothin’.” I started buttoning my shirt. “Just Papa’s on my ass again.”

  “You should move outa there,” Lupe said, running a hand along my shoulder.

  “Yeah, maybe.” I sat up.

  “What’d he say to you?”

  I filled her in.

  “You got no future?” Lupe sniffed in disdain. “That old fuck should talk!”

  “He said you were playin’ me,” I said.

  “Playin’ with you, maybe.”

  “Whatever.” I got to my feet, pulled on my slacks.

  Lupe picked up my shoulder harness. “New gun?”

  “New to me. I bought it off Sammy. I figure it did some damage down in Guatemala.” She toyed with the settings on the handle of the weapon, and I snatched it from her. “Don’t mess with it,” I told her. “You’ll blow somethin’ up. Way you got it set, it fires grenades.”

  “Ooh, nice!” She petted the gun and gave me a flirty smile. “I feel so safe with you.”

  This teasing bullshit was normal Lupe mode, and I was used to it; but it irritated me then. “Do you?” I said.

  She looked at me, puzzled. “Huh?”

  “All this jokin’ around we do,” I said, “I wanna know if you really mean it. You feel safe with me?”

  She turned her back, folded her arms. “I don’t need this!”

  “Yeah? Well, I wanna know what’s goin’ on.” I turned her to face me. “Y’know, sometimes when we’re fuckin’, I can feel you. Right with me, right where I am in my head. I know it’s true. But I’d like to hear it from you.”

  She stood mute, refusing to meet my eyes.

  “C’mon!” I said. “Let’s clear this up. You don’t care nothin’ ’bout me, lemme hear it.”

  “What I feel,” she said angrily, “ain’t got nothin’ to do with this. I told you a thousand times, I’m alla ’bout career. You wanna know if I love you?” She gave “love” a sneering emphasis.

  “Do you?”

  She glanced up at me, and I could have sworn I detected a softening of her hard shell, but only for an instant. “If I do or if I don’t, what’s it matter? This is business, Eddie. I ain’t gon’ let emotion fuck it up.”

  Frankie was pointing his lens at me, clinging to the wall a few feet away. I took a swipe at him, and he spider-walked away. “Are you shootin’ this?” I asked Lupe. “You shootin’ this right now?”

  “Read your contract. I can shoot any thing I want ’long as we’re together.”

  “Screw you!” I shrugged into the harness and scooped up my jacket. “Let’s go.”

  “But we’ll be early! I thought we could have a drink.”

  “We get there early, Frankie can take some nude shots of you with the head.” I’d intended this as sarcasm, but I could tell Lupe thought it was a terrific idea.

  Week Two

  The man we had been hired to protect that night, the official spokesman for the AZTECHS Corporation, billed himself as Z2 (as in Montezuma 2). His face was identical to that of the stone head, and speculation held that he’d had some work done, that the AI had gotten hold of some poor bastard lost in the desert and given him a new face, new everything. Whoever he had been, he was a superstar now, and I broke out the limo for him, an old refurbished black Rolls with so much armor, Godzilla couldn’t have dented it with a hammer.

  We drove south into the desert and after slightly more than an hour came in sight of the head. With its glowing eyes and partially eroded features and massive stoic gloom, it had a bewitched air, as if it were in some terrible way alive, condemned to inhabit this wasteland of sage and scorpions and organ-pipe cactus, to stare blindly into forever, displaying but not seeing the images of the things it once had loved. Lupe went off to pose beside the head, and I dialed back the roof of the limo and sat gazing at the stars. They were so bright, the desert sand looked blue in their light, and the low sage-covered hills stood out in sharp relief against the sky. I wasn’t nervous, but I was working on nervous, imagining everything that could go wrong when you were dealing with vicious bastards like the Carbonells. The old cartels had been seriously violent, but the Carbonells, along with the Guzman family, and the recently united youth gangs, who went by the name Los de Abajo…they had taken viciousness to a new level. Mass murder, in their view, should be certified as an Olympic sport. I’d been surprised when the Carbonells had agreed to let Lupe shoot the negotiation, but now I recognized that exposing their criminal activities on a show with an international viewing audience was a validation of their power. They didn’t care who knew what they were doing. Try and stop us was their attitude. We’re a law unto ourselves.

  Sammy, who had followed the Rolls in an armored personnel carrier, established a perimeter and stood watch, stubby AR-20s at the ready, all four men wearing desert camo and plastic armor, carrying light packs. I’d worked with Crespo’s team before. Fetisov had pale blond hair, a Russian icon tattooed on his back. Dennard, like Crespo, was a big time pitfighter, an Afro-American with Egyptian hieroglyphs tattooed on his lips and eyelids. Morely had been a sniper and there were dozens of tiny blue humanoid shapes tattooed on his chest, the record of his kills in Honduras and Guatemala. I hadn’t yet seen Childers’ body art, but I supposed it would be a self-advertisement similar to Morely’s, a few dozen souls rendered into exclamation points or black roses. But they all sported the basic Sammy look—buzzcut, staring, heavily muscled, grim. Months before, I’d visited Crespo at his home, the Green Rat Compound. High stone walls topped
with all manner of security devices, enclosing an old hotel, three stories of green stucco and a dusty courtyard where fighters trained day and night. It was a weird combination of prison, barracks, dojo, and monastery. Sammy hated music—any kind of music drove him up the walls—and so the only thing you heard were enraged shouts from the courtyard and chanted strength mantras. Bulked-up men of every description sat in solitary cells and refined their drugged focus; others lifted weights and toughened their limbs by striking a variety of rigid objects. Walking through the place, I felt like a baby deer in a lion cage. I guess it would be accurate to say that Sammy addicts were the rodeo clowns of the junkie universe, the baddest, most functional and most trustworthy of their kind.

  At twenty to one, Dennard gave the alert. I climbed out of the limo and looked to where he was pointing. Off to the left of the head, some forty yards away, was a rise sentried by organ-pipe cactus. A rider on horseback appeared to be watching us from atop it, and soon he was joined by two more riders. Their silhouettes black as absences against the stars. Something about the way they moved astride their mounts tweaked my neck hairs. They remained on the crest for a minute or so, then wheeled their horses and rode out of sight. Shortly thereafter, Z2, wearing a pale gray suit and matching shirt, came walking toward us from behind the rise, walking with a confident step. He passed Sammy by without acknowledgment and addressed himself to Lupe, who—flushed and excited—had run over to stand beside me. “Senorita Bernal,” he said. “Encantada.” He turned to me and said, “I trust there have been no changes, Senor Poe.”

  “None,” I told him. “We’ll have you at Ramiro’s house by three. After that…” I shrugged. “Who can say?”

  “No one but God,” he said, and smiled. “But God is watching us tonight. You can be sure of that.”