The Collector 03 - The Big Reap

by Chris F. Holm

  I half-expected her – or the guards she summoned to escort me – to ask me why. To tell me we had three Guerreras in custody, and they didn’t know which one I meant. To flat-out refuse to take me to him. But they didn’t.

  Sometimes, it pays to be the boss.

  Nor did they take me to his cell. They brought Guerrera to me. Or rather, had him waiting in an interrogation room when I arrived – handcuffed to a table, an empty chair opposite for me. There was no cop-show two-way mirror. Just a table, two chairs, a corner-mounted video camera, and one very frightened man. And then me.

  The two guards who’d escorted me made to enter the room, but I waved them off without a word. They took up posts in the hall, on either side of the door, which I promptly shut.

  Guerrera did not look well. His skin was pale and sheathed in sweat. His exposed flesh had the look of having been picked at, his forearms furrowed with fingernail scratches, a constellation of tiny half-moons on his cheeks a scabrous red. His hair was a mangy shock of white, as if he’d been pulling it out in clumps. His eyes darted around the room – vigilant, paranoid. His fingers drummed a rat-a-tat atop the metal table. Sitting still – being chained – was torture for him, it was clear. His finger-tapping soon spread to his feet, and as I fixed my gaze upon him, he began to rock back and forth, his breath coming so quickly through gritted teeth I actually worried for his health.

  Then I remembered he was human garbage, responsible for no shortage of deaths, dismemberments, and drug-dependencies in his tenure with the Xolotl Cartel.

  It helped, a little.

  I approached the table. He watched – nervous, rapt – as I dragged the cheap metal chair over to the corner of the room, its legs squealing against the painted concrete floor. I said nothing to him, nor he to me. Then I climbed atop the chair and, after a moment’s fiddling, yanked the wire out of the security camera. His eyes went wide with fear of a different sort. Immediate, explainable. Human in origin. In his mind, I was a bad man, here to do bad things to him. Guerrera understood that all too well. Though usually, he was on the other side of the table. Or the ax. Or the flamethrower.

  The man had quite the colorful file. Made whatever scared the piss and pigment out of him twice as oogly-boogly in my mind as I might have thought it otherwise.

  When I returned from the corner, leaving the chair behind and circling the table toward him, he spat and said, “I tell you nothing.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “You don’t have to.”

  My hand found his chest and reached inside. As my fingers wrapped around his corrupted soul, his eyes widened yet further – his face a mask of pain and disbelief.

  The interrogation room fell away, replaced by a swirling black morass and a lifetime of experiences. A village, slaughtered. Countless women, raped and killed. Enough coke to fell an army, blown off the naked skin of men and women both. A young boy who looked like him, into whose bed he snuck a time or two while his wife slept. And countless nights of Gulf breezes and swanky parties, on yachts, in palaces, on island beaches. As if this bastard hadn’t a care. As if his conscience weren’t touched by all he’d done, his heart full in those moments of laughter and light.

  Again and again, though, one memory bubbled unbidden to the surface of his mind. Of a tunnel – dirt and darkness. Of men and women screaming. A low growl. Teeth gnashing in the black. The popcorn pop of gunfire. The metallic tang of discharged firearms and blood. Cool, clean air as the dirt above gave way to starry night, but still, the creature followed. And then the wet, sticky sound of flesh ripping from bone.

  And then running. And then here.

  One phrase over and over, a sturdy stitch that held the tattered scraps of memory together: El Chupacabra.

  I released his soul from my grasp. He collapsed, gasping, to the table, tears streaming down his cheeks. Tears streamed down mine as well, and my borrowed flesh trembled with the fresh hell of its doubly borrowed memories. Like Guerrera, I couldn’t stop the tears. My strength comes from knowing not to even bother trying.

  The two of us sobbing, I slammed him backward in his chair once more. His eyes were so full of fear – all the more so for seeing the echo of it on my borrowed cheeks. Cheeks built for smiling, not for this. It was clear to me he didn’t understand. Why I was crying. What it was we shared.

  I didn’t need him to.

  What I needed was a location.

  Memories aren’t like a road map. They’re messy. Partial. Untrustworthy. I needed him to unpack them for me. To make sense of them. So I reached my hand back into his chest and squeezed until he wailed like an injured child. Then I let go and asked him questions. He answered – mostly lies. I squeezed again. And asked again. He changed his tune. Screamed so hard I bet he tasted blood.

  It took longer than I expected. An hour, maybe more. But eventually, his answer stayed the same, no matter how hard I pushed. So I stopped.

  Then I remembered that little boy, and I pushed a little harder, just for kicks.

  It was Guerrera who gave up this rathole bar, and Telemundo who led me to my current meat-suit. A sergeant in the Mexican Army. Once I was through with Guerrera, I spent some time live-streaming the network’s coverage of the body-dump on I-83, trolling for a decent bag of bones to tool around in. Ortiz was far too soft for what I had in store. When this guy – Solares, according to the sewn-on patch on his uniform, since my fifty words of halting Spanish couldn’t keep up with what the well-quaffed talking heads back in the studio – stepped up to the mic, all sinew and barely concealed rage, I knew I’d found my man. Because I didn’t need to know what his words meant to know from his grave expression, his unwavering glare into the camera, that he was promising the perpetrators of this horrible act would be brought to justice.

  What he didn’t know was that to make good on his promise, he’d need my help.

  I waited until he finished his statement and left the makeshift podium, and then I left Ortiz behind. Solares flinched as if struck as I took him, but he didn’t fall – and though his mouth flooded with saliva as it prepared to purge me, he didn’t vomit. He was too disciplined – his mind too orderly. Like entering a strange kitchen, only to find it arranged exactly as you would have done. I opened a drawer, and boom bam – there was the button for his nausea response. Anyone who saw me/him mop the flopsweat from our brow probably assumed it was simply a case of delayed stage fright kicking in.

  Of course, it’s possible Solares was not as disciplined as I’m giving him credit for. That the reason the transition was so easy was me. See, historically, I’ve preferred the quiet of the newly dead to the cacophony of a living meat-suit. Only these past few days, I’ve found myself hitching rides with the living more and more, and what’s worse, I’ve not minded it. Partly because the living have access to all manner of creature comforts in which the newly dead cannot indulge. Their credit cards have not been canceled. Their homes are not off-limits to the likes of me. Their IDs and access badges afford entry to all manner of hard-to-reach places, from prison cells to border crossings, and one never has to worry one’s meat-suit will be recognized by some poor sap who’ll subsequently piss himself and run screaming to the nearest tinfoil-hat blogger about how their uncle Merle is Patient Zero in the pending zombie apocalypse.

  Like I said, partly for that reason. But partly not.

  See, the dead – even the newly dead, so fresh and unspoiled by autolysis and/or putrefaction you’d have to check their pulse to tell – drive like that car you had in high school with a busted muffler and no third gear. They’re all tricky. Goofy. Hard to get the hang of.

  But the living – they’re Ferraris, built for speed. for handling. They ride like a dream. Only catch is, you’ve got to subjugate their owner’s will before they’ll relent to your commands. Used to be, I didn’t like that much.

  These past few days, though, I’ve begun to develop a taste for it. Found I kinda sorta enjoy it, like playing a game of psychological Whac-a-Mole. Only the mole
I’m whacking is the thinking, feeling, human owner of the body I’ve gone and hijacked. And the fact I’m having fun is terrifying.

  This gig of mine is a punishment for a life misspent. And as punishments go, it’s a doozy. When I collect a mark, there’s this beautiful, horrible moment in which I experience every decision that’s brought them to the front door of damnation, just as surely as if I made those choices myself. And likewise, every time I abandon one meat-suit in favor of another, I leave a little bit of what makes me me behind. The sum total of those two events is that every job, my humanity is slowly eroded, until one day – ten days from now, or ten minutes, or ten thousand fucking years for all I know – I’ll be as cold and vicious as the demons who pull my strings. I used to think that I could stave it off, that I could avoid my fate.

  Now, as I admire the handling of my military-tuned meat-suit – its owner howling bloody murder from the makeshift cell I fashioned for him in the back corner of his own mind – I think it’s gonna be closer to ten minutes than ten thousand years.

  In fact, I was beginning to wonder if I’ve already lost too much of me to well and truly care.

  All this emo-bullshit inner turmoil meant nothing to the men in this nameless, rathole bar, though. All they saw was my fully automatic rifle aimed right at them, since I’d stopped off at the address on Solares’ ID long enough to swap my olive-drab fatigues and sergeant’s bars for some jeans, a T-shirt, and a gun. These were not Mensa cardholders – they were men of action, men of violence. Given half a chance to consider their predicament, one of three was bound to roll the dice and come up shooting. And while I doubted the world at large would miss any one of them, these men weren’t mine to kill. So best to head off any such ideas at the pass.

  “Any of you fellas speak English?” I asked. None of them responded. though the one nearest me flinched when first I spoke, as if surprised to hear uninflected English come from so clearly Mexican a face.

  I locked my eyes on him as I continued. “I spoke to Javier,” I said. “I know what happened. I’m not here to harm you.”

  The two on the other side of the pool table looked twitchier than ever, my words clearly so much nonsense to them. But before either of them could do anything rash, the one nearest me raised his hands and patted the air on either side of him in a cool-out gesture.

  “Then… why?” he asked in heavily accented English. “Why do you come here?”

  I took a gamble. Lowered my weapon. Held my hands out to my sides, clutching the assault rifle by its stock rather than its trigger. If these men wanted, they could have pumped me full of bullets before I could bring it around to bear again.

  The fuck did I care? I’d probably just end up back in Guam.

  “I need your help,” I replied, hands held up as if in surrender. “I need you to give me access to your tunnels.”

  At that, the men shared a look. Apparently tunnel is close enough to Spanish for them to get the gist. “Even if I know what you mean,” said the lone English speaker, “why would I help you?”

  “Because I know what’s down there,” I told him. “And because I aim to kill it.”

  6.

  The tunnels were nothing short of astonishing.

  I’d seen other smuggling tunnels before, of course. Flipping channels past news specials during downtime in fleabag motel rooms. Killing time in waiting rooms reading magazines before killing time. Once or twice in person on a job. But most of those were rudimentary, unfinished – straight shots of a hundred yards or less that, had the cops not busted them before completion, would have been as likely to bury alive those using them as they were to successfully convey black market goods across the border.

  These were something else entirely.

  Seven miles of interconnected tunnels cut into the sandy soil, all bare-bulb lit and beam-reinforced, shored up here and there with rebar and chicken wire to hold the pressing desert earth at bay. They fanned outward from the bar in four spokes – east, northeast, northwest, and west – each bisected here and there by smaller tunnels at various points. Some of those tunnels led from one spoke to another, yet others to food or weapons caches. A few were designed to confuse would-be pursuers, with camouflaged trapdoors leading to hidden chambers deeper in the earth, or booby traps that could be triggered once past that would collapse the passage behind.

  They’d been carved out of the desert over a period of years – men working in secret, under the cover of darkness, carting out tons of rock and dirt hidden in containers made from jury-rigged beer kegs, lest anyone should see. First one main branch, and then another, and then another – the interstitial passageways added over time to allow cartel spotters Stateside to call audibles should there be too much heat surrounding any one outlet point. Eventually, when all the spokes were connected, the system served not only as a conduit for narcotics to cross the border, but also as a safe-house of sorts for cartel agents operating within the US. They could duck into one of the access points and lay low, leaving either from the same place they entered or somewhere two miles away. The freedom to move both across the border or laterally along the US side was key to the cartel’s business plan.

  How long the creature had inhabited them, these men had no idea.

  It began, as all things do, with stories. Hardened men, chests puffed with false bluster, recounting tall tales over shots of tequila: low growls half-swallowed by earthen walls, the dragging rasp of claws along dirt floors, a plume of hot breath against their cheeks as they navigated the wells of darkness that lapped at the edges of the dim, swinging lamplight of the dangling bulbs. By the light of day, such tales were no more than seasoning, intended to add zest to their self-perpetuated reps. But beneath the ground, in the choking dark of the tunnel system the cartel’s foot-soldiers referred to as Mictlan – after the underworld of Aztec myth – those stories metastasized into something far more sinister in the minds of the men who carried them. Those stories made them quake, though to a one they blamed that on the chill damp earth, so far removed from the sunbaked desert surface. Those stories made them cautious.

  Those stories likely kept them all alive.

  The first person to disappear was an illegal immigrant-to-be, who’d paid for the privilege of using the cartel’s tunnels with his life-savings before ultimately paying with his life. He was part of a small group – the first such group to be granted access to the tunnels. Sneaking migrant workers across the border wasn’t part of the cartel’s business plan; in fact, it was expressly forbidden. The tunnels were for human trafficking and narcotics, and funneling countless civilians through them – any one of whom might be rounded up by US authorities, only to use the knowledge of the tunnels’ existence as leverage – was a sure way of shutting the lucrative pipeline down. But the men manning the tunnels thought that they could keep their sideline business quiet enough their superiors would never catch wind of it, and make a goodly chunk of change while they were at it.

  They were wrong.

  The man who disappeared was traveling alone. He gave no name, and scarcely spoke to anyone during his brief, ill-fated journey. In truth, that was not uncommon – most of these would-be illegals were migrant workers, family men looking to send back cash enough to their loved ones to make up for the upfront investment of buying their way across the border. They had no interest in placing said family on the cartel’s radar, for although they were glad to take advantage of these men’s assistance, they were not fools enough to think they could be trusted with the information as to when and where to find women and children left unprotected. Pretty wives and daughters – and, on occasion, sons as well – had a habit of disappearing when the cartel came to town. So when this man vanished from the small group of huddled, terrified border-crossers on his way through the tunnel system, there was no one to complain, to worry, to insist he be tracked down. The tunnel’s minders assumed he must have simply wandered off, and either died down there or found himself another exit. Either way, it didn’t trouble the
m at all.

  At least until they found his headless, eviscerated remains hanging from a cross-beam in one of the lesser-used side-tunnels, nails driven through his splayed hands as though he’d been crucified and left to drain. But the dirt beneath was not bloodied, instead it was marred with the signs of something that had rested there and been dragged off. A tarpaulin, it turned out, which when found was still blood-sticky and looked for all the world like something had done its best to lick it clean. That something left tracks – two by two like a human’s, but dotted here and there with claw marks on either side as if the beast occasionally used all fours – that led deeper into the tunnels, toward a section where it seemed the power to the lights had been disrupted.

  Not disrupted, the men discovered, but bulbs broken one by one.

  They sent a party of four men armed with lanterns, blades, and rifles in to find out who or what was responsible for stringing up the nameless man. That party never returned. So the remaining men decided to wait out whatever lurked in the darkness. They set guards at the tunnel mouth to ensure whatever it was could not escape, and to kill it if it tried. The guards were found slaughtered as the nameless man had been. Their heads, like his, were never found.

  And that’s when Guerrera, rising star within the cartel and the lieutenant entrusted with the day-to-day operation of the Mictlan tunnel system, caught wind of his men’s ill-fated side-business, and decided to step in. Step in he did, killing anyone who’d participated in the unsanctioned border-crossing scheme, and placing charges at the mouth of the creature’s chosen lair – the fetid air that emanated from it now heavy with the sickly stench of rotting flesh, of corruption, of violent, messy death – sealing it off forever. Every corner, every chamber, every blind alley and secret hidey-hole of the sprawling tunnel system was then inspected, and no further sign of the creature or its horrid appetites was seen.