The Sin Eaters

by Aaron Summers

  WheresHeTakingUsThisIsWeirdHesBeingWeird

  “I can’t read Spanish. Can you? This is…” she glanced at him. “Do you know what this is?”

  “Check the…,” he closed his eyes, “check the last file.”

  Her finger wavered over the Back button. This was not a thing to read. This was not a good idea. She selected Attempt 3 - 1992. No one could fail at the same simple task this many times.

  Dozens of scanned Polaroids appeared. A mountain trail. A storeroom with an empty slot among a row of wooden barrels. A mine entrance. The headlamps and pick axes of what looked like frantic workers. A pile of rubble deep inside a mine. She flicked the screen and a map of the Grupo compound appeared. Many buildings were missing.

  “Because it’s just 1992…,” she whispered.

  She flicked again and gasped. A tangled mess of limbs and blood lay stretched across three hospital beds. Surgeons worked to clean countless wounds. Gruesome wounds. Fatal wounds. Two surgeons carried what looked like carpentry tools. They brutalized something.

  She flicked again. The ruined body was heavily bandaged with four separate IV’s hooked to it.

  She flicked again. The bandages on the body’s head were removed. There was Charlie’s shattered face, like she knew she would find if she kept looking, with a crushed forehead, several deep gashes from chin to scalp, and a litany of stitches holding his ruined jaw together. How had the Polaroid captured the sheer force in his eyes? They were more than alert. They were blazing.

  She selected the medical report.

  “That one’s in English.”

  She startled and almost dropped the tablet. Tim was staring at her. His knee bounced at a terrific pace.

  “I don’t need to read it. He did this. All three times. The first one. That’s the mountain where I met him, before the Grupo built the compound. The valley is empty. He jumped off, right? Then 30 years later he swam out in the Pacific Ocean and tried to drown but it looks like they rescued him.”

  “No, he swam back.”

  “Oh.” She tasted adrenaline and copper, licked her lip, and realized she had drawn blood. “Then this last one. Almost 50 years later. He found a mine and blew himself to hell. That’s the missing barrel and the pile of rocks. But he lived. And he looks so angry in this picture. God he looks mad, almost… almost feral. But look at this pile of rocks. How the hell did he survive?”

  Tim took the tablet from her and locked it. His sneaker was beating a hole in the floor.

  “When did you find these reports?”

  “I found the first one a couple days ago. Didn’t know what it was. Then I found the second one yesterday. The third one was today. I don’t think I understood, until…”

  He looked back out the window.

  “Something’s wrong with him. Not just the obvious craziness but something else. How did he survive all that? Why does he keep trying?”

  “The last one was in 1992. That was probably before you were born.”

  “Definitely true. Definitely not the point.” He swallowed a grin.

  His heel slapped the polished concrete floor a final time before Eliza put her hand on his knee.

  “Tim. Stop. What exactly is bothering you?”

  “It’s just… if he keeps trying to, you know, not be alive…”

  “Kill himself. Use your words.”

  “Kill himself. How are we supposed to believe that he founded the Grupo to help fix himself and that he’s okay with everything that’s going on? It seems more like, maybe, like he’s being kept here against his will. Or like he doesn’t understand what’s happening to him. I don’t know. Like, something’s really wrong with him. Why does he stay here if he wants to die?”

  OhShitOhShitHesRightKnowKnewItSomethingFunkyHerePlusTheresThisWholeTimThing

  She avoided his desperate stare by looking out the window to the compound far below. Had he seen her face flush?

  A distant path light exploded in a shower of blue sparks. She blinked. Yeah, there was a new dark space in the blanket of soft yellow light that illuminated the compound’s many walkways. She seized the diversion.

  “Did you see that?”

  He spun to the window. Another light exploded several blocks away. The sprawling sidewalk network vanished into the night as path lights flickered and failed.

  “Yeah. Power surge?”

  She pointed to an armored building near the railcar entrance on the valley’s opposite end.

  “No, the power plant is over there and everything’s fine. It looks like…”

  Another light exploded. The corona hid two more explosions. When the pair could see again, an entire quadrant was dark.

  “I think that’s a boulder falling!” he said.

  She followed his finger to the cloud of dust rising from the valley walls to a new explosion as a boulder the size of her first car collided with a storage building. It punched through and crunched a second building.

  “You’re right, kiddo. Something’s wrong. We need to get down there.”

  She snatched her jacket from the desk and headed for the corridor. Tim beat her to the door but she ducked under his arm and out. Grupo workers scurried towards the elevators and stairs. A blur raced past in cowboy boots. They were the polished kind, hand stitched and colorful if you knew where to look. Where was Jim Finch headed?

  She darted after him. He wasn’t wasting time looking around. Why was she hiding? But she kept her head as low as she dared while still tracking him. It was a waste of time. The man would see Tim hobbling after them both if he turned. He never did.

  The crowd began to thin as workers scrambled through doors Eliza had never seen open. Most of the doors had staircases leading down into the mountain. A few led up. She saw one open directly onto a landing high inside the valley walls. The scrambling worker almost flipped over the guardrail to his death. He managed to stop, pivot, and continue down stairs that descended along the natural walls.

  Jim Finch paused long enough to enter a passcode before he vanished into a reinforced door. Eliza slipped inside. She turned back as she remembered Tim but the door was closing. He locked eyes with her and was saying something. All she could hear was her own surging heartbeat. The door sealed. She looked around.

  This was a familiar hallway. The Grupo had, in theory, given them both full access to the compound but they had been too busy to test that. Compound schematics weren’t included in the data provided, either. But she had seen this hallway before. Every surface except the smooth floor was cut from living rock. Fireflies crawled along the walls. She realized she was panting. Those were just lights.

  She followed them down the hall. The wall on her left fell away into a rail line. The tunnel looked barely large enough for a railcar. A partially open door was on her right. Frigid air and the stench of rotting soil rushed through the slender opening as orange light flickered. Fire in the fireplace. Someone was home. She slipped through the opening.

  “Well hello there, Miss Eliza Reyes.”

  A man sat in the chair she had sat in the night Charlie shared his story. She tried to focus on his face before she remembered his boots. Those were more distinct. Focus on those. How had she not thought about this strange man during the last week? He was almost as unique as Charlie or Michael.

  BecauseYoureNotMeantToRememberHimHeToldYouThisGottaKeepUp

  She shook her head. Jim Finch cocked his. His boot was propped on a knee. He needed to talk more so that she could see him.

  “What are you doing here?” she said.

  “Me? I work here. What are you doing here?”

  “Work here. Right. You go out and collect people for the Grupo to run its tests on.”

  “I invite folks back here so they can understand themselves better. What has you all in a tizzy?”

  “Why were you running?”

  She circled the couch to stand near the pile of furs. Why was there a fire burning? He was only a few seconds faster than she was. He was expecting someone, or h
ad warned them and they had just left.

  “Had to find the boss man. That’s my job when things go upside down ‘round these parts. You shouldn't be out and about. We’ve been attacked.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Again.”

  “Why did Charlie leave? He was just here, wasn’t he? And what do you mean, attacked again?”

  Jim Finch held up both hands and smiled. She saw his smile. It was unsurprisingly typical. She dug her fingers into her palms and shivered at the pleasant pain. There he was. The blur became useful shapes. Didn’t he look like an actor, a Bill or a Jeff or...?

  “Lots of questions. Ain’t you the professor? Charlie left ‘cause that’s what he does when we’re attacked. He goes to see if he can figure who attacked us and make ‘em stop.”

  “Who would be attacking the Grupo on top of a mountain?”

  The furs stank of animal. Yeah, Charlie had just been here. Wind whistled through the seals of the exterior door. Jim Finch looked back over his shoulder to see what she found.

  “That’s a fine question. It’s happened before. I dunno why. The world’s a scary place. Have you seen what’s on the Brazilian side of them mountains? Forests and jungles forever and ever. There’s a lot out there and not all of it is good.”

  “I… no. I haven’t thought about it. There’s forests over there? We’re up in the mountains.”

  Jim Finch moved to the door. She started to move towards him but he held up a hand as he worked a keypad. The exterior door retreated into the wall. Colder air rushed in. The hungry fire surged.

  “I ain’t stoppin’ you, Eliza Reyes. My job was to find the boss man. He ain’t here and I ain’t goin’ out there ‘til things settle down. Tis dangerous, ya know. There’s beasts in these mountains that don’t like what we’re doin’.”

  She eyed the door. He mock bowed and backed way. She zipped up her jacket, considered the frigid air, slipped her fists down into the too-long sleeves, and stepped out onto the trail. Whoever built the access door had blasted a simple channel in the mountain and stopped there. The ruins of rock still blocked the trail. It was an approach uniquely suited to the room’s intended inhabitant.

  “Be careful out there,” he called.

  The door was closing. He watched the fire. She thought she saw him, the actual man, as firelight glowed on his face. He looked sad. They would talk later. She would begin learning more about all the people here, not just the weirdest one.

  The trail was steep and rough. Raw shattered rocks sliced her hands. The hiking boots protected her softer feet. She collapsed when the trail ended. The damned air again. How long would it take to adjust to the altitude? Running 25 miles a week for the last two years wasn’t worth shit, apparently.

  The valley waited below. It had been distant, a child’s model, from her workspace but was truly miniature now. The path from there to Charlie’s lair and up the trail climbed hundreds of feet. The besieged quadrant was still dark. Ants dragged floodlights down the paths. Pebbles dotted the ground. Those pebbles had dug long trenches in the valley walls. They ruined whatever buildings they hit. Someone had launched boulders into the compound. Her eyes traced their grooves back to the rim and over the mountain.

  Rocks clattered behind her. She dropped to a crouch as she spun. A woolly great ape scampered up the trail from Charlie’s room and over the edge. Eliza rushed to the same edge in time to see the beast curl into a cannonball and barrel down a slope of crushed stone. It cared nothing for the jagged edges. The cannonball uncurled at the slope’s base into a form she recognized. She started to call out for him but covered her mouth in time to muffle Charlie’s name. He loped down a path.

  “Alright, so there’s that,” she whispered.

  Eliza’s breath steamed. She cupped her hands to her mouth to warm them with the wasted breath. There was the compound. She could go back. Its light filled the immense natural bowl. The path lights twinkled back into existence. They might need her help.

  She looked back to the trail. The jagged platinum shards of a thousand ruined boulders shone in the scant starlight. It was death by trailhead. She looked at the compound one more time before starting down the slope. Tim would figure it out. Jim Finch would tell him where she went.

  Charlie was long gone by the time she snuck down to his trail. There was only one way to go. She followed it. The trail led to a ravine filled with larger boulders all big enough to shame a school bus. Had the attackers taken their ammunition from a place like this? The Grupo would know about these boulder fields. How was this so unsecured?

  BecauseYoureOnTopOfTheseFreezingMountainsThankGodForTheseHikingBootsDumbass

  There he was again at the top of the boulder field. He scampered over the rocks using an oddly graceful combination of hands and feet, like an orangutan sorely misplaced from its jungle sanctuary but somehow at home among these barren mountains. Then he was gone. She growled and began to climb.

  The rock field ended at a flat space just a few yards wide. Eliza fell onto it. Her lungs screamed for a taste of the precious gasses she thought so little of down near sea level where normal people lived. How the hell did the Peruvians deal with this? Oh, yeah. They lived by the ocean and not up here in hell. She caught her breath as she examined the platform. There was nothing here except for the path she’d come from, a sheer drop to more endless gray stone, and a vertical stone wall. It was too vertical.

  She moved to the wall and ran her hands over it. There were no handholds. It towered another 50 feet above her head. Even for Charlie, it was too high and too sheer to climb. She rolled onto her toes and felt around the surface. There was a groove. She reached high to run her fingers along the horizontal score in both directions until she found right angles pointed down. Those lines stretched her arms to their limits. She ran her fingers down the grooves until she touched the ground. Nothing. She backed way. The grooves at least looked like a door. That was something to remember.

  Another howling wind whipped against her and she stumbled, remembering in time that a fatal cliff waited to her left and mercilessly sharp boulders to her right. A stumble here would hurt. She wrapped her arms around her shivering torso.

  “Well, shit.”

  “You should not be here.”

  Eliza screamed as she leapt. Her ankle collapsed when she landed. How had it not snapped? She fidgeted with the tight laces and high leather walls of her hiking boots. Saved by the Grupo’s equipment, again. She stood and dusted herself off.

  It was Charlie, waiting among the boulders. How had she missed him?

  ProbablyTryingToNotTripAndDieYoureNotExactlyMissMountaineer

  “That’s how hillbillies sneak up on people before they make them squeal like pigs, you know.”

  Eliza took time dusting herself. Her ragged breaths slowed.

  “What is this place?”

  He stepped onto the platform and towards the wall. She watched his hands find and run the same grooves she had found. The carvings fit his exaggerated proportions.

  “Ilhuicac.”

  “I… don’t know what that means. Is that Spanish?”

  He smiled. In the charcoal dark, it made her shiver. His black eyes shined almost like a leopard’s despite the full dark. They were alone on top of the world.

  “What does it mean?”

  “This is the name of this place. You will see. Ilhuicac.”

  She stared at his neck in search of a purple bruise but saw nothing. The night might be hiding it. But no. He was lucid and knew what he was looking for.

  He set his feet and leaned into the wall. At first, nothing happened. Naked toes, built more like claws, dug into the stone. There were older grooves beside the new ones his feet carved. He grunted as he pushed. It was strange to see the behemoth struggle. Something inside the mountain wall shifted. The door receded inch by inch until a yard-wide gap appeared. He seemed to compress his frame as he eased into the waiting pitch black. She waited. He stuck his head out.

  “Come. See Ilhuicac.”


  NothingToAddHereYouWontListenAnywaysDoWhateverYouWantEnjoyBeingEaten

  She grinned, tightened her bootlaces, and slipped into the tunnel.

  CHAPTER 15 - BURNING FOLK

  Camdzic of the Steppe lingered in the sun outside the tent. The menfolk squawked beneath its shade in a circle around the airag bowl. They would be drunk soon on the fermented mare’s milk, if they weren’t already. Their squabbling voices and foolish ideas made her think they were. She did not enjoy enclosed spaces, even if the walls were rolled up to let the eastern wind howl across the plains. Why could they not migrate to a forest?

  Airag dulled her senses. What value was life if she could not sense it? She looked up to the fading sky and allowed a rare smile. This, this, was how a woman ought live her life.

  The lithe Berian brought her hard stare back to earth. It was hardly the almighty sky but still, she mused, it was a good place to be. Fen had asked her to be just the third member of his young tribe, after himself and Old Jonah, and she accepted immediately as she stood in front of the feverish boy still covered in his own blood from his hunt. He would abide no hierarchy. She was simply with the Leyevi until she chose otherwise.

  She considered herself again. It was a strange circle to make, but her days with Fen forced her to think more and more. It was easy enough to understand his attraction to her. She knew she was beautiful in the leonine way Berian women were, taller than most men with long slender limbs full of an unyielding sinewy strength. She could run almost as long as a Leyevolki, stalk better than the hyena, and longed to live every moment of her life beneath the endless sky that her ancestors called Tengri. They had believed in gods. She did not.

  Nor did Fen. He lounged in the circle with his friends as they argued, somehow, about the long history of humanity. How could anyone know? It was so long ago. They were either making stories or chirping corrupt knowledge gleaned from the abandoned scrolls of the Hollow Folk.

  She liked the healer Lundoo least of all. His paunchy belly belied the softness of his foreign life. He claimed to come from west of here but east of the Uralskiye. Jonah told Camdzic that the man’s accent sounded more like the wintery Novgorodi in the abandoned plains. It was just a few weeks travel from that middle place west of the Uralskiye to the true Hollow Lands. Lies were like vultures. One meant many. Camdzic, who enjoyed nakedness in most people, wished the sagging old man would wear more clothing.