Dark Screams, Volume 7 Read online

  Here in the southside neighborhood in the Colonia Buenavista, Enrique knew they were getting close without anybody having to say a thing. It was the population explosion on the other side of the SUV. People on their own. Families. Mothers and fathers carrying sleepy babies, crying toddlers, to introduce them to Saint Death. The slow-goers made it up the street on their knees, not because they had to but to show humility and devotion. They brought offerings. They brought photos and needs. They brought sorrows no one would ever hear about except the saint.

  It wasn’t a proper sanctuary, not like a church or a mission. The shrines never were. It just happened, grew up here like a tree from a seed. Some family starts it in their home, puts up the saint in their front window, and that’s all it takes. They built it, and people came. Eventually they moved the saint farther inside, where there was more room, once their shrine took on a life of its own.

  Hector wheeled as close as he could, then cut over to the side of the street and shut down. He stayed with the SUV while the rest of them went ahead, stepping out into the clamor, the laughter, and the tears and the numb despair of people who didn’t know where else to turn.

  Along the way, Crispin bought a bouquet of droopy flowers from a kid on the street. “Why not?” he said, and waggled them at Enrique and Sofia and Sebastián, petals sifting to the street. “Maybe we can get her to bless this next album.”

  Sofia perked up again. She was like that—you never knew when she was tuned in and listening. Looked hard and wiry and ready for combat, muscles like taut cables, drummer’s muscles, her thoughts a thousand miles away, yet she was onto you. She shouldered past to squeeze up close to this PR guy who was always coming off like the band’s biggest fan, like he’d never heard genius until he heard Los Hijos del Infierno.

  “Don’t joke,” Sofia told him. “I know you’re only joking, but don’t, okay? You stop a minute and think what it takes to push people, good people, everyday people, to revere what’s inside there. It makes sense the narcos would pray to her, sacrifice to her. She’s made for men like that. But these folk? Jesus and Mother Mary…people still believe; they’ve just given up. Jesus and Mary don’t deliver anymore. Or they can’t. Or maybe they stopped listening. But Santa Muerte does. She’s the one who listens now. She’s the one who loves them. She’s the one they look to for healing. So remember where you are and think what it’s taken to do that to them.”

  Crispin was a clean-cut Anglo who looked beyond shame, but he wasn’t above looking chastened. Good to see.

  Did these people in the street know who they were? Many looked, some stared. A few, maybe, might have recognized them. The six of them weren’t your average half-dozen people out here, that much was blatant. Three gringos and three Mexicans, but even as locals, more or less, he and Sebastián and Sofia stood out. The black clothes and boots, the hair. No other guys out here had a need for eye makeup. Sebastián drew the stares most of all, the way a front man should—a head taller than most, crazy thin, with a spiked black leather pauldron belted over his left shoulder, like a gladiator on his way into the arena.

  Equals, though, in spite of it all. Death turned everybody into equals.

  The closer they got to the pink shrine house, the more crowded it got. After a minute of conferring with Olaf, Crispin squeezed his way inside and found the owners, used the power of dollars to get them to close off the inside for a private audience. After passing through a couple arched doorways, the walls close and the ceiling low, they had the place to themselves.

  Santa Muerte came in all sizes, and this one was as big as a live woman—on her pedestal, even a little bigger than that. She wore pale patterned robes, purple and white, with a sky-blue cowl over her head. A wreath of dried-out flowers circled her brow. Her scythe was enormous, the blade oversized and stylized, six inches wide in the middle, curving over her head from outside one shoulder to past the other. It was way bigger than anything you’d want to swing in the fields, with a smaller skull mounted where it angled away from the wooden shaft.

  Her teeth were white and even, her eyes a pair of empty voids.

  She swam in wavering shadows, lit by a forest of candles. The rest was like every shrine he’d ever seen, gaudy and colorful and beautiful and sad. Flowers, from fresh to withered, lay everywhere, more bouquets than they had vases. A plate of tortillas sat at the bottom hem of her robes. Petitioners’ notes were pinned to her robes. Pictures were taped to the walls, propped against the candle jars, stacked on tables—the sick and the dying, the dead and the missing, and somewhere in between them, the lost. Those who were simply lost.

  Morgan was on it, in her element now, setting up a tiny, stubby-legged tripod with the efficiency of a soldier field-stripping a rifle—a tabletop tripod but down on the floor. She set out a couple Nikons, then unfolded a pair of circular reflectors, one silver and the other gold, and put them off to one side, and then went scurrying about with a light meter.

  Olaf moved the three of them around, had them hunker and squat while he sprawled on the floor with his camera mounted on the pygmy tripod, the lens angled at them, shooting up from below. You could see his bald spot from here, a circular patch the size of a drink coaster missing from his white-blond hair.

  He sounded happy with what he was seeing.

  He’d positioned Sofia in the middle, the way photographers often did. Balance, Olaf was probably after, but there was something else he may not have been consciously aware of. The way Sofia looked, her features were a hybrid of the polarities on either side of her. In Sebastián, what you saw was a fine-boned European strain, the face of a Spanish conquistador. In Enrique, the broad peasant face and long, coarse hair of what the conquerors had found waiting for them, like he’d stepped out of some arid canyon that time forgot.

  You looked at their faces and saw the whole of Mexico’s history in them.

  And now, behind them, Santa Muerte looming over them all.

  —

  A couple hours later and one pig’s heart heavier, the SUV rolled west out of Matamoros, through that zone where the city frayed apart and unraveled into the countryside, a stark land seared by the sun and sprinkled with small farms, small ranches, tiny hovels. Twenty miles into it, Hector hooked a right onto a dirt road and headed north, until they were only a mile or so from the river. One mile away, Texas, but still, a whole other world.

  Hooray for GPS. It wasn’t like there were signs pointing the way here.

  They stretched their legs again across the scrubby, hardscrabble ground and listened to Crispin be confused.

  “There’s nothing here,” he said. “I thought there’d at least be some buildings left.”

  “Not for a long time,” Sebastián told him. “After the investigation, the police brought in some curanderos to cleanse the spirit of the place, then burned everything.”

  “Then what’s the point, may I ask? For all that’s going to show in the photos, you could shoot them literally anywhere.”

  “Because the point is here. Here is the point.” Bas sidled up to him and threw an arm around Crispin’s shoulders, a rare moment of salesmanship for him instead of flat-out telling how it’s going to be. “You can’t cleanse away something like what happened here. You can’t get it all. You don’t feel it? You will. It’ll come through.” He patted Crispin on the back. “The fans, it’ll mean something to them. They’ll appreciate the effort. This place called to us. We heard it loud and clear, and we had to answer.”

  “What’s this ‘we’ shit?” Sofia muttered, only loud enough for Enrique to hear.

  She was right. This was totally a Sebastián thing. Not a bad idea, necessarily, as image went, because image mattered, but still…this was kind of out there, even for Bas.

  “Half the songs on this next album are about here, and what came out of here. What they did here opened the gates to Hell and the gates never shut. If you don’t get that, you don’t get us.” Sebastián, closing the deal with their alleged number-one fan. “Where else co
uld we shoot?”

  Rancho Santa Elena, this place had been called, back when it was somewhere that somebody wanted to live. A generation ago it was the headquarters of a family business moving marijuana from the south up into the States. Different era, same old shit. Problems with the DEA, problems with rivals. They’d hooked up with this good-looking Cuban guy out of Florida who was making his own religion—part voodoo, part Santería, part Palo Mayombe, and the rest his own sick craziness. An isolated spot like this, with an outbuilding to repurpose as a temple, nobody close enough to hear the screams, human sacrifice seemed a reasonable price to pay for keeping their traffic routes safe. Eleven shallow graves’ worth. Body parts for their cauldron, necklaces out of bones. There was power in it. It made you bulletproof. Made you invisible.

  And nobody knew, nobody cared, until the Cuban decided he needed the blood of a young gringo who would die screaming. So they nabbed a college boy down on spring break, he and his buddies coming over the border for a change of scenery after they got tired of things on South Padre Island. Poor guy went off for a piss and never came back. They gave him twelve or so really bad hours before they got down to the serious business and took off the top of his head with a machete to get at his brain.

  Enrique had to get a little older to learn the less obvious lesson: where he and his parents and sisters and everyone he knew ranked in the North American scheme of things. If it had been another dead Mexican, those people would’ve kept getting away with it. You want to wreck your shit, kill a gringo. That’s when people start noticing.

  By now, Hector had opened up the SUV’s back door, and they moved in to help slide out the long, bulky crate that had flown cargo class from L.A. Real wood, you didn’t see that much anymore. Pride in your work, right there—the props company had packed this thing for survival. Hector took a tire tool and pried off the lid, and after they pawed aside the foam peanuts, they lifted the thing free.

  Plenty of wows and holy shits all around. Those props people knew their stuff, how to take fiberglass and make magic. The statue was lighter than it looked, sturdier than it felt, and even when standing right next to it, it looked exactly like stone that had weathered for centuries. They’d even painted it with stains.

  “What is it?” Morgan asked, the only one of them who didn’t know.

  “It’s called a chacmool,” Sebastián told her. “It’s a really old design, pre-Colombian. Aztecs, Mayans, maybe even older. Up at the top of a pyramid, that was one place they might go. See that platter in the middle? That was for holding sacrifices.” He grinned, a needling meanness behind it. “Didn’t have to be a heart, but if you got one lying around loose, why not.”

  The same as the likenesses of Santa Muerte, chacmools might differ in little details, but the core was always the same. A strange design, blocky, the way so much of that ancient Mesoamerican sculpture was carved. The basic template was a man, feet flat, knees up, leaning back on both elbows, while balanced on his middle was a receptacle to receive offerings—could be a platter, could be a bowl. His head was turned to the side, like he was challenging anyone who approached him to give until it hurt.

  For their replica, they’d opted for a platter. They all three liked the look of the bowl better, but its sides would have blocked the view, in pictures as well as onstage. Sebastián’s idea—for the next tour’s stage show, he was going to mime a self-sacrifice three songs in, cut out his own heart with a fake obsidian knife, and present it to the audience on the chacmool. It would continue beating the whole time and eventually start gushing blood again.

  Every tour, the show just got messier.

  And why shouldn’t it? So was everything else in the land of their birth.

  Olaf and Morgan and Sebastián conferred on where to set up for the shots. Crispin kept trying to offer suggestions and was tolerated, but otherwise got frozen out. Looked like it would be awhile, so Enrique wandered the property, scouting for cues as to what might have happened where. Where was the temple, where were the graves?

  It was easy to be distracted in a cluster of people bickering and chasing the best light. Get off by yourself and you could feel the weight of what had happened here.

  No…not happened. That made it sound like an accident. Everything that went on here had been done. It had occurred to human beings to do this to other human beings. Sodomize them. Chop them up. Lop off the top of their heads. Scoop out their brains. Wrap wire around their spines before they buried them, and leave the end sticking out of the ground so that after the worms and beetles and decay had their way with the corpses, they could pull the wire and haul up a nice new spinal column to use for making necklaces. Save them the trouble of digging again.

  Shit like that did not just happen. Something got inside you, or was there all along and got loose from its cage, and told you that doing these terrible things was a good idea. Told you that was how business needed to get handled from now on. Same as it told the Aztecs: This is what it takes to keep the corn coming up in the fields, to keep the sun moving across the sky every day. This is what it takes to keep your world intact. Blood, and lots of it.

  “You feel it, too, don’t you?” Sofia said, coming up behind him.

  “It leaves a stain; you know?” he said. “Like it’s sunk in. You’d have to dig this place out fifty feet down and haul the dirt to an incinerator, and maybe even then you wouldn’t get it all. It’s like, whatever the curanderos thought they were doing, all they managed was to sweep the porch.”

  Somebody had died here. Right here. On this spot. He was sure of it. The whole plot of earth, saturated with fear and betrayal. Maybe it was the little boy. That was the one that really haunted him—how one of the guys doing this killed his own nephew. Decided he needed to snuff a kid, so somebody else went off and snatched him a kid. Brought the boy here, tossed him on the ground. The guy with the machete went right at him—just a boy with a bag over his head. It wasn’t until the kid was dead that the guy started thinking, hey, that green football sweatshirt sure looks familiar.

  But it’s okay, you did right, the malignant thing inside him must have said. This is what it takes to keep your world running.

  “Come on.” Sofia reached up to rub his shoulder. “You’re not doing yourself any good over here. Let’s get back to the van so I can fix your makeup. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

  “No,” he said, like it was the silliest question she’d ever asked, and the exact right thing to do at the time, because it broke the spell. And he loved her for it. Loved her, anyway, but sometimes it was good to be reminded of reasons.

  They found that Sebastián and the photo team had decided where to take the shots. They had the chacmool—complete with the pig’s heart now—set against a backdrop of gnarly scrub. Off to one side was a hummock of earth that, if they insisted it was a grave, the fans would say, Oh, right, sure. A grave, still there after all this time. I totally buy that.

  Olaf positioned them in different configurations, shuffled them around, with the sun dipping low enough that the natural light was coming in from the side. Morgan held the gold reflector to bounce the light back from the other side, give the scene a warm tinted glow, like the whole place was simmering.

  Every few shots it was a different motivation. Look angry. Look disinterested. Look like you’re grieving. Look hungry. Look dead. Anything but look like you’re having fun. The only one of them enjoying the process was Sebastián. His idea, after all, the only one of them who could conceive of this. Who could think they could come here and evoke the spirits of this place where so much misery and evil were done, and then go away untouched?

  Hector, though—Hector knew better. Once they’d unloaded the chacmool and got it set up, he was back in his SUV and hadn’t left. Probably going to burn his shoes tonight because of what they’d touched, so he didn’t track it into his home.

  Be like Hector, Enrique told himself.

  When they wrapped it up, packed it up, he’d never been more ready to leave
a place. It was fitting that the last image he would take away from this little spot of Hell on earth was the heart of some poor pig, tossed aside now that they were through with it, left in the dirt for scavengers and blowflies.

  Then they were in the SUV again, backtracking along the dirt road, halfway to the highway. He was slumped into the door with his head against the window when he perked up at the sight of something shooting out of a bush ahead of them. Thinking in that instant, Holy shit, it was the biggest snake he’d ever seen, even though he knew that wasn’t right.

  An instant later came the sound of blowing tires, a double bang in front, another double bang in the rear. Enrique swiveled his head to follow the sound, and saw the not-snake slithering back into the bushes. No snake was triangular like that. No snake had spikes sticking up from its spine.

  Hector was all instinct now, fighting the steering wheel and stomping the brake as the SUV slewed back and forth until he brought it to a halt, skidding across the loose dirt as a churning cloud of dust caught up with them.

  Just the worst feeling ever. Knowing, on one level, exactly what was happening, the rest of him denying it, no no no, this can’t be real, Morgan’s hand almost breaking his fingers she was squeezing them so hard, and he didn’t even know when she’d grabbed him.

  The driver’s window blew inward and Hector’s head went with it, a blizzard of glass and blood and brains and hair and bone and eyes spraying into the windshield. In the front passenger seat, Crispin got showered with some of it and had no idea what it was, turning with a look of pissed-off disgust on his face, like he was thinking what next, first the flat tires and now somebody had thrown a pot of stew at him, and the next dumb thing out of his mouth was going to be Who’s going to pay for this, do you have any idea how much this shirt cost?