Dark Screams, Volume 7 Read online

  Outside, more guys than Enrique could count at once were converging from every direction, and he couldn’t conceive of where they’d come from. This place was so poisoned that people like this came bursting out of the ground. If from the comfort of home he’d envisioned something like this, they would have been wearing masks. But they weren’t. They had faces and didn’t care who saw them, and that was the most frightening thing he could imagine.

  They began yanking open the SUV’s doors, and if they found one locked, would either aim through the window and scream until the person on the other side got the idea or bash out the glass with the butt of a gun and reach in to unlock it themselves.

  Everybody was vacating, stumbling out on their own or getting dragged. No say in it, Enrique hit the road hard and tasted a mouthful of hot, dry grit. A few feet away from him, Crispin was finally up to speed, groping for his pocket and pulling out his ID to flash like it was going to matter to someone: Oh, it’s you, sorry for the mistake.

  “Americano!” he screamed. “Americano!”

  Nobody could’ve cared less. Nobody wanted to deal with him other than right then, right there, on the spot. They could just tell, the scariest judges of character in the world. You hear about someone getting blown out of his shoes and think, No way, that’s Hollywood bullshit. But it happened. Steps away, Crispin was hit with gunfire so hard he bounced off the fender and left a dent as he went down barefoot.

  All Enrique could think of was Sofia, Sofia, because she’d gone out the other side and he couldn’t see her anymore. He’d forgotten how to pray, too, something about Santa Maria, but it wasn’t there anymore.

  Santa Muerte, full of grace, was the only thing he had left. You don’t want us now.

  Vans came roaring up from the south, the direction of the highway, this entire operation going off with military precision. Someone’s knee dropped into the center of his back and emptied his lungs with a whoosh. They twisted his arms behind his spine and he was so confused and paralyzed he let it happen, let some guy squat on top of him like a goblin and lash his wrists together with a nylon zip-tie before he realized that was happening, too. Then everything went dark and stuffy when they yanked a black hood over his head, and now the world was reduced to bad sounds and worse sensations.

  They hauled him upright, slinging him around like a bawling calf destined for a branding iron. Once his feet were under him, two pairs of hands rushed him, stumbling, toward whatever was waiting next. Then he was cargo, banging into the hard floor of a van as other bodies landed around him. Doors slammed, then the blackness shot into high-speed acceleration, and whenever any of them said anything somebody up front yelled for them to shut up, no talking, and it was a long, bumpy ride before the last person was too tired to cry anymore.

  —

  The only thing Enrique was sure of was that they hadn’t gone north. Whatever was coming next, they hadn’t been driven into Texas for it. No, they’d gone a long way south, or west, or both. The air felt dryer and hotter on his arms.

  After hours of motion, the van finally stopped and guys hauled them out and rushed them across open ground, hard-packed earth under his wobbly boots. Then it was doorways and a fresh feeling of claustrophobia—a hallway. That opened into an expanded sense of space, the noise around them no longer confined. Wooden floors, he knew from the sound.

  The ties were cut and the hoods came off and they were shoved forward. Behind them, doors slammed and locks turned. Then they were on their own in a big, dark emptiness, still nothing to see, because the night had followed them inside.

  Head count: Sofia. Sebastián. Morgan. Olaf. Himself. In spite of the hours in the van, he hadn’t been totally sure. Free to move, Sofia hugged him. Morgan hugged Olaf. Sebastián was on his own for the moment, and that wasn’t right, so Enrique pulled him close and wrapped him up, too. Everybody stank of sweat and fear, and he didn’t care, he’d never been so glad to smell anything in his life.

  They weren’t alone. From the darkness came a sound of somebody stirring.

  “Who’s there?” he asked. “Who is that?”

  “Solamente nosotros los muertos. Acostúmbrate a la idea y cierra tu puta boca para que lo demás podamos dormir,” came the sullen answer.

  Just us dead people. Get used to the idea and shut the fuck up so the rest of us can sleep.

  —

  They staked their claims on the floor, and if he could’ve folded himself all the way around Sofia like a fort, he would have.

  The two of them had known each other too long to feel like anything other than brother and sister, but there were times he wondered, Man, what if, huh? They’d come into each other’s orbits as a couple nerdy kids from bad neighborhoods, the kind it was easy to beat the shit out of, so that’s what other kids did. The kids that listened to that thing inside, telling them, This is what it takes to make your day more fun.

  They listened a lot, the cruel ones. Like they knew already, nothing had to tell them anything.

  And keep at it, okay? There’s a future in this. We got plans for you.

  A couple nerdy school-band kids—they had targets on them early. It wasn’t much of a band, and the instruments weren’t much, either. Sofia liked to hit things, so they put her with a snare and a marching bass drum and a tom, but she never got to hit them as hard as she would’ve liked because she was scared of breaking a head, and then where would she be?

  Enrique they’d fixed up with a leaky trumpet, but every spare moment he let the gravity of the out-of-tune piano in the corner pull him over to its yellowed keys. He could play more than one note at a time, plus if he held down the sustain pedal, he could pound them out and they’d keep ringing, a tapestry of overlapping noise that never had to end. The same thing he was doing now, just that with Los Hijos del Infierno he was doing it electronically, with synthesizers and sequencers and samplers, and it was way harder and louder and a lot more caustic.

  So no, it wasn’t much of a school band, and the instruments weren’t much, but he always figured that without them, he and Sofia would be dead. Dead for real, or as good as dead, or wishing they were, or, maybe worst of all, dead on the inside and not realizing it. There were all kinds of dead.

  And Santa Muerte loved each and every one.

  —

  The dark bled out with the dawn.

  He stirred awake at the first sign of it, sitting up on the floor so he could put an environment around them as things took shape. Get that much figured out, at least.

  The first light came slanting in through windows set up high, near the roof. It lit up rough, bone-white walls and a gently peaked ceiling with wooden beams arching overhead, plus a few square pillars near the front and back. The windows on ground level started to brighten next. All of them were barred—no surprise.

  It looked like it may have been an abandoned church or mission that had outlived its usefulness as anything but a prison, in some dusty little village where the good cops, if there were any to start with, were all dead. The mayor, dead. Anybody who’d ever said one wrong word, dead.

  It was gutted of everything that might have marked it as a holy place. The pews were gone, the altar was gone, the font for holy water was gone. All that was left was a raised platform at the front where the altar would’ve been, and empty alcoves in the walls where statues of saints would’ve stood.

  They shared the place with twenty-odd other people. Most were curled up on the floor, still asleep. A few others sat with their backs to the walls, looking ring-eyed and dazed, like they’d forgotten what sleep was. Men, mostly, gone grubby and unshaven. A couple hard-looking women.

  “We don’t belong here.”

  He turned and found Sebastián was awake now. He’d seen their singer looking this bad before, but it was only hangovers, or too many days speeding catching up with him. Nothing like this, like now he wasn’t expecting to get better.

  “This is cartel shit, man. We don’t have anything to do with that. Why would they grab us?
” Bas stopped for a moment, getting a freshly horrified look on his face. “You don’t think it has to do with the pictures during the show, do you?”

  That was something new the past couple tours, since they’d put out the last album, La máscara detrás de la cara. They’d always gone for a projected multimedia assault whenever they played, and Sebastián had decided it was time to forget about the chaos of the world at large for their imagery and tap currents events closer to home. All the photos of carnage you could want were a few clicks away online. The aftermath of massacres and assassinations and messages sent in buckets of blood splashed across pavement. Severed heads and arms hacked off at the elbows, and death sentence by blowtorch, and rows of butchered bodies hanging from train trestles. Film clips, too, that the anonymous murder teams had posted online. This is who we are, this is what we do, this is what it takes to keep our world turning.

  He never knew how Sebastián could do it, comb through the ugliest shit in the world and arrange it in a sequence that whizzed by at four frames per second. From the audience perspective, there wasn’t time to linger on any one thing, so you couldn’t be sure what you’d just seen, you only knew it was terrible and probably real. Bas, though…he had to linger over it.

  “No, I don’t think it’s got anything to do with that,” Enrique said. “That’s free advertising for them, is all.”

  He looked down at Sofia, still asleep, the kind of sleep that becomes the only self-defense you have left. Same with Morgan. Olaf, too, only he looked like could just as easily be unconscious as asleep, all that dried blood down one side of his face and caked in his white-blond hair. He must’ve really taken a beating during the grab.

  Sebastián was trying to look hopeful, but it came off looking queasy. “Maybe they’re gonna ransom us, that’s what this is about. It’s part of the business model now, you know.”

  He was right on that much. Used to be, the people might see cartel crews rolling in their convoys of pickup trucks, and as long as everybody kept out of their way, they’d leave the people alone. Not anymore. Times were tougher, even for the cartels. Every time a boss got killed or captured, organizations fractured and the chaos ramped up. Plus, anybody who said the federal police and the American DEA weren’t having an impact wasn’t paying attention. Whenever they lost another tunnel to the north side, or another supply route, that was another fortune lost.

  But all around them were people too scared to fight back. And people who loved those people. Some of them even had a little money to pay to get their loved ones back in more or less one piece. It wasn’t drug-sized cash, but $40,000 for a few days of no-risk work wasn’t a bad sideline.

  Only Enrique wasn’t seeing it. Not here.

  “I don’t know, Bas,” he said. “They didn’t have any interest in Hector. They didn’t give him a chance. And Crispin, he was the one looking like he could buy his way out of anything.”

  Go back to the site now, what would be left? A lot of nothing. The SUV would’ve been towed to a chop shop in Matamoros or Reynosa. For Hector and Crispin, graves no one would ever discover, or maybe an acid bath.

  “What I can’t figure is how they knew where to find us at all. They shouldn’t have known that. Nobody was following. Where would they have picked up on us?”

  Oh, God, that look on Sebastián’s face—like his eyes were falling back inside the cold, black emptiness of his head and his skin was on too tight.

  “What did you do, Bas? What the fuck did you do?”

  It came from somewhere so far inside him he could barely squeeze out sound: “I sent out a tweet. Right after we got to the airport.”

  Enrique’s breath left him all at once. Twitter. Sure, why not. Because Sebastián couldn’t wait to get a jump on the image thing. Tell the whole world what a lonely, godforsaken, evil place they were going to. Look at us, everybody, see how edgy we are. Never guessing who might be paying the wrong kind of attention.

  “The airplane didn’t kill us, so you figured you would?” Enrique whacked Sebastián across the face, open-handed but with heft behind it, to knock him off his ass and send him sprawling across the dingy wooden floor.

  A few of the dead people, los muertos, looked up at the commotion, decided they’d seen it all before, and tuned them out again.

  Near tears, Sebastián scuttled a few feet away and put his head between his knees. Sofia roused, coming awake, feeling the disturbance in the air.

  “What?” she said, her tongue thick with morning, then she jolted into high alert as everything hit her all over again. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.” He couldn’t think of a single good result that could come from telling her. Not now. Later, if there was time for it to matter. “Just nerves.”

  She looked around, taking it all in and liking none of it. He noticed, for the first time, a pair of five-gallon plastic buckets in the farthest corner—the communal toilet. Currently in use.

  Meanwhile, Sebastián had gotten brave enough to have a look out one of the barred front windows flanking the pair of main doors, big slabs of wood and iron that looked solid enough to withstand cannon fire.

  Up. Sebastián was looking up.

  He backed away from the window then, one slow foot after another, so tense his tendons were going to pop if he wasn’t careful. His fingertips went to his lips and he stopped, something inside shutting down.

  They took his place at the window.

  Not far beyond the front doors was the biggest Santa Muerte he’d ever seen. She stood fifteen feet tall, easy. Her blue robes were voluminous, enough material there for a festival tent. She seemed too big to have found her a scythe that wouldn’t look like a toy. Yet they had. Somebody must’ve made it just for her, a scythe big enough to cut the moon in half. And somehow…somehow the skull was at scale.

  “That can’t be real,” Sofia said.

  No. It couldn’t. It just looked real. The yellowing of age. The uneven teeth. The missing teeth, random gaps in the jaw. They’d had it made, that was all. Same props company that made the chacmool, maybe. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the head.

  A sight like this, the biggest thing around, your eyes would naturally go to it, linger on it. So it took awhile for them to notice the rest, the bits and pieces scattered around the hem of Santa Muerte’s giant robe. Never mind the skull. These were real. Arms and legs, hands and feet and heads. They were as real as real got.

  “Do me a favor,” Sofia said, quiet as a butterfly. “If it looks like that’s where I’m headed, kill me. If I ever got on your nerves and you wanted to break my neck, that would be a good time.”

  —

  After everybody was awake and moving, there was only one person who would talk with them, a graying, droopy-jowled viejo who said he was a priest. Everybody else, Enrique figured it was like that guy in war movies—the tight-faced veteran with the thousand-yard stare who’s been around the longest, and he doesn’t want to get to know the new recruits transferring into the unit. Doesn’t even want to know their names. They’ll be dead in a week, so why bother.

  “What’s a priest have to do to get a cartel mad at him?” Enrique asked.

  “Exorcisms,” Padre Thiago said. “I cast out the Devil from the ones who let him in but don’t want him dwelling in them any longer. He doesn’t like that, and neither do his servants.” The old man looked out in the direction of the towering Santa Muerte, then grinned and spread his hands as if to bless his flock. “But you see how God works. He brings me here, where prayers of liberation are needed most.”

  Enrique had all kinds of things he could’ve said then about God and deliverance and working in mysterious ways, but there would have been no upside to any of it. You choose your battles wisely. And you don’t drive off your allies.

  “Who are his servants here?” he said instead. “I don’t know what this is about. I don’t know who took us, or why.”

  “That group of men over there?” The priest pointed with discretion at a sullen cluster
occupying the farthest corner opposite the toilet buckets. “They say they are with the Sinaloa Federation. This would probably make it the Zetas who have you.”

  “Just me,” Enrique said. “Not you?”

  “Wherever I am, I am only God’s.”

  Knowing who still didn’t explain why. The Sinaloa Federation controlled the northwest. The Zetas, once they’d turned against the Gulf Cartel, took control of the northeast and the coast all the way down to the Yucatán. There were others, but these two were the guerrillas, fighting for as much turf as they could take, with strips of contested no-man’s-land running down the center of the country.

  “And there’s that one, too.” Padre Thiago meant a stocky man milling about on the Sinaloa periphery, as though he didn’t belong but was allowed closer than most. “Do you recognize him?”

  The man looked to be in his upper thirties, and like the rest of them, he’d been at least a week without a razor, so his beard was catching up with his mustache. Enrique gave it his best, trying to see who he was under the whiskers and the unruly, unwashed hair.

  No,” he had to admit. “Should I?”

  “You don’t recognize Miguel Cardenas? I thought one music person might know another, but what do I know?”

  Enrique never would have gotten it on his own, but now he had enough for the connections to link. Different music, different look, different everything. He knew the name, ignored the rest. Miguel Cardenas was a traditionalist, singing dusty songs for the provinces. Enrique could picture the man in his cowboy hat, holding an acoustic guitar, in front of a backup band of brass and accordion, tasteful drums, and upright bass. He still wore a white dress shirt, dingy now, and black slacks with silver studs down the sides. What had they done—nab him after a show?

  “I bet I can guess,” Enrique said. “The idiot did a narco ballad about one of the bosses in the Federation.”

  Padre Thiago gave a sad nod. “If you seek favor by flattering one side, the other may not turn a deaf ear to it.”