Dark Screams, Volume 7 Read online

  Enrique couldn’t help but stare. He was looking at the deadest man in this room. A guy like that, there would be no ransom for him. He was an insult that couldn’t be forgiven. He was the pet dog that got killed to make a point.

  And it was one more reason why this didn’t make sense. The three of them, Los Hijos del Infierno, weren’t on anybody’s side. They sang nobody’s praises. It would’ve been like asking whose side you were on between lung cancer and heart disease. They were on the side of life, end of story.

  That was the thing people never got about them. The look, the sound, the lyrics, the stage show…all of it left people who couldn’t look or listen any deeper thinking they must’ve been on the side of death. What else could they be? Because look at them. Look at the freaks. Never once considering the band was another symptom, the world getting the art it deserved.

  You screamed that loud only when dying was the last thing you wanted to do.

  —

  It was the middle of the day when they came for Olaf and Morgan.

  A squad of armed guys burst in shouting for everyone to get on the far side of the room, and everybody else knew the drill already. It seemed to be the way the cartel guys handled everything here. They either brought what they wanted or took what they wanted, and they did it at gunpoint, with lots of yelling.

  If you wanted to die quick, here was your chance. Whatever they said, do the opposite. Go straight at them, screaming for blood. It had to be a better end than you’d get under that giant Santa Muerte. There was every reason to believe whatever happened there would go a lot worse.

  So why didn’t anybody do it? Most of these people had been here for days or longer. Padre Thiago had been here for more than two weeks. They all knew what was going on.

  The only thing that could’ve stopped them from rushing into gunfire was hope. They still hoped someone cared enough to buy their release. That’s what kept them docile. That’s what would keep them docile one day too long.

  Then again? Forcing a quick end was easy to dream about, but when they came in that first time, all stormtrooping and chaos, the only thing Enrique could do was scuttle to the wall with everyone else and try to wrap the adobe around him. Ashamed, because the thing he wanted most in the world right then was to be invisible. Don’t see me, don’t pick me, don’t act like you even know I’m here. He folded himself over Sofia, and that was all the altruism he could muster. When he saw it was Olaf and Morgan they wanted, he’d never been more disgusted with himself for feeling relief.

  Olaf was still feisty. They had to pry Morgan from his arms and knock the wind out of him with the butt-end of an AK-47 to the gut. He dropped to his knees, gasping, then they dragged him by the shoulders. Morgan went easier, stumbling along with her eyes popped wide and her mouth open in a silent scream, like she’d hit a place of panic so overwhelming she froze there.

  As quickly as they’d come, the extraction team was gone, and everyone unglued themselves from the wall. Enrique drifted up to the front window, forcing every step, because someone who knew them should bear witness. He would watch as long as he could.

  Only they didn’t reappear. Santa Muerte continued to stand alone.

  That was life here, the terrible erratic rhythm of it. Long stretches of boredom and soul-eating dread, waiting for something to happen, and when it did, you shit yourself with fear.

  Within hours, he and Bas and Sofia had become fixtures the same as the rest, subject to the same pecking orders and probing. Even in captivity, the Sinaloa guys had their own mini-cartel going. They’d been watching, taking the measure of the newcomers, and an hour or so after Morgan and Olaf were taken, one of them decided he wanted a woman and wanted one now, and made a move on Sofia.

  Enrique went tense, ready to go off if needed, and he figured he would be before it was over. One on one, though, the guy didn’t have a chance. Sofia had been fending off grabby assholes for years. She’d gone through a phase when she cut her hair short and choppy, thinking it might discourage them, but it didn’t, so she’d grown it out again and instead worked on preemptive strikes.

  This one she kicked in the balls, and when he doubled over, gripped him by the curly ringlets of hair on the back of his head to steady him for a knee to the face. He was on the floor before his buddies saw it was going to happen. A few of them moved to step in, so Enrique came forward for the intercept.

  He’d already guessed how they had him pegged. That they saw him as someone for whom size didn’t matter, whose mass they could dismiss. He’d accepted years ago that he was always going to have the round, moonfaced look of some lumpen guy too big and slow to do anything other than let bad shit happen to him.

  Sometimes it was good to leave the wrong impression. When all they saw was freaks with smudged, day-old makeup, you could do a lot of damage before they caught on.

  The first one who got close, Enrique hooked a punch into the side of his neck that landed with the sound of meat slapping onto stone. It sent him staggering until he dropped a few steps away. The next, Enrique stomped a kick into his belly to fold him in half, then brought a hammer-fist down like an anvil to the back of his skull. Another he picked up and threw at two others, a carnival game of pins and balls. It took them by enough of a surprise that one of them stood there stupid long enough to let Sofia break his wrist, and all at once they were backing away, changing their minds; no fresh pussy was worth this.

  He’d have to sleep light from now on but was probably going to, anyway, if last night was any indication.

  Awhile later, Olaf and Morgan were brought back, neither of them worse off than before. The cartel guys, Olaf said, had only sat them down and grilled them about who they were, what they did, where they came from, who did they know with money. Mainly it was about the money.

  Nobody was more relieved to hear this than Sebastián. He turned giddy, going on about how it was only a matter of time before somebody came through, somebody had to—they made other people money, didn’t they? They were an investment somebody would want to protect. Bas couldn’t wait to help their captors out, give them names. Manager, label people, promoters. They had fans, so maybe a Kickstarter, bring the whole world in on getting them home safely.

  Sebastián was everything hope looked like when it came unhinged.

  The longer the day went on with nobody asking them anything, the farther Bas fell again. By dusk, he was making such a fuss at the barred windows, shouting to anyone who’d listen how ready he was to talk, that Enrique dragged him back before someone decided they were sick of listening to him squall.

  It wasn’t happening.

  Whatever they were here for, it was something other than money.

  —

  Later that night they got their first look at how things ultimately went here. It was just late enough for people to start getting drowsy, this holy prison filling with the sounds of people dropping off and snoring, one of them muttering from someplace deep inside a bad dream. Then reality intruded, as, bad or worse, everybody rousted by the extraction team as they burst in and went straight for one of the Sinaloa guys he’d scrapped with earlier and dragged him away screaming.

  Straight to Santa Muerte.

  Maybe they’d picked him because he’d outlived his usefulness. Or because it was a good time to grab him, since he was fucked up from earlier and couldn’t struggle as well. Or because he’d lost a fight with a big, chubby guy and this left him looking weak. Maybe it was random and there was no reasoning behind it at all.

  Enrique’s nerves were too shredded to settle on how he was supposed to feel about this. Relieved? One less enemy to worry about, after all. Hours earlier he could’ve killed the guy himself. He’d wanted him dead, wanted him humbled and suffering.

  Just not like this.

  Enrique was the only one at the window—everybody else must have seen it all before—until Sebastián joined him like it was the last place he wanted to be except for every place else here.

  “Don’t
watch, boys,” Padre Thiago called out to them. “Why would you watch?”

  Good question. With that cartel snuff footage he’d combed through online, at least Sebastián was better equipped to handle it. As for himself? Could be he needed an unfiltered look at where this could end for them. All the motivation he would need to push the schedule and make it quicker, when the time came.

  The crew had enough stark white lights burning out front that it wasn’t hard to see. It took eight or nine guys to handle things—three to get the victim into place, the rest standing guard to enforce compliance if needed, then one more coming into view when the others parted and the light caught him.

  “Oh, shit,” Sebastián breathed. “I know that one, I’ve seen him…seen him in pictures, I think.”

  This newest guy didn’t need the machete in his hand to look like walking death. He had the part down already. Tall, thin as a broomstick, and without a shirt, bone and ropy muscle standing out in equally sharp relief across his tattooed skin. They covered him, maybe twenty percent of his hide left uninked for contrast. The rest was monochrome designs in black and dark green, cheap ink. Or maybe he hated color.

  “How can you be sure?” Enrique said.

  “The ones on his face. I only ever saw one of them looking like that.”

  The skin around his eyes had been shaded into dark ovals. The sides of his nose were blacked out, too, along with his lower cheeks and parts of his chin. His head was shaved. From a distance, and probably close-up, too, the effect was like a living, decorated skull.

  “I think he’s MS-Thirteen,” Sebastián said. “They don’t even try to blend.”

  Funny thing—he thought he was at rock bottom already. No more room left to feel worse about their chances. But hearing this was a reminder: There was always room to go lower.

  Some may have been as bad, but nobody was worse than MS-13. Salvadorans from Los Angeles, originally, but over time they’d spread, exported, colonized, let others in. Worked with the cartels, some of them. Salvadoran, Mexican, Guatemalan…nationalities didn’t matter as much when the big thing you had in common was the ability to bury your humanity so deep you could never find it again, leaving it to rot with the worms. When you could do what they did without feeling anything more than that it had to be done. That this was what it took to get business taken care of. No different than guys who clocked in at the meat plants. They all had two eyes, two ears, and a mouth, same as the pigs and cows, but were still the ones holding the chainsaws.

  The Sinaloa guy was stripped to his boxer shorts, then stretched out flat on the ground as somebody stood on each arm to keep him there. The Skull started by taking off his hands. As somebody else moved in with a propane torch to cauterize the stumps, he picked up the hands and flicked the blood from them into the dirt as he carried them over to Santa Muerte. They hacked off his feet next and made offerings of those, too. The men weighting him down stepped off to let the guy roam at will because how far could he get now, down to four stumpy limbs, nothing but charred nubs at the ends.

  They seemed to find it entertaining. Nothing funnier than watching a guy in that condition try to flop away.

  The Skull opened a big wooden box then, pulling out every kind of knife there was: military knives, hunting knives, fish knives, kitchen cutlery. He took his time, sticking one in and leaving it in place like a plug, because pulling the blade out would free the wound to bleed, and the Skull didn’t want that. Soft tissue, areas that wouldn’t be immediately fatal—those were his targets, and he found them one by one.

  There seemed no end to it, a harder thing to watch than the amputations because of the calm, casual progression, the guy on the receiving end mindlessly trying to wallow away every time another blade skewered him, until he could no longer manage even that much, and could only lie there and take it, more and more bristling like a porcupine. The only way Enrique was certain he was still alive was because of how the handles rose and fell with each ragged breath. Every now and then, his whole carcass shuddered.

  Enrique wouldn’t have thought so until now, but he found this ordeal worse to contemplate than coming apart at the joints. He had more soft tissue than anybody here, enough to keep the Skull busy for hours.

  He watched when he could, turned away when he couldn’t. But he never left the window. This is what it takes to be glad to die.

  Sebastián, though, had checked out a long time ago, sliding down the wall and holding himself together with both arms wrapped around his knees. Maybe it was easier to watch when it was on video. Bas could always pretend it was special effects in a movie. All he had to do was turn off the sound.

  Sound was the giveaway, he’d explained once, how you knew when something was real and when it was staged. Terrified people, dying people, people in agony, made sounds that nobody could get to under any other circumstances. Once you’d heard the difference, there could be no confusing the two.

  Just as there were sights you couldn’t unsee, there were sounds you couldn’t unhear, and this poor fucker out there had made them all.

  So when they finished it, the Skull tugging a wicked-looking military knife free of the guy’s groin and using it to saw off his head, the sound was more a part of it than anything Enrique could see. The angle was bad, too many bristling knife handles in the way. But he could hear it, that soul-shredding crescendo of mortality the guy had been holding in reserve.

  Enrique didn’t know when it happened, only that at some point Nietzsche’s old warning came to mind: If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. This was the feeling he got every time the Skull looked up from his work and peered straight at him in the window, as if making sure Enrique was still watching.

  Good. You need to pay attention, the Skull seemed to be saying. I know it’s rough, but this is what it takes to get where we’re going.

  —

  He lost track of time, didn’t know if it was an hour after the slaughter or an hour before sunrise. All he knew was that he was lying on the floor next to Sofia, their arms hooked around each other’s at the elbow. He remembered seeing somewhere that otters slept this way, holding hands so they wouldn’t drift apart on the river. If he had a next life coming, that was how he wanted to be reborn. Come back as an otter, sweet-faced and sleek and holding hands while he slept, and life would be simple.

  “We should have never gone to Matamoros,” Sofia said to him in the dark. “You and me, we should have voted Bas down. We should never have agreed to go to that ranch.” She moved her head closer and kept her voice low, everything just between them. “It had us then. It reached out from the past and took us.”

  That was how it felt, yeah. They’d raised their heads high enough to be noticed by the dreadful thing that claimed this land, and it decided it wanted them. It opened its jaws to gobble them up, and the cartel guys were its teeth.

  “I was going to tell you earlier, when we were there, but I didn’t want the place listening to me, you know?” she said. “Hearing about what happened at that ranch was my first memory. The first one I can pin down.”

  So much worse was going on around them, but this still hurt him straight to the heart. “That’s awful.”

  “I was three,” she went on. “Something like that, kidnapping, human sacrifice, you don’t understand it when you’re that little. And you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t ever have to understand it. At the time, it was more about the effect it had on my mother, and me seeing how she reacted. Not just to what they’d found, but what they hadn’t, too, because there was talk of them maybe taking kids that never did turn up.”

  Lying there, he wished for an arm of iron that they could never break if they came in to drag Sofia away.

  “I didn’t understand it, but my mother did. I could see how much it scared her. How afraid she was for me. That there were people out there who would do these things. That’s what came through. And I could tell, she was afraid she couldn’t protect me, not from people like that. Because they had t
he devil behind them. Once that settled in, I don’t know if I ever felt totally safe again.”

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, and meant it for everything he hadn’t been able to do for her, then or now.

  “I should have never stopped believing in the Devil.”

  —

  The next afternoon, at the height of the heat of the day, they came for Sebastián.

  At first, weirdly enough, it was just an order, almost deferential compared to their usual methods, threat behind it but no force. When he didn’t want any part of it, only then did things get rough, Bas taking a knee to the groin so hard it brought up his meager lunch. The bones went out of his legs, the fear so overwhelming every muscle went loose.

  Sofia was screaming, reaching for Bas as they dragged him across the floor. It took both of Enrique’s arms in wraparound to hold her back. Had it been just him and Bas, he would’ve done it, rushed them, made these savages shoot them both, let them bleed out quick from twenty bullet wounds apiece. But with Sofia here, he couldn’t bring himself to do it, not as long as they didn’t want her yet, and he hated himself for being like the rest of the docile herd, buying into the desperation: that as long as there was time, there was hope.

  When they got Sebastián out the door, they surprised everybody by coming back for one more. Miguel Cardenas this time, the country balladeer who’d written one narco ballad too many, in his filthy white shirt and black pants with the silver studs down the sides. With him, there was no deference at all, the cartel team back to their usual routine of brutality first, orders later. Once he got over the shock, he begged all the way out the door.

  You could follow their path outside by the sobbing. After Sofia hunkered on the floor with her hands squashed over her ears, Enrique forced himself to the window and saw two guys waiting near Santa Muerte, holding sledgehammers like firing-squad riflemen waiting for the order to aim.

  Both, as it turned out, were for Cardenas. They took out his knees first, and after he was down they smashed his elbows, then went to work on his hands and feet. They left him plenty alive, just nothing to crawl with, fight with, grab with, resist with. They reduced it all to pulp and compound fractures.