Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (5 page)

She smiles. I catch the tears that leak from the corners of her eyes and lick them from my fingers.

“We’re about to go over,” I say, though I know she can’t hear me.

Her still-loving stare punishes me, sears my insides until I wish I could vomit my self-revulsion into the churning water.

“I told you not to look,” I whisper.

Her smile grows softer.

Suddenly, I can no longer stand the thought of being on this boat, alone with that smile, those eyes. I toss myself over the edge, and the small boat capsizes. Kaapi cannot even move her arms, but her eyes still somehow indict me just before she sinks below the water that last time.

I turn away from her and force my way across the current—the effort to reach the far bank exhausts even me, and I sit among the roots and mud, gasping in the damp air. I wonder, if I look over the edge of the falls, will I see Kaapi’s body? I want to look, but when I try to move I discover that my limbs no longer obey me. The sun rises behind the waterfall, but even that spectacular vision grows dimmer with each second. It takes me a long time—too long—to understand.

I’m stopping.

At the last moment I close my eyes. I remember Kaapi—not her eyes, or my guilt, but the simple, animalistic pleasure of her pounding into me, the ants skittering across my skin.

I wish I were an ant. Dull eyes wouldn’t matter to me then. And if I died, I could just be squashed flat—a featureless smear on loamy earth that not even lightning could revive.

Under Cover of Night
Christopher Golden

Long past midnight, Carl Weston sat in a ditch in the Sonoran Desert with his finger on the trigger of his M-16, waiting for something to happen. Growing up, he’d always played army, dreamed about traveling around the world and taking on the bad guys—the black hats who ran dictatorships, invaded neighboring countries, or tried exterminating whole subsets of the human race. That was what soldiering was all about. Taking care of business. Carrying the big stick and dishing out justice.

The National Guard might not be the army, but he had a feeling the end result wasn’t much different. Turned out the world wasn’t made up of black hats and white hats, and the only way to tell who was on your side was looking at which way their guns were facing. Weston spent thirteen months in the desert in Iraq, and for the last three he’d been part of a unit deployed to the Mexican border to back up the Border Patrol.

One fucking desert to another. Some of the guys he knew had been stationed in places like El Paso and San Diego. Weston would’ve killed for a little civilization. Instead, he got dirt and scrub, scorpions and snakes, land so ugly even the Texas Rangers had never spent that much time worrying about it.

Army or Guard, didn’t matter that much in the scheme of things. None of it was anything like he’d imagined as a kid. If he’d earned a trip to Hell, he was living it. Never mind the heat, or the sand in his hair and every fucking orifice . . . the boredom was Hell enough. It was all just so much waiting around.

Once upon a time, he’d have been excited about a detail like tonight. Border Patrol and DEA were working together to take out a cocaine caravan, bouncing up from South America on the Mexican Trampoline. The traffickers were doing double duty—taking money from illegals to smuggle them across the border, and using them as mules, loading them up with coke to carry with them. Where the DEA got their Intel was none of Weston’s business. He was just a grunt with a gun. But from the way the hours were ticking by, it didn’t look good. They hadn’t seen shit all night, and it had to be after two
A.M.

South of the ditch, Weston couldn’t see anything but desert. Out there in the dark, less than half a mile off, locals had strung a barbed wire fence that ran for miles in either direction. The idea that this might deter illegals from crossing the border made him want to laugh and puke all at the same time. Yeah, Border Patrol units traversed this part of the invisible line between Mexico and the U.S. on a regular basis, but if you were committed enough to try crossing the border through the desert, you had a decent shot at making it. Border Patrol captured or turned back hordes of illegals every day, but plenty still slipped through.

And that was just the poor bastards who didn’t have transport, a bottle of water, or a spare sandwich. You had a little money and wanted to get some drugs across, all you needed was a ride to the border and a pair of wire-cutters. Came to it, you didn’t need the cutters, either. If you drove a little way, you’d find an opening.

The whole thing was a game. That was what bothered Weston the most. Over in Iraq, the other guys were full of hate and trying to take as many Americans out of action as possible. That was war. This whole business, sitting around in the ditch, was hide-and-fucking-seek.

“Weston.”

He blinked, turned and glanced at Brooksy. The guy hadn’t been in Iraq with Weston’s unit. He was brand new to the squad; eighteen years old and thinking this shit was war. Grim motherfucker, skinny as a crack whore, hair shaved down to bristle, and twitchy as hell. The squad leader—Ortiz—had made Weston the kid’s babysitter, which meant they were sharing the ditch tonight. Six other guys in the squad, but Brooksy had to be Weston’s responsibility. He wasn’t sure if Ortiz was punishing him or complimenting him, making him look after the kid.

“Shut up,” Weston said, voice low.

He held his M-16 at the ready and glanced around to see if anyone was picking up on their chatter. No sign of movement from the rest of the squad, never mind the Border Patrol grunts or the DEA crusaders.

“I gotta piss, man,” Brooksy said.

Weston’s nostrils flared. “Not in this ditch.”

“What do I do?”

“Hold it, dumbass.”

“And when I can’t?”

“You piss in this ditch, I swear to God I’ll shoot you.”

Brooksy’s eyes narrowed. He gripped his M-16 and scanned the desert in the direction of the border.

Weston rolled his eyes. He turned and looked north. In the moonlight, the black silhouettes of a dozen or so small buildings were visible. They were all single-story, slant-roof shacks, most of which had once been houses. One had been offices, one a gas station, and one a saloon. The tiny desert town had never had a name—though one clever prick had painted a sign and planted it at the south end of the cluster of shacks. It read WELCOME TO PARADISE.

From what Ortiz had told the squad, passed down from the DEA briefing, the place had been hopping back in the days when heroin production had been huge in Mexico—before they’d realized that their greatest asset wasn’t crops, but the border itself, and started putting all of their efforts into trafficking instead. There’d been a big operation going in this little shithole, but the DEA had compromised it then and it had been abandoned ever since. The few people who’d actually tried to live there had long since wandered off.

Paradise Lost.

“Seriously, man,” Brooksy began.

Weston laughed softly, reached out with his foot, and kicked the kid’s pack. “Drain your canteen and piss in it.”

“I’ll never get it clean, man. I’ll never be able to use it.”

That might be true. Weston gave him a hard look. “Go in the corner over there. Dig yourself a little hole, piss in it, then cover it up again. And you better hope the wind doesn’t shift.”

Brooksy nodded, propped his weapon against the side of the ditch, and went over to the corner. He used the heel of his boot to dig into the ground, then got down and deepened the hole with his hands. When he stood and unzipped, Weston laughed.

“Keep your head down, Brooks.”

The kid bent his head and his knees, half-crouched, and it was just about the most foolish-looking thing Weston had ever seen. For a few seconds, it seemed inevitable that Brooksy would stumble into his hand-dug latrine.

From out across the desert came the distant growl of an engine. Weston swung round, propped the barrel of his M-16 on the top of the ditch, and sighted into the darkness. The sound of the engine cut off abruptly. Maybe there had been more than one. Regardless, it had come from the other side of the border, and no way anyone was joyriding the Sonoran in the wee hours of the morning.

“It’s on,” he whispered.

Brooksy might have been a kid, but instead of losing his cool and flopping all over the place, he turned pro. Quietly, he sat backward on the floor of the ditch, used his boots to cover the hole he’d made with dirt, then lay back and zipped up. He was back at his post with his weapon up in a handful of seconds, eyes gleaming in the dark. All the nervous energy that made him so twitchy had gone away. Weston nodded to him, then settled in to wait. Maybe the kid wouldn’t be a liability after all.

He imagined he could hear the twang of the barbed wire being cut, but at this distance, that might have been in his head. For long minutes they sat in the ditch, barely breathing. The other six members of the squad were broken into three two-man teams in different locations, but all on the obvious approach to the empty husks of Paradise.

At first, the rhythmic sound was so muffled that it could’ve been his own pulse in his ears. But when it grew louder, Weston knew the mules were on the move. Ortiz had told them the DEA expected a couple of dozen, but as the noise of running feet multiplied, it sounded like a hundred or more. The illegals would all have backpacks full of coke. They’d been warned some of them would be guards sent along to protect the coke—coyotes herding the mules—and those guys would be armed. Weston tried to do the math. If he figured twenty-five pounds of coke per mule—over ten kilos—at a hundred mules, they were talking about over a thousand kilos of cocaine.

How the DEA knew about the whole setup, he had no idea. That was their job. But obviously the traffickers had to be pretty confident to risk that kind of product on a bunch of desperate Mexicans looking for a better life in the goddamn desert.

Shadows out on the desert began to resolve into running figures. They were coming, but after crossing through the hole they’d cut in the fence, they’d spread out. DEA and Border Patrol were set up in the ramshackle buildings of Paradise, hiding behind and inside them, just waiting. There were big black Humvees and somewhere—not far off—a DEA chopper was waiting to be deployed.

Weston sighted down the barrel of his M-16. He almost felt bad for the mules. They didn’t stand a chance. They expected to show up in Paradise, get a meal and a blanket, and transport deeper into the U.S. But their ride wasn’t ever going to show up. DEA had already taken care of that.

A night wind blew over the desert and Weston shivered. During the day, the Sonoran was a frying pan. But at night, it could get cold as Hell.

He watched the tiny figures running closer, moving in and out of patches of moonlight. The night played tricks on the eyes. It was hard to track them closely from this distance. But the sounds of their running grew louder and pretty soon he motioned to Brooksy to duck down inside the ditch.

They slid down, their backs to the dirt wall. The mules started running by, some of them so close he could hear their labored breathing and their grunts of exertion. A voice snarled, let off a stream of abuse at one of the mules. Had to be one of the shipment’s guards. Weston forced himself to take his finger off the trigger to fight the urge to rise up from the ditch and blow a hole in the bastard’s skull.

He kept his own breathing steady. Their assignment was simple. Let the mules and the coyotes pass on by, then close ranks behind them so that when the shit hit the fan in Paradise, none of the coke fled back across the border.

Simple.

Until the screaming started.

In the dark, he saw Brooksy glance at him, wondering who the fuck was screaming. There’d been no gunshots yet. Nobody was supposed to make a move until they got the go signal from DEA, and that wasn’t intended to happen until all of the coke-carrying illegals and their guards had marched into Paradise, putting them between the DEA and Border Patrol on one side, and the National Guard on the other to keep them from retreating. But to the south, toward the border, a grown man had started shrieking like someone had just cut his dick off. It sent a chill up Weston’s spine, and he wondered how the other guys would be taking it.

The sound of running footsteps slowed, became hesitant.

Voices barked, urging the illegals on. The guards couldn’t let the mules change their minds now. Whoever was hurt or dying out there, it didn’t concern the drug runners.

Then the screaming died abruptly, a second of silence followed, and several other voices started a chorus of screams. At least one of them had to be that of a child, badly injured or at least in terror.

“Damn,” Weston whispered.

Brooksy flinched and stared at him, almost like the kid was judging him for breaking silence. Punk could fuck off as far as Weston was concerned. You got to the point where the terrified, maybe dying screams of a child didn’t rip your heart out, you might as well eat a bullet right there.

The comm unit in his ear crackled. “Go. Word is go.”

Engines roared—the Humvees coming to life. Shouts began to arise, in English. “Go, go, go, go!” over and over. Weston took one glance at Brooksy and saw that, indeed, the twitchy motherfucker had vanished, leaving one stone cold bastard behind. No more babysitting for Weston.

“Go, go!” Brooksy chimed in.

They ran up out of the ditch, weapons up and ready. Instantly, Weston saw what had happened. The screams back there in the darkness of the border had made the flood of illegals hesitate. They’d slowed down. Some had maybe even started to turn back, going to check on friends or family members who were stragglers, worried that they were the source of the screams. Whatever it was, the DEA cowboys had gotten worried that they might lose part of their score—or they’d just gotten impatient, which was typical. Grunts like Weston were used to waiting around for the world to explode. From what Ortiz had said, DEA cowboys spent too much time in offices, doing paperwork, and got stir crazy enough that once they hit the field, they couldn’t wait for shit to go down.

The mules started shouting in Spanish. Weston didn’t have to be fluent to know what they were yelling. “Fuck. We’re fucked. Get the fuck out of here.” Pretty much a universal language.

The Mexicans started dropping the backpacks full of cocaine—mules couldn’t run very fast with kilos of blow strapped to their shoulders—and turning toward the border full speed. One of the guards—they were better dressed, healthier looking, and didn’t carry any coke—started screaming at them, raised a 9mm, and put a bullet in the head of the nearest mule who’d dared to dump his drugs.

Weston stitched him with a few rounds from his M-16 and the guy danced a little, spraying blood, and then sprawled onto the desert.

That didn’t accomplish anything except to start more shouting and make them run all the faster, like a starter pistol. Only about two thirds of the hundred and fifty or so Mexicans had made their way past the ditches the National Guard squad had been waiting in, not even all the way into Paradise. Now they were fleeing.

“Stop right there!” Brooksy roared.

Like they were going to listen.

“Hustle!” Weston told him.

Brooksy fired a few rounds into the air and they started running alongside the illegals, watching for more coyotes—more guns. Not one of them slowed down. They all figured to take their chances that it would be some other guy who got dropped. Ortiz and the other guys in the squad were on the other side of the stampede. If it was only the eight of them, they’d have had to let most of them go.