The Dead Run (17 page)

 

CHAPTER 29

W
hat the fuck, Britannica?” Galvan demanded, leaping to his feet as limbs began to emerge from the roiling soil—a slim, bangle-sheathed wrist ten yards away, a muscular pair of nut-brown arms a few paces farther, and who the hell knew how many more beyond, just awakening to the presence of the heart and its No-Longer-Righteous Messenger.

Its exhausted, 75 percent protectorless, shit-outta-luck-and-tricks, half-dead, waterlogged courier asshole.

Galvan keened at the fake priest, staggered over and grabbed him by the sleeve, and brought them eyeball-to-eyeball, very well aware that he was wasting time they did not have, on questions that did not matter.

“What happened to ‘they can't cross the water,' motherfucker? What happened to ‘if we can just get to the other side, we'll be safe'?”

The sweat was pouring down Britannica's already river-drenched mug in sheets. “They didn't cross,” he pointed out, looking more terrified of Galvan than of the Virgin Army. “I was right about that, at least.”

“Who cares?” asked a high, fierce voice by Galvan's side, and they both turned to find Betty, eyes blazing, wounded arm wrapped in her own torn-off T-shirt, pink bra glinting in the sun.

“What do we do?” she demanded as the first two members of the Virgin Army, Second Division, finished exhuming their nether regions.

Bangles and Muscles must not have seen much action, Galvan thought deliriously. There probably hadn't been a heart north of the river in a long-ass time. Maybe they were rusty.

Or hungry.

He stared at Betty, her face open and pleading. At Veronica, by her side. Their lives flashed before his eyes, or so it seemed, and Galvan's whole being filled up with regret. They were so fucking young. So innocent.

Two dead girls had become four in the time he'd taken to reflect, all of them sashaying over in that slow, all-the-time-in-the-underworld way. What accounted for the varying velocities of their approaches? Galvan wondered again. Could Cucuy's wife really be exercising that level of fine control, or did these un-girls have something resembling free will—some remnants of personalities that dictated that one hurtled herself madly while another played it cool? Was it a matter of tactics? The speed of their quarry? How long they'd been dead?

“Back in the water,” Britannica barked. “We're not gonna last long out here.”

“Longer than we'll last in there!” Betty shot back.

Innocent
. The word flashed through Galvan's mind again, like a flint striking a rock.

This time, it gave a spark.

“Wait!” He thrust the box at Betty. “Here. Take this. I can't protect it anymore. But you can.”

She deadpanned, “Me.”

The first Virgin was closing in. Galvan could read the lettering on her begrimed Jefferson Airplane T-shirt.

“Yes! You're the new Righteous Messenger! Take it—quick!”

Betty eyeballed him a moment longer, then accepted the box, holding it atop the flats of her hands like she was delivering a pizza. Galvan exhaled a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding and looked over at the advancing soldiers.

They kept coming.

That was when Veronica piped up. “I think maybe you got the wrong idea about us, Calvin. We're not exactly—”

“We're hookers,” Betty finished with a shrug of her bare shoulders.

“That shouldn't matter,” Britannica sputtered, but he was already breaking into a trot, stubby legs pumping double time as he scaled the bank's incline and reached the flat, currently unpopulated plain above.

“Gimme that, then.” Galvan snatched back the box, and he and the girls followed the priest.

“We've done some fucked-up shit,” Veronica elaborated at his side. Her long legs ate up the distance gracefully, but she was already breathing hard. “We're not bad people, but—”

Galvan raised a hand. “I don't need to hear this now.”

“It's a bad world,” Betty finished, all the same.

“Yeah, no shit,” said Galvan, glancing behind him. They'd opened up a little space, the Virgins still moving in that lackadaisical, low-gear way. It was little comfort.

The living tired out—especially when they were a hairsbreadth from exhaustion already.

The dead, Galvan was guessing, did not.

The math was a bitch, and that was putting it politely.

“Yo, Padre,” he shouted, Britannica still in the lead, though not by much, “any theories on how we get clear? Can these fuckin' things chase us all the way through Texas, or what?”

The con man huffed and puffed as he spoke. He didn't look like he could sustain this pace for long, Galvan thought grimly.

“They can only sense the heart when it's close.”

“Oh yeah? What's close?”

Galvan and the girls were by his side now. Britannica managed to shrug without breaking his stride. “I dunno, a mile or two, if I had to guess.”

“Great.”

There were six girls on their tails now, and the landscape ahead was starting to darken with pop-up bodies. Galvan felt his heart thudding beneath his shirt—not because of the workout he was giving it, but in desperation, pure and simple.

He was a resourceful man, but facts were facts: this was the end of the road. No river to broach, no weapons to stave off the enemy. No water. They could dodge and weave, elude them for a while, hope for a miracle. But the clock was winding down on this doomed mission, this fool's errand.

This evil errand,
Galvan corrected himself, a suppressed rage rising through his rib cage. He'd been pushing the ugly truth of what he was doing far away for hours now, banishing it from his mind with all his might. But truth was truth, as surely as death was death and numbers were numbers. He was the devil's lackey, just like Gum had said—Gum, who knew. Who'd mouthed his awful claims and dark appetites from another realm, a shadow world of desolation. A place Galvan found he could imagine with perfect clarity, could almost see.

It made his blood run cold.

If he had to die, Jess decided, he wasn't going out as Cucuy's servant, any more than he was gonna give these un-girls what they wanted. He looked over at Betty and Veronica, running for all they were worth, and tried to guess at what their brief lives had been like. What cruelties they'd endured, what bargains they'd struck with themselves to turn the choices they had made endurable. These girls had not set out to sell themselves. No one did. Galvan's fury expanded, to encompass every person and injustice and coincidence that had forced them down this path.
Goddamn this fucking world
.

Then Galvan thought of his daughter.

There but for the grace of God . . .

He couldn't bear to complete the thought. But if Galvan could save these two, give them a do-over, a shot at a fresh start . . .

That would be a death worth dying. A death worthy of Payaso, of Gutierrez, of all the fallen soldiers he'd left behind, the casualties this mission had already claimed.

With a final burst of strength, Galvan sprinted ahead of the others, veering hard right, toward a low bluff looming in the distance. He didn't have to look behind him to know the Virgins were recalibrating their trajectories to follow. The pack had doubled again; at least a dozen un-girls stalked him now.

Patient as vultures.

Galvan's lungs burned, but he ran on. Fumbled with the box, until he felt the seal give. Dropped to his knees, stared down at the soft, pinkish-red lump within, and felt a sudden, shocking pang of sympathy for it. He watched it pulse once, twice. It was like staring at a baby animal, or an embryo. His instinct, still, was to protect it.

But no life could come from this. Just death.

Or worse.

Galvan gritted his teeth and reached for the heart, intent on tearing it apart. Scattering the pieces. Letting the Virgins tear him limb from limb.

Nobody wins.

He stared down at it a moment, thinking of the girl, the terror on her face, the way her eyes had flared as Cucuy reached inside . . .

The world faded at the edges, the heart filling Galvan's field of vision even as a flurry of questions filled his mind.

Who had she been, that girl? What dreams had she nurtured, how had this fate befallen her, how could the world not explode beneath the weight of so much horror?

Had she yet been buried? Was she sensing even now the presence of the heart, yearning to have this piece of her restored?

What would he do, were she to confront him, this girl whose life he'd watched extinguished—and what made these others any different?

What prevented Cucuy from burning the bodies, after he was done?

What difference would it make if Galvan destroyed this tiny, supple organ, when a being of unspeakable power had an infinite supply of girls to murder for more?

Maybe not much. But at least the monster's plan wouldn't come to fruition on Galvan's watch.

He bent forward and picked up the heart.

Closed his eyes in wordless prayer, for the first time in twenty-something years.

A shout echoed across the plain, froze Galvan where he knelt.

“Órale! Look alive, pendejo!”

The voice was not familiar. His eyes opened, his neck snapped up, and Galvan scowled in disbelief.

Spread across the top of the bluff before him were a dozen men, dressed in leather and armed to the teeth with automatic weapons.

Behind them, a row of glinting motorcycles, and a lone BMW.

His eyes must have given out on him, Galvan decided. Hell of a mirage, though. Had to give his fried brain points for creativity.

The guy standing before the Beemer was the one who'd spoken. He was short dude, decked out in a suit and shades. No gun.

The man in command.

“Get down,” he called. Jess goggled at him, unable to process what was happening.

“Down,” the man called again, jabbing a finger to illustrate. He hitched up his suit pants at the knees and acted it out, dropping to the ground as if about to do a set of push-ups, then craning his neck to see if Galvan understood.

Slowly, Jess swiveled at the hips and looked behind him.

A dozen consigns of the Virgin Army were almost on him. Behind them, Britannica and Betty and Veronica were lying flat, just like the guy in the suit, the priest's arms wrapped protectively around the girls' shoulders.

Galvan assumed the position, clutching the heart in the crook of his arm. No sooner did his head hit the dirt than a sustained hail of gunfire rang out.

And out.

And out.

He'd never heard anything like it—not in volume, or intensity, or length. Thousands of bullets were tearing through the air each second. Galvan imagined them as a swarm of bees, hive-minded death dealers intent on destroying hive-minded death dealers.

He lifted his chin a millimeter, crooked his neck to look behind him at the carnage, wished he hadn't. The dead girls were being systematically reduced to chunks, the sheer profusion of the gun spray cutting them limb from limb, spattering pieces in all directions. By the time the noise abated and the men lowered their weapons, there was not a recognizably human form left. Hell, there wasn't half of one. If the impulse to pursue the heart remained within these decimated lumps of flesh—present on some cellular level—it wasn't going to be one they had much ability to act on.

Galvan staggered to his feet, woozy. The bikers' weapons dangled by their sides, probably sizzling to the touch. The man in the suit was sucking on a cigarette, a thin calligraphy of smoke winding its way into the sky.

Galvan keened at him, then stumbled, legs gone rubbery, and pitched forward. Britannica was there in time to catch him. Galvan draped an arm over the priest's shoulder, and together the four of them approached the bluff, the shooters. Salvation.

Or, at least, a different kind of death.

The man in the suit dropped his cancer stick as they drew near and eliminated the threat of forest fire with a practiced twist of his ankle. He looked them up and down, a smirk playing on his pillowy lips.

“You my courier then, ese?”

Galvan goggled at him, the world vanishing longer with every blink of his eyes.
I know that dude from somewhere,
he thought woozily, but it was all too much. His batteries were out of juice. The recognition wouldn't come.

“Yeah,” he managed, through parched lips. “Name's Galvan.”

The man nodded.

“Right.”

He pulled out a snub-nosed .38 and put a bullet hole in the middle of Britannica's forehead. The priest died silently, a note of protest frozen in his throat.

“Sedate the courier,” the suited man ordered his minions. He turned crisply, strode toward his car, and handed the gun through the window, to the driver.

“What about the girls?” somebody asked, the voice husky and broad.

“You can take them or leave them. No se importa.”

“Dibs on the big-titty one,” another voice called out.

The last thing that flashed through Galvan's mind before the blackjack connected with his temple and put him under was a name.

One laden with history, and pain.

Pescador.

 

CHAPTER 30

T
he brambles slashed at her calves. The handcuff had scraped her wrist raw. Any moment, Sherry expected to hear the crack of a gunshot, feel a bullet tear into her flesh. Beside her, Eric was hobbling as fast as he could, but that wasn't very fast—and being joined at the wrist made it impossible for Sherry to take on any of his weight.

All they had going for them was misdirection. And luck.

Lord knew she was due for some.

When Nichols had made his move, Sherry had made hers: she and Eric feinted toward the parking lot, then scampered back up the hillside and found a rock big enough to hide behind. It wasn't much of a move, just an extension of the play-possum strategy that had governed her whole life up to this point: go limp and pray. And in fact, she'd found herself directing some insipid string of silent syllables toward the heavens, to Eric's surprise and her own disgust.

But it had worked, or something had. Thirty seconds later, Officer McGee had passed within three feet of them—loped right by, in a frictive cacophony of razor grass against polyester, and disappeared. Moves of his own to make. Sherry offered another prayer, this one specific, heartfelt:
Keep Ruth and the sheriff safe, oh Lord.
She waited another thirty seconds out of caution, then pulled Eric to his feet, and they took off.

The lot in which the Jeep was parked lay half a mile in the opposite direction: back up the hill and past the cave, then down a decline just like the one they'd been descending.

“You're gonna have to drive,” Eric panted, wincing as his weight came down on that injured left leg. “I'm too much of a mess. Do you know stick?”

“I guess I'll learn.” She threw a smile his way. It didn't have far to travel, their faces only inches apart. Eric's glowed pink beneath the dust and grime, the film of sweat.

He really was incredibly cute.

“I can shift for you. You'll just have to work the clutch. It's not that hard.”

“I'm sure I can manage.” She flashed another smile and felt something inside her crumple. It was as if allowing herself even the smallest moment of respite, of lightness—a smile, a flirty word—brought the despair screaming back with doubled potency, indignant at being pushed aside.

Was this guilt?

How did one mourn, much less recover?

Sherry shook her head clear, reminded herself that she had her own life to save right now. And Eric's. These questions were for later, no matter how urgent they might have felt. And there was plenty of later to come. A lifetime of later. She had only been this person, racked with loss and anger, for a few hours, even if it felt like an eternity. Her mother had been alive this very morning. And now she was gone. It was almost impossible to comprehend—so much so that Sherry forced herself to think it, over and over,
My mother's dead
. To inflict that truth on herself until she felt it sink in. Take root.

She felt Eric's eyes on her and realized she'd zoned out, gone somewhere else. They couldn't afford that right now; maybe he was trying to figure out how to tell her as much. Again, Sherry pushed it all away, gave herself a savage shove into the here and now.

Another minute passed, and then the parking lot loomed into view, below them. Sherry clasped Eric's hand, cuff clanking against cuff, and they beelined for the Jeep, marooned on the perimeter of the near-empty asphalt expanse.

Eric exhaled sharply through his nose as they approached, and Sherry pulled up short, assuming it was a sound of distress.

But no. Eric was laughing. “Look. I parked in a handicapped space. Am I clairvoyant, or what?”

Getting into the car took some doing, because of the cuffs. Eric clambered through the truck-high driver's-side door, stepped around the gearshift. Sherry followed, the chain linking their wrists going taut as he collapsed into the passenger seat and she settled herself behind the wheel.

“Thank God,” he said, leaning back against the vinyl seat and closing his eyes.

Without thinking about it—hell, without knowing what she was going to do, if that was possible—Sherry leaned over the gearshift, and kissed him hard and full on the mouth.

Eric's eyes opened wide, and he kissed back. Pulled Sherry closer with his unencumbered arm and kissed her back some more.

Sherry's position was an awkward one, a torso-arched half twist over the shift knob, her right arm braced against his left, both handcuffs somehow biting into her. The windows still closed, the air inside the Jeep practically steam.

It didn't matter. Sherry felt herself melt into him. She'd never understood that phrase before—you were yourself, always. How could one body, one
prison-house of flesh,
to use her mother's garish phrase, possibly grow indistinct from another? Wouldn't intimacy only intensify your feelings of self-ness, bring the contours of your being into even sharper focus?

Nope.

It was a sensation unlike anything Sherry had ever experienced—a revelation, in the true sense of the word.

And, she thought with a surge that started somewhere below her waist and swept deliciously up her spine, there was plenty more where this came from.

Worlds yet to be discovered. A universe of pleasure for the taking.

Was Eric an oasis, a desperate refuge?

Sure.

But he wasn't
just
that.

And it was time to quit overthinking every fucking thing. Life was short and tragic. If it feels good, do it.

There was a religion Sherry could get into.

She swung her left leg over the knob, pressed her whole body against his, and felt a tingle of excitement shudder through her.

Eric's kiss turned into a grin beneath her lips. Sherry pulled away, volleyed it back.

“We should get out of here,” he breathed.

“You're right.” But Sherry didn't move.

“We can pick this up later,” Eric continued. “And by later, I mean really, really soon.”

She heaved a theatrical sigh and dropped back into the driver's seat.

“Okay, so teach me how to shift.”

Eric leaned toward her. “First you've gotta turn the car on.” His lip twitched upward. “That shouldn't be too hard, for you. Press the clutch all the way down, with your left foot, right on the brake, and turn the key.”

She batted her lashes at his goofy innuendo—
Careful, Sherry, not too much, don't bring it crashing down—
and fished in her pocket for the key. Fed it into the ignition, put her feet where he'd told her to, and flicked her wrist.

Nothing.

Eric furrowed his brow. “That's weird. Let me try.”

Nothing.

“Could it be the battery?” asked Sherry, just to say something. What she didn't know about cars could have filled a warehouse.

Eric never had the chance to answer.

A fist smashed through the driver's window, grabbed Sherry by her hair, and pulled her halfway out of the car. Before she knew what had happened, she was facedown on the pavement, cheek and chest throbbing where she'd landed, stars wobbling before her eyes.

She gasped for air, a thousand bits of glass embedded in her arms and legs, her body crying out in silent pain, a pair of dust-covered brown cowboy boots positioned inches from her head.

Bam,
Eric thudded down on top of her, and Sherry felt him writhe, try to rise, then fall back, roll off her, and go motionless.

She tried to scream, and a giant, rough hand clapped itself over her mouth.

“Ah, ah. Hush now, darling, or I'll knock you out, just like your boyfriend.”

The sound of his voice was enough to make Sherry hyperventilate. The harder she struggled to draw air into her lungs, the less there seemed to be. The world went flickery, began to short out.

Please, God, no. Please, please, please, God. Not this, not him, please no.

Marshall Buchanan's hideously mottled face filled her diminishing field of vision, electric-blue eyes dancing with a wolfish glee. His wet lips brushed her ear, and he spoke in a gravelly whisper.

“You and me still got some dancin' to do, missy. Now smile pretty for the boys back home.”

He rose, pulled out his cell phone, snapped a picture.

Then he gathered them both up, Sherry pressed back-to-back with Eric, the two of them stacked like pallets of wood atop Buchanan's forklift arms.

The monster grunted, rose, and marched off toward his car.

Dad,
Sherry thought as stars spangled her field of vision.
Please, Dad, I need you.