The Dead Run (20 page)

 

CHAPTER 35

G
alvan had always assumed that when people talked about watching something happen in slow motion, it was just poetic bullshit. Time didn't slow down. It might speed up, if it was pissed off enough. It might leave you behind, pass you right by. But it sure as hell wasn't going to accommodate your petty-ass need to savor a crucial moment of your petty-ass life. Time was too busy fucking everybody over for that.

And yet.

The knife sure did seem to take forever to flash across the twenty feet separating his hand from Pescador's body.

Long enough for Galvan to reflect short and hard on the folly of revenge.

Not long enough for him to do a goddamn thing about it.

Had the weapon been flying through a static world, the people moving as laconically as the moments, the blade would have been perfectly on target. Would have speared Pescador straight through the heart, arrested the flow of blood to his brain. The Federale would have been a corpse by the time he hit the ground, just one more body for the desert to swallow.

Situation's dire and / when the fire end / blind men dilate / mindstates vibrate / as the planet cry rape / others ask why wait / games is high stakes / fakes and pi-rates / their lies break / like waves on the sand of time . . .

Instead, Pescador juked left, and the steel caught him in the fleshy part of the shoulder. He yelped and stumbled back a pace, not yet sure of the extent of the damage.

Galvan had no such illusions.

He had failed.

The goddamn movie spot,
he thought as Pescador closed his fist around the knife, a low growl rising up his throat. He'd hit the motherfucker where every hero in every action flick ever made caught his requisite glancing bullet wound. It had never slowed a single one down.

Lights, camera, I'm fucked.

With a burst of noise and a furious backhand motion, Pescador yanked out the knife and flung it away. Galvan caught a brief glimpse of the crimson coating the blade, before the weapon was consigned to the dust.

The Federale lowered his head, locked eyes with Galvan, and marched forward.

Steady, Jess, steady. He has his orders. Motherfucker still can't kill you.

Pescador squared off before Galvan, spread his legs, and clasped his hands behind his back. He took a deep breath, closing his eyes as he inhaled. A sense of calm fell over his face as he reopened them, as if the Federale had pushed all the pain away.

“I offered you a fair fight, cabrón,” he said, voice low and even. “Why? Because I'm a fair man. And what do you do, you pinche coward?”

He daubed a finger to the wound, showed Galvan a bloody fingertip.

“There's no honor to you at all, Mensajero.”

He spit in the dirt, turned on his heel, then threw a lazy gesture over his shoulder at the gaggle of bikers. “Lock him down. Don't worry, Knowles, we're almost done here. You got my word.”

The True Natives' president stepped forward, with two of his dudes a pace behind. He looked pissed, but he did as he'd been told: shouldered in behind Galvan and yoked both his arms into an elbow lock as efficient as any straitjacket.

Jess didn't even bother to struggle. The reek of beer and tobacco lay heavy on Knowles's breath, his beard; Galvan tried to enjoy it vicariously. Failed.

Roman candles whiz-banged before his eyes, and all at once, Galvan realized how light-headed he was. The paucity of food and water, maybe. Or the incremental loss of blood.

He shook his head, trying to clear it. Now was not the time to go foggy. But Galvan could practically see the clouds drifting down from the heavens to wreath his plodding brain.

A distant click as Pescador unlocked the trunk of his BMW and bent over it.

When he straightened, there was a machete in his hand.

“You ever heard of the Temple of Tenochtitlán, gringo?” Pescador asked as he sauntered back. “No? The cult of Tezcatlipoca, maybe? They're basically the same thing.” He reassumed his position in front of Galvan, rested the machete on his good shoulder.

The sight of it sent questions rising up from Galvan's mind, like feeble bubbles in a stew. Hadn't he had a machete himself, sometime earlier today? Where had he gotten it, and where had it gone? Could this be the same one?

“In the days of the temple,” Pescador was saying now as he paced a little three-step circle, “the code of punishment was simple.
Si tu ojo te hace pecar, sácatelo. Si tu mano te ofende, córtala.
You understand, pendejo?”

Galvan did, and a dull horror began to pulse through him, as if a drummer somewhere within the depths of his body had started beating out a war rhythm.

Or a distress call.

He opened his mouth, but no words came. His tongue was swollen, useless, a fat slug writhing out its death throes in his mouth.

Pescador eyed him for a moment, then translated.

“If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out. If thine hand offends thee, cut it off.”

He hefted the machete, wrapped both fists around the hilt, and raised his chin at Knowles. “Get him on the ground. Hold out his arm. The right one.”

Before Galvan could react, Knowles kicked both his legs out from under and he was flat on his stomach, with three Natives pinning him down. He gasped for breath, inhaled a mouthful of dust, coughed it back out.

Pescador crouched inches from his head. “My boss needs you alive, Boy Scout, but he don't need you whole. Lucky thing you're already dickless, eh?”

The Federale stood. The machete rose into the sky, catching the last of the sun and throwing it back at the horizon. Rough hands grabbed Galvan's arm, pulled it away from his body.

This was going to happen.

He tried to brace himself. To breathe. To gird himself against the coming pain and somehow power through it.

He'd made it through eleven brutal months of lockdown. Survived a desert full of ghouls, slave traders, and desperados. Forded a killer river. Watched his friends murdered. Crossed into his country. Where his daughter lived. Where she waited. Somewhere close by.

He'd be goddamned if he'd roll over and die for this punk delusions-of-grandeur-having cocksucker.

Galvan didn't know where he found the wherewithal to summon words, but just as the weapon reached its apex—a fraction of a second before the Federale brought the blade whistling down—he managed to speak.

“Hey, Pescador.”

The Mexican froze, machete poised in the air, arms raised high, sweat stains and bloodstains blooming across his shirt.

“Yes, Boy Scout?”

“I'm still gonna fuckin' kill you.”

The Federale lowered the knife, threw back his head, and roared with laughter. When he looked down at Galvan again, there were tears in his eyes.

“Oh, man,” he said, blotting one with the back of his hand. “If you say so, cabrón. Maybe you can pick up your arm and beat me to death with it, eh?”

And in one huge, circular, wood-chopping motion, he brought the machete up.

And back down.

A sickening squelch and crunch, as steel had its way with muscle and bone.

The blade was sharp and the blow true. It severed Galvan's lower arm cleanly, two inches below the elbow.

As cleanly as possible, anyway.

He threw back his head and howled. Maybe the adrenaline lessened the pain; maybe the shock intensified it. Who the fuck knew. Galvan squeezed his eyes shut, ground his teeth, balled his fists—clenched every part of himself, trying to transform his entire being into a tourniquet, even as the blood flowed from him.

Fist.

Not fists. Fist.

Singular.

Though he could swear he felt them both.

“There's a blowtorch in my trunk,” Pescador barked, swinging the machete back onto his shoulder and tossing his keys to the nearest biker. “Cauterize that shit, and hurry.”

He started to stroll away, then stopped when he saw Betty. She was shaking uncontrollably, tears streaming down her face, one hand extended toward Galvan in a helpless gesture of sympathy.

The Federale looked her up and down, and smiled. “Somebody escort this one to my car. I'll give her a ride.”

It wasn't until the blue flame began searing into his flesh that Galvan passed out.

 

CHAPTER 36

O
jos Negros had not always been a prison; that was a recent convenience, a useful disguise. Cucuy had been wise enough to vanish from sight more than three hundred years ago—to wipe all evidence of himself and his temple off the face of the earth. The site had been many things since then, from a seat of government to an army barracks. Whatever façade, whatever alliance, served the Timeless One's evolving needs.

All that men could not see, they quickly ceased to remember. What they could not remember, they ceased to believe. Soon they were blind as moles, incapable of recognizing the very forces that controlled their destiny. Unable to act in their own self-interest. As willful and elaborate in their self-delusion as little children.

Some five centuries ago, when he still counted himself as human, Cucuy had conducted a series of experiments in an effort to better understand the nature of perception—and thus, of stealth. All the world's animals, he had quickly learned, were essentially the same. Anything that lay outside their expectations, their brains simply refused to process. A frog only recognized a fly if the fly flew. Surround it with live flies hanging from strings, and the creature would starve to death.

So, too, with man.

The Temple of Tenochtitlán was gone, but what remained beneath had never changed—was all the more unassailable for being invisible, like the Great One himself. The labyrinth of sacred chambers extended deep underground, and except for a few odious modern conveniences—climate controls to preserve the ancient texts from the creeping dampness, a cache of inelegant contemporary weaponry—it existed outside of time. The final stronghold of an age when gods had walked with men and the boundaries separating one world from the next had been porous. Negotiable.

The record of that world was preserved here, and here alone. Set down on handwritten scrolls and in gold-leafed volumes. Agglomerated in a cavernous, domed library, carved from the bedrock of the earth—the deepest and largest chamber of them all.

It was to this room that Cucuy had hastened now. He perched on a high, ornate stool, carved from the trunk of a tree and inlaid with gold. The warm, flickering light of twin wall-mounted candelabras played on the enormous volume splayed open on the desk before him.

It was a holy book—and a manual.

The treacherous god Tezcatlipoca had dictated its contents to the Line of Priests, over the course of generations and centuries. The high priests had received his wisdom while in a state of trance, after ingesting the prescribed herbs, performing the proper sacrifices, undergoing the necessary mortifications.

They had been compelled to transcribe the god's words in blood.

Their own.

Adding to the Book of Knowledge was the single most important duty of the high priest, and it could not be undertaken until he had produced an heir. This was not a dictate of the god but a rule made by his acolytes—a practical matter, meant to safeguard the line. More than one holy man had died, quill in hand, from loss of blood.

Or, perhaps more accurately, from lust for power. For with each line inscribed, the mysteries of Tezcatlipoca deepened, and the priests' influence increased apace.

One had to know the limits of his strength. Balance them against the infinite, know where to draw the line.

And when to stop drawing it.

Cucuy had never flayed open his veins to contribute. His communion with the god had taken other forms, darker and more direct than any of his predecessors could have imagined.

The times he'd lived in had been fraught.

And the Ancient One, when he had been a priest—a man—had lacked an heir. He had been denied the pleasure of raising a son. Robbed of the chance to love a wife.

The intensity of those losses had never diminished, even as Cucuy's humanity had fallen away, become vestigial. No creature had suffered as he had. As much as the god's power, it was that balled fist of pain, glowing inside him like the core of a nuclear reactor, that had fueled the Ancient One's reign.

Now he flipped slowly through the delicate pages of the book, their ink dried to a dark, rich burgundy. He could smell the difference between each author, the blood scent as unique as a fingerprint despite the genetic carryover from one priest to the next.

The care he took belied the desperation surging through the Great One's blackened veins. Somewhere, amidst hundreds of guided transcriptions, thousands of edicts and recipes and prohibitions, he hoped to locate some kernel of lost wisdom—to allay his fears, or confirm them.

Merely communing with the book could be enough. Often, Cucuy did not find the answers he sought within it, but rather accessed his own near-bottomless well of knowledge more easily while in its presence.

And so it was today. With a jolt, an epiphany that surged through his weakening body like an electric charge, Cucuy understood the possibility inherent in the danger. All at once, he saw the manner in which he might make use of this unforeseen danger, use it to increase his power. Compound his victory. Seal his enemies' fate.

If the Righteous Messenger was descended from the Line of Priests, then so, too, was the Messenger's daughter.

And if the Ancient One's holy blood flowed through the girl's veins, then she might serve as more than mere leverage.

Infinitely and wonderfully more.

With great risk came great reward.

She was, Cucuy saw now, the gateway to the fulfillment of his greatest desire.

A Virgin Army of his own.

One he could set against his foes, his wife's ever-swelling legion of minions. Against the fallen woman herself, the progenitor whose will set all the others' against him and who had suffered so cruelly at his hand.

His forced hand.

It was in her now-unspeakable name that Cucuy had waged his world-changing act of vengeance—as an apology she would never understand, much less accept.

My heart dies with you, my love.

The remorse he felt had been instant—staggering, despite all he had done to steel himself. Before the light had even left her eyes, Cucuy's misery had hardened into hatred. Resolve. The magnitude of his loss would reverberate through the cosmos. The god who had made him do this thing would pay.

And he had.

But Tezcatlipoca had not been the only one.

The Timeless One's wife deserved to find peace, at long last. To be counted among the dead and put to rest. That he had been unable to give her that, had instead doomed her to exist as an abomination, wandering a nameless realm, was Cucuy's greatest regret.

The final, fluttering flame of his humanity.

He would extinguish it when he extinguished her, and the New World would truly be born.

Everything would come full circle. Five hundred years after it had been performed, in terror and weakness and shadow, the ritual would be repeated—in the fullness of potency and understanding.

Perfected.

The joining of bodies. The killing. The consumption. A new army would arise.

But this time, through their shared bloodline, Cucuy would control that army's queen. Its hive mind. Its will.

A new body.

A new army.

A new world.

A new peace.

The fear that had gripped him turned itself inside out, and Cucuy felt strength coursing through his veins again. Jess Galvan would not hurt him. On the contrary, Jess Galvan was an instrument of fate, delivered to Cucuy through an act of tremendous providence. The universe, the distant, world-abdicating gods themselves, offered their blessings on this day.

The priest lifted his head out of the book and called to the servant standing watch outside the library's doorway.

“I must commune with my son. Prepare the chamber.”

A moment's pause. A wave of trepidation rose from the man's skin and shimmered through the air like heat. Finally, and haltingly, the servant spoke.

“I'm afraid he is already en route to the site of the ceremony, my master.”

Cucuy fulminated for a moment, his brow clenched and his talons curled into jagged fists. If he could not reach Seth, who knew what the fool might do. Sherry Richards was nothing but bait to him, valuable only as an assurance that Galvan would play his role, deliver the heart as the ritual demanded. Seth must be made to understand her value, lest he despoil her in some way that would render the girl useless. Cucuy would not put it past his son: Seth surrounded himself with brutes, used rape and violence as methods of discipline.

Sherry was no good to Cucuy unless she was pure.

The priest grimaced. “You are certain?” he asked, eyeing the servant in disgust. The man's face was unfamiliar and unpleasant. Cucuy resolved to have him dismissed—then remembered that in a matter of hours it would no longer matter. Soon he would leave this temple-turned-dungeon and walk beneath the sun again.

He would eat fruit and fuck women. A power great enough to remake the world would glow within him once more, hot as the sun itself, and men would kneel in terror. If they did not, he would rain curses upon them that had not been heard in centuries. Bring the heavens crashing down, the underworld oozing up like mud through the pores of the earth.

Cucuy shooed the servant away. “Fetch that infernal matrix of communication, then,” he spat.

“Right away, master.”

The man darted away. A moment later he returned and handed Cucuy a hideous confabulation of cheap plastic. The priest held it to his ear and waited to hear his son's voice for the final time.

Soon, that voice would be his own.