“I found him near the fountain in the center of town, selling his services. He was handsome and charming and called himself ‘Vaquero.’ Cowboy. He remembered Gabriela. She had been desperate to reach America, but she had been unable to pay, so he had taken her to men he knew would help her. If she was willing to carry something across the border for them.”
“Drugs.”
“That is what I thought. At first. I wanted to kill this Vaquero for handing my sister over to the narcos, but he was nothing. Less than nothing. Men like Vaquero paid Cártel de Sinaloa for the privilege of running their businesses. And helped them find mules when they were approached by people who had no money. I realized that if I wanted to find Gabriela, I was going to have to do exactly what she had done. So I told him I wanted to meet with these men who could help me get across the border. That I was willing to do whatever they asked. And then he smiled. I knew I was making a terrible mistake, but I would have done anything to find my sister.”
She paused for several seconds. When she spoke again, it was in a voice so soft, Mason could hardly hear her over the rumble of the tires on the ice.
“Anything.”
46
Alejandra didn’t speak for so long that Mason thought she might have fallen asleep. He could sense she was to the part he was waiting to hear, but he didn’t want to push her too hard. At the same time, though, he needed to find out what she knew.
“What did he do to you?”
“Vaquero?” she said. “He did nothing to me. The man he gave me to, though…”
He waited her out.
“Vaquero took me to an area of town where no one goes. Past the maquiladoras. Into the barrio. There was an old building. It looked like all of the others. Like it would soon fall down. It was dark inside. He pulled me by the hand to a set of stairs leading underground. The room at the bottom was small. There were other people, too. People like me. I could not see them, though. It smelled bad. Like frightened animals. There was a hole in the wall. At the back. A hole that led to a different building. Vaquero told me to step through. I heard him collecting money behind me. Vaquero, he sold me to these men in the dark.”
“Who did he sell you to?” Mason asked. “What do you remember about them?”
“The men. They wore black ski masks with respiradores.”
“Respirators?”
“Like we wore in the army when we used tear gas. At the time, I thought it was because of the smell. It was so strong. They used their flashlights to direct me through another hole in the wall. There were candles on plates. On the floor. And a man sitting at a desk in the middle of the room. He did not have a mask or a respirator. He wore an old-fashioned suit, like men wore a hundred years ago. Black, with thin lapels. A striped vest and a string tie. And a hat, like a sombrero, only much smaller.”
Mason’s heartbeat accelerated. He recalled his encounter in the quarry with the man with the blue eyes. He’d been wearing an old suit then, too. Beneath a butcher’s apron smeared with blood.
“There was a chair in front of him,” she said. “I sat across the desk from him. The men in the respirators left me alone with this man. When he smiled, the corners of his mouth went all the way back to his ears, showing all of his teeth. Like a crocodile.”
“Was his skin scarred?”
“Not yet.” Mason heard the smile in her voice, but it wasn’t the kind meant for others. “It was his eyes that I remember most.”
“A deeper blue than you’ve ever seen on a human being before.”
“Bluer even than the ocean near my home in Oaxaca. I told him my sister had come through here, that I was trying to find her. He just smiled, said I would be with her soon, and placed his hand on the table, palm-up. I placed mine in his. For a moment, I thought everything was going to be all right, and then he pulled out two small cases. He set them on the desk before me. He opened one, then the other. He showed them to me. Both had jeringas … syringes, with short needles. They were half-full. He took one out of each case. Then he said, ‘Necesita vacunas si desea ir a los Estados Unidos.’ ‘You need vaccinations to go to the United States.’ He walked around the desk. So close I could feel his heat. Smell the sickness on his breath. Like he was rotting on the inside.
“I told him I would not let him stick me with his needles. ‘Está bien,’ he said. ‘Eres libre de irte.’ ‘That is fine. You are free to leave.’ He closed his cases, returned to his chair, and called for the men to take me away. I said for him to wait, and he waved them off. When I looked at him again, he was smiling. He already knew what I would do and had the syringes ready. I watched him walk around the desk. Looked up into his eyes as he stood over me. He uncapped the first syringe and stuck it in my shoulder. He did the same with the second one. It hurt all the way to the bone. Like he had struck me with a hammer.”
“You let him inject you?”
“I told you I would have done anything to find my sister. I would have let him do a thousand times worse. Besides, I had no reason to suspect there was disease in the needles. I thought they were drugging me, so I would not see where they were taking me.”
“You should have killed him right then and there.”
“It would have been easy. We were alone and he did not fear me. I could have broken a plate and slit his throat. Used the chair I was sitting on to crush his skull. But I did not. I needed this man to help me find my sister.”
A green highway sign glided past on the right, its face rimed with snow and ice. Mason had already driven past it once in the last twenty-four hours. He knew what it said: BRUSH 14 MILES.
“The man took me to another room. It was dark, but I could hear other people. This room, it smelled of vomit. I was relieved when the men with the respirators finally came. They put eight of us in the trailer of a small truck. It was so hot. I do not know how far we drove or in which direction. All I remember is dust. The taste. The smell. And the red of the setting sun when the truck stopped and the men opened the doors. It was so bright, we had to cover our eyes with our hands. We were surrounded by cacti and briars. There was nothing but sand for as far as we could see. And a fallen barbed-wire fence. I knew esxactly what was on the other side. I just had no idea how far we still had to go.
“One of the men spoke to us in Spanish, but his words were hard to understand with the respirator. He told us to head north toward the mountains we could barely see against the horizon. That was where we had to go. He said we would walk thirty-five miles and it would take three days. We would travel at night, he said. When the sun was down and it was cooler. There would be a vehicle waiting to take us to a welcome center when we got there. I asked if my sister would still be there when we arrived. He said she would definitely still be ‘hanging around.’ It was a strange choice of words, but I blamed it on his poor Spanish. We all just stood there, watching him unload cases of bottled water, bags of protein bars, and packages of tuna. And then we watched him drive away. When the dust settled, we divided up the food and water and started walking.
“We did not exchange names, only where we came from. It was strange. We were together and apart at the same time. The others were excited. They were in America. They made plans for where they would go and what they would do. They ate and drank nearly all of their rations. They talked about the future. But they were fools. The heat the next day was more than any of us could bear.”
Mason nodded. He remembered how hot it got in that desert. It might have been a while, but it wasn’t the kind of experience he was likely to forget.
“The sun burned through us. Made our sweat turn to salt. It dried our eyes and made it hard to blink. Made it hurt to blink. Our lips chapped, then peeled, and then bled. We ate the cactus for its fluid. We had needles in our lips and tongues and inside our cheeks. We ate the few agave we found. We ate the lizards we could catch. We walked until our feet bled inside our shoes and until our hands and knees were skinned from falling on the slick rocks. And on the night of the second day, we praye
d. We prayed to any god or saint who could hear our words. And we walked.
“On the third day, the heat was even worse. The blisters on our feet burst. The cactus needles pierced our soles. There was no shade. We developed fevers. We thought it was because we could not cool off. At first, anyway. Until the woman from Puebla screamed. Her sister had fallen and was gasping for air. When she rolled over and looked up at us, it was obvious something was very wrong. The woman knew she was going to die. The veins in her eyes burst and the whites turned red. We barely had the strength to walk on our own, but we carried her as far as we could. It was a mercy for all of us when she finally died.
“It was not long before the man from Tabasco passed out. He stood up, walked a little farther, then collapsed again. We could hear the fluid in his lungs. There was so much, he could not get even a single breath. It was then that we realized what the man with the blue eyes had done to us. The woman from Apaxtla cried so loud that the rest of us tried to get as far away from her as we could. The sound was so horrible, so … lamentable, I wanted her to die. She lasted longer than most of the others. Longer than the man and the woman from Zacatepec. Longer than the man from Guerrero. I was dying, too. I knew this, but I could not allow myself to give up. I prayed.… I prayed to God that Gabriela had not been infected. That if she had, she had not suffered as I was suffering. But God did not hear my prayers.”
There was nothing Mason could say. If ever he’d harbored any doubt that the people responsible for doing this to her were deeply and truly evil, he no longer did. There were simply people who were different from the rest of humanity, people who not only embraced the evil inside of them, but wallowed in it.
“The woman from Apaxtla was the last to die. I crossed her arms over her chest, closed her eyes, and said a prayer to San Toribio Romo. And then I was alone and the only thing I could think to do was run. I ran as far as I could. Until I, too, collapsed. It was so hot. My chest was tight. I could not breathe. I could feel the fluid in my lungs. Feel it deep down. I tasted blood and I knew.… I knew it was my turn to die. But I did not want to die there. Not like that. So I crawled up onto the rocks. Through yuccas and cacti and paloverdes. I crawled with needles and thorns in my hands and in my face until I finally found shade. And then I closed my eyes.…”
Mason waited her out.
“But I did not die. A man wearing a respirator dragged me from the shade and into the awful heat again. Pulled back my eyelids and shined a light into my eyes. Stuck a needle in my arm and gave me fluid from a bag. Carried me back to his vehicle, where the bodies of the others were already piled. The skin on their faces was purple and black and crawling with moscas—”
“Moscas?”
“Flies. They were covered with flies. The men fanned them away as they loaded the bodies into a trailer. I understood then that even death would not be the end.”
She was silent for so long that Mason feared he had pushed her too hard.
“It was only the beginning.”
47
Alejandra visibly tensed as they neared Fairacre Ranch Surplus and Auction. Mason watched her the entire time from the corner of his eye. There had to be something he was missing, and there was no better place to start than where all of the threads converged.
Ground zero.
The telltale silhouettes of the house and the outbuilding materialized from the storm against the western horizon.
Alejandra’s breathing grew faster.
“Why are we here? I did not ever want to come back.”
“I was hoping you might remember something crucial. I don’t know what to do from here. Maybe there’s something I missed earlier. Some piece of evidence they didn’t properly destroy.”
“You do not understand what they did here.”
“Then tell me.”
Mason parked by the house and climbed out of the car. The wind blew across the fields from the west with such velocity that the snow didn’t have much of an opportunity to stick. It was maybe four inches deep where the tall weeds had been flattened and swept into drifts against the structures.
He heard the passenger door close behind him.
What little remained of the roof of the auction house sagged under the weight of the snow. A drift had formed against the interior wall, partially concealing the open area where the auction floor and the corrals behind it had once been.
Mason turned around at the sound of footsteps. Alejandra somehow looked even smaller, despite the oversize parka. He watched her eyes for signs of recognition, but she caught him looking and tugged her hood down.
He needed her to help him figure out why whoever bought the Fairacre shelf corporation had gone to such great lengths to prevent anyone from investigating this property if there was nothing incriminating here. This was the piece of the puzzle he couldn’t quite make fit, and yet it was the discovery of this property that had started the chain of events that culminated in the deaths of his wife and a federal prosecutor.
“This is the place.” Alejandra’s soft voice was swept away by the wind. “I remember the smell. It was the first thing I noticed when they unloaded me from the truck.”
“How long were you here?”
“I do not know for sure. A week? Two?”
Mason stood back and let her lead the way into the back area, where stalls had once lined the rear wall. He followed her eyes up to the rafters from which the chains and hooks had once hung, then quickly back down to the ground.
“‘Scream all you want. No one will hear you.’ That is what one of the men said to me. ‘Scream all you want.’ And for the first few days, I did just that. I screamed until I had no voice left and the pain in my throat was too great. When I learned that my cries gave them pleasure, I stopped. I would give them no more pleasure.”
“Did they…?”
“Rape me? No. That is a sick pleasure, but it is the pleasure of men. The people here, they were monsters. Their pleasures were twisted … sádico.”
“Did they bring you straight here from the desert?”
“I do not know. I was asleep most of the time. The crossing nearly killed me. I remember being pushed from the truck into a muddy field with an old fence. It was night, but I could tell there were no mountains. No trees. No ocean. Nothing. They shoved me up a wooden ramp. Into a room that smelled of animals. It was an old smell. Like it is now. There was another smell, too. One I could not place. Not then. Chemicals, I later learned. The chemicals they used to clean up the messes they made. That we made.”
She walked past where the row of stalls had stood before the fire consumed them.
“How many of you were here?”
“Ten. I think. It was hard to tell. People came and went so quickly.”
“Went? Where did they go?”
“They died. I listened to a woman die that first night. After they locked me in the darkness.”
Alejandra stopped at the end of the row, near where the rusted cattle gate was wedged in the mouth of the chute. She turned in a half circle, then dropped to her hands and knees. She scooped away the snow and scraped at the hard dirt.
“They already sanitized this place,” Mason said. “They didn’t leave anything behind. Trust me, I”—he caught a glimpse of dark metal, maybe iron, beneath the dirt—“… already … checked.…”
He knelt opposite her and chiseled the dirt away as fast as he could. They exposed the seams. The corners. The notch where someone could insert the end of a rod and lever it open like a manhole cover. When it was fully revealed, he sat back on his haunches and stared down at it. He never would have found it. He’d probably even walked right on top of it.
“Help me lift it.” She clawed at the edges, searching for any kind of grip. “There has to be … has to be a way.”
“Hang on.”
Mason ran back through the snow and opened the trunk of the Bronco. He found the tire iron under the false floor beside the emergency case, right where he remembered seeing it. He popped the cas
e, grabbed the Infinity, and tucked the pistol under his waistband. He had a hunch the under-barrel light might come in handy. Besides, there was no such thing as having too much firepower.
By the time he returned, Alejandra had scooted back against the rear wall, where she sat motionless, her face concealed within the shadows of her hood. He stepped in front of her, wiggled the end of the tire iron until it caught the notch, then lifted it with a scream of rusted hinges.
She crawled forward and peered down through the swirling dust into the darkness. The odor was one of disuse, of the faint traces of chemicals beneath the overriding scent of age. He dropped the tire iron, drew the Infinity, and switched on the LED light. The beam illuminated a staircase leading underground.
“What’s down there?”
“Hell.”
48
Mason cautiously descended into the darkness. The wooden stairs were old and warped and creaked loudly enough to echo from the subterranean structure, which, judging by the sound, was much larger than he initially suspected. He reached the bottom and found the floor was made of bare concrete, treated with the kind of sealant he associated with industrial garages and zoos, the kind designed to be hosed off into drains. The rest of the structure was obviously much older. The wooden cribbing was so ancient, it looked almost petrified. This must have been a storage room during Prohibition. Or maybe it had always been a vile place hidden even from God’s sight.
Mason was almost surprised when he heard Alejandra’s footsteps on the stairs behind him.
The Extinction Agenda Page 23
