By now, Hector had opened up the SUV’s back door, and they moved in to help slide out the long, bulky crate that had flown cargo class from L.A. Real wood, you didn’t see that much anymore. Pride in your work, right there—the props company had packed this thing for survival. Hector took a tire tool and pried off the lid, and after they pawed aside the foam peanuts, they lifted the thing free.
Plenty of wows and holy shits all around. Those props people knew their stuff, how to take fiberglass and make magic. The statue was lighter than it looked, sturdier than it felt, and even when standing right next to it, looked exactly like stone that had weathered for centuries. They’d even painted it with stains.
“What is it?” Morgan asked, the only one of them who didn’t know.
“It’s called a chacmool,” Sebastián told her. “It’s a really old design, pre-Colombian. Aztecs, Mayans, maybe even older. Up at the top of a pyramid, that was one place they might go. See that platter in the middle? That was for holding sacrifices.” He grinned, a needling meanness behind it. “Didn’t have to be a heart, but if you got one laying around loose, why not.”
The same as the likenesses of Santa Muerte, chacmools might differ in little details, but the core was always the same. A strange design, blocky, the way so much of that ancient Mesoamerican sculpture was carved. The basic template was a man, feet flat, knees up, leaning back on both elbows, while balanced on his middle was a receptacle to receive offerings—could be a platter, could be a bowl. His head was turned to the side, like he was challenging anyone who approached him to give until it hurt.
For their replica, they’d opted for a platter. They all three liked the look of the bowl better, but its sides would have blocked the view, in pictures as well as onstage. Sebastián’s idea—for the next tour’s stage show, he was going to mime a self-sacrifice three songs in, cut out his own heart with a fake obsidian knife and present it to the audience on the chacmool. It would continue beating the whole time, and eventually start gushing blood again.
Every tour, the show just got messier.
And why shouldn’t it. So was everything else in the land of their birth.
Olaf and Morgan and Sebastián conferred on where to set up for the shots. Crispin kept trying to offer suggestions and was tolerated, but otherwise got frozen out. Looked like it would be awhile, so Enrique wandered the property, scouting for clues as to what might have happened where. Where was the temple, where were the graves?
It was easy to be distracted in a cluster of people bickering and chasing the best light. Get off by yourself and you could feel the weight of what had happened here.
No … not happened. That made it sound like an accident. Everything that went on here had been done. It had occurred to human beings to do this to other human beings. Sodomize them. Chop them up. Lop off the top of their heads. Scoop out their brains. Wrap wire around their spines before they buried them, and leave the end sticking out of the ground so that after the worms and beetles and decay had their way with the corpses, they could pull the wire and haul up a nice new spinal column to use for making necklaces. Save them the trouble of digging again.
Shit like that did not just happen. Something got inside you, or was there all along and got loose from its cage, and told you that doing these terrible things was a good idea. Told you that was how business needed to get handled from now on. Same as it told the Aztecs: This is what it takes to keep the corn coming up in the fields, to keep the sun moving across the sky every day. This is what it takes to keep your world intact. Blood, and lots of it.
“You feel it too, don’t you?” Sofia, coming up behind him.
“It leaves a stain, you know?” he said. “Like it’s sunk in. You’d have to dig this place out fifty feet down and haul the dirt to an incinerator, and maybe even then you wouldn’t get it all. It’s like, whatever the curanderos thought they were doing, all they managed was to sweep the porch.”
Somebody had died here. Right here. On this spot. He was sure of it. The whole plot of earth, saturated with fear and betrayal. Maybe it was the little boy. That was the one that really haunted him—how one of the guys doing this killed his own nephew. Decided he needed to snuff a kid, so somebody else went off and snatched him a kid. Brought the boy here, tossed him on the ground. The guy with the machete went right at him—just a boy with a bag over his head. It wasn’t until the kid was dead that the guy started thinking, hey, that green football sweatshirt sure looks familiar.
But it’s okay, you did right, the malignant thing inside him must have said. This is what it takes to keep your world running.
“Come on.” Sofia reached up to rub his shoulder. “You’re not doing yourself any good over here. Let’s get back to the van so I can fix your makeup. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
“No,” he said, like it was the silliest question she’d ever asked, and the exact right thing to do at the time, because it broke the spell. And he loved her for it. Loved her anyway, but sometimes it was good to be reminded of reasons.
They found that Sebastián and the photo team had decided where to take the shots. They had the chacmool—complete with the pig’s heart now—set against a backdrop of gnarly scrub. Off to one side was a hummock of earth that, if they insisted it was a grave, the fans would say, oh, right, sure. A grave, still there after all this time. I totally buy that.
Olaf positioned them in different configurations, shuffled them around, with the sun dipping low enough that the natural light was coming in from the side. Morgan held the gold reflector to bounce the light back from the other side, give the scene a warm tinted glow, like the whole place was simmering.
Every few shots it was a different motivation. Look angry. Look disinterested. Look like you’re grieving. Look hungry. Look dead. Anything but look like you’re having fun. The only one of them enjoying the process was Sebastián. His idea, after all, the only one of them who could conceive of this. Who could think they could come here and evoke the spirits of this place where so much misery and evil were done, and then go away untouched.
Hector, though—Hector knew better. Once they’d unloaded the chacmool and got it set up, he was back in his SUV and hadn’t left. Probably going to burn his shoes tonight because of what they’d touched, so he didn’t track it into his home.
Be like Hector, Enrique told himself.
When they wrapped it up, packed it up, he’d never been more ready to leave a place. It was fitting that the last image he would take away from this little spot of Hell on earth was the heart of some poor pig, tossed aside now that they were through with it, left in the dirt for scavengers and blowflies.
Then they were in the SUV again, backtracking along the dirt road, halfway to the highway. He was slumped into the door with his head against the window when he perked up at the sight of something shooting out of a bush ahead of them. Thinking in that instant, holy shit, it was the biggest snake he’d ever seen, even though he knew that wasn’t right.
An instant later came the sound of blowing tires, a double bang in front, another double bang in the rear. Enrique swiveled his head to follow the sound, and saw the not-snake slithering back into the bushes. No snake was triangular like that. No snake had spikes sticking up from its spine.
Hector was all instinct now, fighting the steering wheel and stomping the brake as the SUV slewed back and forth until he brought it to halt, skidding across the loose dirt as a churning cloud of dust caught up with them.
Just the worst feeling ever. Knowing, on one level, exactly what was happening, the rest of him denying it, no no no, this can’t be real, Morgan’s hand almost breaking his fingers she was squeezing them so hard, and he didn’t even know when she’d grabbed him.
The driver’s window blew inward and Hector’s head went with it, a blizzard of glass and blood and brains and hair and bone and eyes spraying into the windshield. In the front passenger seat, Crispin got showered with some of it and had no idea what it was, turning with a look of pissed-o
ff disgust on his face, like he was thinking what next, first the flat tires and now somebody had thrown a pot of stew at him, and the next dumb thing out of his mouth was going to be Who’s going to pay for this, do you have any idea how much this shirt cost?
Outside, more guys than Enrique could count at once were converging from every direction, and he couldn’t conceive of where they’d come from. This place was so poisoned that people like this came bursting out of the ground. If from the comfort of home he’d envisioned something like this, they would have been wearing masks. But they weren’t. They had faces and didn’t care who saw them, and that was the most frightening thing he could imagine.
They began yanking open the SUV’s doors, and if they found one locked, would either aim through the window and scream until the person on the other side got the idea, or bash out the glass with the butt of a gun and reach in to unlock it themselves.
Everybody was vacating, stumbling out on their own or getting dragged. No say in it, Enrique hit the road hard and tasted a mouthful of hot, dry grit. A few feet away from him, Crispin was finally up to speed, groping for his pocket and pulling out his ID to flash like it was going to matter to someone: Oh, it’s you, sorry for the mistake.
“Americano!” he screamed. “Americano!”
Nobody could’ve cared less. Nobody wanted to deal with him other than right then, right there, on the spot. They could just tell, the scariest judges of character in the world. You hear about someone getting blown out of his shoes and think no way, that’s Hollywood bullshit. But it happened. Steps away, Crispin was hit with gunfire so hard he bounced off the fender and left a dent as he went down barefoot.
All Enrique could think of was Sofia, Sofia, because she’d gone out the other side and he couldn’t see her any more. He’d forgotten how to pray, too, something about Santa Maria, but it wasn’t there any more.
Santa Muerte, full of grace, was the only thing he had left. You don’t want us now.
Vans came roaring up from the south, the direction of the highway, this entire operation going off with military precision. Someone’s knee dropped into the center of his back and emptied his lungs with a whoosh. They twisted his arms behind his spine and he was so confused and paralyzed he let it happen, let some guy squat on top of him like a goblin and lash his wrists together with a nylon zip-tie before he realized that was happening too. Then everything went dark and stuffy when they yanked a black hood over his head, and now the world was reduced to bad sounds and worse sensations.
They hauled him upright, slinging him around like a bawling calf destined for a branding iron. Once his feet were under him, two pairs of hands rushed him stumbling toward whatever was waiting next. Then he was cargo, banging into the hard floor of a van as other bodies landed around him. Doors slammed, then the blackness shot into high-speed acceleration, and whenever any of them said anything somebody up front yelled for them to shut up, no talking, and it was a long bumpy ride before the last person was too tired to cry any more.
* * *
The only thing Enrique was sure of was that they hadn’t gone north. Whatever was coming next, they hadn’t been driven into Texas for it. No, they’d gone a long way south, or west, or both. The air felt dryer and hotter on his arms.
After hours of motion, the van finally stopped and guys hauled them out and rushed them across open ground, hardpacked earth under his wobbly boots. Then it was doorways and a fresh feeling of claustrophobia—a hallway. That opened into an expanded sense of space, the noise around them no longer confined. Wooden floors, he knew from the sound.
The ties were cut and the hoods came off and they were shoved forward. Behind them, doors slammed and locks turned. Then they were on their own in a big dark emptiness, still nothing to see because the night had followed them inside.
Head count: Sofia. Sebastián. Morgan. Olaf. Himself. In spite of the hours in the van, he hadn’t been totally sure. Free to move, Sofia hugged him. Morgan hugged Olaf. Sebastián was on his own for the moment, and that wasn’t right, so Enrique pulled him close and wrapped him up too. Everybody stank of sweat and fear, and he didn’t care, he’d never been so glad to smell anything in his life.
They weren’t alone. From the darkness came a sound of somebody stirring.
“Who’s there?” he asked. “Who is that?”
“Solamente nosotros los muertos. Acostúmbrate a la idea y cierra tu puta boca para que lo demás podamos dormir,” came the sullen answer.
Just us dead people. Get used to the idea and shut the fuck up, so the rest of us can sleep.
* * *
They staked their claims in the floor, and if he could’ve folded himself all the way around Sofia like a fort, he would have.
The two of them had known each other too long to feel like anything other than brother and sister, but there were times he wondered, man, what if, huh? They’d come into each other’s orbits as a couple of nerdy kids from bad neighborhoods, the kind it was easy to beat the shit out of, so that’s what other kids did. The kids that listened to that thing inside, telling them, This is what it takes to make your day more fun.
They listened a lot, the cruel ones. Like they knew already, nothing had to tell them anything.
And keep at it, okay? There’s a future in this. We got plans for you.
A couple of nerdy school band kids—they had targets on them early. It wasn’t much of a band, and the instruments weren’t much, either. Sofia liked to hit things, so they put her with a snare and a marching bass drum and a tom, but she never got to hit them as hard as she would’ve liked because she was scared of breaking a head, and then where would she be?
Enrique they’d fixed up with a leaky trumpet, but every spare moment he let the gravity of the out-of-tune piano in the corner pull him over to its yellowed keys. He could play more than one note at a time, plus if he held down the sustain pedal, he could pound them out and they’d keep ringing, a tapestry of overlapping noise that never had to end. The same thing he was doing now, just that with Los Hijos del Infierno he was doing it electronically, with synthesizers and sequencers and samplers, and it was way harder and louder and a lot more caustic.
So no, it wasn’t much of a school band, and the instruments weren’t much, but he always figured that without them, he and Sofia would be dead. Dead for real, or as good as dead, or wishing they were, or maybe worst of all, dead on the inside and not realizing it. There were all kinds of dead.
And Santa Muerte loved each and every one.
* * *
The dark bled out with the dawn.
He stirred awake at the first sign of it, sitting up in the floor so he could put an environment around them as things took shape. Get that much figured out, at least.
The first light came slanting in through windows set up high, near the roof. It lit up rough, bone-white walls and a gently peaked ceiling with wooden beams arching overhead, plus a few square pillars near the front and back. The windows on ground level started to brighten next. All of them were barred—no surprise.
It looked like it may have been an abandoned church or mission that had outlived its usefulness as anything but a prison, in some dusty little village where the good cops, if there were any to start with, were all dead. The mayor, dead. Anybody who’d ever said one wrong word, dead.
It was gutted of everything that might have marked it as a holy place. The pews were gone, the altar was gone, the font for holy water was gone. All that was left was a raised platform at the front where the altar would’ve been, and empty alcoves in the walls where statues of saints would’ve stood.
They shared the place with twenty-odd other people. Most were curled up on the floor, still asleep. A few others sat with their backs to the walls, looking ring-eyed and dazed, like they’d forgotten what sleep was. Men, mostly, gone grubby and unshaven. A couple of hard looking women.
“We don’t belong here.”
He turned and found Sebastián was awake now. He’d seen their singer looking
this bad before, but it was only hangovers, or too many days speeding catching up with him. Nothing like this, like now he wasn’t expecting to get better.
“This is cartel shit, man. We don’t have anything to do with that. Why would they grab us?” Bas stopped a moment, getting a freshly horrified look on his face. “You don’t think it has to do with the pictures during the show, do you?”
That was something new the past couple tours, since they’d put out the last album, La máscara detrás de la cara. They’d always gone for a projected multimedia assault whenever they played, and Sebastián had decided it was time to forget about the chaos of the world at large for their imagery and tap current events closer to home. All the photos of carnage you could want were a few clicks away online. The aftermath of massacres and assassinations and messages sent in buckets of blood splashed across pavement. Severed heads and arms hacked off at the elbows, and death sentence by blowtorch, and rows of butchered bodies hanging from train trestles. Film clips, too, that the anonymous murder teams had posted online. This is who we are, this is what we do, this is what it takes to keep our world turning.
He never knew how Sebastián could do it, comb through the ugliest shit in the world and arrange it in a sequence that whizzed by at four frames per second. From the audience perspective, there wasn’t time to linger on any one thing, so you couldn’t be sure what you’d just seen, you only knew it was terrible and probably real. Bas, though … he had to linger over it.
“No, I don’t think it’s got anything to do with that,” Enrique said. “That’s free advertising for them, is all.”
He looked down at Sofia, still asleep, the kind of sleep that becomes the only self-defense you have left. Same with Morgan. Olaf too, only he looked like could just as easily be unconscious as asleep, all that dried blood down one side of his face and caked in his white-blond hair. He must’ve really taken a beating during the grab.
Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 3 Page 18
