Conquistadors

by Jeff Kirkham

  Noah reminded himself that this wasn’t archaeology. It was criminal psychology. Some sick bastards returning from the U.S. had committed this atrocity on their way to join with some other sick bastards. The cartels were clearly consolidating and that could only mean one thing: suffering for the innocent.

  The days of whisking away death to protect the gentle sensibilities of the living were officially over. With the now-permanent arrival of what they were calling the “Black Autumn collapse,” death would be the Main Event. Nothing stood between human predator and prey now that the gears of society had ground themselves into metal sand.

  Noah checked his six—taking a slow look around the deserted cartel campsite—wary of lingering danger. Then, he panned over the site again, this time searching for potential scavenge.

  Focusing on the constellations of human activity printed in the dirt, he looked for anything that might have been forgotten or lost. The band of murderers appeared to be a small team of cartel soldiers moving south, just like the team that hit his dad’s ranch three days before.

  He found a mostly-full bottle of water, a dusty can of black beans, and then a small pile of dried out corn tortillas. The tortillas had turned into dry frisbees, but he chomped one anyway. Scavenge always tasted better than an MRE. Found food was the best food.

  Noah stepped carefully to where the cartel vehicles would have been parked, mindful of his footfalls. Things often fell off vehicles in the rush to leave. Laying on its side in the dust, he spotted a partially-buried plastic milk jug.

  “Jackpot,” he said out loud. He’d discovered a quarter gallon of gasoline, the bangers must’ve been carting around in the back of their cars, probably using any container they could find. He took a good look at the plastic jug.

  “Roundtree Family Dairy, Des Moines, Iowa. We love our cows and you love our milk.”

  Noah wondered if the cows loved the arrangement half as much as the Roundtrees. The rolling hills and idyllic cows on the label got him thinking about dairies. He was a cattleman, not a dairy farmer, however he knew that milk markets were regional. Nobody shipped milk more than a few hundred miles. These ‘bangers must’ve come from Des Moines, Iowa or close by. He couldn’t do the math in his head, but he figured it to be around 1,500 miles from Arizona. If they’d come that far, it made sense that they’d be stockpiling gas along the way.

  They were under orders, that much seemed clear to Noah. Why would they bother to build an altar? He didn’t know many drug dealers, but he did know a lot of Catholics. This wasn’t something learned in catechism. This was an atrocity someone had cooked up for another reason.

  Strangely, the two factors seemed companionable in Noah’s mind: following orders, as implied by the 1,500 mile trek south, and religious fanaticism. Adding a dash of the supernatural would definitely help unite an army. It seemed like it’d been done before in religious history, though Noah didn’t know enough about history to say precisely when.

  He expanded his search circle around the camp, his interest piqued. Far outside the circle of human activity, he found where someone had taken a shit behind a big clump of sage brush. They’d taken their dump on the ground without digging a hole first. Old Man Bill would’ve curled his lip and labeled the offender a “Surface Shitter,” which was one of Bill’s most rueful maledictions. Noah assumed his adoptive father had stepped in someone’s surface shit “over in the sandbox,” since the insult had a darker spin on it than the practice probably deserved. A father’s shame had magical powers, and even as an adult, Noah would never think of shitting outdoors without digging a hole first. So when he saw the barely-drying human turds curling on the sand, scorn swamped him. He hadn’t felt nearly as much disgust with the gangbangers when he’d examined the corpses.

  The realization made him smile. His father would always be with him, buried in a thousand lessons, habits and deep predispositions. The old man had big opinions, and most of those had become his own. As a young man, Noah had rebelled against many of them. Now as a man with wounds of his own, in a way, he treasured them.

  The scorn at the sight of the shit subsided and Noah’s practiced eye caught a piece of paper wobbling in the breeze, snagged in the twigs of a nearby sage. He knew it’d be covered in shit—recently used to wipe a gangbanger’s ass—but he plucked the paper out of the bush anyway. Holding it by two corners, he stretched the little page out and read the print beneath the yellow smears.

  “El Codigo de los Caballeros Templarios,” the top of the page read. “The Code of the Knights Templar.”

  Noah didn’t know anything about the Knights Templar, except what little he could recall from The Davinci Code. His wife had made him watch the movie with her. He remembered it having something to do with crusaders and a secret society. But the movie couldn’t hold his interest. He had preferred Westerns.

  “We shall help the poor, fight against materialism, not kill for money, and not use drugs. To do otherwise, we shall offer ourselves up to the order of Knights for execution.”

  Noah raised his eyebrows. What a crock of shit. But it made sense. A narcotics organization would have a serious issue with soldiers and dealers using its product. Making sobriety part of a larger “code of ethics” would serve to limit waste. The other stuff—materialism and helping the poor—would just be ancillary crap meant to paint the enterprise in the colors of Robin Hood and Zorro. These drug soldiers would cast themselves as the golden-hearted outlaws who only committed acts of violence to further the will of God. Whoever created this cartel wasn’t an average idiot. The man had spent some time thinking about how to extend power from Sinaloa to the farthest reaches of America. The realization brought Noah a new understanding of his enemy—and he began to see the breadth of his own crusade. He hadn’t been sent on a mission to pick off a few bad guys and die in a blaze of glory. He’d been pulled up short by something from the Great Beyond and set on a path to resist an immense evil. With that realization came a sense of responsibility. People were counting on him.

  Noah let the wind re-take the shit-paper, twisting and tumbling until another sage bush grabbed it.

  He retraced his steps to his own camp, about a mile away over the rolling hills. Once atop the rise above his camp, Noah lingered, watching his back trail and observing his own camp with a small set of binoculars. If anyone had moved in to ambush him, he would leave his beloved Land Cruiser behind. Nothing was more important, now, than fighting this bunch of sickos. Not even his Cruiser.

  Nobody had followed him and nobody had taken up bushwacking positions in his camp. Noah made his way down the hill and checked the trip lines around his rig. From now on, he’d cover the Cruiser in camouflage netting before moving out to cut track. He’d also do a better job setting up his base camp with “sign traps”—cleared areas in the sand that’d make it easy to see from a distance if anyone had come in. He was one man against a smart, organized enemy. They had many lives to give and he had but one.

  Noah walked a hundred yards from the Cruiser to his hidden cache: a full backpack and a scoped, lever action 30-30. The cache had been placed away from any line of approach, so if he had to bug out, his supplies would be ready.

  Satisfied that his camp remained secure, he climbed just short of the top of a hill to rest and eat his scavenged food. He had plenty of Bill’s MREs in the Cruiser, but he preferred the way of the scavenger. He’d eat what he’d found and conserve resources against an uncertain future.

  His vantage point allowed him to see the surrounding area and would give him time to react in case anyone approached. He poured water into a canteen cup, crushed the tortillas, and dribbled them into the water. They slowly turned to mush. He built a tiny fire from dried sage twigs and warmed the mush over the licking flame.

  The sun sagged to the west and the little fire crackled its wistful song. He took a deep, cleansing breath and settled back onto a hillock of sand. It felt like settling into a new life. Like a man just emerging from winter, Noah regarded his miss
ion fresh, through open eyes and an unfettered heart.

  Without a care for the future, he would ply all he had learned from Bill against the darkness rolling across the desert. He’d been tracking a few lapping waves heading south, but he suspected that a great swell would turn and pour northward in the days to come. He would go out in front of that flood, and he would know what to do when the moment was ripe.

  Old Bill had harped endlessly about ignoring intuition and obeying the sign on the ground. But Old Bill hadn’t known the ghosts Noah knew, and Bill hadn’t ever been brought into the counsels of the souls who drifted in the desert stars.

  The signs of man’s passing would be heeded by Noah, with every bit of skill he could bring to bear. But the greater signs in the sky—the light that cast shadows onto his heart—would be his masters. Noah would be vigilant, but grace-filled. He would be keen in his craft, but surrendered to the warm winds.

  He could feel the bands of murdering coyotes coalescing across the desert sands, becoming one force focused in one malignant will. Noah had no idea who that might be, but he knew his place in the universe: to stand against that man and against all who would follow him.

  With the warm evening breeze consenting to his mission, Noah drifted into the arms of sleep.

  Chapter 19

  Tavo Castillo

  US Highway 19, Aerospace Parkway Exit, Tucson, Arizona

  They were too late, and Tavo knew it when they crossed the abandoned border station at Nogales. The inky haze of smoke had been visible for almost seventy miles, and smoke that black could only come from burning oil—a lot of burning oil.

  There was no good reason to set fire to a refinery, but it took only one vandal or one pyromaniac with a blowtorch to set off eight and a half trillion BTUs of dazzling fuel. With every minute, Tavo could feel the psychotics inching closer to every refinery in the western United States. His plan of empire could rise or fall based on the whims of sickos who liked to whack themselves off to the flames of a burning structure.

  For the moment, he had gasoline in the tanks of his Jeeps and trucks. Between the gas he’d managed to place under guard at the Pemex stations in Hermosillo and the fuel Sofía had shipped from Monterrey, Tavo launched his foray into the United States.

  He had planned on seizing a fuel refinery in Tucson, but now that idea had likely gone up in smoke. Ten miles outside of the city, Beto jogged back to Tavo’s Humvee from his command position at the front of the convoy.

  “Canoso. Check it out. We’re in America, carnal.” Beto put his hand on Tavo’s shoulder and beamed.

  His lieutenant spoke truth. Despite the probable loss of the refinery, they had successfully invaded America. Tavo’s recollection of the Mexican-American war was rusty, but he thought that he might be the first Mexican to invade America since Santa Anna crushed the Alamo.

  “Viva Mexico.” Beto whispered.

  Loyalty is a strange and fickle creature, Tavo thought. The man beside him had been born in Mexico, raised in America and had undoubtedly sworn allegiance to the American flag as a Navy SEAL. But faced with the idea of his adoptive country in flames, Beto’s true loyalty revealed itself. The dust of Mexico had worked its way into his soul, displacing the gleaming steel of America. Yet Tavo’s own daughter, when she discovered his invasion into America, would probably repudiate him. Loyalty was indeed fickle.

  What did she care if America fell into Tavo’s hands instead of falling into ruin?

  He suspected she would care very much. Or she might pretend to care while working another angle. He hadn’t witnessed his daughter commit a single devious act in her life, but he juggled her motives in his mind, never climbing out from underneath his suspicions.

  He needed to put his mind at ease. This day was worthy of celebration—of leaving behind the gadflies of family and treachery. Not three hours ago, Tavo's four hundred and fifty-man army rolled through the American City of Nogales without firing a shot. The scant border town—a soulless cluster of dirty, stucco buildings and a Denny’s restaurant—could barely be called a city. Even so, it was an American city, and that meant he was the first military force to invade America in a long, long time.

  It was a victory, but Tavo wasn’t sure how much to celebrate. If anything, America was collapsing too fast; devolving into chaos before he could get his arms around their assets. The whole point of taking down America would be to accumulate and protect key resources, all of which dangled in the wind, vulnerable to scavengers.

  Gasoline was at the top of his list of resources, and the burning refinery in Tucson spoke to the ticking clock that had already begun to erode his plan. Like a sandcastle chewed by the surf, Tavo’s future empire would not wait long. Perhaps a week. Maybe less.

  Nobody in modern times had seen such an immense civilization collapse. Would it dwindle like a socialist third world country or implode overnight like America during the Great Depression? By the look of the Nogales border station, America had already broken all records for historical collapse. In just one week, the nation had crumbled inward like a tower of ash.

  “Bravo One, Charlie One, this is Actual.” Tavo keyed his radio. “Converge on me. We need to talk.”

  Between Nogales and Tucson, as they passed the Blue Skies Indian Casino, a tattered banner hung between the pillars of a dead electronic sign announcing a law enforcement expo. But all the police must’ve left because they encountered no resistance.

  As they rolled closer to Tucson, the southbound side of the freeway filled with stumbling Americans, walking or driving south with their families. Saúl stopped one of the walkers and learned that the water had shut off in Tucson four days earlier, not long after the electricity. Anyone without water storage—which was almost everyone—was being forced to relocate their families to the water treatment facility south of the city.

  Like hikers passing a bear cave, Tavo’s four-hundred and fifty men were painfully aware of the massive U.S. airbase looming to their east. Even a single A-10 Warthog or attack helicopter could destroy their military expedition in the blink of an eye.

  But Tavo had a fair understanding of the American military. A fighter jock couldn’t just hop in an A-10 and come blow them up. There were logistics, support and authorizations that had to be satisfied before American government released hellfire. His grab bag of Mexican soldiers and highly trained gangbangers hadn’t fired a shot on American soil. So far as America was concerned, they were undocumented immigrants. America’s first impulse might be to give them a hot meal and shelter, not grind them up with the Avenger cannons of their ground attack planes.

  Tavo was betting that American National Guard command, communications and support had become unstable in the last week, especially around National Guard bases where soldiers could walk home to their families. How many soldiers would maintain readiness, no enemy in sight, while their families suffered without water?

  Even if he was wrong, and if the American military was alive and well, they would certainly give Mexicans—their neighbors and allies—a generous opportunity to head home. He half expected to see a mayor drive up in a car and ask them “can I help you with something.” There would be a first-mover advantage in any fight, and Tavo had that advantage in spades. The man who came primed for violence usually won.

  They’d passed thousands of pairs of eyeballs on the freeway, and Tavo’s column appeared to be exactly what it was: an invasion force. But nobody would believe it. In retrospect, he should’ve ordered his men to invade in passenger vehicles instead of green-painted trucks bristling with machine guns. But even in army vehicles, Americans would have a hard time believing they’d been invaded by their insignificant neighbor to the south.

  Given the speed of their probe into America—it’d only been four hours since they’d crossed the border—Tavo frankly didn’t know what to expect. The Americans he’d seen so far seemed defeated, if only by their circumstance. But he’d spent countless hours attending American firearm trainings, and he knew full we
ll that Tucson was no New York City, full of hapless Millennials and gender-confused urbanites. Tavo had shared sack lunch sandwiches with the other kind of American—the kind who fantasized about Mexican narcos streaming across their border after a collapse. Somewhere in the city of Tucson, men and women carried AR-15 rifles and vests bursting with loaded magazines. Even if the military was dead, not everyone would be dragging themselves, hapless, toward the last remaining water in southern Arizona. Some citizens might actually be revved up to protect their city, and he knew that kind well enough to know they wouldn’t wait for government permission before shooting.

  In any case, speed would be Tavo’s greatest ally. Passing quickly through Tucson would give him a straight shot at the National Guard armory to the southwest of Phoenix, and that armory would deliver a mountain fortress and fifty Humvees, some of them up-armored.

  Every day his force grew by a couple hundred men, and many of them were Templario commandos. His lieutenants had arranged for emergency communications with their organization via pre-arranged sat phone call-ins. Even as the cell networks fell apart, the satellite phones remained solid. His cartel had ordered thousands of fighters to rendezvous in Hermosillo, promising food, work and plunder. When Tavo returned to the ranch in the next day or two, he expected to greet another wave of thousands of men, ready to join his expedition. If he could capture and arm a National Guard garrison inside the U.S., he could re-route reinforcements to that garrison and speed the process of force consolidation.

  He stopped his army outside the city of Tucson and scanned ahead to confirm the source of the massive column of smoke. As expected, the Chevron Sunset Fuels refinery burned like Iraqi oil fields on CNN. Given the loss of the easy refueling point, Tavo would need to move even faster, lest he be cut off from five or six gas refineries that would be easy pickings—the few lonely storage facilities strung between Tucson, Arizona and Boise, Idaho. California would be crawling with dangerous refugees, and the refineries of the Midwest would require that he cross the Rockies. Tavo would do everything he could to avoid the oilfields of Texas. It was one thing to invade Arizona, but it was another thing entirely to invade Texas. History could cut both ways. Passing through dozens of Texas towns with a lightly-armed military force would be like daring the townsfolk to “remember the Alamo.” Tavo preferred to move directly up the center of the American west, taking advantage of the wide open spaces. By the time he took the flatlands between the High Sierras and the Rocky Mountains, he’d have the food and fuel he’d need to seize anything else he desired.