The Devil's Bag Man

by Adam Mansbach

  “Isn’t that right, my queen?”

  Chacanza was walking toward them, her eyes fixed on the prostrate girls, her face a husk of silent hatred. She didn’t look up at Tezcatlipoca to acknowledge his question and didn’t appear to notice Jess. She knelt before the closer girl, brushed a lock of bloody hair off her forehead, then raised her head and nodded into the distance.

  Four more girls approached on silent feet, clad in identical tunics made of a burlaplike plant fiber. They bent before the sleeping girls, lifted them expertly beneath the knees and arms, and carried them away.

  “So,” Tezcatlipoca continued, “you are the one from whom Cualli reaped new life.” He looked Galvan up and down and then glanced at Gum, who hovered by the parlor’s periphery as if hoping to go unseen. “And I am told that you resisted for some time. That must have caused him no end of misery.”

  He strolled closer and fixed his bottomless eyes on Galvan. “This pleases me. I may allow you some enjoyment here.”

  He opened his palm and offered Galvan a glinting, marble-sized bit of matter; it looked like a clump of earth, or a globule of resin.

  “An intoxicant of my creation. Based loosely on the fruit of the poppy, but infinitely stronger. It may kill you, for a while.”

  Galvan stepped closer.

  “I’m not interested in that. I’ve got a deal for you.”

  Tezcatlipoca regarded him with curiosity and popped the drug into his own mouth.

  “There is nothing I want.”

  Whatever the hell he’d just ingested was taking effect fast. A ripple of iridescence streamed down the god’s body like a gentle wind; in its wake his limbs took on a new lugubriousness.

  Tezcatlipoca crossed his arms behind his head, his body rising slightly off the ground as he reclined on an invisible bed.

  “Speak your mind,” he slurred, looking up at the sky. “If I don’t like it, I’ll tear out your liver twice a day for the next hundred years.”

  “Fair enough.” Galvan took a deep breath and wondered whether Tezcatlipoca’s state would make him more receptive to the pitch or less. He sensed movement in the periphery of his vision and looked over to see Chacanza striding toward him, slow and stately. He caught her eye, hoping for some hint of recognition, of confederacy. But there was nothing.

  “Put me back in my body and let me kill Cucuy. The right way. Once and for all.”

  Tezcatlipoca’s body swung vertical, and he leaned toward Galvan.

  “Why would I want that?”

  “Because if he dies any other way, you lose all this. No more virgin fucktoys, no more drugs, no more conjuring shit into being. Just seven billion assholes busy destroying the planet all by themselves.”

  Tezcatlipoca was quiet for a moment. Whether he was weighing the words or simply too zooted to listen, Galvan didn’t know. But he continued.

  “I dunno, maybe that sounds like fun to you. Pop back up, surprise-surprise, hey, wow, it’s Tezcatlipoca, the Divine Sorcerer, Most Fearsome and Beloved. Bam, he’s blowin’ shit up, he’s real, boom, fall the fuck in line, humanity. Except here’s the thing: three-quarters of them would rather die than turn their backs on Jesus or Allah or fuckin’ Vishnu. And even if you do convert them all or kill off the heathens, then what? Spend twenty years waiting for a bunch of slaves to build you a castle you could’ve snapped your fingers and created here? Float around double-dicking chicks to death Dominio Gris style, except out there they got wills of their own, plus you gotta find ’em and replace ’em cuz they won’t just heal up afterward?”

  Galvan paused, trying to gauge how this was going over, but Tezcatlipoca was inscrutable.

  “Bottom line, there’s not a single reason for you to trade this for that, so let me unmake that fucker. Because believe me, if I don’t kill him right, sooner or later somebody else is sure as hell gonna do it wrong.”

  He realized he’d reached the end of his sales pitch, shut his mouth, and waited for a response. Tezcatlipoca was undulating in a slow, hypnotic rhythm now. The outlines of his body blurred, became indistinct and wavy. As if he were fading into the ether, becoming one with the air.

  That was some fuckin’ drug, all right.

  “Do you know how to do it?”

  Galvan’s head snapped toward the voice.

  It was Chacanza. Her hands were folded, her shoulders squared to his.

  Her face was seared into Galvan’s memory in a wide range of states: seduction and aggression, determination and abandon. But this expression, Galvan could not read.

  It took him several moments to understand that it was hope.

  “Think so,” he said.

  “Then allow me to remove all doubt.”

  A stalactite of lightning crackled through the sky, and Galvan spun in time to see it hit Tezcatlipoca square in the middle of the chest.

  Where his heart was, assuming that the god had one.

  And precisely where you’d slam a junkie with a syringe of adrenaline to bring him out of a nod.

  His body shuddered and Tezcatlipoca groaned in ecstasy as the surge of electricity crackled through him, blue sparks shooting in all directions.

  His feet found the firmament.

  His body found form.

  The bottomless black eyes found Galvan.

  “I have renounced the earth. This realm is my only home.”

  He raised a hand, and Galvan watched as the fingers grew together, turned metallic, became a reaper’s sickle. “But if I were forced to return, it would not be to wage petty war. It would be to finish the job my brothers and sisters abandoned, and destroy that world entirely.”

  “All the more reason for me to do it right.” Galvan clenched his teeth, felt his jaw flare. “He stole from you. Kept what wasn’t his to keep. You landing on your feet here doesn’t change that.”

  Galvan spread his arms. “Make me your weapon of vengeance.”

  For the first time, the full weight of Tezcatlipoca’s attention came to rest on him. The pressure seemed to begin inside Galvan’s head, as if the god were probing the very folds of his brain. He winced, as the pain ratcheted up to excruciating and the world beyond went fuzzy.

  “It is not a decision to be made on faith,” Tezcatlipoca intoned. “You must prove yourself worthy to be my sword.”

  Galvan felt the ground beneath him drop away, and then everything went black.

  CHAPTER 36

  Miguel Fuentes had lost track.

  Of time.

  His present physical location.

  His place in the world.

  The basic rules by which the universe was governed.

  All he knew was that he was very, very drunk.

  And hundreds of miles from anywhere he ought to be.

  And totally, permanently, royally fucked.

  Consider yourself bought.

  For days now, he’d tried to blot out those words. How many, he couldn’t be sure. Beer didn’t help, so he’d switched to tequila. When that proved ineffective, he’d tried sex; the roadhouse bar he’d stumbled into rented rooms by the hour, and a handful of working girls trickled through when the sun went down. He had a go at one the first night, and out of embarrassment at how that had gone, he swapped the booze for coffee a few hours before dusk the second night and took a different one upstairs.

  But sobriety only unleashed the black-eyed monster inside.

  As far as work knew—work and his wife—Fuentes was on the clock. Working a contact, trying to flip a disgruntled lieutenant and roll him up at his Barrio Azteca superiors. Just another badass workweek for the pride and joy of Intelligence Ops.

  And when he rolled back into town with Herman Rubacalo’s corpse in his trunk and some kind of heroic story about how it had gotten there—a story he was currently too drunk to devise, since the inspiration to double back and collect the body was the last sober-headed thing Fuentes had done—well, shit. The sky was the limit. Awards and promotions out the asshole.

  Cucuy was gonna own himself on
e high-ranking son of a bitch.

  If Fuentes managed to sack up and go home before the body rotted beyond recognition, anyway.

  The odds on that were maybe three to one.

  He leaned forward until his forehead touched the bar, and he raised a finger for more tequila.

  When he looked up, he was staring at a basket of steaming tortillas instead.

  “You should eat something,” the barkeep said.

  “Fuck you,” Fuentes mumbled, already tearing into the hot morsels.

  Before he could swallow, his phone chirped in his pocket and Fuentes nearly toppled off his stool. He fumbled for it, filled with dread, anticipating the flash of Marisol’s name across the screen. But when he wrestled the device free, there was no name on the screen at all.

  In its place was the word Unknown.

  As if it was his future calling, Fuentes thought as he stared at it, trying to bring the word into focus, obscurely proud of the sentiment’s poetry.

  “Fuentes,” said Fuentes.

  “Do you know who this is?” The voice was low, even, almost a purr. And yet, it made every hair on his body stand.

  “How did you get this number?” he blurted, without thinking.

  The empty air on the other end of the line was answer enough.

  “Valentine,” Fuentes capitulated at last. “It’s Valentine.”

  “Tomorrow between three and four P.M., a cargo plane will land at a hidden airfield fifteen miles outside Gómez Palacio. You will meet it. You will unload it. And you will transport the contents to Ojos Negros. This will require three or four large vehicles. Police vehicles. I will transmit exact coordinates when I hang up. You will be paid upon delivery. Is all that clear?”

  Fuentes’s stomach plummeted, as a host of impossibilities swarmed around his head like flies. He could not put hands on that many vehicles, or that many men. Questions would be asked. Getting from here to home to there in time also posed difficulties. Particularly in his current state of shitfacedness.

  And then there was the plane’s cargo.

  Guns or drugs if he was lucky. Fucking surface-to-air missiles if he was not.

  “I don’t think—”

  “Do not think. Do as you are told.”

  “I’d like to, Mr. Valentine, of course.” He could feel the sloppiness of the words as they rolled off his tongue, the inadvisability of each one. But Fuentes couldn’t stop himself. “It’s just that right now isn’t really the—”

  “Your wife’s name is Marisol,” the procurer said, as if he were informing Fuentes of the weather. “She’s thirty-nine years old, too pretty for you, and wants another child. The ones you already have are Javier, Jacinta, and fat little Federico. Shall I go on?”

  Fuentes’s spine went rigid, and a bead of sweat rolled down his back.

  In a flash, he was stone-cold sober.

  “That won’t be necessary,” he said, rubbing his eyelids with a thumb knuckle and forefinger. “I’ll be there. I’ll figure it out.”

  “I’m sure you will.”

  The line went dead.

  Fuentes could hardly breathe. He slapped open the bar’s saloon doors, staggered into the stifling heat, and sucked down a huge helping of dusty air.

  His lungs burned as he scrolled through his contacts, looking for Marisol’s cell number. Fuentes pressed the phone to his sweaty ear and prayed his wife would pick up.

  His heart played over the ringtone in triplicate. Just as he was about to hang up, she answered.

  “Miguel?”

  “Where are you? Are you at home?”

  The panic in his voice was unmistakable, and that was all it took for Marisol’s to jump into the same register.

  “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

  “You’ve got to leave town, Marisol. Take the kids and go, right now.”

  “Go where? Miguel, you’re scaring me. What’s happened?”

  “Go to your parents. No— Go to the airport. To Alberto’s.”

  “In California? Miguel, please, what are you talking about? What kind of trouble are you in?”

  Fuentes heaved a sigh, stared past the meager parking lot and into the sun-blighted desert beyond.

  His eyes widened, and his arm dropped to his side. The phone slipped from his slack hand, dropped soundlessly to the ground.

  “Miguel? Hello?”

  “Mother of Christ,” Fuentes whispered.

  Perhaps he was hallucinating. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, hauled off and slapped himself hard in the face like some kind of goddamn Loony Tunes character.

  Nothing doing. They were still there.

  Thousands of them, streaming over a hill in the distance, and down across the flat plain.

  Swarming like ants. The entire landscape suddenly dark with bodies.

  And those bodies were headed straight toward him. Toward the town, as if it represented no impediment whatsoever to their progress. As if they didn’t even notice it, any more than a tsunami noticed land.

  Fuentes felt the bile rise in his throat. He bent double, hands on his knees, waiting for his insides to knot and rebel, but still he craned his neck up at the approaching storm. The coming plague.

  It didn’t matter that they were young, female, dressed in rags or sundresses or nothing at all.

  Fuentes knew an army when he saw one.

  He could smell the stench of death in the air.

  The closest ones had left the hill behind now, halved the distance to him in the scant, frozen minutes he’d been watching.

  Fuentes’s phone rang—Marisol trying to figure out what was going on—but he couldn’t process the sound. It entered his mind as a death knell.

  Run, he thought, but could barely stand.

  A gush of vomit poured from him, splashed hot against the ground. He gagged, spat, squinted back up at the advancing army.

  And found the ground erupting, giving birth to more.

  There and there and there.

  The new recruits fell seamlessly into step with their sisters, joined a progression that was swift and wordless, chillingly efficient, silent except for the cacophony of footfalls.

  It was loud enough to bring the rest of the bar’s patrons spilling outside. A dozen others joined Fuentes in the next few seconds—first with the boozy joviality of men finding distraction in an unexpected spectacle, and then with the quiet terror of men gazing upon a scene out of some ancient, communal nightmare.

  Since Fuentes had gotten there first—or maybe because he comported himself like a man who’d looked into the devil’s eyes—they all deferred to him.

  “The fuck is that, cabrón?” the man closest to him asked in a guttural whisper. He was a rangy dude, none too steady on his feet, and as he spoke he gestured with an almost-empty beer bottle.

  “The Virgin Army,” Fuentes heard himself say. The words sounded far off and hollow, as if his mouth were a cave. There was a bitter taste on his tongue, a taste like ash.

  The guy elbowed him in the shoulder, like Fuentes had made a joke.

  “Yeah, right,” he said. “Tell me another one, Grandpa.”

  Then he looked for himself—really looked—and shut the fuck up.

  Dozens of people were standing in the street now; every business on the strip that comprised this town’s commercial district had emptied out. Women with their hair in curlers stood crossing themselves in front of the salon across the street; old men stood gape jawed before the bodega on the corner.

  No one ran; no one even spoke. It was as if they’d all, somehow, been waiting their whole lives for this moment. And now that it was here, there was nothing left to fear, no illusion that they had any agency in the face of it.

  The girls were almost upon them now—crossing out of the desert and into the town by the score. The great river of bodies cleaved in half to stream around the back of the bar and then re-formed, whole again.

  They never once broke stride. And they paid absolutely no mind to the living.

&nbs
p; Fuentes stood still and let the endless wave of girls wash over him, and everybody else did exactly the same. They were all inside the same spell, he thought, the watchers and the walkers—or no, the opposite, it was like they occupied two entirely different worlds and one just so happened to be passing in front of the other at that moment, gliding over the face of it like the moon eclipsing the sun.

  For the first minute, he didn’t even breathe. At any instant, half a dozen of them were close enough to touch.

  All that young, supple flesh.

  Young, supple, cold, and dead.

  Fuentes didn’t know whether to pop a boner or drop dead from fear. But the stampede went on, thousands of them passing by as thick and swift as driven cattle, and kicking up just as much dust. And like anything, it became normal after a while.

  Maybe not normal.

  Fuentes was breathing again, though.

  This too shall pass.

  Wait it out, man. Just wait it out.

  Rest of your problems are gonna look a whole lot better afterward, cuz as fucked up as your life is, it ain’t half as fucked up as a billion undead bitches headed who knows where to do who knows what to who knows who.

  Even as he thought it, Fuentes realized he knew.

  Cucuy.

  Who else could it be?

  Either they’d been summoned, or they were on the warpath. Hell, maybe the Virgin Army was his fucking salvation. The enemy of his enemy.

  The monster’s monster.

  A man could dream, couldn’t he?

  The stream of girls was thinning; a second battalion was crossing the hill, but they weren’t here yet. Fuentes and his fellow witnesses stood in the eye of the hurricane.

  That was when he saw the palanquin.

  It was a word he knew from reading King Arthur stories to his sons—not something he’d ever had the opportunity to use in conversation, much less lay eyes on in the real world.

  Twelve girls gripped the ends of the long wood beams that supported it, three walking on each of the four sides, their pace stately, their footfalls synchronized, so as not to jostle whoever was inside the long, curtained box that sat atop the beams.

  The queen, thought Fuentes, and his throat constricted. Did one bow? Kneel? Avert his eyes? Run back inside and hide behind the bar?