Hungry Ghosts

by Stephen Blackmoore

  The thing that really grabs my attention is the scapular, a piece of cloth hanging on his chest from a braided cord around his neck. It’s a Catholic thing. They’re not big, usually have a prayer on them and they come in different colors. Red for The Passion, blue for the Immaculate Conception, black and blue for St. Michael. Lot of Catholics down here, so that’s not too surprising.

  But this one’s enormous. Black with red edging and an embroidered image of Santa Muerte hanging from a red, black and white cord. Catholics don’t flaunt their scapulars, they wear them under their clothes, keep them private. But with Señora de las Sombras, you wear that shit like it’s a fucking badge.

  Above it all hangs a gold crucifix. I’ve seen this sort of thing before. Some in L.A., but much more frequently down here. The cognitive dissonance is something that tweaks a lot of people.

  The Catholic Church has been denouncing Santa Muerte for years, but she’s gained a foothold in the public consciousness, anyway. Otherwise good Catholics are turning to her not because they’ve lost faith, not because they’re denying their god, but because she’s more accessible. When your god doesn’t answer your prayers, why not try talking to Death?

  The soldier asks me who I am, what I’m doing down here. I tell him I’m a priest coming down from the U.S. to work with poor kids in Mexico City. He pauses at that, stammers a bit. Finally just nods. He asks me about my sunglasses. It’s after midnight, and there are no lights on this stretch of highway. I say I have an eye condition. He isn’t sure what to say to that, either, but the Sharpie magic does its thing and he seems to buy it.

  “Everything all right?” I say, my Spanish purposely stilted. Better to sound like an out of towner than a local. He might give me more crap, but it also excuses a lot of behavior.

  “Yeah,” he says. He glances back at the truck idling behind me, mosquitoes and dust dancing in the headlight beams. His nervousness doesn’t seem focused on me anymore.

  “When’s the last time you gave confession, son?” I say. It’s mean. And yes, I know, I’m a dick. I think that’s been pretty firmly established by now. But the sudden look of fear in his eyes tells me everything I need to know.

  “A long time,” he says, frowning.

  He’s a good kid. Grew up right. Made his abuela proud when he joined the army. Only, well, it ain’t so simple. Maybe he took a bribe. Maybe he looked the other way when a commanding officer did. Maybe somebody’s got something over his head that he can’t seem to shake.

  Whatever it is, he knows he’s compromised. His perch on the moral high ground is cracking beneath him, and he doesn’t know what to do. Eventually he’s going to have to make a choice. Keep fighting the good fight or don’t.

  The crime down here is savage, sudden, and a big moneymaker. Kidnappings, murders, marijuana and heroin carted up to the border. There’s cash in murder, money to be had in brutality. Violence is currency.

  Not to say it’s like that everywhere in Mexico, but only an idiot doesn’t recognize that the cartels are the real kings. Ruling through fear and intimidation. Criticize too much and end up missing your head, or with a slit throat and hanging from a bridge with half a dozen others.

  The cartels are holding the nation hostage and every time the government thinks they’ve cut one down it regroups under a new name, a new look and the same old bullshit.

  It’s no surprise that this soldier’s both a devotee of Santa Muerte and a Catholic. He’s conflicted, but he’s not stupid. Even the devout down here don’t always think God can save them amidst all the violence. Santa Muerte might not be able to save you, but she doesn’t promise anything, either. Prayers to her are suggestions at the best of times. Honoring her is like wearing a talisman against dying. Maybe she’ll listen. Maybe she won’t.

  But when you draw your last breath she’s the one you’ll see. Everything dies eventually, and that’s the only thing you can be sure of with her. It’s like Bustillo said. There’s nothing more honest than death.

  The soldier’s got that look that says he’s thinking back to when it was simple. When things made sense. The cartels were bad, the police and the army were good. But there’s poverty and low pay and too much violence and too many dead friends. And no matter how many times he tells himself he’s doing the right thing when he has to make one of those gray area choices, he doesn’t really believe it.

  “Might want to see your priest, then. Lot of things weigh on a man’s soul.”

  He nods, his entire focus shifting inward. I’m forgotten except as a cursory task he has to deal with. He wishes me luck and gets back into the truck to rejoin the convoy. I give it a few minutes before pulling out back onto the road. I don’t want to be too close to them. There have been ambushes against police, occasionally soldiers. The last thing I need is to get caught in a crossfire.

  The rest of the drive to Zacatecas is uneventful. No speeding headlights come my way, no chatter of AK fire. I pull into the city around four in the morning. Traffic’s increased on the highway. Semi-trucks, mostly. Some commuters. The hustle and bustle of a city just waking up, getting ready to start its day.

  Not everything down here is violence and drug money. It’s like anywhere else in the world. Most of the people are just trying to get by. Live their lives, find love, have families. When all I see is ghosts and death it’s sometimes a little hard to remember that.

  I pull into Zacatecas proper and start looking for a place to crash. Not long before I find a hotel off the highway. Big, yellow box of a building in between two vacant lots filled with scrub brush, the only decoration a bizarre, rococo-style double-staircase leading to the lobby that looks as out of place as a wig on a pig.

  I get out of the car as a hot wind picks up. It’s a short burst of blast-furnace air. Like the Santa Ana winds up in L.A., but harder, dryer. Like sandpaper against my skin. Just as suddenly it’s gone, replaced with a cooler breeze that makes more sense for the early hour.

  I tell myself that it’s just wind. But I have to wonder about that. Nothing is “just” anything these days. Maybe I’m paranoid. Enemies in the shadows I can’t see. Those can sometimes be just as dangerous as the ones I can.

  The wind has me on edge a lot these days. Any wind. The wind can be playful or it can be cruel. I went to a wind spirit in the desert outside Los Angeles for help finding someone not too long ago. It sees everything. It goes everywhere. It isn’t just wind. It’s Wind.

  The Wind down here isn’t the same as the one up there, but the edges blur. What one knows they all know. Their needs and desires blend together until they’re indistinguishable from each other. Anger one in Alaska, expect to feel the brunt of it in the Kalahari.

  The price for the information was fire. Most winds enjoy a good blaze. In the parched, dry parts of the American Southwest fire season’s like fucking Christmas. It pushes the flames along, fans them higher, spreads them across hills, down mountains, into valleys. And if people are in the way, well, what does the Wind care? It was around long before humans showed up.

  But it wasn’t just any fire it wanted. It was the burning down of my home. Joke’s on it. I don’t have one. The only place I’ve considered home burned down over fifteen years ago with my parents inside of it. I own a place in upstate New York, but I haven’t been there in five years. I bounce around, keep moving. Home is as alien a concept for me as dry land is for a fish.

  So of course I said yes. I figured I’d gotten off easy. At most some flea bag motel would catch fire. And then it pointed out to me that I was the new Aztec King of the Dead. It wanted me to burn down Mictlan.

  Why, I couldn’t say, but I have some guesses. Mictlan’s a pretty specific thing to want to burn. That’s like asking somebody to burn down Cleveland. The Wind wouldn’t want it to burn unless it had a reason, and there are only a few that I can think of.

  I have no idea how I’m going to accomplish this. May as well have tasked me with burning down Valhalla or Hell.

  But if I don’t do it,
it’s going to come back on me and I’m not looking forward to that fallout.

  I grab my messenger bag out of the trunk and head up the ridiculous staircase into the hotel. Inside it’s clean but shabby. A front desk, some leather club chairs that look like they were salvaged off the side of the road, an air-conditioner that rattles and grinds. The smell of cigarettes and Febreze is heavy in the air. A woman in a brown, bad-fitting polyester suit coat sits slumped on a stool with her head on the counter, snoring.

  I ring the bell next to her head and she startles awake almost falling out of her chair.

  “Whoa, hang on,” I say. “All good. I’m not gonna eat ya, or anything. I just need to get a room.”

  “A room? Oh. Yes. A room.”

  There aren’t many cars in the lot, so I doubt there are a lot of people here. She probably hasn’t seen anyone in hours and probably never does this time of the morning. I pass her a handful of peso notes. “Preferably near the elevator. On a floor without a lot of people on it. Better yet, no people on it.”

  She rubs sleep out of her eyes and counts the notes. “This is too much.”

  “Think of it as a tip.”

  Money talks no matter what country you’re in. She pokes at a computer terminal behind the counter. “There’s nobody on the third floor.”

  “That would be perfect.” She codes a plastic keycard and hands it to me.

  I can feel her staring at me as I cross the lobby to the elevator. I give her a big smile as the doors close.

  Like the lobby, the third floor is clean, but shabby. Cheap carpet, cheap light fixtures. This place is so new there are no ghosts. Nobody’s died here, yet. I can feel a few Wanderers outside, and the ones that have been following me since Tijuana haven’t caught up with me, yet.

  I retrieve a can of red Krylon from my bag, give it a shake and spray a large, circular rune on the floor of the elevator. I press my hand to the floor and send some power into it. I do the same on the outside door, the stairwell door, a couple of spots down the hall and finish up with a few inside the stairwell itself. I paint the same one on the landing that I put on the elevator floor.

  If anybody steps onto this floor through the elevator or the stairwell, I’ll know about it. And if I don’t like their look I have a nasty surprise waiting for them.

  I find my room and unlock it with the key, but I don’t go inside. I’m not going to stay in it. I just want the computer at the front desk to register my using the key. Instead I pick a room at the end of the hall across from the stairwell. I open the door with a spell that pops the lock, but shouldn’t alert the system.

  It might just be paranoia, but my first night in Tijuana some locals decided I looked like an easy mark and busted into my room. Started shooting up the place. It was annoying more than it was dangerous. I took them out easily enough with an electricity spell I know that’s kind of like a big ass Taser. I left them lying unconscious and twitching on the floor of my room.

  That would have been fine if it hadn’t happened again in Hermosillo, only with half a dozen men armed with assault rifles. I think they were trying to kidnap me, or something. That didn’t go so well for them, either. I shot three and gutted the rest with a straight razor. I left an extra big tip for the cleaning staff.

  Ever since then I’ve been taking extra precautions wherever I stay. I always use runes, glyphs and wards near wherever I’m staying, but they’re all low level spells to keep people from paying attention to the room. That doesn’t work so well when you’ve already grabbed somebody’s attention and they tail you to your room. So I’ve added some really unpleasant ones, started sneaking into different rooms, setting traps. Whatever it takes.

  Inside the room I put up other wards, but these ones are less for intruders and more to keep the ghosts out. They’ll show up eventually, and having the Dead watch you while you sleep isn’t nearly as fun as it sounds.

  I sit on the edge of the bed and take stock. I’m so goddamn tired I don’t know what to do next. I need a shower. I need a shave. I need to get into some clothes that aren’t spattered with Bustillo’s blood.

  The shower’s water pressure is almost non-existent, but it’s hot. I let it wash away the grime, sweat and blood. My body is shot through with jade. My chest, stomach, left thigh and down both arms to just past the elbow is a deep, sea green, dull and waxy. It crawls up my neck with thin tendrils and down my legs like varicose veins. My tattoos shimmer in the bathroom light, their colors muted in the stone.

  I have one tattoo on my chest, a circular pattern with three circling crows. They move around inside their prison, shifting position. Looking too closely at them gives me a headache. In a pinch they can be released from my body, pecking and clawing at an enemy in a swarm of black feathers and razor sharp beaks. They’re not real, of course. They’re phantasms, constructs of magic locked away inside my chest.

  Lately, they’ve changed. More menacing somehow, though honestly I didn’t think that was possible. But now I can feel them inside my skin, angry, wanting blood, wanting to be released. That’s never happened before. They’ve always just been another spell.

  Now it feels as though they’re gaining will. Is it the stone that’s doing it? The change itself? I don’t know. I really don’t want to let them loose. Before I knew what they would do, how they operated. Now, I have no idea.

  I get out of the shower and look myself over in the mirror. The last couple of months have not been kind. I’ve barely slept, depending on magic and Adderall to keep me going. I’ve been shot, stabbed, punched. Somebody took a baseball bat to my head in Hermosillo. The magic in my tattoos protected me from the brunt of it but I’m pretty sure one of my molars is loose.

  Somebody else went after me with a broken bottle in Tijuana that scraped along the stone of my chest and cut a shallow furrow up the side of my neck. I had to stitch myself up with dental floss and a needle sterilized with tequila and a lighter after that one. My own damn fault for not packing a surgical kit. The scar is pink and raw. One more in a vast collection.

  But things are finally starting to fall into place. I have a location on Tabitha. She told Bustillo to tell me where she was. That means she wants me to find her. She won’t be moving until I get there.

  One of the things I got out of this arrangement is some of Mictlantecuhtli’s power. This dark, roiling thing that wells up inside me like it wants to tear through my skin. I could use that power to go straight to Mictlantecuhtli’s tomb, I’ve done it before. Once I’m there I could just stab him with the knife. Finish this once and for all. But I probably wouldn’t survive it.

  Every time I tap into that power my body changes faster. Too much of it has gone to stone, already. Much more and the transition will be complete. How many times can I use it before it eats me up entirely? Two times? Three? Or worse, one? What if I get there and before I can stab the sonofabitch the transition completes?

  So I’m doing this the hard way. Finding Tabitha’s the first step. I don’t just want her to make sure I clean up a loose end. I need her because I need a door into Mictlan.

  That’s really the problem. Getting there. Once I’m inside, tracking down Santa Muerte and Mictlantecuhtli can’t be that hard. At least I’ll know what plane of existence they’re in.

  The thing I’m most worried about is moving around without either of them knowing I’m there. I’ve got spells keeping her from tracking me out here, but in there, on their home turf, I don’t know how well they’ll work. I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it.

  For now I just need to sleep.

  ___

  My eyes snap open when the ward on the elevator breaks. Who is it? A hotel guest who’s gotten a room on this floor? Unwanted visitors with guns? I glance at the clock on the nightstand. I’ve been asleep about an hour.

  They couldn’t have waited another couple hours before they came to kill me?

  I close my eyes again and reach out for the rune I painted in the elevator. I can sense six men inside. Vi
ewing through runes is a synesthetic cross-stitch of senses that all meld into one. I can feel the men’s weight, smell the gun oil on them, see the skull-printed face masks, camouflage Kevlar vests. Feel the automatic weapons at the ready.

  Well, we can’t have that.

  I trigger the elevator rune, but I’m too late to catch them all. A column of phosphorescent flame erupts inside the elevator, hitting two of them with a furnace blast of heat. I hear screams, yelling. The blast is hot enough to cook the skin off their bones, but not hot enough to cook off the ammunition. I made that mistake once. Almost died from all the bullets in the air.

  That should buy me a couple minutes as they try to save their buddies. They’ll figure out pretty quickly that there’s nothing left to save. I roll out of bed and throw on my clothes, slide everything but my car keys and the Benelli into my bag as quickly and quietly as I can. I don’t bother to put my shoes on. No time. I step to the door, watching them through the runes.

  The remaining four come down the hall, guns in shaking hands, waiting for something to move so they can shoot it. I can feel their panic, their uncertainty.

  They gather around the room I’m supposed to be in. Three of them flank the door, the fourth fires a burst through it that’s loud and effective for no other reason than he just used an entire magazine on it. The hollow, plywood door blows off its hinges into the room in a shower of splinters. He does a ridiculous roll into the room. What are these guys, F-Troop?

  The other three follow him inside, and I take that as my cue. I slip out of the room and hit the stairwell. One of them comes out and sees me as I’m stepping through the door. He takes a shot, the bullet blowing a hole in the wall as the door closes behind me. I take the steps two at a time.

  I hit the bottom floor as the two of them get into the stairwell. I trigger the rune on the landing with a thought and another column of bright, blue fire burns through them. That’s four down, two to go.

  That slows them down, but not by much. There’s no way I can hit them with the Benelli from here, but I can do something else. I wait until I hear footsteps on the stairs. I put my hand on the metal railing and put as much power as I dare into an old stand-by, a big ass lightning spell.