Hungry Ghosts

by Stephen Blackmoore

“Why not?”

  “Because they’re not us.” She ducks into the hole and the blackness swallows her up. Behind me the cars are speeding closer, throwing up a wake of shattered bone behind them, the engines a deafening roar.

  I don’t know what I’m doing, but I know I don’t want to deal with a bunch of post-Apocalyptic cosplayers with war wagons. I jump after her, but a line shoots out from one of the cars and wraps around my ankle, biting deep into the skin, pulling taut. I hit the ground about a foot short of the entrance and get yanked back as the car fishtails into a U-turn.

  More trees go over, the car dragging me along and back onto the road. I pull together a small fire spell that I hope won’t cost me too much power and tip me over the edge. A pinpoint of the line holding me begins to smolder.

  It’s hard to concentrate when you’re being dragged across a field of broken bones by a car that looks like it should be driven by a nightmare Barney Rubble, but I make do. The spot begins to glow, then flame. As the line burns I can smell cooking meat. Of course. This stuff is made out of flesh.

  The car fishtails again, whipping me around just as the flame burns through the line, severing it. Momentum shoots me across the ground, and I skip over the skull landscape like a rock across a pond. Where my skin hasn’t turned to jade it’s getting the mother of all road rashes.

  I hit one of the trees hard, fight back the dizziness and pain. I pull myself up onto my knees, hope to Christ I haven’t broken any bones. Blood seeps into my eyes, the skin on the back of my left hand is shredded. I grasp for the shotgun over my shoulder, but it’s gone. I look around wildly for it as the cars circle me, closing in like sharks. I might not be able to kill them with it, but I bet I can make their day suck.

  I find it about five feet away from me and leap for it, but one of the cars peels off from the pack toward me to cut me off. I try to move out of the way but I’m too slow and maybe even a little concussed.

  It veers off at the last moment, missing me by inches and knocking over a tree. For a brief second I think maybe I’ll get out of this okay. But then somebody in the passenger seat reaches out and swings a massive bone club at me and clocks me over the head. The blow throws me backward hard into the ground and everything goes dark.

  When my friend Alex, whom I’d known since he was a kid using magic to run penny-ante scams on normals, had his soul consumed and replaced by the same man who’d killed my parents, I put a bullet in his brain.

  I told myself he was already gone. That this wasn’t my friend. This was some monster using his face. I didn’t believe it.

  When I saw him again months later I thought I was going insane. He couldn’t be a ghost. Ghosts are remnants of souls, leftovers, images. His had been eaten. No soul, no ghost.

  It turned out that it was Mictlantecuhtli choosing his face to get to me, his dark power running through my veins. I kicked him out, blocked him from my thoughts, from contacting me, from even knowing where I was. I pushed until I couldn’t hear him anymore, and then I locked him out with more spells inked into my skin.

  I didn’t push hard enough.

  “You look like hell,” Alex says from the driver’s seat of my Cadillac. It’s night in Mictlan. I can smell the dry, desiccated air, feel the strange heat, the smell of flesh and ash and bone blasted by searing winds.

  There is no moon in Mictlan and so the only light is from the Caddy’s headlights casting strange shadows along the bone-paved road to who knows where. This has happened before, me being in the car with him like this. Not quite a dream, not quite reality.

  Of course, it’s not Alex. And it shouldn’t even be Mictlantecuhtli.

  “I kicked you out,” I say. “And barred the door. Why are you here?”

  “What, no hello? No, hey buddy, how ya doin’? I’m hurt. Come on, man. It’s been months.”

  “It’s the power I have from you, isn’t it? And being here in Mictlan. That triggered something.”

  “And they said you were stupid,” he says.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Why are any of us here, really?”

  I don’t bother answering him.

  “No sense of humor,” he says after the silence becomes uncomfortably long. “I’m here because you’re here. I’m not Mictlantecuhtli. I’m your idea of a piece of him stapled onto your own soul. It’s all very meta.”

  “I didn’t think it was possible, but you’re just as big a pain in my ass as Mictlantecuhtli. So I’m talking to myself? Awesome.” Mictlantecuhtli was always like this with me, so I guess it makes sense that this piece of him has the same personality.

  “Sort of? Not really? Think of me as fake Mictlantecuhtli. Mictlantecuhtli Lite. I’m just the piece left over in your head. Stuck in here with your self-loathing and shitty self-confidence. All the death god with fewer calories. Fake me, real you. After a while we’ll just be us. Make sense?”

  I rub my temple where I got hit. My head is starting to hurt and I’m not sure if it’s this conversation or the bone I took to my skull. I’m assuming I’m unconscious and this is all going on in my head, so feeling pain is probably a sign I’ll be waking up soon.

  “Not really. Is this the same thing as what Tabitha has with Santa Muerte?” I’m still having trouble figuring out what Tabitha really is. Is she Santa Muerte? Is she Tabitha? If what he says is happening to me is also happening to her, then the answer is yes.

  Tabitha told me that she and Santa Muerte had merged but she has her own opinions, her own thoughts. She was connected to Santa Muerte, had her voice in her head, until I cut it off with the handcuff.

  I knew Tabitha had a chunk of Santa Muerte in her soul, and I wasn’t entirely sure she had any of her own. Santa Muerte killed her to make her avatar, after all.

  He frowns. “Pretty much, yeah. I’m a little sketchy on the details. I don’t know everything real me knows. A lot, but not all of it. I’ve got holes. But if you’re asking if she’s her own woman? Yes.”

  My head is really starting to throb. I press the heels of my hands against my eyes. Christ, when I wake up this is gonna suck. “Okay, so why are you here now?”

  “At the moment you being unconscious is the only way I can talk to you. The longer you’re here in Mictlan, the faster we’ll sync up. Eventually I’ll just be a voice in your head. And then we’ll be one mind. Anyway, I wanted to talk before you kill real me in the hopes that you’ll flush out fake me and stop turning into a yard ornament.”

  “Figured that out, huh?”

  “I’m in your head,” he says. “Mictlantecuhtli Lite, remember? Everything you know, I know.”

  “You gonna try to stop me?”

  “Well, duh. We both know the second I can connect to the real me outside of your skull, I’ll do it in a heartbeat.”

  “Fantastic.”

  “I think so,” he says. “But that’s not really why I’m here.”

  “Oh? Do tell.”

  “Quetzalcoatl.”

  There’s no reason for playing coy or trying to deny I know what he’s talking about. If this piece of Mictlantecuhtli’s soul knows about my plan to kill the real Mictlantecuhtli, then he knows about my arrangement with Quetzalcoatl. “I did make a deal with him. And I try to keep my promises.”

  He laughs, a braying, mule-like guffaw that goes on so long he starts to wheeze. “Oh, that’s rich. Promises. You.” He wipes a tear from his eye. “Have you stopped to think what burning down Mictlan would do?”

  I look out at the bone road speeding by in the headlights. “Raise the property values?”

  “You’ll destroy hundreds of thousands of souls.”

  I stare at him. How had that not occurred to me? The answer comes to me immediately. Because I didn’t want it to. I’ve been thinking of any souls I might run into as the same as ghosts. Just remnants that haven’t moved on to their respective afterlives. Only this is their afterlife.

  I came here to save myself, exact revenge for my sister’s murder. Fully prepared to take ou
t anything that got in my way. But this? I burn down Mictlan, I destroy everything in it. I destroy those souls forever. This is mass murder.

  But if I don’t burn down Mictlan, then when I get out of here Quetzalcoatl’s going to make my life a living hell. Scratch that. If I get out of here.

  “Shit.”

  “And here I thought you didn’t have a conscience,” he says.

  “What the hell is Quetzalcoatl’s deal, anyway? Why’s he got such a hate on for this place?”

  “Oh, the usual. Jealousy, ambition, he’s a dick.”

  “Sounds like there’s a story there.”

  “There always is.”

  “Christ, I hate talking to you.”

  The car shudders. I know what that means. The last time I had this vision the car crashed, and I woke up covered in blood, in a storage room of an electronics store, a couple of demons arguing about whether they should eat me or not.

  “I think you’re going to have to wait on that story,” he says. “I’m sure I’ll see you again soon, the next time you get the shit kicked out of you.”

  The car rocks as something unseen hammers it from the side, it goes into a skid. Mictlantecuhtli pulls hard on the wheel, looking suitably surprised. Is he really, I wonder, or is it just my brain’s interpretation of things?

  The car wobbles, hits something in the road and goes end over end like something out of a bad, seventies TV show. Whatever. I’ve been here before. I sit back and enjoy the rollercoaster.

  Because whatever is happening here, it’s going to suck so much more when I wake up.

  ___

  I come to, my right eye snapping open, my left too crusted over with blood from a cut on my forehead to do more than twitch. I’m lying on the bone ground staring up at the ceiling of some kind of tent that, it takes me a moment to realize, is stitched together panels of human skin.

  Where the jade hasn’t covered me, bruises and scrapes have. There’s a goose-egg of a knot on my forehead where I took that femur to my skull. It takes a few tries to sit up and when I finally make it I wish I hadn’t.

  “Manuel,” I say, seeing the dead Bustillo sitting cross-legged in front of me, skin sallow, the upper left side of his head from the cheekbone up sheared away from when I shot him with the Browning. And he ended up here. Huh. Guess he really is a true believer. “You’re looking good.”

  He smiles, a sick rictus that only goes up on one side, his push-broom mustache twitching. “Better than you, I bet,” he says.

  “Yeah, I get that a lot. Little surprised to see you here, though. Shouldn’t you be a little further back in line for your journey to the Promised Land?”

  I’m also surprised to see I’m still breathing and haven’t been tied up. My bag is missing, as is the shotgun, and I can’t feel the weight of Mictlantecuhtli’s blade in my pocket. But nobody’s shanked me so far, so I’ll call that a win.

  “I’m told it normally takes a few years to get to this point,” Bustillo says, “but as you can see there is a certain lax enforcement of protocol. Quite the cottage industry has sprung up at the gate from Mitla to get souls this far. And I am resourceful.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt that.”

  We sit under a makeshift pavilion constructed from long bones wrapped in tendons and flaps of skin for a tarp. Around us are bone buildings that look like they were put together by a toddler with a poor understanding of architecture. They have no doors, windows are thin, crooked slits.

  And then there’s the twisted pyramid to Huitzilopochtli.

  Up close it’s even more messed up than I thought. The stones aren’t just poorly cut and ill-fitting, they sag as though they’re made less out of rock and more out of Jell-O. A thick green slurry drips from the cracks and it has a faint but undeniable stink to it. But it’s the perspective that really does the trick. Like an Escher drawing it seems to twist in on itself, angles folding into other angles that don’t make sense.

  “You probably don’t want to look at that too closely,” Bustillo says. “It gives even me a headache. And I don’t have much of a head left.”

  I tear my eyes away from it, turn back to Bustillo. Behind him I can see men and women, some in far worse shape than Bustillo here, wandering around the area. Some look lost, aimless, others are tending to the bone vehicles. Old and young, some killed violently, others from disease or old age. Most of these people look modern, but a few are wearing loincloths or skirts and simple cloaks.

  A few wear the armor of Aztec Jaguar or Eagle warriors, macuahuitls, wooden swords with flat slabs of razor sharp obsidian embedded in the sides, hanging from their sides. I even spy a few men wearing dented Spanish cuirasses. Every one of these soldiers shows the wounds that killed them.

  I scan the crowd for Tabitha. She should stand out like a neon sign, but I can’t see her anywhere. I guess that hole she jumped into really could keep them out. “Quite the crew you got here. Kind of surprised, though. Shouldn’t the warriors and soldiers be with Huitzilopochtli? Riding with him to the sun?”

  He cocks an eyebrow in surprise. “You’ve done your homework.”

  “When you take a trip to Hell it helps to read the brochure. How’d you pull this together? You’ve been here, what, all of two days?”

  “Has it been?” Bustillo says. “Seems much longer than that. Years, even. I think time moves differently here. Or we perceive it differently.” He stands and holds his arm out to help me up. I’m wary, I did put a bullet in the guy’s head after all. He obviously wants something. Otherwise why not just shank me while I was unconscious? Finally, I take his hand.

  I stand, wincing from the pain in my left leg. It’s not broken but it’s pretty banged up. My left knee is swollen, making it hard to bend, and the bottom of my pants leg is stiff with blood. I wipe at my eye, clearing some of the crusted blood away, but it’s still too swollen to open.

  “Some of these people have been here more than half a millennium,” he says. “Up the mountains is Izmictlan Apochcalolca, the blinding fog. It’s their final challenge before they reach Chicunamictlan. This is as far as any souls have gotten in the last five hundred years. They enter the mists, and they’re spit back out. Mad, lessened. Every time they try to pass through it takes more from them. So many have stopped trying or have not made the attempt at all out of fear.” He walks toward the row of bone vehicles and I follow him, limping.

  “Isn’t that the point of a challenge? That it isn’t easy?”

  I catch the souls giving me furtive glances. Anger in their eyes, fear. I know they’re not ghosts, or they would have eaten me already, but I don’t know what they’re capable of. I shift my weight and feel a sharp pain in my ribs. Well, I know some of what they’re capable of.

  “This is beyond that,” Bustillo says. “No one has gotten through for as long as anyone can remember. It seems once the Aztecs lost to the Spanish everything shut down. Can you imagine how frustrating it must be for them? To be stuck here for centuries knowing that on the other side of those mountains are their families, their friends. Some of them have lost all hope. But I’ve given it back to them.”

  “Yeah?” I can see where this is going and I don’t like it. “How’d you pull that off?”

  We come to one of the vehicles. It’s actually more disturbing up close like this than seeing it barreling down on me. It’s vaguely car-like. Four wheels, a chassis, seats, steering. But that’s where the similarities stop. Like the trajinera Tabitha created it looks like it’s built from some child’s nightmare TinkerToy set.

  The tires are round, more or less, with femur spokes and flat slabs of bone for treads. The seats are rough frameworks covered in flaps of leathery skin and a raised platform in the back holds the driver’s seat and the steering wheel. Skulls are perched all along the sides. For the life of me I can’t see how the hell it runs.

  “I told them you were coming. The reincarnation of Mictlantecuhtli who will bind this world together again.”

  “You know that’s no
t technically true, right?”

  “It’s true enough for them.”

  “Let me guess. They think I’m going to lead them out of here. Over the mountains and through the mists to grandmother’s house we go? I was wondering why you hadn’t killed me. I get you through the mists, you’re hailed as the good guy. And then it’s an eternity of blowjobs for the guy who saved the souls of thousands of desperate dead.”

  “You catch on quick.”

  “And if I don’t want to do it?”

  He pulls Mictlantecuhtli’s blade from his pocket and holds it in his palm as though he’s weighing it. “Then you don’t get this back.”

  “I was wondering where that went.” I figured he had it the moment I laid eyes on him. It’s an interesting threat. He’s not saying he’ll take my skin. We both know he can’t use it anymore. And he’s not threatening to kill me, either. I wonder if he thinks I can’t be killed here. I could make a play for it, but to be honest I’m not sure it would work. I’m limping, I’m slow and even if I can get it from him, what about all the rest of these people? It’s not like I’ve got anywhere to run.

  “I assume you have the rest of my stuff.”

  Bustillo reaches into the vehicle and lifts out my messenger bag, hands it to me. I look through it. Everything’s there as far as I can tell, the powders, the charms. Even the Browning and my pocket watch are in there along with a box of bullets and a couple of loaded magazines. All of this had been sitting in the trunk of the Caddy for over a year. It’s good to have it back. I’d hate to lose it again.

  “No shotgun?”

  “Sorry. It got run over by one of the cars. It didn’t survive.”

  That’s impressive. Benellis are tough. But looking at the bone wheels on these cars I can believe it. Pity. It was a nice shotgun. I got it off a guy in Tijuana who tried to ventilate me with it. But like Tabitha said, shotgun’s gonna do sweet fuck-all out here.

  “So aside from threatening to not give me back my toy, what makes you think I’m going to help you?”

  “We both know you’re going that way, anyway,” Bustillo says. “And when you get where you’re going you’re going to need the knife. We both win.”