The Dead Run

by Adam Mansbach

  “You got it.” He slapped Betty hard on the ass. “Your lucky day, sweet cheeks. Get outta here.”

  Betty didn’t waste a second. She put her head down and sprinted. Reached the highway, banked onto the blacktop, and kept going.

  The biker watched her go, then stepped forward and reached for Sherry.

  Before he could lay a finger on her, Galvan’s hand shot out and chopped him across the throat. Knowles gasped and dropped to his knees, clutching at his windpipe. At full strength, Galvan would have crushed it with a blow like that. But full strength was miles off right now. He’d need a goddamn team of Sherpas to find his way back there.

  “Don’t put your fuckin’ mitts on her again,” he told Knowles, looking past the downed biker at the tribe’s beta males, the cowards who’d held him down for Pescador’s machete. “Any of you. Don’t test me.”

  He turned back to Buchanan, demanded his eyes. “Let Sherry go, and I’ll do whatever you want. Give you my word.”

  But it was useless. A bargain without a chip, and an appeal to the better nature of a man whose soul was rotten to the core.

  Besides, muscle wasn’t supposed to think. Just follow orders.

  As muscle yourself, you oughta understand that, Jess.

  Buchanan didn’t bother to reply. He’d turned his attention to the other woman. Sherry’s friend. Galvan couldn’t remember her name for the life of him.

  “Howdy again, doc. Just don’t know when you’re not wanted, do you?” Buchanan slow-grinned and snapped his fingers at the bikers. “Throw her back there, too.”

  He raised his voice and called across the field. “Haul your carcass over here, Nichols. That’s an order. The rest of you, we have no quarrel. Go with God—unless you’d rather go to God.”

  Galvan looked to the Mexican jefe, Fuentes. Watched him paw the ground with the toe of his boot and knew it was all over. Dude had gotten what he wanted; Pescador was good and dead, and his own hands were nice and clean. Maybe Nichols was his buddy, but Fuentes’s men weren’t risking their under-gunned, outmaneuvered asses in a firefight to save the guy. They’d been sloppy—lost their vehicle and watched their appetite for destruction vanish along with it. Just been going through the motions since.

  Nichols knew it, too. He gave Fuentes a curt nod, letting him save face; dropped his head; and started walking toward the van.

  At least I can sit with my daughter, Galvan thought as the bikers massed around them, herding him and the box and Sherry and the doctor toward the steel cage at the vehicle’s rear.

  Nobody touched Sherry—nobody touched any of them. Galvan had taught the dirtbags that much, at least. Showed them he still had a little fight left in him.

  Like any dying animal.

  Buchanan was the last to speak to him, as Galvan boarded the bus and wedged himself onto one of the two narrow, prison-transport-style benches inside—after Ruth and Sherry, with Nichols still to come.

  Aaron Seth’s muscle splayed a mammoth hand over the box, and for an instant Galvan expected him to rip it away. To claim it for his own, as so many had tried to.

  But no. The soldier was disciplined. “Remember,” he intoned, “what’s inside there is keeping all of you alive. Do what you’re told, this doesn’t have to end in blood.”

  And off he strode, in the direction of his car. They watched him through the slivered-open doors: a lone figure framed beneath a swollen orange sun.

  “Eric,” breathed Sherry, her face half lost to shadow. “Eric’s still in there.”

  Ruth Cantwell took her hand. “We’ll get him back.”

  Galvan was too spent to ask. He could feel the adrenaline withdrawing from his system, the pain it served to blot out flooding back.

  Nichols piled in last, and a pair of Natives locked the doors. The four of them were plunged into near-total darkness, the only relief arriving via slim rays of sunset filtering in through the distant front windshield, past the half-dozen True Natives sprawled across the front rows and the crosshatching of the cage.

  The compartment’s twin fold-down benches were narrow, but Galvan’s knees still touched Nichols’s across from him. Sherry leaned into her father’s chest and held the doctor’s hand across the aisle.

  The box sat on Galvan’s lap. He could feel the heartbeat faintly, like the tick of a clock.

  Or the tick of a bomb.

  The engine turned over, and the van pulled out. A few seconds later, the driver cranked up the radio, and some shit-kicking good ol’ boy started warbling a tale of whiskey, guns, remorse. The Natives whooped and sang along. Monitoring the chitchat of their captives did not seem to be of paramount concern.

  Luckily for them, Galvan didn’t have a thought in his head worth sharing. The storm that was coming was coming. You couldn’t plan for it, any more than you could map out a strategy for avoiding lightning.

  At least, Galvan couldn’t. Not now.

  Sherry pressed herself against him harder, as if wanting to climb into his rib cage and hide there, and Galvan held her close. Her terror was a palpable thing.

  Galvan remembered it well. Fucking Melinda. What a shit show that woman’s life was. If he’d been anything in his life worth being proud of, it was a rock for Sherry. A port in the storm.

  For as long as he’d been able.

  Please, Jesus, let me be that for her again. She doesn’t deserve this. I’m the one to blame . . .

  The chain of events might have been unclear, but the fact was unassailable; he felt it in his bones. Something he’d done, something he’d failed to do, had put her here, in the middle of this hell.

  He wasn’t Sherry’s rock anymore. He was her hard place.

  He couldn’t live with that.

  Couldn’t die like that, either.

  The only thing to do was make it right.

  Yeah, Jess. There’s an idea.

  He hugged her harder. Started to whisper Everything’s going to be all right, but the words caught in his throat, and Galvan swallowed them back down. His mind went blank. The van chugged on, the silence and the music growing more oppressive with each second.

  Galvan squeezed his eyes shut and reopened them.

  “Anybody know any good knock-knock jokes?” he asked, seized with a morbid need to lighten the mood.

  “Cut the shit,” Nichols growled, as if he’d been waiting for the opportunity to pounce. “Do you have any idea what’s about to happen?”

  “Is it gonna come as a major shock if I say I got no fuckin’ idea?” He rested his head against the back wall and sighed. “Enlighten me, huckleberry.”

  The sheriff mirrored Galvan’s posture, skull meeting metal with a dull thud. “Something bad.”

  “You mean before or after this Aaron Seth peckerwood eats his Happy Meal and turns into a god?”

  He rubbed Sherry’s shoulder, suddenly self-conscious. “Pardon my language, sweetheart.”

  Cantwell sprang to her feet, head bowed beneath the low ceiling. “Let me see it.”

  Galvan pulled the box closer. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, doc.” He studied her in the weak, shifting light. “Why?”

  “I need to see it to believe.”

  “Trust me. Or ask Nichols.”

  The sheriff nodded.

  Cantwell sat down heavily, as if pushed by invisible hands. “It’s all true, then,” she muttered. “The legends. The Virgin Army.”

  “Oh yeah, they’re real as fuck. Take it from me.”

  She shook her head slowly. “It isn’t possible.”

  Galvan stared into the blackness, bored with this conversation. “And yet, I spent the day watching them tear my friends apart. You got anything useful to add here, doc? A plan, maybe? A real good knock-knock joke? Or are we just making chitchat?”

  The doctor pogoed up again, unable to stay still. “Des
troy it.”

  “Nope.”

  “Let me.”

  “You willing to die? Because you’re talking about the only thing keeping us alive right now.”

  “I am if it means stopping—”

  “You willing to take us all with you?”

  They both looked at Sherry, and the doctor fell silent.

  “What about eating it?” Cantwell said a beat later, a decibel softer. “That’s what Seth will do.”

  Galvan shook his head. “I’ve seen what’s behind that door. I’d rather die.”

  Nobody asked.

  Good.

  “All right, here’s the plan,” said Galvan a moment later, making it up as he went along. “The way I understand it, I gotta hand the fuckin’ thing over to Seth, directly. I’m the Righteous Messenger.”

  I think.

  “That puts me close enough to kill him. Which happens to be something I’m good at.”

  If I can retain consciousness that long.

  “And if Seth dies, all bets are off. It’ll be fuckin’ chaos, and they won’t care about us anymore.”

  Probably.

  “With a little bit of luck, we grab a few guns and ride off into the sunset.”

  Nichols dropped his hands onto his thighs, bowed out his elbows. “That’s your plan.”

  Galvan shrugged. “Yeah. More or less.”

  “Stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “You got a better one?”

  “As a matter of fact,” the sheriff said, “I might.”

  CHAPTER 44

  The hour of reckoning was upon him, and Aaron Seth could only hope he was prepared. He had consumed neither food nor drink for three days, as his father had instructed—so that his ego might recede and the passage be eased. He had shed the blood of an impure man and immersed himself in the blood of a pure woman.

  It was the proper day of the month. A harvest moon, fat and crimson, was mounting the horizon. To compound the date’s auspiciousness, it was the proper year—the final year. The same blood-pregnant moon had presided over Cucuy’s ascendance, precisely a half millennium ago.

  There would never be another chance. If the god’s powers did not pass to him this night, they would pass beyond man’s grasp forever. What that meant, Seth did not know; Cucuy had never seen fit to specify the horror failure would bring. Perhaps Tezcatlipoca would return from exile and slake his thirst for revenge. Perhaps the gods would reverse their abdication and history would circle back on itself, the New World transformed into the Old.

  Seth gazed out the tinted window of his chauffeured town car, and a reverent shudder passed through him as the Rock of Tezcatlipoca loomed into view. This was the holiest of sites, described by the deity in the very first of his great decrees, when the world was young and man had not yet learned to worship—much less joust with—the divine.

  Find a great spear, cast from the heavens into the earth, the sorcerer-god had commanded the man who would soon found the Line of Priests. Upon its blade, mortify your flesh, so you may come to know me.

  The holy man—a simple farmer, until that day—had wandered the desert for weeks, growing weaker and purer, the veil separating the worlds lifting a little at a time. Finally, in a hallucinatory daze, he had found this place, sighted the great, jagged pillar of quartz from afar and prostrated himself before it. The razor-sharp rock drew his blood as a quill draws ink, and the god’s voice filled his head. The priest wrote the words down feverishly, until his veins would yield no more—and yet, when the communion ended, he found his strength renewed. He returned to his village clutching the instructions for a great temple, one that would cost thousands of hours and hundreds of lives.

  To build it was to build an empire.

  The priest would not live to see the project completed. Nor would his son, groomed from infancy to be initiated into the sorcerer-god’s mysteries.

  The village had grown into a capital city by the time his grandson consecrated the house of worship—which now doubled as the seat of government. Its people were no longer land tillers and craftsmen, but warriors and politicians, savvy in the arts of death and manipulation.

  On that holy day, the preserved body of the first priest was buried deep beneath the temple, alongside his son, there to await the Final Days.

  The first of a great and noble line.

  It would preside over the Old World’s fall—throw off the tyranny of gods and rise to heights of power that the pious men slumbering in the temple’s bowels could never have imagined.

  And it would hide itself among the ashes, as the New World rose. Disappear from sight. Pull unseen strings. Bide time. Double and redouble its strength beneath a cloak of silence.

  Until now.

  The New World had grown old. Rotten. It, too, had to fall. And once more, the sacred Line of Priests would be there to usher in a new age.

  Third time’s the charm.

  The car eased to a standstill, and Seth unfolded himself from the backseat, closed the door gently, and stepped into the warm night air. Arrayed in a circle around the rock, clad in white vestments and holding unlit torches, were the elders of his flock, the eighteen men whose belief in Seth had endured the longest, burned the brightest. They had earned the privilege of witnessing the ceremony. Seth greeted each one, clasping the men’s hands in solemn recognition. These were his elect—bankers and bakers, lawyers and truckers—and while the mysteries of the priesthood were for the priests alone, these men understood the weight of the occasion, had labored for years to bring this day about.

  In the days to come, Seth would lean heavily on the loyalty of such individuals. Fear was a poor substitute for belief; one shepherd was worth a hundred soldiers.

  These men would teach the world how to worship him.

  Communing with them quelled Seth’s nerves, and he lingered longer with each one as he moved around the circle. To his consternation, the tranquillity he wished to feel at this portentous moment remained elusive. His aides assured him that the Messenger’s arrival was imminent, and no aspect of the ceremony had been left to chance, but Seth found it impossible to find peace within himself.

  Perhaps that was appropriate. The human condition was a churning stew of fear and worry. He would not be human for much longer, Seth thought as he shook the final hand and turned out from the circle. He ought to embrace the feeling while he could.

  The decision to accept the fear banished it, as was so often the case.

  “Fire,” Seth said softly, and the torches of the elect flared up. The light fell softly on the outer circle of guests: the pure women of Seth’s flock. They, too, wore white, and sat scattered among the lesser rock shelves, amidst the outcroppings of quartz that littered the plain. Unlike the elect, they knew nothing of the ceremony’s significance. They were mere girls, lambs among the world’s lions—the chaste forever chased, as he had often sermonized—but Seth liked to keep them close. Their presence energized him; he had sustained himself for decades on the purity of such creatures.

  As had his father.

  The sacred rock glowed pink in the firelight, seeming to pulse with energy. Seth stared at the plateau before it.

  Where he would soon stand, a beating heart in his hand.

  Like his father before him.

  If Seth understood correctly—and Cucuy preferred to dole out history and explanation and command in discrete, perplexing fragments, so it was possible that Seth did not—the original journey from the temple to the rock had been a test. The power of Tezcatlipoca resided in the vessel, but Cucuy could not assume it until he had proved his mettle, until he stood at the world’s holiest site. Seth had long puzzled over that. Why would the god test his servant, when failure would ensure his own demise? What compelled him to do so?

  And if the journey was meant to be a test, why was Seth not the one taking it? />
  That, he had pondered even longer.

  There were only two possibilities. Either he was too important to risk, or he was unequal to the task.

  It was a moot point now. In his boundless wisdom, and through his peerless sorcery, Cucuy had fashioned the Righteous Messenger into a double, a doppelgänger. Empowered an expendable man to assume the role.

  Scores of them, Seth reflected, had not even made it out of the temple, the hearts dying in their hands, and the Messengers dying at the priest’s.

  Perhaps the heart’s chaperone did not matter—only its journey. Certainly, Cucuy’s insistence that the vessel pass from the temple to the rock in the same manner as before had turned a simple task grueling—delayed this blessed day by years.

  Seth’s father had set off along the secret, treacherous path with four soldiers—forbidden to bear his burden, instructed only to ward off interlopers, wild beasts, evil men drawn to the power of the heart. Their fates even Cucuy claimed to be unable to recall, but by the time he collapsed of exhaustion, he was alone.

  A band of traders had found him—marauding nomadic tribesmen, the empire’s scourge—and the priest promised them great power if they conveyed him to the holy place.

  Wisely, they agreed. Their descendants remained in Cucuy’s employ still. De la Mar, the man who had been assigned to meet the Messenger today, was replaying his ancestors’ errand, though he knew nothing of it. Of them.

  Any more than he knew why he could not intercept the Messenger earlier.

  Or why he’d been instructed to kill any companions the man retained.

  The marionette does not see the strings.

  The sound of an automobile brought Seth out of his reverie, and he looked up to see a black van rumbling into view. The rock was miles from any road, any settlement, any incorporated land; this could only be the Federale’s vehicle. After a few seconds, Buchanan’s sedan appeared, behind it. The anticipated escort of True Natives was nowhere to be seen.

  No matter. Seth could sense the closeness of the heart.

  He turned on his heel, the gold-trimmed white robe flaring around his ankles. Strode toward the altar and took his place on the rock shelf at the base of the great spear.