by Jay Smith
He sighed, like a tired day care worker with a constipated toddler. "You lack imagination so I want you to experience what I did that day. The heat stripped me of my burdens. I stopped the drinking and the cocaine that day. When I found the angel’s tears, they filled me with new purpose. I finally had the means to build something that could last forever."
"When you say ‘angel’s tears’ you mean jewels of some sort."
"Diamonds, hidden in the dead man’s coat."
Horus went on for another minute or so talking in his own fancy language about events that, if true, were more about luck than destiny. How Horus came to be at that part of the desert at the right time to find $20 million in stolen diamonds hidden in the lining of a thief’s dinner jacket will remain a mystery. He conveniently lost all recollection of the time after finding the angel’s tears, claiming that he "emerged from the darkness of memory" next to his car.
Through most of the story I considered the likelihood that Horus was going to march me out into the desert and leave me there face down, ass up for the buzzards.
"My empire was born on angel tears spilled in the desert," he concluded. "Since you read the book, you know the ceremony that goes with that gift."
"I forget. Fan dancing?"
In fact, I knew the books described how, every three months, Lord Bunting-upon-Stropf visited the desert and sacrifices two citizens – a virgin and a criminal – to the gods. If I was going to do anything about my imminent demise, it would have to be soon. Dawn would arrive soon over the eastern peaks. I had no idea if he meant the fictional world in which he lived or the business empire. It was all-too clear not that he considered them the same thing. He kept peering skyward like a kid waiting on his first fireworks show. His smile broadened, revealing his huge, white teeth to the sound of propellers whirring in the distance. The sound was far away, but it made Horus’ straighten up and scan the gray-blue sky.
"We are five miles from the nearest road, Winston. Nine miles more from any human settlement. The sound you are hearing is approximately fifteen seconds old. When overhead, you’re hearing an airplane nine seconds in the past while the real one is already more than a mile further along in the sky."
"And the sun’s light is eight minutes old. I do have a college degree, Alan. I’d prefer you just got on with whatever it is instead of talking me to…"
A flash of movement caught my attention in the distance out of the corner of my eye. A half-second later, I heard a low THOOM as dirt and dust bloomed from the desert floor perhaps a quarter mile away. As I tried to make sense of what I was seeing, another flash of light colors fell from the sky and struck the ground to the right of the first. A third struck a little closer to the left of the other two. Every few seconds for the next minute another mass struck the desert floor with a thunderous THOOM closer and louder than the last, raising a wall of dust that filtered the sun’s first rays as it peaked the mountains. A dozen impacts in all. The last few shapes fell through a wall of dirt creating tiny vortices and trails before striking the ground to burst in a fine pink mist. They were close enough to see.
Bodies.
Random. Burst sacks of meat. People.
"Twelve tears," Horus sighed.
The radio squawked again and one of the henchmen muttered something in reply.
I don't remember screaming, but I remember my throat being raw. Maybe it was the dry air. I do remember turning on Horus and grabbing for him before one of his goons hit me in the chest with an open palm and put me in the dirt. Even before I went down, the world twisted and spun around. A small black dot raced across the blue sky, without lights that usually mark the passage of an aircraft.
The only question that mattered. "Why?" I propped myself up on elbows, noticing the two goons lurking nearby ready to kick.
"This isn’t a game, Winston. It isn’t even a business. This is a movement. I don’t expect you to get it. Everything I’ve learned about you in the last few weeks tells me Parker just sent you here to tie up my assets and test my principles. I want you to know your place here. I also want you to understand mine."
I didn’t understand most of that, particularly the testing of "principles" – I was too alarmed to argue.
"The next time you cross me, it won’t be a limo ride into the desert. You’ll watch the sunrise from two miles high as you drop through the air to become my next angel tear."
The wind carried the dust into the desert toward the horizon. I could make out a hand and forearm rising from the brush. A knee. A sneaker tangled in a dead bush. The threat meant nothing to me. It made no sense to threaten me that way. I expected the Shadows to come for the souls of the dead, but thought maybe the sunshine kept them away or maybe the bodies weren’t real. Maybe, I thought, these "angel tears" were just another trick or illusion in a world built on an agreement of lies. That had to be it, I decided. My own tears turned to vapor as soon as they formed. My eyes burned.
A big hand clenched my shoulder and a deep voice warned me "Don’t move."
I hadn’t planned to. Car doors opened and the limo engine growled to life behind me.
"I’ll leave you here to wonder who didn’t learn that lesson soon enough. Who knows? You might know a few faces out there in the dirt."
"Assuming they still have them," the deep voice added before removing the hand from my shoulder.
By the time I realized they were leaving me behind, the limo kicked up a dirt storm turning back toward the road. My Magic Book, ID and wallet were with one of Horus’ goons. Anything else that might be helpful to me remained in my suite.
~
I walked among the unburied dead in the eerie quiet of the morning. I hoped to find crash dummies or stunt corpses in the desert. I even considered the idea that a dozen people might even jump up along the hundred-yard stretch and yell "April Fool!"
But they didn’t. The first body I came across had landed head-first creating a bloody mess as most of its insides exited the body through the inseam, legs buried into the earth in an "S" shape. The horror kept me numb enough to keep walking and past the next crater. I couldn’t make out much detail beyond the thin, black arms of maybe a teenager rising from a pool of blood.
I kept walking. If I stopped, I’d fall to my knees and throw up maybe lose my mind. The wrists I could see each had bruises indicating they were bound tight for a long time, by either rope or cloth or handcuffs. The clothing didn’t fall into one group of people or even climate. There were a couple of suits, but also a few track suits, jeans and polo shirts. Most were white and male, some young and some middle aged. I can only see them as piles of matter containing clues, like I was figuring them out by a pile of laundry and personal items.
My wandering took me past all the bodies and I was grateful I didn't know any of them. At least, most of them were too badly mangled for me to identify them at all. But once I reached what I thought was the end, I turned and found a small crater at the top of a small sand rise. I'd missed one.
~
I don’t know if Nadeim Parker was the first out of the plane or even the first to hit the ground. She landed furthest from the limo to the east and on a shallow slope with a southern face. I followed a trail of blood and upturned sand from the crater she left on initial impact down to her remains in a dry stream bed about a hundred feet away. There wasn’t much left to see or make sense of except a rag doll parody of human anatomy splayed across a ditch with as much of her insides outside her uniform as her outsides leaving a trail down the hill. I recognized the Ebetha Resort uniform but not the sneakers. I couldn’t identify her by the left side of her face, but the right was more or less untouched.
In my nightmares I see a group of Horus’ minions waiting for Nadeim after work. She exchanged her sensible shoes for sneakers to make the walk home like a lot of people do and probably ended up in a van with the same people who came hunting for Parker’s secret stash at the cabana. It wasn’t clear when she died and very she had so many slashes, holes and missin
g pieces that an execution before the fall would be hard to prove …or disprove. Why Nadeim and the other eleven had to come to that place at that time remains a mystery to me. Surely Nadeim was part of Horus’ warning.
Looking through the garden of the self-buried dead in the first place rather than chase down the limo was no more logical than seeing the dead stand up from their impact craters in a fog of dust and dried blood to turn toward me, twisted and broken like melted plastic figures. One short of a dozen ghosts stood silent in the morning sun between me and the highway. The hot wind blew the dust over me it passed through the ghosts, obscuring their form and drying them out until the remains broke apart and blew away in the breeze. I covered my face with my shirt and kept moving forward through the storm toward the highway, toward two sets of headlights approaching from the west, bouncing over the rough terrain as they moved quickly toward me.
I recall falling forward at one point, gasping for air, gagging on my own dry throat as the wind left a fine layer of grit over me.
I thought I heard my name from the direction of the two old pick-ups now parked around where the limo left me to rot. Men leaped over the sides of each while others handed out the kind of tools used to flip a house or storm a local castle. These men wore the uniform of the migrant worker – comfortable clothes in cotton and denim, worn from months or even years or real work. I noticed they all wore the same construction boots – new and shiny – probably handed out at the start of the job. One truck contained the familiar deep, leathery tan of Central American farmers. The other carried five large – cartoonishly large – bald white men in overalls without shirts. Each one carried a comic book's worth of artwork across their flesh. They wore the same new boots and an expression that judged everything and anything that ever was to be quite unsatisfactory.
"Winz-tone Cay-ZEE! WIN-zone KAY-zee! Where you at?" A shaved polar bear called out from the bed of the skinhead truck. He repeated his call as fellow skinheads set out into the killing field with their shovels and plastic bags. A small back hoe rolled off a trailer behind one of the trucks.
Rubbing the dirt out of my eyes, I stumbled toward the big man calling my name. I took note of the fact that every man I came across had a pistol on one hip and a machete on the other. Each one wore goggles on their forehead and electrician gloves. I passed a man carrying a power saw and another with a cylindrical clear backpack full of some liquid connected by hose to a fire nozzle that he carried like a rifle in parade march. No one took notice of me as they went to work, teaming up around each corpse discussing something I couldn't understand.
"WINZ-TON CAY-ZEE! YOU COME HERE PLEASE! NOW!"
He pointed to me and then spun his arm around to tell me to hurry up and join him at the truck. I staggered faster and he laughed as I stumbled into the side.
"You sit here. Not to run away, yes?"
"Yes. I'll just sit here." The words came hard and rough as my throat burned again. I picked a shady spot that smelled like vodka sweat and kimchee farts.
"Good. Very good." He smiled and rubbed a dirty handkerchief over the swastika tattooed across his bald head. "You no Jew, yes?"
I coughed. "Not a Jew, no. Is that a problem?"
"Good you not a Jew. You look like Jew."
I had nothing to say to that, so I tried to count all the blackheads on the one side of his bulbous nose. He was the foreman of the Nazi gravedigger squad and shouted in Russian to some tough lads sharing a long plastic tarp over their shoulders. They sneered back at him and spat in Russian and kept walking. The boss spat on the floor of the truck near my feet. Then, from a nearby cooler, he pulled two bottles of water out and tossed me one. He dumped the other over his head and it rolls down over his chubby, sagging body into the grooves of the truck bed. I held mine to my head, glancing out into the field. The Russians were dismembering the bodies with their tools and feeding pieces onto tarps. The migrants were using tools to fill the craters and erase all traces of blood pools and spray.
I wanted to ask my new guardian Nazi how much Horus paid for that kind of service, if there were fees tacked on for disposal – but I realized my black sense of humor was just my brain trying to keep me sane in a situation I never imagined happening.
I wondered if they found Nadeim and how she'd be laid to rest and how many others just vanished one day and wound up thrown from a plane and cut up by day laborers. Did Nadeim have a family? Did they wonder where she was? Were they searching Ebetha? What about Jean-Paul? Was he among the corpses I couldn't recognize?
"You stay put so we don't fuck you up." Nazi the Bear was pointing at me. "Boss say to fuck you up insides. Lots of pain. No mark."
"I got it. Wait. That's only 'if' I don't stay put, right?"
He was already yelling at the men about something and spitting to make his point. Over the sound of saws and shovels, I tried to pretend I was anywhere but there and that they were dismembering and bagging up something other than a dozen murder victims.
~
One bottle of water was not enough but I wasn't going to ask for more after watching the workers get a ladle over the head from a pot every half hour and suck their sweaty headbands for more.
We were there less than an hour but it felt so much longer. The entire time, the Nazi Foreman yelled a lot and stomped around, occasionally reminding me with a pointed finger that I was to stay put or suffer internal injuries. He was trying to be mean but I could tell he really just couldn't give a shit about me. Soon, Russians started loading up the bed of the truck with green bags tied up with electrical tape. They tossed them over the side and they hit the bed like bags of mulch. Each one was roughly the same size and shape meaning this was not something the team did on the fly. This was as routine as the Monday morning shuffle from the parking lot back home.
A few more minutes of heat and stress put me in something of a catatonic state. Bags of body parts fell around me, remains of strangers creating a wall between me and the desert. That was their point, to surround me and cover me in their cargo. It left room for the men and their tools and kept me contained.
It also kept me from seeing where we were going.
The rough road back to the highway made the green packages shift and lean, sometimes to a point I thought they might fall over me. Some of the packages began to leak at the corners where the tape job wasn't tight enough. It might have just been a few drops, but that was enough. I pictured the men outside the wall in their bloody overalls, wiping innocent blood across their faces trying to clear off the sweat. They laughed and joked in their own language and I wondered how long I would have to wait for the next terror and how long my mind and body would be able to put up with it before both broke down completely.
~
I began thinking that this was how I was going to die. They doused me in some flammable liquid. They probably slathered the stuff over the evidence inside the packages, too. Once we got to our destination they'd light up the entire truck with me inside it all.
The world was a white blur and I felt nothing but pain from my eyes down to my waist. The alcohol leached the last of the moisture from my body and burned my skin. I couldn't take it and stood up, not knowing where I could run, but intent on jumping from the truck. The dark shape that flashed across my eye line turned out to be an open palm. It hit me in the side of the head and I fell to the truck bed, dazed.
I pressed the heels of my palms to my face but it didn’t help the burning much. It felt slightly better than sunlight. I folded myself into a fetal ball and tried to ride it out. I’d felt pain like that before. It wasn’t the worst and I fell back on my breathing and my meditation. For the moment, Stalin’s skinheads were leaving me be.
"Weez-tone! You lonely, little Jew?" In falsetto he continued, "Oh! I lonely little NEEgur gurl! I looky for a little crooked cock to suck!"
I opened my eyes and, though blurry, saw only green bags and blood seeping into the grooves of the truck bed. The voices stopped but it didn't change my situation or my
options.
The boss hollered down at me. "Come on! Give kiss! Mmmmmm." I looked up to see the bald mother fucker laughing and holding Nadeim's severed, half-crushed head by her bloody cornrows. The neck and face slick with blood, his shaking caused more to squeeze out her exposed sinuses and out of the jagged cut across her neck.
As I screamed, the men in the truck laughed like it was all some awesome fraternity prank. Nazi Bear brought Nadeim's face close to his own and stuck out his tongue pretending to lick her mangled lips.
"Oh, nuggur gurl…you so sexy! What hole will I stick it in you? What hole, little Jew?"
I tried to stand, the only thought in my head was to fight until I died or escaped. In the movies, they show you how stress and anger can give you a surge of superhuman strength. But you don't see that often in real people and certainly not me. I tried to stand but the world shifted and I tumbled back down, bounced off a pile of wrapped body parts and slumped to the truck bed.
The Russians laughed at that, especially the boss who tossed Nadeim's head onto my lap and spit on my chest. I only moved when I realized that what was left of her jaw was on my crotch. I turned the head around and her left eye, which had been pinned shut from swelling, burst open across my thigh. I felt the wet, warm egg-like goop soak into my pant leg.
~
Time passed. For a while I was trapped inside my own head with my own monsters, doubts, and shame. I hid there knowing those monsters needed me alive to feed themselves. They weren't flesh eating zombies. They were parasites. But I knew them. I lived with them all my life and could deal with them like estranged family.
I felt a sudden, blessed wave of cold come over me and I thought maybe I'd suffered a stroke or one of the skinheads tired of the game a just crushed my head with a shovel. The pain throughout my body ebbed as the shaking stopped. I could hear voices all around me, points of light, distant and bright like swirling stars around me. I remembered the hospital and how the Shadows would come and dance for me. They would swim in the moonlight over my bed and sing, a tiny point of light to show the soul they'd taken from the floor that night. They would soon come and ask me again if I'd join them. They'd come to me and offer mercy and escape on their terms.
