“It might. It just might. But no. I’m not going to kill you in cold blood, Jefe.”
Marcus bent down and took a knife from an esbirro’s belt—poor fool didn’t even get the chance to draw it—and tossed it to the ground at Thorin’s feet.
“I am a man of honor. And a man of honor doesn’t kill an unarmed opponent.” He looked at the carnage around him. “Where possible, of course.”
Thorin stared at the knife as if it were a particularly repulsive insect. He glared at Marcus with arms crossed, his fear partially buried beneath a wall of sulky insolence. Marcus tutted.
“Death in combat is usually quick, Jefe. But if a man doesn’t fight, it can come slow indeed.”
Thorin stood up like an old man, one hand braced against the small of his back, the other inching toward the handle of the knife. His eyes stayed locked on Marcus’s switchblade. He looked to Marcus like a squirrel taking food from a suspiciously outstretched hand, all fits and starts and coiled-spring nerves.
His hand closed the final six inches in a single clumsy snatch, fumbling the knife and nearly dropping it in his crouching retreat. Marcus watched the whole thing with amusement.
“Very good. Now, Jefe, show me how a conqueror fights.”
It wasn’t a fight, really. Marcus slid into range with his knife at his side, making no effort to strike. Thorin tried a top-heavy swing that nearly pulled him off his feet. Marcus side-stepped it easily. His ever-thrumming street fighter’s brain noted half a dozen motions that could have killed Thorin outright, and another dozen that would have crippled him. He acted on none of them, preferring to observe to clumsy puppetry of Thorin’s attacks.
The Jefe wielded his weapon as if it were the leash of a large and poorly-trained dog. It scented blood and darted, dragging Thorin two steps behind. Marcus watched the spectacle with a mixture of amusement and pity. Growing bored, he reached out during one of Thorin’s lunges and slashed a culvert diagonally down his wrist.
The Jefe’s fingers went slack, tendons severed, and the knife clattered to the floor. Thorin followed it a second later. He dropped to his knees, his ruined forearm cradled to his chest, and fell into his side, where he curled into a ball and whimpered.
Marcus’s smile flattened into a thin, pinched line. The drop of pity he’d felt for this creature evaporated, and his amusement soured into contempt. He thought of Emilio at the moment when his hand had been lopped off, that look of almost child-like disbelief and hurt. Of the relentless infections that slow-cooked him in the days that followed. Of that final moment in the abattoir before he died by Marcus’s blade, his eyes brimming with neither hate nor sorrow, but simple understanding.
These thoughts and a thousand more broke free of the vault where he’d stored them. They entered his knife hand and guided it to Thorin’s back, where they split his jacket at the seam and flayed a strip of skin from hip to shoulder. Blood bubbled in the newly exposed tissue, less a spurt than a slow seeping of groundwater from an aquifer. Thorin shrieked, hands flying to the debased flesh. Marcus caught them and pared the tissue from their fingers, one after another.
Thorin’s screams grew louder. The sound grated on Marcus’s ears. He stuck the blade in Thorin’s mouth and, with a deft scooping motion, sliced through the root of his tongue. The screams grew no quieter, but took on a liquid, gurgling quality.
At that moment, Marcus saw himself as he looked from outside: a mad beast with a foam-flecked snout laughing as he mutilated his prey. It was an act of debasement so grotesque it scarred the subject and object alike—an onanist molesting his own dark reflection. He staggered back, repulsed. Thorin writhed on the concrete, mewling nonsense with a half-severed tongue. He was a spider with seven legs torn off, a broken thing clinging pointlessly to life. Marcus stabbed him in the chest once, twice, a dozen times. He lunged without elegance, thoughtlessly, with a clumsiness he hadn’t known since infancy.
When he’d finished, he knelt by the body and wept.
44: Gracias
Selena hadn’t realized how deep the alleys of Juarez went. She and Mary had used them as shortcuts in the past, and these journeys had shown her the alleys were big—big enough to count as streets in their own right, replete with enough beggars, vendors, and pedestrians to rival all but the largest calles. But it wasn’t until Krell dragged her into his lair that she began to understand the true scope of their byzantine depths. The alleys weren’t a mere supplement to the city’s outer roads, auxiliary channels catching Calle de Jefes’s spillover when the flow was high. They were a parallel urban ecosystem, with their own flora, fauna, and food chain.
And their apex predator had Selena by the wrist, and he wasn’t about to let her go.
The alleys twined and bent and bulged and narrowed, tracing a route that seemed to double back on itself endlessly yet never cross its own path. Gradually the ground sloped downward, and the slice of sky overhead thinned into a greyish wedge. The wedge vanished, and they were underground, the cool earth carrying a smell of must and minerals.
“Why are you doing this?” Selena asked. “Thorin’s probably dead by now, and even if he isn’t, his reign is over. You won’t get a dime for this he hasn’t paid you already. So why bother?”
Selena didn’t expect an answer beyond “shut up!” or a clout around the head, but asking the question gave her the chance to feign breathlessness. Krell surprised her.
“Because I am the hunter, girl,” he said. “And you are my prey.”
During their voyage through the labyrinth, Selena made no effort to break free of Krell’s grip. She gave a few phony tugs, hapless and clumsy, playing the weak little girl that men like Krell so easily saw in her, but that was all. A serious attempt would have been pointless—even if she managed to slip his grasp and evade the dozen men behind him, where would she go? The path was so tangled, and the light so dim, she couldn’t even begin to retrace her steps. There was a time to buck and a time to simply watch, and their passage through the alley had been the latter. Her energy was better spent searching for opportunities. So she played the docile captive and bided her time.
Then they reached the room, and she saw the chair, and everything changed.
The room was a crude circle hewn into the dirt and plastered with red-black clay. Its walls tapered inward at neck height, forming a dome fifteen feet high at its center, from which an electric lamp hung suspended. The sight of electricity felt anachronistic in this place—she’d encountered little of it outside of Todd’s hacienda—and gave her a renewed sense of Krell’s power. If Jefe Thorin got by with corn oil lamps, how did this crevice-dwelling ghoul get electric light?
Below the lamp, floating atop the yellow island of its glow, was a large metal chair. Coal black where it wasn’t flecked with rust, it had the cobbled-together look of Last War salvage. Bolts as thick as Selena’s thumbs secured it to the ground. Manacles yawped atop its armrests like hungry mouths. A second set, large enough to accommodate ankles, grinned from crossbeams between the chair’s front legs. Hinges connected its joints, allowing its captive to be bent into all sorts of inventive and uncomfortable shapes.
As she studied the chair, her strategy of watch and wait vanished. It had been the best play with a poor hand, but now the game had changed altogether. It was time to fight. That it was a fight she couldn’t win was irrelevant. She was outnumbered, out-armed, and trapped in the nexus of a labyrinth that her opponents knew intimately, and she knew not at all. To fight back was laughable, futile.
But letting Krell put her in that chair was worse. Perhaps she’d live a bit longer if she did, but it wouldn’t be good living. Nothing pleasant happened in a chair like that. Whatever happened in its confines would be horrible, and she could do nothing about it but beg for mercy.
And Selena was not one for begging.
If she was going to die today, then she could at least make sure she died on her feet.
Her arm snapped free of Krell’s grip. The ra
gdoll weakness she’d played at earlier was gone; she struck like coiled steel and Krell’s fingers, expecting no more than a bit of wriggling, parted easily. She chambered a kick and rocketed her foot into Krell’s knee. The blow knocked him down, but fat and muscle sheathed the bone, and the blow lacked the brittle crack of a shattered patella or dislocated fibula—something to put him out of action early. She brought her heel down on his tailbone and vaulted over him, putting his prostrate body between her and the other men.
Krell’s men fanned out across the room. She’d hoped they might rush her, giving her a chance to skirt the horde and make for the door, but they were too clever for that. Several planted themselves in the doorway while the rest closed in as a single constricting line. Selena backed up, scanning the room for weapons, exits, points of tactical advantage. There were none. The room was a featureless egg, smooth-walled and barren save for that hideous chair.
Her target was a slight man about her height. His face jangled with piercings beneath a frieze of pointed black hair. Threads of muscle ran along his skinny arms, but he was small enough to bowl over, and that was all Selena needed.
She charged the line, aiming for a beefy man with a spider tattooed across his face standing two bodies to the right of her real target. There was a tiny gap to his right, and she made for it, broadcasting her intentions before springing on the wiry man and driving her forehead into his nose.
Cartilage cracked. Winkles of metal lacerated her cheek, but the piercings weren’t weapons, and they did more damage to his skin than hers. The wiry man toppled, and Selena leapfrogged over him. Hands grabbed for her, and she dodged them all, landing mid-sprint and dashing for the doorway. The men stationed there were bigger than the guy she’d tackled, but they also hadn’t expected her to break through the cordon so quickly. She spied a gap in the lower left of the doorway and dove for it.
She almost made it.
The guards caught her around the waist and hurled her back into the room. She landed awkwardly, torquing her right ankle until it squealed and falling to one knee. The line closed in, became a circle of flesh three men deep, and pummeled her into submission. She threw punches against the onslaught, but it was like fighting the tide, and every split lip or busted nose was replaced with a fresh one before the blow had even fully landed.
The circle grabbed her with its myriad hands and dragged her toward the chair. She fought with all she had, but the current was too strong.
“Déjala ir, Krell.”
The words struck the crowd like a whip crack. Selena craned her neck to catch a glimpse of the doorway, where Grace Delgado stood with arms crossed. She stepped into the room. Behind her trailed a phalanx of women armed with bits of refuse—broom handle bow staves, table leg cudgels, knives pilfered from kitchens or fashioned from bits of pointy metal. They wore kerchiefs and homespun dresses and dirt-streaked dungarees. Selena recognized a few of Todd’s girls, but most were older, blanca and marcada alike.
Krell stepped out of the crowd and looked the lot of them up and down. He grinned, a huge toothy fissure dividing his face into two unequal hemispheres. He said something in Mejise, spat, and cackled.
For a moment, the two groups held each other in stasis, a malevolent cord pulled taut between two banks of staring, somber faces. The break was short, but Selena had no intention of wasting time. She swatted free the hands that held her and dove between a pair of legs, driving her fleeing heel upward into its crotch as she went. Her action snapped whatever force had hung between the men and women, and the room collapsed into pandemonium.
Clubs swung, knives jabbed, missiles flew. Blood greased the floor and tinted the air with its bright coppery stink. Selena slugged a man in the jaw, drove her elbow into another’s belly, and ducked a haymaker thrown by a third. A fourth managed to sock her in the shoulder. It was a hard blow and spun her around. She salvaged the momentum into a right hook that knocked him flat.
The urge to reach the door and safety burned away, swallowed by a roiling tide of molten fury. Blood pounded in her ears at a jungle drum tempo. Her fists hardened into granite, her legs became pistons of spring and steel.
A knife skated across her ribcage, carving a shallow gash that stained her shirt a vibrant red. She barely felt it. Her knuckles struck a nose, and the nose exploded, blood showering from cracks in the ruined cartilage. She stomped on the man’s neck as soon as he fell, grabbed another man’s ears, and drove his face into her forehead. Wet, warm fluid broke across her cheeks like summer rain. Later, its presence would repulse her, but at the moment, she was elated. A lunatic’s cackle ripped through the room. Selena released it was coming from her. Knowing this made her laugh harder.
A huge pair of arms closed around her from behind. They threw her to the ground, driven by a terrible weight. She whirled onto her back and saw Krell’s face hovering over her, fat and pitted as a harvest moon. His grin had broadened further, but the mocking humor in it had curdled into rage.
“You think a marcada bitch and some withered old brujas can save you?”
She kicked and writhed and hammered with her fists, but he outweighed her, and without leverage, her blows lacked heft. There were certain positions where raw meat counted more than anything else, and Krell, through instinct or guile, was a master of edging his opponents into them. His fingers crawled like slugs over her chest and up her neck.
His thumbs settled against her eyes and pushed. The pain was excruciating. She whipped her head to the left, and his thumbs slipped free. He smashed her face with the bottom of a closed fist and tried again.
The pressure resumed, intensified. It felt like an inverted mountain balanced on her corneas. She slashed out, blind and frantic, snatching for the lever that would relieve this unsupportable load. Her hands found something sharp, closed on it, and thrust upward.
A jet of hot blood splashed across her chest. The thumbs fell away, allowing her to see Krell, his look of triumph drifting into confusion. Her fetish medallion erupted from his neck, barbed shells sinking into wattled flesh. He clawed at the object, trying to pull it from his skin. Before he could manage it, Selena rammed the heel of her fist against the amulet.
“When you see Santa Meurte, tell her I say thanks.”
The fetish had sharp points at every angle, and its barbs sank nasty divots into her palm before the bone stopped their progress. Facing no such impediment at its other end, it burrowed into Krell’s neck like an enormous and ravenous chigger. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Bloody spittle stretched over his lips in a fine membrane. It swelled with his final exhaled breath and burst.
His body collapsed over her, enveloping her in momentary darkness. She wriggled her upper body free in time to see Grace and the other women forming a protective circle around her. The men, rudderless at the loss of their leader, pulled back, unleashing invective in Mejise as they fled.
The women bent down and rolled Krell’s body off Selena. Grace extended a hand and Selena took it. She stood and looked at each woman in turn. They looked back at her, faces smooth with wonder—at her, at what they’d done, at the changes convulsing the city above them. Selena saw it all and had no idea how to respond. She lacked the words even in her own language, which she assumed none of these women spoke. There was only one thing she could think to say.
“Gracias.”
45: Someone Else’s Turn
The haciendas had escaped the worst of the fighting, but it was still clear by looking at them that something had changed. The fields, normally buzzing with the labor of blancos and marcados alike, stood empty. Implements of farming lay strewn about the pastures over which sheep and cattle wandered, oblivious to their newfound lack of oversight.
Nearer the houses, the porches where guardsmen held watch were also mostly vacant. A few embattled figures stayed on, crouched behind makeshift parapets with weapons clung to their chests, but they were a minority. And at Mr. Todd’s hacienda, there were no guards left at all.
“It’s a damn ghost town out here,” said Mary.
She rested her hand on the bandage wrapped around her stomach. Her fingers skirted the spot where the wound lay beneath several layers of gauze without actually touching it. It was an unconscious gesture she’d picked up in her recovery, a flirtation between fascination and pain.
“You face one lousy uprising, and all your indentured servants go and quit on you. How’s that for gratitude?”
“Shameful,” Selena agreed. In truth, she was a little surprised. Juarezians weren’t unacquainted with political instability—they’d weathered a shift from a triumvirate pseudo-democracy to a dictatorship not long ago. Surely, they must have had plans to combat unrest of some kind.
“I guess when your boss’s ex-slave becomes heir apparent to the entire government, you start to think about earning your pay elsewhere.”
“I thought ‘slave’ was an offensive term.”
Mary shrugged. “Yeah, well, times change. And we were slaves, if you get right down to it.”
“True. We were.”
They climbed onto the porch, which sagged slightly under the weight of their party. Todd’s girls were all accounted for, along with two dozen Delgado men loyal to Grace. Their presence seemed prudent in the fading anarchy of Juarez proper, but out here it felt a bit ridiculous. Selena had expected some token resistance at least, but it seemed they could walk into Mr. Todd’s manor without facing any opposition at all.
This, she soon learned, was only partially true, for there remained one guard too loyal—or too stupid, Selena mused—to desert in times of trouble, and he faced her in the hallway with rifle in hand.
“Hi, Trejo,” Selena said.
Mr. Todd’s enforcer looked even uglier than usual, his bald head rumpled with wrinkles. He snarled down the barrel, which was pointed squarely at Selena’s chest. His left eye narrowed to a squint while the right one stayed wide, its dead pupil floating faintly in its sac of yellow-white fluid.
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