The Big Reap (9 page)

“You're fucking kidding me.”

“I assure you, I am not. In all your years, you must have wondered why hell would employ lowly monkey middlemen to do their dirty work when every demon in creation is chomping at the bit to get their cloven hooves on a real, live human soul. The fact is, they physically cannot access a living soul. If they could, it would be a bloodbath, which is why Collectors are employed. Your kind are mediators of sorts – final arbiters, so to speak. Or at least that's how the role was envisioned to be. Ever since the last Great War, and the shaky Truce that's followed, the autonomy of Collectors has been on the wane. Hence you having me.”

“So you're saying only a Collector can kill a member of the Brethren.”

“That's right.”

“And what? We're gonna mount up a Collector army and march on the remaining three?”

“Something like that,” she said, “with only two corrections.”

“What's that?”

“Correction the first: there is no army. It's been decided the assignment falls to you and you alone.”

“Are you out of your goddamn mind? I barely killed
one
of these crazy fuckers, and in case you failed to notice, I managed to get myself evicted from a perfectly good skin-suit doing it. How the hell am I supposed to take on
three
?”

“Actually, that brings me to correction the second,” Lilith said, pursing her perfect lips a moment before continuing. “I'm afraid in light of recent events, we're no longer merely targeting those three.”

“Come again?”

“What I'm saying, Collector, is it's been decreed that you're to kill all nine.”

 

5.

When I kicked open the flimsy screen door that marked the entrance to the dingy, nameless bar, the doorframe parallelogrammed a moment, its joints squealing in protest. My shadow projected against a field of sunset-orange as I stepped across the threshold. Then the rusted hinge caught and slammed it shut behind me with a nail-on-chalkboard creak.

A bracket hung above the door, the kind you'd hang a bell off of to announce the arrival of new customers. But all that hung from it was a frayed piece of twine, knotted at both ends. The topmost knot was a frizzy-haired bun jutting through the bracket. The twine was kinked above the bottom knot – thanks, I'd imagine, to the erstwhile bell – so that it hung off to one side, the idle strands poking through the bunny-hole to form the knot and feathering down to nothing just below. It put me in mind of a strung-up voodoo doll. I wondered if somewhere in the world there was a full-sized hanged man to match.

The absence of a bell didn't matter much. The door itself announced me fine. But even if it hadn't, the three men inside the bar – for they were all men, and all burly, stress-jumpy, and armed, shooting pool beneath a ceiling fan that shook, palsied, as it spun – would no doubt have noticed me. This was their bar, after all, or, at least, their employer's, and to own the truth, it wasn't even a real bar. A careful observer would note that no one ever came or went from the property but for they and their cohorts, and the neon
Open
sign might well have been dead when they purchased it, for all the use it got. The bar itself sat empty and unused – no old-timers thousand-yarding the bottoms of their glasses, no dolled-up women preened and plucked and perched atop the barstools in front of it, eyeing their lipstick in the soot-streaked, dirt-specked Sauza mirror mounted crooked on the wall. The men here were not interested in the women or the drink that any bar worth frequenting promised, or at least heartily suggested. What they were interested in was underneath. A system of tunnels, leading deep into the desert in four directions from this squat adobe structure plopped smack in the middle of hot dry nowhere, each popping out a mile or two past the sad, desperate mud-caked trickle that is the Rio Grande. See, this glorified tent of mud and rough-hewn beams sat smack in the middle of a small, landlocked peninsula of Mexico that jutted northward into Texas thanks to the meandering line of the river that marked their border, which meant that the United States lay just north
and
east
and
west from where I stood. The men inside the bar were here to see the tunnels leading there were well-protected – and the local officials who stopped by well-bribed – so they'd stay open to serve as pipeline for the parade of drugs, guns, and strung-out little girls the Xolotl Cartel provided to the fat wallets and bottomless appetites of their American neighbors.

Come to think of it, it might have made more sense to possess one of the aforementioned local officials. Then maybe they wouldn't be looking at me so bug-eyed for showing up unannounced. Eyes wide in purple-gray hollows. Sallow skin, sickly-hued and grease-shiny from lack of sleep, pulled taut across their cheeks and their wifebeater-bared shoulders. Muscle-corded arms rigid at their sides, fingers splayed and twitching as each in turn calculated the odds of getting to their piece before I could put them down.

Oh, did I not mention I was carrying an assault rifle? Well, I was. Which might explain these fellas' wiggins.

It was a Mexican-Army-issue FX-05 Xiuhcoatl carbine, which made sense, on account of my new meat-suit being Mexican Army, though he and I were in civilian clothes at the moment on account of I'm not
completely
stupid. He was a dark-skinned, wiry thirty-something man with hard eyes, a black bottle-brush mustache, and a jagged scar that traced his cheekbone from right eye to age-lined dimple. Given all he'd seen in his years at the front lines of the drug war, it's hard to believe that dimple came from smiling. His gun was a boxy, industrial, matte-black carbon-fiber motherfucker with thirty rounds in its magazine, and though it was capable of going fully automatic, at present it was set to three-round bursts. If it weren't, and I were forced to pull the trigger, the magazine would likely be empty before the first shell casing hit the ground, and these lovely gentlemen would wind up a fine paste. Since I needed them alive, three rounds a pop was as much stopping power as I was willing to risk, and even still, I was aiming for their knees.

These men were not Brethren. But I had reason to believe they might know where I could find one. And that reason's name was Lilith.

 

“Take a look at this,” she said to me back on that beach in Guam, producing a paper from God-knows-where. It's disconcerting, I'll tell you, spending one's days with beings whose physical form is simply a projection of how they wish to look. From where I'm sitting, Lilith doesn't look a day over thirty, her flawless porcelain skin on ravishing display thanks to a bikini so small that if it were made of postage stamps, it wouldn't get a four-page letter around the block. And yet she's been around since the dawn of time, since Paradise was a for-serious place and not a pitch to sell time-shares, and somewhere on her person, she'd secreted an entire fucking newspaper. Best to not ask where, says I. Point is, out it came just after she said I'd have to make with all the Brethren-killing as if she'd been just waiting for the moment, and when she saw me squinting by the pale light of the rising moon as I tried to read it, she snapped her fingers and conjured a steady orange flame. It gave off no heat, and despite the ocean breeze it never flickered, so my guess was, it wasn't a magic trick so much as showing off. A flame appeared because Lilith elected to project one, not because she'd conjured fire.

Come to think of it, that's a way cooler magic trick than if she'd simply conjured fire.

The paper was a copy of the Houston Chronicle, dated three days prior. The top story was about yet another bloody border-town body dump, courtesy of the Mexican drug war. You know the kind; we've all read about them. Heads and hands removed. Bodies left someplace public, in this case, the busy north-south route of US Highway 83, where it jags eastward along the border, to send a message. No witnesses. No IDs on the vics. Gruesome, senseless, and unfortunately these days, a dime a dozen.

I scanned past it, looking for whatever it was Lilith wanted me to find. But when I made to flip the page, she shook her head. “No, that's the one,” she said.

I skimmed. Missed the point. Four columns on the front page – complete with lurid shots of tarp-draped bodies and pavement stained red-brown – and another eight or so pic-free buried in the middle of the “A” section. I combed through a second time, Lilith watching lips pursed. Then I folded it over in frustration and said, “This thing's five thousand words long, Lily, how about you just give me the bullets? Starting with why the hell I should give a shit about a bunch of rival dirt-bag drug-runners slaughtering each other?”

“Well, for one,” she said, clearly annoyed I hadn't deduced what she wanted me to, “those victims weren't gun-thugs or drug-runners. Their clothes were tattered, filthy. They weren't armed. And what little's left of them suggests malnourishment and poor health-care, likely stretching back to birth. They were illegal immigrants, who'd probably paid a pretty penny for the privilege of being smuggled safely across the border, likely utilizing the same pipeline as the cartels, sure, but that alone is not enough to make them a target to a rival cartel. For two, you'll note the bodies were discovered on the US side of the border. Any cartel smart enough to stay in business is too smart to drag the US military into their fight with so brazen and foolhardy a move as that; to a one, their high-profile body dumps have all taken place south of the Rio Grande. And for three, those heads and hands? They weren't sawed off to prevent identification, though I'm sure that's what the perpetrator wanted anyone who happened by them to think. They were gnawed off. Eaten, perhaps. As, my friends among the Fallen tell me, were their hearts, though
that
fact didn't make the paper. Purposefully withheld, I'm sure, by authorities too foolish to realize the perpetrator or perpetrators of this horrific act are beyond the reach of their justice system, not to mention beyond their ken.”

I fell silent a moment, listening to the waves roll in, while I digested what she told me. When I finally spoke, it was to say, “Whatever did this ate their fucking
heads
?”

“Maybe,” she said. “But I doubt it. The flesh and bone would provide little by way of sustenance for a creature subsisting on the life-force of living beings, though I will admit that cheek meat, well-braised, is quite delicious. Brain, heart, and blood are all far better. Eyes, too. Spinal column will do in a pinch. So my guess is, the hearts were consumed fresh, and the heads removed so that the brains might be eaten at the perpetrator's leisure. Though skulls are difficult to break open, they are quite well-suited as storage vessels for the gray matter inside, and cellared properly, they
will
keep.”

“Jesus,” I said, more to myself than to her. Her utter lack of revulsion at the topic of eating human heads and hearts chilled me as thoroughly as the gruesome acts themselves. Yet another reminder that, despite her appearances, Lilith was pretty fucking far from human.

“Mind your tongue, Collector.” As if
I'm
the one whose utterances offended.

“I'm just saying. There's gotta be someone else who can do this.”

Lilith sighed. “There's a war on, Collector. Each of us is being asked to do our part. I would have thought ridding humankind of these creatures who've been feeding off the living for centuries would appeal to that pesky conscience of yours. You'll be eliminating untold evil, preventing no shortage of human suffering. I won't deny the assignment is high-risk, but even if I could convince the powers that be to reconsider, what are the chances your next task would prove so palatable? This is your chance to make a difference in the world, to fight the good fight for a change. See it as the gift it is, would you? For once, just be a good little soldier, and do what you're told.”

She was right. I knew she was. But that didn't mean I had to like it.

“So this thing,” I asked hesitantly, wanting yet not wanting to know the answer, “is it one of the members of the Brethren the Fallen moved against?”

“You mean does it know you're coming? No. Its very existence is, at present, my own conjecture, pieced together based upon the evidence at hand. And I've only the vaguest of notions where you might find it. But I am certain that I'm right. And if I am, this is one of several that dropped off hell's radar centuries ago; gone mad and feral, we'd assumed, since until recently we had no idea they could die. It seemed to me you might have better luck in hunting a quarry unsuspecting of your approach. The first time out, at least.”

“Okay, then, how do I find this as yet hypothetical quarry?”

Lilith nodded toward the newspaper once more. “There's another story in that issue I've reason to believe is connected to the bodies found on 83.”

“What's that?”

“Check the police blotter.”

This one was easier to spot. Seems at three AM the morning prior to the paper's release, a known lieutenant of the Xolotl Cartel by the name of Javier Guerrera who currently sat at seventh on Mexico's Most Wanted List wandered blood-soaked and panicked into a police station in McAllen, Texas, babbling nonsense and insisting he be locked up. Local PD kindly obliged. Guerrera now awaited extradition, said the piece, at the Willacy Detention Center in Raymondville, Texas – the largest detention center in the country for illegal immigrants, which also functions as a high-security prison for the most dangerous and recidivistic of border-breaching offenders.

Beside the blurb ran two pictures, one taken from his Wanted profile, and the other a mug shot taken upon his arrest. In the former, his hair was black as Texas crude. In the latter, it was white from root to tip, though the man beneath the shock of white couldn't have been more than twenty-seven.