The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

WEST OF MATAMOROS, NORTH OF HELL ^{BRIAN HODGE}

It was the photographer’s idea, get some shots of them in the city before heading west into the countryside. He’d done his homework. Good for him. Good for Olaf the photographer. He’d read up on how one of Mexico’s biggest shrines to Santa Muerte was here in Matamoros. So they might as well take advantage of that, right? The shots they’d already planned for, they wanted afternoon light for those, didn’t want that glaring vernal sun directly overhead. There was time.

Sofia thought it was cheesy and wasn’t shy about saying so. Sebastián was all for it, but then, he would be. More pictures meant more pictures of him. Enrique didn’t care either way. You choose your battles wisely. No point in getting into one here inside the airport terminal.

And see? The idea was a done deal anyway. Olaf had run it past the PR guy on their flight down from LA, so Crispin had arrived pre-sold. Crispin was all about the enthusiasm. That was his job: make cheesy things sound like a good idea. The label must have paid him well for enthusiasm.

Besides, Crispin reminded them, they had to stay in town long enough to find a carniceria for the pig’s heart. There had to be one close to a Santa Muerte shrine. They practically went together, right?

Crispin turned to Morgan, who looked all of a hundred pounds, half of it hair and the rest of it camera bags. “Maybe we can put you on that.”

She looked queasy and stammered something about not speaking the language.

Olaf wasn’t having it anyway. “If you want an assistant, maybe you should’ve brought your own.”

So. These three in from LA Plus the crate they’d shipped along in cargo. Plus Enrique and Sebastián and Sofia, fresh off their puddle-jumper flight up from Mexico City. Twenty minutes later, all of them were packed into their driver’s SUV. This was how it was going to be for the rest of a very long day. At least it was a long SUV.

Crispin sat up front, taking the only other bucket seat for himself so he could play captain, give the orders. After a few moments of idling beside the curb as their driver scrolled his phone, Crispin slapped his fingertips on the back of the man’s headrest, bap-bap-bap-bap-bap. “Come on, let’s get rolling. We’re not paying you to check Twitter.”

“Yeah you are,” Enrique said. “Back home, all you got to check is traffic reports. Where we are now, before you go anywhere it’s a good idea to check that you’re not gonna be heading into somebody’s shootout.”

“I’m sorry, señor,” the driver said. “He is correct.”

Sofia perked up from the very back. “Crossfires don’t ask to see your passport.”

Hector, that was their driver’s name. A middle-aged guy, big thick moustache, and you could just tell, this spotless SUV meant everything to him. It wasn’t all that long ago Enrique would’ve laughed at the idea of a guy like Hector, where Hector found his pride. And had, probably more times than he wanted to admit. It took a while to grow up and find the respect again. The man was somebody’s father.

Hector spent a few more moments on his phone, then looked up happy and put the SUV in gear. They were rolling.

Next to Enrique, Morgan was still looking queasy, but in a whole new way, like she didn’t know what she was doing here and was two seconds from jumping out and running back into the terminal. They’d ended up seated together in the middle because he was so big and she was so small, so they evened out. And what was wrong with this Olaf guy, anyhow, he does his homework but doesn’t bother telling her what to expect.

“It’s okay. We’ll be okay.” Enrique leaned in close, kept his voice to a soothing murmur. “Just a little precaution, that’s all. Nothing bad is gonna happen.”

She took a deep breath and smiled at him. Tried to, at least.

“And remember this: Tiene usted un corazón de cerdo?” he told her. “That’s how you ask for a pig’s heart. Just in case.”

Growing up, Enrique knew who Santa Muerte was. No secret about her. She was around. You just didn’t see much of her, not then. She was a back room kind of saint, for the kind of altars you never got to see as a kid, because they were private, kept by people who fucking meant business.

Now, though? Now you didn’t have to look hard at all to find her. Santa Muerte was everywhere, never more so than during the last decade, ever since the cartel wars erupted into a never-ending series of bloodbaths and massacres. Saint Death, Holy Death, had really come into her own.

In hindsight, it seemed inevitable. There were things you took for granted as a kid that took being an adult to see how strange they really were. That, and being lucky enough to gain perspective, to see past your own borders. And he had. Enrique had seen enough of the world to know now. The band had given him that much. Every tour made it that much clearer:

Here at home, people found death a lot more interesting than life.

Santa Muerte—she might look different in a hundred details, but was always the same simple figure: a skull in a dress, a skeleton where a woman used to be. She might look like a nun. She might look like bride. She might look no different from Santa Maria, except for that face of bone. Sometimes she might be holding a scythe. Always, she held your fate.

Here in the southside neighborhood in the Colonia Buenavista, Enrique knew they were getting close without anybody having to say a thing. It was the population explosion on the other side of the SUV. People on their own. Families. Mothers and fathers carrying sleepy babies, crying toddlers, to introduce them to the Saint of Death. The slow-goers made it up the street on their knees, not because they had to, but to show humility and devotion. They brought offerings. They brought photos and needs. They brought sorrows no one would ever hear about except the saint.

It wasn’t a proper sanctuary, not like a church or a mission. The shrines never were. It just happened, grew up here like a tree from a seed. Some family starts it in their home, puts up the saint in their front window, and that’s all it takes. They built it, and people came. Eventually they moved the saint farther inside, where there was more room, once their shrine took on a life of its own.

Hector wheeled as close as he could, then cut over to the side of the street and shut down. He stayed with the SUV while the rest of them went ahead, stepping out into the clamor, the laughter and the tears and the numb despair of people who didn’t know where else to turn.

Along the way, Crispin bought a bouquet of droopy flowers from a kid on the street. “Why not?” he said, and waggled them at Enrique and Sofia and Sebastián, petals sifting to the street. “Maybe we can get her to bless this next album.”

Sofia perked up again. She was like that—you never knew when she was tuned in and listening. Looked hard and wiry and ready for combat, muscles like taut cables, drummer’s muscles, her thoughts a thousand miles away, yet she was onto you. She shouldered past to squeeze up close to this PR guy who was always coming off like the band’s biggest fan, like he’d never heard genius until he heard Los Hijos del Infierno.

“Don’t joke,” Sofia told him. “I know you’re only joking, but don’t, okay? You stop a minute and think what it takes to push people, good people, everyday people, to revere what’s inside there. It makes sense the narcos would pray to her, sacrifice to her. She’s made for men like that. But these folk? Jesus and Mother Mary… people still believe, they’ve just given up. Jesus and Mary don’t deliver anymore. Or they can’t. Or maybe they stopped listening. But Santa Muerte does. She’s the one who listens now. She’s the one who loves them. She’s the one they look to for healing. So remember where you are and think what it’s taken to do that to them.”

Crispin was a clean-cut Anglo who looked beyond shame, but he wasn’t above looking chastened. Good to see.

Did these people in the street know who they were? Many looked, some stared. A few, maybe, might have recognized them. The six of them weren’t your average half-dozen people out here, that much was blatant. Three gringos and three Mexicans, but even as locals, more or less, he and Sebastián and Sofia stood out. The black clothes and boots, the hair. No other guys out here had a need for eye makeup. Sebastián drew the stares most of all, the way a front man should—a head taller than most, crazy thin, with a spiked black leather pauldron belted over his left shoulder, like a gladiator on his way into the arena.

Equals, though, in spite of it all. Death turned everybody into equals.

The closer they got to the pink shrine house, the more crowded it got. After a minute of conferring with Olaf, Crispin squeezed his way inside and found the owners, used the power of dollars to get them to close off the inside for a private audience. After passing through a couple of arched doorways, the walls close and the ceiling low, they had the place to themselves.

Santa Muerte came in all sizes, and this one was as big as a live woman—on her pedestal, even a little bigger than that. She wore pale patterned robes, purple and white, with a sky blue cowl over her head. A wreath of dried-out flowers circled her brow. Her scythe was enormous, the blade oversized and stylized, six inches wide in the middle, curving over her head from outside one shoulder to past the other. It was way bigger than anything you’d want to swing in the fields, with a smaller skull mounted where it angled away from the wooden shaft.

Her teeth were white and even, her eyes a pair of empty voids.

She swam in wavering shadows, lit by a forest of candles. The rest was like every shrine he’d ever seen, gaudy and colorful and beautiful and sad. Flowers, from fresh to withered, lay everywhere, more bouquets than they had vases. A plate of tortillas sat at the bottom hem of her robes. Petitioners’ notes were pinned to her robes. Pictures were taped to the walls, propped against the candle jars, stacked on tables—the sick and the dying, the dead and the missing, and somewhere in between them, the lost. Those who were simply lost.

Morgan was on it, in her element now, setting up a tiny, stubby-legged tripod with the efficiency of a soldier field-stripping a rifle—a tabletop tripod, but down on the floor. She set out a couple of Nikons, then unfolded a pair of circular reflectors, one silver and the other gold, and put them off to one side, and then went scurrying about with a light meter.

Olaf moved the three of them around, had them hunker and squat while he sprawled in the floor with his camera mounted on the pygmy tripod, the lens angled at them, shooting up from below. You could see his bald spot from here, a circular patch the size of a drink coaster missing from his white-blond hair.

He sounded happy with what he was seeing.

He’d positioned Sofia in the middle, the way photographers often did. Balance, Olaf was probably after, but there was something else he may not have been consciously aware of. The way Sofia looked, her features were a hybrid of the polarities on either side of her. In Sebastián, what you saw was a fine-boned European strain, the face of a Spanish conquistador. In Enrique, the broad peasant face and long, coarse hair of what the conquerors had found waiting for them, like he’d stepped out of some arid canyon that time forgot.

You looked at their faces and saw the whole of Mexico’s history in them.

And now, behind them, Santa Muerte looming over them all.

A couple hours later and one pig’s heart heavier, the SUV rolled west out of Matamoros, through that zone where the city frayed apart and unraveled into the countryside, a stark land seared by the sun and sprinkled with small farms, small ranches, tiny hovels. Twenty miles into it, Hector hooked a right onto a dirt road and headed north, until they were only a mile or so from the river. One mile away, Texas, but still, a whole other world.

Hooray for GPS. It wasn’t like there were signs pointing the way here.

They stretched their legs again across the scrubby, hardscrabble ground and listened to Crispin be confused.

“There’s nothing here,” he said. “I thought there’d at least be some buildings left.”

“Not for a long time,” Sebastián told him. “After the investigation, the police brought in some curanderos to cleanse the spirit of the place, then burned everything.”

“Then what’s the point, may I ask? For all that’s going to show in the photos, you could shoot them literally anywhere.”

“Because the point is here. Here is the point.” Bas sidled up to him and threw an arm around Crispin’s shoulders, a rare moment of salesmanship for him instead of flat-out telling how it’s going to be. “You can’t cleanse away something like what happened here. You can’t get it all. You don’t feel it? You will. It’ll come through.” He patted Crispin on the back. “The fans, it’ll mean something to them. They’ll appreciate the effort. This place called to us. We heard it loud and clear, and we had to answer.”

“What’s this we shit?” Sofia muttered, only loud enough for Enrique to hear.

She was right. This was totally a Sebastián thing. Not a bad idea, necessarily, as image went, because image mattered, but still… this was kind of out there even for Bas.

“Half the songs on this next album are about here, and what came out of here. What they did here opened the gates to Hell and the gates never shut. If you don’t get that, you don’t get us.” Sebastián, closing the deal with their alleged number one fan. “Where else could we shoot?”

Rancho Santa Elena, this place had been called, back when it was somewhere that somebody wanted to live. A generation ago it was the headquarters of a family business moving marijuana from the south up into the States. Different era, same old shit. Problems with the DEA, problems with rivals. They’d hooked up with this good-looking Cuban guy out of Florida who was making his own religion—part voodoo, part Santeria, part Palo Mayombe, and the rest, his own sick craziness. An isolated spot like this, with an outbuilding to repurpose as a temple, nobody close enough to hear the screams, human sacrifice seemed a reasonable price to pay for keeping their traffic routes safe. Eleven shallow graves’ worth. Body parts for their cauldron, necklaces out of bones. There was power in it. It made you bulletproof. Made you invisible.

And nobody knew, nobody cared, until the Cuban decided he needed the blood of a young gringo who would die screaming. So they nabbed a college boy down on spring break, he and his buddies coming over the border for a change of scenery after they got tired of things on South Padre Island. Poor guy went off for a piss and never came back. They gave him twelve or so really bad hours before they got down to the serious business and took off the top of his head with a machete to get at his brain.

Enrique had to get a little older to learn the less obvious lesson: where he and his parents and sisters and everyone he knew ranked in the North American scheme of things. If it had been another dead Mexican, those people would’ve kept getting away with it. You want to wreck your shit, kill a gringo. That’s when people start noticing.

By now, Hector had opened up the SUV’s back door, and they moved in to help slide out the long, bulky crate that had flown cargo class from LA. Real wood, you didn’t see that much anymore. Pride in your work, right there—the props company had packed this thing for survival. Hector took a tire tool and pried off the lid, and after they pawed aside the foam peanuts, they lifted the thing free.

Plenty of wows and holy shits all around. Those props people knew their stuff, how to take fiberglass and make magic. The statue was lighter than it looked, sturdier than it felt, and even when standing right next to it, looked exactly like stone that had weathered for centuries. They’d even painted it with stains.

“What is it?” Morgan asked, the only one of them who didn’t know.

“It’s called a chacmool,” Sebastián told her. “It’s a really old design, pre-Colombian. Aztecs, Mayans, maybe even older. Up at the top of a pyramid, that was one place they might go. See that platter in the middle? That was for holding sacrifices.” He grinned, a needling meanness behind it. “Didn’t have to be a heart, but if you got one laying around loose, why not.”

The same as the likenesses of Santa Muerte, chacmools might differ in little details, but the core was always the same. A strange design, blocky, the way so much of that ancient Mesoamerican sculpture was carved. The basic template was a man, feet flat, knees up, leaning back on both elbows, while balanced on his middle was a receptacle to receive offering—could be a platter, could be a bowl. His head was turned to the side, like he was challenging anyone who approached him to give until it hurt.

For their replica, they’d opted for a platter. They all three liked the look of the bowl better, but its sides would have blocked the view, in pictures as well as onstage. Sebastián’s idea—for the next tour’s stage show, he was going to mime a self-sacrifice three songs in, cut out his own heart with a fake obsidian knife and present it to the audience on the chacmool. It would continue beating the whole time, and eventually start gushing blood again.

Every tour, the show just got messier.

And why shouldn’t it. So was everything else in the land of their birth.

Olaf and Morgan and Sebastián conferred on where to set up for the shots. Crispin kept trying to offer suggestions and was tolerated, but otherwise got frozen out. Looked like it would be awhile, so Enrique wandered the property, scouting for cues as to what might have happened where. Where was the temple, where were the graves?

It was easy to be distracted in a cluster of people bickering and chasing the best light. Get off by yourself and you could feel the weight of what had happened here.

No… not happened. That made it sound like an accident. Everything that went on here had been done. It had occurred to human beings to do this to other human beings. Sodomize them. Chop them up. Lop off the top of their heads. Scoop out their brains. Wrap wire around their spines before they buried them, and leave the end sticking out of the ground so that after the worms and beetles and decay had their way with the corpses, they could pull the wire and haul up a nice new spinal column to use for making necklaces. Save them the trouble of digging again.

Shit like that did not just happen. Something got inside you, or was there all along and got loose from its cage, and told you that doing these terrible things was a good idea. Told you that was how business needed to get handled from now on. Same as it told the Aztecs: This is what it takes to keep the corn coming up in the fields, to keep the sun moving across the sky every day. This is what it takes to keep your world intact. Blood, and lots of it.

“You feel it too, don’t you?” Sofia, coming up behind him.

“It leaves a stain, you know?” he said. “Like it’s sunk in. You’d have to dig this place out fifty feet down and haul the dirt to an incinerator, and maybe even then you wouldn’t get it all. It’s like, whatever the curanderos thought they were doing, all they managed was to sweep the porch.”

Somebody had died here. Right here. On this spot. He was sure of it. The whole plot of earth, saturated with fear and betrayal. Maybe it was the little boy. That was the one that really haunted him—how one of the guys doing this killed his own nephew. Decided he needed to snuff a kid, so somebody else went off and snatched him a kid. Brought the boy here, tossed him on the ground. The guy with the machete went right at him—just a boy with a bag over his head. It wasn’t until the kid was dead that the guy started thinking, hey, that green football sweatshirt sure looks familiar.

But it’s okay, you did right, the malignant thing inside him must have said. This is what it takes to keep your world running.

“Come on.” Sofia reached up to rub his shoulder. “You’re not doing yourself any good over here. Let’s get back to the van so I can fix your makeup. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

“No,” he said, like it was the silliest question she’d ever asked, and the exact right thing to do at the time, because it broke the spell. And he loved her for it. Loved her anyway, but sometimes it was good to be reminded of reasons.

They found that Sebastián and the photo team had decided where to take the shots. They had the chacmool—complete with the pig’s heart now—set against a backdrop of gnarly scrub. Off to one side was a hummock of earth that, if they insisted it was a grave, the fans would say, oh, right, sure. A grave, still there after all this time. I totally buy that.

Olaf positioned them in different configurations, shuffled them around, with the sun dipping low enough that the natural light was coming in from the side. Morgan held the gold reflector to bounce the light back from the other side, give the scene a warm tinted glow, like the whole place was simmering.

Every few shots it was a different motivation. Look angry. Look disinterested. Look like you’re grieving. Look hungry. Look dead. Anything but look like you’re having fun. The only one of them enjoying the process was Sebastián. His idea, after all, the only one of them who could conceive of this. Who could think they could come here and evoke the spirits of this place where so much misery and evil were done, and then go away untouched.

Hector, though—Hector knew better. Once they’d unloaded the chacmool and got it set up, he was back in his SUV and hadn’t left. Probably going to burn his shoes tonight because of what they’d touched, so he didn’t track it into his home.

Be like Hector, Enrique told himself.

When they wrapped it up, packed it up, he’d never been more ready to leave a place. It was fitting that the last image he would take away from this little spot of Hell on earth was the heart of some poor pig, tossed aside now that they were through with it, left in the dirt for scavengers and blowflies.

Then they were in the SUV again, backtracking along the dirt road, halfway to the highway. He was slumped into the door with his head against the window when he perked up at the sight of something shooting out of a bush ahead of them. Thinking in that instant, holy shit, it was the biggest snake he’d ever seen, even though he knew that wasn’t right.

An instant later came the sound of blowing tires, a double bang in front, another double bang in the rear. Enrique swiveled his head to follow the sound, and saw the not-snake slithering back into the bushes. No snake was triangular like that. No snake had spikes sticking up from its spine.

Hector was all instinct now, fighting the steering wheel and stomping the brake as the SUV slewed back and forth until he brought it to halt, skidding across the loose dirt as a churning cloud of dust caught up with them.

Just the worst feeling ever. Knowing, on one level, exactly what was happening, the rest of him denying it, no no no, this can’t be real, Morgan’s hand almost breaking his fingers she was squeezing them so hard, and he didn’t even know when she’d grabbed him.

The driver’s window blew inward and Hector’s head went with it, a blizzard of glass and blood and brains and hair and bone and eyes spraying into the windshield. In the front passenger seat, Crispin got showered with some of it and had no idea what it was, turning with a look of pissed-off disgust on his face, like he was thinking what next, first the flat tires and now somebody had thrown a pot of stew at him, and the next dumb thing out of his mouth was going to be Who’s going to pay for this, do you have any idea how much this shirt cost?

Outside, more guys than Enrique could count at once were converging from every direction, and he couldn’t conceive of where they’d come from. This place was so poisoned that people like this came bursting out of the ground. If from the comfort of home he’d envisioned something like this, they would have been wearing masks. But they weren’t. They had faces and didn’t care who saw them, and that was the most frightening thing he could imagine.

They began yanking open the SUV’s doors, and if they found one locked, would either aim through the window and scream until the person on the other side got the idea, or bash out the glass with the butt of a gun and reach in to unlock it themselves.

Everybody was vacating, stumbling out on their own or getting dragged. No say in it, Enrique hit the road hard and tasted a mouthful of hot, dry grit. A few feet away from him, Crispin was finally up to speed, groping for his pocket and pulling out his ID to flash like it was going to matter to someone: Oh, it’s you, sorry for the mistake.

“Americano!” he screamed. “Americano!”

Nobody could’ve cared less. Nobody wanted to deal with him other than right then, right there, on the spot. They could just tell, the scariest judges of character in the world. You hear about someone getting blown out of his shoes and think no way, that’s Hollywood bullshit. But it happened. Steps away, Crispin was hit with gunfire so hard he bounced off the fender and left a dent as he went down barefoot.

All Enrique could think of was Sofia, Sofia, because she’d gone out the other side and he couldn’t see her any more. He’d forgotten how to pray, too, something about Santa Maria, but it wasn’t there anymore.

Santa Muerte, full of grace, was the only thing he had left. You don’t want us now.

Vans came roaring up from the south, the direction of the highway, this entire operation going off with military precision. Someone’s knee dropped into the center of his back and emptied his lungs with a whoosh. They twisted his arms behind his spine and he was so confused and paralyzed he let it happen, let some guy squat on top of him like a goblin and lash his wrists together with a nylon zip-tie before he realized that was happening too. Then everything went dark and stuffy when they yanked a black hood over his head, and now the world was reduced to bad sounds and worse sensations.

They hauled him upright, slinging him around like a bawling calf destined for a branding iron. Once his feet were under him, two pairs of hands rushed him stumbling toward whatever was waiting next. Then he was cargo, banging into the hard floor of a van as other bodies landed around him. Doors slammed, then the blackness shot into high-speed acceleration, and whenever any of them said anything somebody up front yelled for them to shut up, no talking, and it was a long bumpy ride before the last person was too tired to cry any more.

The only thing Enrique was sure of was that they hadn’t gone north. Whatever was coming next, they hadn’t been driven into Texas for it. No, they’d gone a long way south, or west, or both. The air felt dryer and hotter on his arms.

After hours of motion, the van finally stopped and guys hauled them out and rushed them across open ground, hardpacked earth under his wobbly boots. Then it was doorways and a fresh feeling of claustrophobia—a hallway. That opened into an expanded sense of space, the noise around them no longer confined. Wooden floors, he knew from the sound.

The ties were cut and the hoods came off and they were shoved forward. Behind them, doors slammed and locks turned. Then they were on their own in a big dark emptiness, still nothing to see because the night had followed them inside.

Head count: Sofia. Sebastián. Morgan. Olaf. Himself. In spite of the hours in the van, he hadn’t been totally sure. Free to move, Sofia hugged him. Morgan hugged Olaf. Sebastián was on his own for the moment, and that wasn’t right, so Enrique pulled him close and wrapped him up too. Everybody stank of sweat and fear, and he didn’t care, he’d never been so glad to smell anything in his life.

They weren’t alone. From the darkness came a sound of somebody stirring.

“Who’s there?” he asked. “Who is that?”

“Solamente nosotros los muertos. Acostúmbrate a la idea y cierra tu puta boca para que lo demás podamos dormir,” came the sullen answer.

Just us dead people. Get used to the idea and shut the fuck up, so the rest of us can sleep.

They staked their claims in the floor, and if he could’ve folded himself all the way around Sofia like a fort, he would have.

The two of them had known each other too long to feel like anything other than brother and sister, but there were times he wondered, man, what if, huh? They’d come into each other’s orbits as a couple of nerdy kids from bad neighborhoods, the kind it was easy to beat the shit out of, so that’s what other kids did. The kids that listened to that thing inside, telling them, This is what it takes to make your day more fun.

They listened a lot, the cruel ones. Like they knew already, nothing had to tell them anything.

And keep at it, okay? There’s a future in this. We got plans for you.

A couple of nerdy school band kids—they had targets on them early. It wasn’t much of a band, and the instruments weren’t much, either. Sofia liked to hit things, so they put her with a snare and a marching bass drum and a tom, but she never got to hit them as hard as she would’ve liked because she was scared of breaking a head, and then where would she be?

Enrique they’d fixed up with a leaky trumpet, but every spare moment he let the gravity of the out-of-tune piano in the corner pull him over to its yellowed keys. He could play more than one note at a time, plus if he held down the sustain pedal, he could pound them out and they’d keep ringing, a tapestry of overlapping noise that never had to end. The same thing he was doing now, just that with Los Hijos del Infierno he was doing it electronically, with synthesizers and sequencers and samplers, and it was way harder and louder and a lot more caustic.

So no, it wasn’t much of a school band, and the instruments weren’t much, but he always figured that without them, he and Sofia would be dead. Dead for real, or as good as dead, or wishing they were, or maybe worst of all, dead on the inside and not realizing it. There were all kinds of dead.

And Santa Muerte loved each and every one.

The dark bled out with the dawn.

He stirred awake at the first sign of it, sitting up in the floor so he could put an environment around them as things took shape. Get that much figured out, at least.

The first light came slanting in through windows set up high, near the roof. It lit up rough, bone-white walls and a gently peaked ceiling with wooden beams arching overhead, plus a few square pillars near the front and back. The windows on ground level started to brighten next. All of them were barred—no surprise.

It looked like it may have been an abandoned church or mission that had outlived its usefulness as anything but a prison, in some dusty little village where the good cops, if there were any to start with, were all dead. The mayor, dead. Anybody who’d ever said one wrong word, dead.

It was gutted of everything that might have marked it as a holy place. The pews were gone, the altar was gone, the font for holy water was gone. All that was left was a raised platform at the front where the altar would’ve been, and empty alcoves in the walls where statues of saints would’ve stood.

They shared the place with twenty-odd other people. Most were curled up on the floor, still asleep. A few others sat with their backs to the walls, looking ring-eyed and dazed, like they’d forgotten what sleep was. Men, mostly, gone grubby and unshaven. A couple of hard looking women.

“We don’t belong here.”

He turned and found Sebastián was awake now. He’d seen their singer looking this bad before, but it was only hangovers, or too many days speeding catching up with him. Nothing like this, like now he wasn’t expecting to get better.

“This is cartel shit, man. We don’t have anything to do with that. Why would they grab us?” Bas stopped a moment, getting a freshly horrified look on his face. “You don’t think it has to do with the pictures during the show, do you?”

That was something new the past couple tours, since they’d put out the last album, La máscara detrás de la cara. They’d always gone for a projected multimedia assault whenever they played, and Sebastián had decided it was time to forget about the chaos of the world at large for their imagery and tap currents events closer to home. All the photos of carnage you could want were a few clicks away online. The aftermath of massacres and assassinations and messages sent in buckets of blood splashed across pavement. Severed heads and arms hacked off at the elbows, and death sentence by blowtorch, and rows of butchered bodies hanging from train trestles. Film clips, too, that the anonymous murder teams had posted online. This is who we are, this is what we do, this is what it takes to keep our world turning.

He never knew how Sebastián could do it, comb through the ugliest shit in the world and arrange it in a sequence that whizzed by at four frames per second. From the audience perspective, there wasn’t time to linger on any one thing, so you couldn’t be sure what you’d just seen, you only knew it was terrible and probably real. Bas, though… he had to linger over it.

“No, I don’t think it’s got anything to do with that,” Enrique said. “That’s free advertising for them, is all.”

He looked down at Sofia, still asleep, the kind of sleep that becomes the only self-defense you have left. Same with Morgan. Olaf too, only he looked like could just as easily be unconscious as asleep, all that dried blood down one side of his face and caked in his white-blond hair. He must’ve really taken a beating during the grab.

Sebastián was trying to look hopeful but it came off looking queasy. “Maybe they’re gonna ransom us, that’s what this is about. It’s part of the business model now, you know.”

He was right on that much. Used to, the people might see cartel crews rolling in their convoys of pickup trucks, and as long as everybody kept out of their way, they’d leave the people alone. Not anymore. Times were tougher, even for the cartels. Every time a boss got killed or captured, organizations fractured and the chaos ramped up. Plus anybody who said the Federal police and the American DEA weren’t having an impact wasn’t paying attention. Whenever they lost another tunnel to the north side, or another supply route, that was another fortune lost.

But all around them were people too scared to fight back. And people who loved those people. Some of them even had a little money to pay to get their loved ones back in more or less one piece. It wasn’t drug-sized cash, but $40,000 for a few days of no-risk work wasn’t a bad sideline.

Only Enrique wasn’t seeing it. Not here.

“I don’t know, Bas,” he said. “They didn’t have any interest in Hector. They didn’t give him a chance. And Crispin, he was the one looking like he could buy his way out of anything.”

Go back to the site now, what would be left? A lot of nothing. The SUV would’ve been towed to a chop shop in Matamoros or Reynosa. For Hector and Crispin, graves no one would ever discover, or maybe an acid bath.

“What I can’t figure is how they knew where to find us at all. They shouldn’t have known that. Nobody was following. Where would they have picked up on us?”

Oh god, that look on Sebastián’s face—like his eyes were falling back inside the cold black emptiness of his head, and his skin was on too tight.

“What did you do, Bas? What the fuck did you do?”

It came from somewhere so far inside him he could barely squeeze out sound: “I sent out a tweet. Right after we got to the airport.”

Enrique’s breath left him all at once. Twitter. Sure, why not. Because Sebastián couldn’t wait to get a jump on the image thing. Tell the whole world what lonely, godforsaken, evil place they were going to. Look at us, everybody, see how edgy we are. Never guessing who might be paying the wrong kind of attention.

“The airplane didn’t kill us, so you figured you would?” Enrique whacked Sebastián across the face, open-handed but with heft behind it, to knock him off his ass and send him sprawling across the dingy wooden floor.

A few of the dead people, los muertos, looked up at the commotion, decided they’d seen it all before, and tuned them out again.

Near tears, Sebastián scuttled a few feet away and put his head between his knees. Sofia roused, coming awake, feeling the disturbance in the air.

“What?” she said, her tongue thick with morning, then she jolted into high alert as everything hit her all over again. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing.” He couldn’t think of a single good result that could come from telling her. Not now. Later, if there was time for it to matter. “Just nerves.”

She looked around, taking it all in and liking none of it. He noticed, for the first time, a pair of five-gallon plastic buckets in the farthest corner—the communal toilet. Currently in use.

Meanwhile, Sebastián had gotten brave enough to have a look out one of the barred front windows flanking the pair of main doors, big slabs of wood and iron that looked solid enough to withstand cannon fire.

Up. Sebastián was looking up.

He backed away from the window then, one slow foot after another, so tense his tendons were going to pop if he wasn’t careful. His fingertips went to his lips and he stopped, something inside shutting down.

They took his place at the window.

Not far beyond the front doors was the biggest Santa Muerte he’d ever seen. She stood fifteen feet tall, easy. Her blue robes were voluminous, enough material there for a festival tent. She seemed too big to have found her a scythe that wouldn’t look like a toy. Yet they had. Somebody must’ve made it just for her, a scythe big enough to cut the moon in half. And somehow… somehow the skull was at scale.

“That can’t be real,” Sofia said.

No. It couldn’t. It just looked real. The yellowing of age. The uneven teeth. The missing teeth, random gaps in the jaw. They’d had it made, that was all. Same props company that made the chacmool, maybe. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the head.

A sight like this, the biggest thing around, your eyes would naturally go to it, linger on it. So it took a while for them to notice the rest, the bits and pieces scattered around the hem of Santa Muerte’s giant robe. Never mind the skull. These were real. Arms and legs, hands and feet and heads. They were as real as real got.

“Do me a favor,” Sofia said, quiet as a butterfly. “If it looks like that’s where I’m headed, kill me. If I ever got on your nerves and you wanted to break my neck, that would be a good time.”

After everybody was awake and moving, there was only one person who would talk with them, a graying, droopy-jowled viejo who said he was a priest. Everybody else, Enrique figured it was like that guy in war movies—the tight-faced veteran with the thousand-yard stare who’s been around the longest, and he doesn’t want to get to know the new recruits transferring into the unit. Doesn’t even want to know their names. They’ll be dead in a week, so why bother.

“What’s a priest have to do to get a cartel mad at him?” Enrique asked.

“Exorcisms,” Padre Thiago said. “I cast out the devil from the ones who let him in but don’t want him dwelling in them any longer. He doesn’t like that, and neither do his servants.” The old man looked out in the direction of the towering Santa Muerte, then grinned and spread his hands as if to bless his flock. “But you see how God works. He brings me here where prayers of liberation are needed most.”

Enrique had all kinds of things he could’ve said then about God and deliverance and working in mysterious ways, but there would have been no upside to any of it. You choose your battles wisely. And you don’t drive off your allies.

“Who are his servants here?” he said instead. “I don’t know what this is about. I don’t know who took us, or why.”

“That group of men over there?” The priest pointed with discretion at a sullen cluster occupying the farthest corner opposite the toilet buckets. “They say they are with the Sinaloa Federation. This would probably make it the Zetas who have you.”

“Just me,” Enrique said. “Not you?”

“Wherever I am, I am only God’s.”

Knowing who still didn’t explain why. The Sinaloa Federation controlled the northwest. The Zetas, once they’d turned against the Gulf Cartel, took control of the northeast and the coast all the way down to the Yucatan. There were others, but these two were the gorillas, fighting for as much turf as they could take, with strips of contested no-man’s-land running down the center of the country.

“And there’s that one, too.” Padre Thiago meant a stocky man milling about on the Sinaloa periphery, as though he didn’t belong but was allowed closer than most. “Do you recognize him?”

The man looked to be in his upper thirties, and like the rest of them, he’d been at least a week without a razor, so his beard was catching up with his moustache. Enrique gave it his best, trying to see who he was under the whiskers and the unruly, unwashed hair.

No,” he had to admit. “Should I?”

“You don’t recognize Miguel Cardenas? I thought one music person might know another, but what do I know.”

Enrique never would have gotten it on his own, but now he had enough for the connections to link. Different music, different look, different everything. He knew the name, ignored the rest. Miguel Cardenas was a traditionalist, singing dusty songs for the provinces. Enrique could picture the man in his cowboy hat, holding an acoustic guitar, in front of a backup band of brass and accordion, tasteful drums and upright bass. He still wore a white dress shirt, dingy now, and black slacks with silver studs down the sides. What had they done—nab him after a show?

“I bet I can guess,” Enrique said. “The idiot did a narco ballad about one of the bosses in the Federation.”

Padre Thiago gave a sad nod. “If you seek favor by flattering one side, the other may not turn a deaf ear to it.”

Enrique couldn’t help but stare. He was looking at the deadest man in this room. A guy like that, there would be no ransom for him. He was an insult that couldn’t be forgiven. He was the pet dog that got killed to make a point.

And it was one more reason why this didn’t make sense. The three of them, Los Hijos del Infierno, weren’t on anybody’s side. They sang nobody’s praises. It would’ve been like asking whose side you were on between lung cancer and heart disease. They were on the side of life, end of story.

That was the thing people never got about them. The look, the sound, the lyrics, the stage show… all of it left people who couldn’t look or listen any deeper thinking they must’ve been on the side of death. What else could they be? Because look at them. Look at the freaks. Never once considering the band was another symptom, the world getting the art it deserved.

You only screamed that loud when dying was the last thing you wanted to do.

It was the middle of the day when they came for Olaf and Morgan.

A squad of armed guys burst in shouting for everyone to get on the far side of the room, and everybody else knew the drill already. It seemed to be the way the cartel guys handled everything here. They either brought what they wanted or took what they wanted, and did it at gunpoint with lots of yelling.

If you wanted to die quick, here was your chance. Whatever they said, do the opposite. Go straight at them, screaming for blood. It had to be a better end than you’d get under that giant Santa Muerte. There was every reason to believe whatever happened there would go a lot worse.

So why didn’t anybody do it? Most of these people had been here for days or longer. Padre Thiago had been here over two weeks. They all knew what was going on.

The only thing that could’ve stopped them from rushing into gunfire was hope. They still hoped someone cared enough to buy their release. That’s what kept them docile. That’s what would keep them docile one day too long.

Then again? Forcing a quick end was easy to dream about, but when they came in that first time, all stormtrooping and chaos, the only thing Enrique could do was scuttle to the wall with everyone else and try to wrap the adobe around him. Ashamed, because the thing he wanted most in the world right then was to be invisible. Don’t see me, don’t pick me, don’t act like you even know I’m here. He folded himself over Sofia and that was all the altruism he could muster. When he saw it was Olaf and Morgan they wanted, he’d never been more with disgusted with himself for feeling relief.

Olaf was still feisty. They had to pry Morgan from his arms and knock the wind out of him with the butt-end of an AK-47 to the gut. He dropped to his knees, gasping, then they dragged him by the shoulders. Morgan went easier, stumbling along with her eyes popped wide and her mouth open in a silent scream, like she’d hit a place of panic so overwhelming she froze there.

As quickly as they’d come, the extraction team was gone, and everyone unglued themselves from the wall. Enrique drifted up to the front window, forcing every step, because someone who knew them should bear witness. He would watch as long as he could.

Only they didn’t reappear. Santa Muerte continued to stand alone.

That was life here, the terrible erratic rhythm of it. Long stretches of boredom and soul-eating dread, waiting for something to happen, and when it did, you shit yourself with fear.

Within hours, he and Bas and Sofia had become fixtures the same as the rest, subject to the same pecking orders and probing. Even in captivity, the Sinaloa guys had their own mini-cartel going. They’d been watching, taking the measure of the newcomers, and an hour or so after Morgan and Olaf were taken, one of them decided he wanted a woman and wanted one now, and made a move on Sofia.

Enrique went tense, ready to go off if needed, and he figured he would be before it was over. One on one, though, the guy didn’t have a chance. Sofia had been fending off grabby assholes for years. She’d gone through a phase when she cut her hair short and choppy, thinking it might discourage them, but it didn’t, so she’d grown it out again and instead worked on preemptive strikes.

This one she kicked in the balls, and when he doubled over, gripped him by the curly ringlets of hair on the back of his head to steady him for a knee to the face. He was on the floor before his buddies saw it was going to happen. A few of them moved to step in, so Enrique came forward for the intercept.

He’d already guessed how they had him pegged. That they saw him as someone for whom size didn’t matter, whose mass they could dismiss. He’d accepted years ago that he was always going to have the round, moonfaced look of some lumpen guy too big and slow to do anything other than let bad shit happen to him.

Sometimes it was good to leave the wrong impression. When all they saw was freaks with smudged, day-old makeup, you could do a lot of damage before they caught on.

The first one who got close, Enrique hooked a punch into the side of his neck that landed with the sound of meat slapping onto stone. It sent him staggering until he dropped a few steps away. The next, Enrique stomped a kick into his belly to fold him in half, then brought a hammer-fist down like an anvil to the back of his skull. Another he picked up and threw at two others, a carnival game of pins and balls. It took them by enough of a surprise that one of them stood there stupid long enough to let Sofia break his wrist, and all at once they were backing away, changing their minds, no fresh pussy was worth this.

He’d have to sleep light from now on, but was probably going to anyway, if last night was any indication.

Awhile later, Olaf and Morgan were brought back, neither of them worse off than before. The cartel guys, Olaf said, had only sat them down and grilled them about who they were, what they did, where they came from, who did they know with money. Mainly it was about the money.

Nobody was more relieved to hear this than Sebastián. He turned giddy, going on how it was only a matter of time before somebody came through, somebody had to—they made other people money, didn’t they? They were an investment somebody would want to protect. Bas couldn’t wait to help their captors out, give them names. Manager, label people, promoters. They had fans, so maybe a Kickstarter, bring the whole world in on getting them home safely.

Sebastián was everything hope looked like when it came unhinged.

The longer the day went on with nobody asking them anything, the farther Bas fell again. By dusk, he was making such a fuss at the barred windows, shouting to anyone who’d listen how ready he was to talk, that Enrique dragged him back before someone decided they were sick of listening to him squall.

It wasn’t happening.

Whatever they were here for, it was something other than money.

Later that night they got their first look at how things ultimately went here. It was just late enough for people to start getting drowsy, this holy prison filling with the sounds of people dropping off and snoring, one of them muttering from someplace deep inside a bad dream. Then reality intruded, as bad or worse, everybody rousted by the extraction team as they burst in and went straight for one of the Sinaloa guys he’d scrapped with earlier and dragged him away screaming.

Straight to Santa Muerte.

Maybe they’d picked him because he’d outlived his usefulness. Or because it was a good time to grab him, since he was fucked up from earlier and couldn’t struggle as well. Or because he’d lost a fight with a big chubby guy and this left him looking weak. Maybe it was random and there was no reasoning behind it at all.

Enrique’s nerves were too shredded to settle on how he was supposed to feel about this. Relieved? One less enemy to worry about, after all. Hours earlier he could’ve killed the guy himself. He’d wanted him dead, wanted him humbled and suffering.

Just not like this.

Enrique was the only one at the window—everybody else must have seen it all before—until Sebastián joined him like it was the last place he wanted to be except for everyplace else here.

“Don’t watch, boys,” Padre Thiago called out to them. “Why would you watch?”

Good question. With that cartel snuff footage he’d combed through online, at least Sebastián was better equipped to handle it. As for himself? Could be he needed an unfiltered look at where this could end for them. All the motivation he would need to push the schedule and make it quicker, when the time came.

The crew had enough stark white lights burning out front that it wasn’t hard to see. It took eight or nine guys to handle things—three to get the victim into place, the rest standing guard to enforce compliance if needed, then one more coming into view when the others parted and the light caught him.

“Oh shit,” Sebastián breathed. “I know that one, I’ve seen him… seen him in pictures, I think.”

This newest guy didn’t need the machete in his hand to look like walking death. He had the part down already. Tall, thin as a broomstick and without a shirt, bone and ropy muscle standing out in equally sharp relief across his tattooed skin. They covered him, maybe 20% of his hide left uninked for contrast. The rest was monochrome designs in black and dark green, cheap ink. Or maybe he hated color.

“How can you be sure?” Enrique said.

“The ones on his face. I only ever saw one of them looking like that.”

The skin around his eyes had been shaded into dark ovals. The sides of his nose were blacked out too, along with his lower cheeks and parts of his chin. His head was shaved. From a distance, and probably close-up, too, the effect was like a living, decorated skull.

“I think he’s MS-13,” Sebastián said. “They don’t even try to blend.”

Funny thing—he thought he was at rock bottom already. No more room left to feel worse about their chances. But hearing this was a reminder: There was always room to go lower.

Some may have been as bad, but nobody was worse than MS-13. Salvadorans from Los Angeles, originally, but over time they’d spread, exported, colonized, let others in. Worked with the cartels, some of them. Salvadoran, Mexican, Guatemalan… nationalities didn’t matter as much when the big thing you had in common was the ability to bury your humanity so deep you could never find it again, leaving it to rot with the worms. When you could do what they did without feeling anything more than that it had to be done. That this was what it took to get business taken care of. No different than guys who clocked in at the meat plants. They all had two eyes, two ears, and a mouth, same as the pigs and cows, but were still the ones holding the chainsaws.

The Sinaloa guy was stripped to his boxer shorts, then stretched out flat on the ground as somebody stood on each arm to keep him there. The Skull started by taking off his hands. As somebody else moved in with a propane torch to cauterize the stumps, he picked up the hands and flicked the blood from them into the dirt as he carried them over to Santa Muerte. They hacked off his feet next and made offerings of those, too. The men weighting him down stepped off to let the guy roam at will because how far could he get now, down to four stumpy limbs, nothing but charred nubs at the ends.

They seemed to find it entertaining. Nothing funnier than watching a guy in that condition try to flop away.

The Skull opened a big wooden box then, pulling out every kind of knife there was: military knives, hunting knives, fish knives, kitchen cutlery. He took his time, sticking one in and leaving it in place like a plug, because pulling the blade out would free the wound to bleed, and the Skull didn’t want that. Soft tissue, areas that wouldn’t be immediately fatal—those were his targets, and he found them one by one.

There seemed no end to it, a harder thing to watch than the amputations because of the calm, casual progression, the guy on the receiving end mindlessly trying to wallow away every time another blade skewered him, until he could no longer manage even that much, and could only lie there and take it, more and more bristling like a porcupine. The only way Enrique was certain he was still alive was because of how the handles rose and fell with each ragged breath. Every now and then, his whole carcass shuddered.

Enrique wouldn’t have thought so until now, but he found this ordeal worse to contemplate than coming apart at the joints. He had more soft tissue than anybody here, enough to keep the Skull busy for hours.

He watched when he could, turned away when he couldn’t. But he never left the window. This is what it takes to be glad to die.

Sebastián, though, had checked out a long time ago, sliding down the wall and holding himself together with both arms wrapped around his knees. Maybe it was easier to watch when it was on video. Bas could always pretend it was special effects in a movie. All he had to do was turn off the sound.

Sound was the giveaway, he’d explained once, how you knew when something was real and when it was staged. Terrified people, dying people, people in agony, made sounds that nobody could get to under any other circumstances. Once you’d heard the difference, there could be no confusing the two.

Just as there were sights you couldn’t unsee, there were sounds you couldn’t unhear, and this poor fucker out there out had made them all.

So when they finished it, the Skull tugging a wicked looking military knife free of the guy’s groin and using it to saw off his head, the sound was more a part of it than anything Enrique could see. The angle was bad, too many bristling knife handles in the way. But he could hear it, that soul-shredding crescendo of mortality the guy had been holding in reserve.

Enrique didn’t know when it happened, only that at some point Nietzsche’s old warning came to mind: If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you. This was the feeling he got every time the Skull looked up from his work and peered straight at him in the window, as if making sure Enrique was still watching.

Good. You need to pay attention, the Skull seemed to be saying. I know it’s rough, but this is what it takes to get where we’re going.

He lost track of time, didn’t know if it was an hour after the slaughter or an hour before sunrise. All he knew was that he was lying on the floor next to Sofia, their arms hooked around each other’s at the elbow. He remembered seeing somewhere that otters slept this way, holding hands so they wouldn’t drift apart on the river. If he had a next life coming, that was how he wanted to be reborn. Come back as an otter, sweet-faced and sleek and holding hands while he slept, and life would be simple.

“We should have never gone to Matamoros,” Sofia said to him in the dark. “You and me, we should have voted Bas down. We should never have agreed to go to that ranch.” She moved her head closer and kept her voice low, everything just between them. “It had us then. It reached out from the past and took us.”

That was how it felt, yeah. They’d raised their heads high enough to be noticed by the dreadful thing that claimed this land, and it decided it wanted them. It opened its jaws to gobble them up and the cartel guys were its teeth.

“I was going to tell you earlier, when we were there, but I didn’t want the place listening to me, you know?” she said. “Hearing about what happened at that ranch was my first memory. The first one I can pin down.”

So much worse was going on around them, but this still hurt him straight to the heart. “That’s awful.”

“I was three,” she went on. “Something like that, kidnapping, human sacrifice, you don’t understand it when you’re that little. And you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t ever have to understand it. At the time, it was more about the effect it had on my mother, and me seeing how she reacted. Not just to what they’d found, but what they hadn’t, too, because there was talk of them maybe taking kids that never did turn up.”

Lying there, he wished for an arm of iron that they could never break if they came in to drag Sofia away.

“I didn’t understand it, but my mother did. I could see how much it scared her. How afraid she was for me. That there were people out there who would do these things. That’s what came through. And I could tell, she was afraid she couldn’t protect me, not from people like that. Because they had the devil behind them. Once that settled in, I don’t know if I ever felt totally safe again.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and meant it for everything he hadn’t been able to do for her, then or now.

“I should have never stopped believing in the devil.”

The next afternoon, at the height of the heat of the day, they came for Sebastián.

At first, weirdly enough, it was just an order, almost deferential compared to their usual methods, threat behind it but no force. When he didn’t want any part of it, only then did things get rough, Bas taking a knee to the groin so hard it brought up his meager lunch. The bones went out of his legs, the fear so overwhelming every muscle went loose.

Sofia was screaming, reaching for Bas as they dragged him across the floor. It took both of Enrique’s arms in wraparound to hold her back. Had it been just him and Bas, he would’ve done it, rushed them, made these savages shoot them both, let them bleed out quick from twenty bullet wounds apiece. But with Sofia here, he couldn’t bring himself to do it, not as long as they didn’t want her yet, and he hated himself for being like the rest of the docile herd, buying into the desperation: that as long as there was time, there was hope.

When they got Sebastián out the door, they surprised everybody by coming back for one more. Miguel Cardenas this time, the country balladeer who’d written one narco ballad too many, in his filthy white shirt and black pants with the silver studs down the sides. With him, there was no deference at all, the cartel team back to their usual routine of brutality first, orders later. Once he got over the shock, he begged all the way out the door.

You could follow their path outside by the sobbing. After Sofia hunkered on the floor with her hands squashed over her ears, Enrique forced himself to the window and saw two guys waiting near Santa Muerte, holding sledgehammers like firing squad riflemen waiting for the order to aim.

Both, as it turned out, were for Cardenas. They took out his knees first, and after he was down they smashed his elbows, then went to work on his hands and feet. They left him plenty alive, just nothing to crawl with, fight with, grab with, resist with. They reduced it all to pulp and compound fractures.

At the first couple of blows, Sebastián buckled to the ground as if he’d been hit too, going fetal as the hammers rose and fell. When the guys swinging the iron backed off, the Skull took over, squatting next to Sebastián, doing no worse than laying a hand on his shoulder, but Bas flinched anyway.

This was beyond figuring out, as long as he couldn’t hear what the Skull was saying—and there was a conversation going on. One minute, two minutes, three. He wasn’t treating Bas cruelly, only patting him on the shoulder a couple of times, as if telling him, There, there, it’ll be all right.

Then the Skull had somebody bring his box of knives and it looked to be last night all over again. Until he took one for himself and gave another to Sebastián. He pointed at Cardenas and his pulverized joints, lying on his back and howling at the sky.

Enrique clutched the bars over the window as Bas began shaking his head, no no no no. The Skull went first, sinking his first knife to the hilt into Cardenas’ thigh, then glaring at Sebastián: Your turn.

When he couldn’t do it, the Skull’s voice got louder, yelling now, discernible.

“You don’t hate him? You don’t hate his music, everything a hack like him stands for?” the Skull shouted. “Come on, man, you’re ten times the singer he is. Let it out! You sing about hate all the time! Is that just an act? What good is the hate if you don’t let it out!”

Sebastián gave Cardenas a half-hearted poke, sufficient to scratch the skin, but not good enough. The Skull badgered and threatened, then told him he’d better do it right this time or maybe Santa Muerte would get one of his eyes. He didn’t need both eyes to sing. Didn’t need either of them, for that matter.

It snapped him. Bas wailed from the ground and with a sob plunged the knife into Cardenas’ belly.

Back and forth then. One for you, one for me. It came easier each time, Bas sticking in every subsequent blade with less hesitation and more resolve. This is what it takes to crawl away. It was like watching a little more of him going dead inside each round.

Ten or twelve knives later, the Skull called a break to confer, voices too low to hear again. He had somebody bring another wooden box—like a small, low crate—and hefted something out of it, treating it with obvious care. Enrique couldn’t tell what it was, only that it looked flat and heavy and as black as outer space. It was lost from view as the Skull put it on the ground and the two of them hunched over it.

Minutes of this, while every so often, Cardenas wailed and moaned and tried to move in some way that his smashed parts wouldn’t allow.

Until it was back to the knives. Just the Skull this time, looming over Sebastián in a posture of challenge, authority. Bas kept trying to back away but was too cracked to get anywhere, head hanging at the end of a neck gone limp as he used up the last of whatever he had in him to say no. Not that. Please no. Every time he did, the Skull merged another knife with some part of Miguel Cardenas.

“I can do this all day!” the Skull told him. “You gonna let that happen? Gonna let me keep doing this until I run out of knives? All you got to do is cut him once. It would be an act of mercy.”

And that was how you broke somebody for good: made him do a thing like this.

“You tell me no one more time, the next thing you get to do is pick which one of your people you get to watch me gut in front of you. Your choice.”

Took one piece of his soul at a time.

Bas must have quietly acquiesced. The Skull handed him a knife, one of the big, mean looking ones, maybe the same go-to blade he’d used to finish things last night. And the finish was the same. From this angle, Enrique couldn’t see much, Sebastián in a kneeling position, his elbow pumping back and forth in a sawing motion. Two hideous screams. One ended quickly, the other one kept going. And going.

That was the impressive thing about Bas. He could hold a note for a long time.

Way past what for most people would be the breaking point.

It was hours before he could talk, another hour after that before anything intelligible came out. Until then, it was just Bas in a corner, huddled up like a whipped dog, catatonic sometimes, shaking when he wasn’t, eyes focused on nothing. Sofia held him, rocked him, reported that he felt like he’d crawled out of a cold river. Morgan and Olaf hung close, ready to help if they could, but they couldn’t.

“He wanted to know,” Bas said, halting every few words, “about the last album.”

La máscara detrás de la cara, that would’ve been. The Mask Behind the Face.

“What about it?”

“He wanted to know where it came from.”

Enrique had to let this sink in, double-check to make sure Bas had it right. Even if it explained why they’d returned him alive, Enrique still couldn’t believe it come down to this: that they’d been taken by a fan who wanted to get close to the band.

“I didn’t understand what he meant. I couldn’t follow him. I didn’t know what to tell him.” Sebastián seemed unable to stop replaying everything in his mind, or stop shaking his head. “He made me look at a rock. He kept making me look at the rock. I couldn’t see what he wanted me to. But he wouldn’t let me look away from the rock.”

It was about all they got out of him.

Things were quiet for the evening and the rest of the night, sitting in the dark with los muertos, the other dead. A whole new heavy black mood had settled in. Forced to butcher each other—this was an escalation nobody had seen coming, and now that it was here, how was anyone supposed to look at the person next to him without imagining which of them might end up forced to hold the knives?

None of them had overheard what Bas had said—it was too soft to hear unless you were right next to him—and Enrique wasn’t going to tell the rest to ease their minds. Go on, keep trusting one another, you’re still in this together, because if it happens again, it’ll only be me or Sofia holding the knife. Yeah, that would go over great.

Just Olaf, just Morgan. He told them.

The rest? Let them live with it, the same fear they’d spent their lives inflicting on their neighbors. This is what it takes to start paying for your sins.

He listened in the dark as Padre Thiago ministered to the ones who decided they’d lived as wolves long enough and it was time to be lambs again. Time to let a priest pray over them, deliver them of the cruel devils that had taken them over to make them do such terrible things. If they were going to God soon, they wanted to go clean and pure and forgiven.

And there it was—the reason he’d never had much use for God. If he had to believe in a god at all, he wanted one who would really hold you to your life’s choices.

When they came for him the next morning Enrique was ready for it, the only one in the room who didn’t retreat to the far wall like the others. They were so used to it, these guys with their guns and their yelling, they didn’t know what to make of him, that somebody would sit in the floor waiting for whatever came next. His passivity unnerved them, all eight guys peeking at each other like they didn’t trust it and didn’t know what to do next, afraid they were being suckered into the struggle of their lives.

“I’ll go,” Enrique said. “No big deal. When did fighting it ever work for anybody? I’ll go.”

They took him alone, him and nobody else. They escorted him around the side of the church, three days since he’d felt the ground beneath his boots and the open sky and the direct searing heat of the sun. At the end of it, the Skull was waiting, and behind him, that colossal likeness of Santa Muerte with her scythe, grim against the cloudless blue and gritting her ivory teeth at the horizon. Everything else looked baked to shades of brown.

Somebody shoved a foot into the back of one knee to drop him to the earth. He knew better than to get up. The guards backed off to give them space.

“I figured it was either you or Sebastián,” the Skull told him. “Drummers, they’re the heart, they’re not usually the visionaries. They feel the pulse of the earth. They don’t see through time. So it had to be you or him. And it wasn’t him.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah you do. You’re just playing stupid.”

From here, close up, it was like seeing this guy for the first time. He was more than a living skull now. Skulls didn’t have eyebrows. Skulls didn’t have lips. Enrique could see the way his skin moved over his actual bones, could discern the numbers and words, patterns and pictures, inked into his skin. He looked close to emaciated, either by genetics or by choice, or maybe he was an example of function creating form. He had only as much as a reaper needed, and no more.

“You keep playing stupid, I’ll treat you like you’re stupid. You’ll make me do something to smarten you up. Is that what you want?”

“I want to be gone from here. Me and mine. That’s what I want.”

The Skull nodded as if this were one of many possibilities. “It could happen.”

Three little words, so much hope. It could happen. But probably an illusion.

“Sebastián may be the one at the front of the stage, but he does what you tell him to. He’s only got as much to work with as you give him. You’re the architect of what you three do,” the Skull said. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

“It’s more complicated than that. But you’re not wrong.”

“I get it. You need him and he needs you. You, you’re not the kind of guy who’ll ever be at the front of the stage. You don’t have the look. But you got something better. You got the brains. You got the vision.”

It was one of the more backhanded compliments anyone had given him. But under the circumstances? He’d take it.

“So… The Mask Behind the Face. I could tell, just from the title, here’s someone who knows some things. Here’s someone who sees. Then I listen and read the lyrics, and I think, here’s someone who understands. How you did it, that’s beyond me, I don’t know how a studio works, but you managed to put together the electronics and all that other aggro shit with those ancient flutes and grinding stones and old drums, and made a sound not like anything I ever heard. An effect not like anything I ever felt. A sound, that’s just noise unless you got an idea behind it. And you did. That was the thing that convinced me, whoever did this is some kind of shaman.”

The Skull was pacing with the frantic movements of somebody who’d spent a long time looking for an elusive prize and was on the verge of finding it.

“It wasn’t just the notes. Anybody can play the notes.” He squatted, nose to tattooed nose with Enrique. “There’s something in there between the notes, looking back out. I don’t know how you captured that. But it’s there. And it’s a fucking monster.” It was hard to tell if his eyes were desperate or insane. “How did you know?”

Slowly, Enrique shook his head. “I’ve got no answer for that. I wish I did.”

“You don’t leave here unless you give me better than that.”

“I could make up a better lie. Is that what you want?”

The Skull peered at him from inches away, as if trying to see beneath the skin. “You got the look of the first people here. Maybe that explains it, why you and not Sebastián. You got the look of the conquered, not the conquistador. You got that blood memory in you, maybe.”

He pulled back, squatting with his bony elbows on his pointy knees.

“And me, see, I know blood. I know sacrifice. I’m one of the ones they call when they really want to send a message, because I can do it and not blink.” He motioned to the towering Santa Muerte, the body parts laid out before her. They buzzed with flies and gave off a stink like roadkill. “It’s just another day’s work to me. But that doesn’t mean I don’t ever think about what I’m doing. To me, it’s nothing new. It’s something that’s come around again, part of something that goes way back. I can feel it in the knives. Their handles, man, they fucking hum.”

His scrutiny turned puzzled, hungry for secrets he’d never been able to grab.

“A guy like you, you don’t get your hands red the way I do. But you figured it out anyway. All I’m asking is how.”

“It’s just knowing some history, some myths, is all. Same shit, different century. It’s just following where it leads.”

The Skull nodded, eager, like they were getting somewhere. “You went straight to the oldest stories, I could tell. The people here, way before the Spaniards showed up, they had a good thing going. They had this teacher, maybe he was a god, or maybe he was something else and a god was the only thing they knew to call him. Kukulcan… Quetzalcoatl… whatever his real name was. He was teaching them everything they needed to know. These people, they were on their way up. The sun was theirs. And then the clouds came. It’s what clouds do, right? Come in and wash things away.”

The legends called him Tezcatlipoca—a dark, malevolent god who had come along and driven the teacher off.

Whatever the differences between them, he and the Skull could speak of this much like equals, at least.

These archaic figures, these events, had always felt to him like more than myth. More than his ancestors’ way of trying to make sense of their failings, their hungers and thirsts, their savagery. Behind the stories was something hidden and true, and behind that, more truths that he couldn’t begin to guess at. He just knew they were there.

Ever since he was a boy, seeing the world take shape around him, farther and farther from his mother’s kitchen, it was hard to deny the sense that something had gone wrong here, in this land. Hundreds of years ago, or maybe thousands. Something had come down from above, or up from below, or in from outside, and convinced the people that it had a never-ending need for their blood, shed in all kinds of ways. You see those knives? You see those chests with the hearts beating inside them? You see those skins you can peel away and wear over your own until they fall apart? Get to it, and don’t ever stop. This is what it takes now, so never forget.

It was everything he knew and nothing he could prove. All he’d ever been able to do was turn up the volume and scream into the clouds.

“Gracias,” the Skull whispered, and pushed up from his squat to stand tall again. “Thank you for letting me know I’m not the only one.”

They’d been friendly enough that the anger began to override the fear. “Man, everything you asked is something you could’ve asked me through the band’s web site. Or hit me up on Twitter. People got questions, we don’t ignore them. We talk back, you know.”

Images flickered like flash cards. Their driver Hector, killed at the wheel. Crispin, shot out of his shoes. Guys butchered outside the window, and forcing Bas to join in. They could let him go right now, and he would never unsee these last few days. For as long as he lived, he would be waking up from nightmares.

“Did it really have to take all this?”

And look. The Skull knew how to smile. “You think this little chat is it? No, this is us getting to know each other. The next part, that’s the initiation. That’s the important part.”

He whistled and motioned toward their makeshift prison, and three guys came out escorting Padre Thiago. He’d chosen not to fight it either. Calmest face you ever saw. Like he expected God was going to take care of him on the spot. There, there, my child, trust in me for deliverance.

“Don’t do this. Please don’t do this.” Enrique had sworn he wouldn’t beg, and listen to him now. Everybody’s got a plan until the knives come out. “Did I not treat you with respect? Didn’t I take you seriously? What’s the point of this? You think trying to turn us into you is gonna get you any closer to answers than you got already?”

The Skull was only half paying attention as he hauled over the box of knives and the compact crate from last night. The latter was the least among his props, and with every other nightmarish thing going on, Enrique had all but forgotten about it.

He made me look at a rock. He kept making me look at the rock.

The desperation was starting to eat deeper. “It wasn’t any shaman that did that album, just three pissed-off people who like to make loud noises. I don’t know shit, all I’m doing is asking the same questions as you.”

I couldn’t see what he wanted me to. But he wouldn’t let me look away from the rock.

Padre Thiago passed him then, patted him on his big round shoulder, the cruelest thing the priest could’ve done—absolving him in advance. It was all Enrique could do to not scream at him. Get your hand off me, old man. Don’t you know where this is going? Don’t you know what he’s gonna make me do to you? I don’t want you forgiving me for any of it.

From the crate, the Skull removed the artifact from last night, flat and heavy. As black as outer space, he’d thought while seeing it from a distance, not knowing why he’d made the connection. Now he remembered reading about an astronaut who came back saying that, from out there in it, space looked shiny.

Obsidian, he realized, now that he saw the artifact close up. Volcanic glass. It was shaped like an irregular rectangle, scooped out but too shallow to be a bowl, too bulky to be a plate, and polished into a black mirror. The rim was threaded with gray-green veins marbled into the stone itself, seemingly random, but nagging him with a promise that if he stared long enough he would comprehend a hidden pattern, an intentional design the earth had woven in the chaos of fire and lava.

The outer edges were rougher, designs carved around the circumference, lines that thickened and thinned, swooped and jittered and curved back onto themselves. Not Aztec, not Mayan, not Olmec, not like any patterns he’d seen before.

As he looked at it, his gaze pulled by its peculiar gravity, it caught a reflection of lumpy clouds skimming overhead, the effect like smoke drifting across its gleaming black surface.

I know what this is…

Except when he looked up, there were no clouds.

The Smoking Mirror—it was another of their names for Tezcatlipoca, the dark god who had chased away their teacher. They hadn’t called him that because of his eyes, his face, his demeanor. None of that. It wasn’t poetics, it was practical. They’d called him that because of something he’d owned and used. He would gaze into it and see things—the far-away doings of gods and men, they said.

“Where did you get this?”

“A guy in Tampico,” the Skull told him. “You kill enough people, you’ve seen everything they try to buy you off with. But this? This was a first. Where he got it, I don’t know. I get the idea it’s one of those things that doesn’t stay in the same pair of hands for long. It keeps on the move. It’s… restless.”

Even Padre Thiago looked drawn to it, mesmerized, until the Skull lunged at him and clocked him across the jaw with his fist. The priest hit the ground before Enrique could scramble over on his knees to catch him, not wholly unconscious but not much good for anything else for a while.

The Skull pointed at him. “He tell you why he’s here?”

“He said it was for doing exorcisms, and somebody didn’t like it.”

“Yeah? That’s what he told you? Well, he’s half right.” The Skull squatted before him again, voice at a murmur. “I heard about him. This priest. Still God’s warrior while the Church is losing people left and right to Santa Muerte. Still out there saving souls.”

It took Enrique a moment to catch on: The Skull didn’t want any of these other murderers listening to what he had to say.

“So I went to him, see what he could do for me. I thought maybe this thing inside, whatever it is that’s got its hooks in me, I want it out, and he’s the one who can do it. Most of the time I think it’s just me. But that’s the lie it feeds you. There’s other times I can feel it moving. Like something else has got itself lined up with my eyes.”

Or maybe that was the lie. Anything to believe it wasn’t purely him all along.

The Skull glared at Thiago with scorn. “He didn’t do shit for me. Isn’t that the worst thing a priest can do? Leave you the same as he found you? But I don’t know why I expected more. He’s still got this Old World way of looking at things. What’s he gonna do for me when he’s stuck chasing after some pointy-tailed devil?”

The Skull patted the bony cage of his chest.

“So I figure as long as I’m stuck with it, I might as well go all in, make friends with it. And I got that.” He hitched his thumb at the black stone, its shiny jet surface still drifting with billows and clouds. “Only it doesn’t work for me. That’s all it ever does. It won’t show me shit.”

I couldn’t see what he wanted me to.

And now, now, Enrique understood why they were here.

But he wouldn’t let me look away from the rock.

“You? You got the vision. You got the look, like your DNA never heard of Spain. You got as far as you did figuring some of these things out on your own,” the Skull said. “So I got to wonder, how much farther could you get if we juice it up for you? How much farther can you get when there’s blood?”

The Skull set the black stone, the smoking mirror, next to Padre Thiago, who still hadn’t come to his senses. Then he chose a knife and tossed it over. Enrique stared at it, lying in front of him on the hard-packed dirt. He gauged the distance between himself and the Skull. Looked at the guys with guns, tuning in again now that the time for talking was over.

If he wanted a firing squad, the moment had come.

“You know what to do,” the Skull said. “First one, that’s always the hardest. Then it gets easier. It did for Sebastián.”

Enrique glanced back at the church and saw Sofia in the window, fists wrapped around the bars and everything about her imploring him to live. She hadn’t watched for Bas. But she was watching for him.

He picked up the knife. The blade was long, thin, with tiny serrations along its edge. A boning knife, it looked like. It would go in easy. The Skull had chosen it for that. Enrique wiped it clean on his pant leg. Pointless, maybe, but he did it anyway.

He made himself look at Padre Thiago, at the man’s droopy, stubbled face as he rolled his head to the side, gaze meeting gaze. There was already blood, leaking from a split lip swollen like a bicycle tire about to burst. The priest was coming around again, peace in his eyes as he granted permission, stupid old man lying there ready to be a martyr. This is what it takes to be like Jesus.

Fuck these guys. He didn’t want to give either one of them what they wanted.

Enrique didn’t think about it. He just did it. Shoved up the long black sleeve of his shirt, crusted with days of sweat and dirt, and slashed the blade across the meat of his forearm. It opened like a lipless mouth, red on the inside but nothing happening, just like he didn’t feel anything yet, then all at once it hurt and welled up and spilled over hot.

“You stupid motherfucker! Why did you do that?” The Skull turned frenetic, diving toward him to snatch the knife and fling it out of reach. “Why would you do that?”

Somewhere behind him, Sofia was screaming too. A voice like that, maybe it should’ve been her at the front of the stage all along. And it was almost funny. This is what it takes to say I love you.

The Skull scrambled with him in the dirt and the blood, and he was strong, crazy strong, freakishly strong as he dragged the stone over and grabbed Enrique’s arm to lay it across the shiny black surface. Because while it may have been the wrong blood, as long as it was flowing, might as well not waste it.

Black and red, red on black—it pulsed and spattered, and the Skull smeared it across the smooth glass like a kid starting on a finger painting. Enrique was already going lightheaded, maybe not so much from actual blood loss as the idea of losing it. He’d always been a wuss about that, seeing himself leak a reminder of those childhood beatings from guys like this, the kids who listened to the call.

Lightheaded—how else to explain what he was seeing? Stone didn’t absorb blood. Sandstone, maybe, a little, but not obsidian. That wasn’t how it worked. That wasn’t how anything he knew about the world and rocks worked.

But the stone was a greedy thing, and it drank as if a million microscopic mouths opened wherever the blood pooled, and wanted more. His arm delivered. The Skull saw to that.

Whatever the black glass was showing him, clouds or smoke or steam, the billows and wisps began to drift apart. The space he saw waiting behind them looked shiny, shiny in a way that went beyond the glossiness of the surface. There was depth here, or a perfect illusion of it, the smooth black more like a porthole than a screen.

He couldn’t tell if what he was seeing belonged to the infinite depths between worlds or the unplumbed recesses beneath the earth, only that whatever stirred there stirred alone. No, not stirred… crawled, all body and no limbs. His perspective was small, yet what stared back seemed vast, titanic in the way only something so pure and simple could be. When it raised its head, its blind face had the unfinished look of a worm.

The Skull was riding his back now, jamming his head next to Enrique’s like they were both reading from the same engrossing book.

He thought of everything that lay between him and this monstrosity on the other side. He thought of altars, of ritual bowls and chacmools. He thought of killing fields and the steep, blood-slick steps descending the side of a pyramid. Channels and conduits, all. It didn’t matter where this thing was—he sensed that much in his heart. Didn’t matter how near or far away it dwelled. When blood was let, the flow found a way there. All spaces were one, a single point in time.

It drank him the same as it must have drunk millions before him, the thinnest visible drizzle falling on the flat, probing slug of its tongue. It then recoiled, as if it didn’t like the taste of him. Blood was blood, you’d think, but maybe its palate was more refined than you’d expect. Maybe it could discern some difference in the flavor of him, his blood let by his own hand because he would rather do that than slaughter the man next to him.

And it spewed him from the cavern of its mouth.

The smoke billowed across the glass to obscure the gulf between once more, and the stone was only obsidian again, black glass and nothing more.

He thought it was a trick of the mind when a shadow seemed to dim the light on this patch of ground where he lay face down and bleeding. That’s what blood loss did. Made your world a dimmer place.

But did it make hardened killers, bored with watching men die, shout and run?

Did it make the ground shake under three ponderous footsteps?

Did it make a sound like an enormous scythe sweeping down from above to cut the air in two?

Beside him, Padre Thiago lifted off the ground, there one instant, then gone. It took the last effort Enrique could call on to roll over onto his back, where he saw the halves of the priest’s body fly away to either side of the enormous blade, and beyond that, looming far above, the bone face of their Santa Muerte, the skull he’d always thought looked much too real.

A red rain showered them all.

He awoke to heat and stillness and the lazy buzzing of flies. There were flies in Hell, weren’t there? Pesky, biting, pain-in-the-ass flies that never let up tormenting the sinners. So maybe he was okay. These were just hanging around, the same old everyday shit-eaters.

The inside of his left forearm burned, but that was his own fault. Enrique found it bandaged, and beneath that, stitched. The Skull and the rest of his crew—what were they, if not a unit gone to war? It made sense they’d have a medic around.

He lay on a thin mattress atop squeaky springs, staring at a ceiling scarred with peeling paint and plaster so cracked and crumbled he could see the wooden slats above it. Some rundown room in some other building that wasn’t the church. He’d slept in worse places, actually, back when the band had to take whatever it could get. Never in clothes sticky with a priest’s blood, though. There were all kinds of ways to hit a new low.

Except for the flies, he couldn’t hear a sound. There was no sound to hear.

He got up from the bed—hung over from something they’d shot him up with, it felt like—and wandered to the window. Like waking up in a ghost town. Nothing out there to see but dust and corpses and pieces of corpses. None of it seemed real. He might as well be waking up in a video game. Wounded, not a clue, and next thing he was supposed to do was find a weapon and start killing anything that moved.

Only everything was dead already. Nothing outside was moving. Just him, once he got there.

Under the hot white eye of the sun, Enrique trudged toward the bodies. They’d really cleaned house before they’d abandoned the place, hadn’t they? Finished what they’d started, wrapping it up in a hurry, then bugging out fast. Maybe this was normal for them, treating places like a landfill, and when the bodies piled up too high, they moved on.

Most were hanging by their ankles, like bloody laundry, from cables stretched between poles, more than he could count at a glance. Nobody had died easy. Some had just died harder than others. More blood for the vast grave worm that tunneled through their lives, their world, their existence. And sooner or later, all the flies found their way here.

He trembled like it was twenty degrees instead of a hundred. As he scanned the rows of the dead, he looked for clothing because he couldn’t bring himself to look at faces, and was relieved to see there wasn’t much black, and none of it meant for a stage.

Lots of black hair, though. Except for the blond guy. Except for Olaf. Olaf the photographer. Whose real name was Oliver, he’d learned in the church, the sort of thing that came out when you were sitting around killing time waiting to see who was next to be killed. Said he got more gigs as Olaf than he ever had as Oliver—a man who knew how the game was played.

Yet here he was.

Enrique checked for a smaller body, half of it hair, but Morgan wasn’t among them. He was past deciding whether something was good or bad anymore. Maybe all that was left was bad right now, and bad deferred to later.

Like that empty spot where the towering Santa Muerte had stood. Did you just pack up a thing like that and move it? Was something like that really a priority? You’d need two strong guys just to carry the scythe.

Because no way had he seen what he thought he had there at the end. That priest had found some other way to get cut in half.

He turned his attention to the church. The pair of front doors was secured with a heavy, squared-off crossbar. Before he wrestled it from its brackets, he stooped to gather what was waiting, what had plainly been placed here for him to find. Three phones, plus a charger. When he tried his own, it was dead. When he tried the others, they were dead too.

But better the phones than Sofia and Sebastián.

He found them inside huddled along the far wall. Before they saw it was him, they scurried back farther, reacting only to the opening of the door, the way you learned to live in a place like this, where a few more millimeters might mean another second of life.

No sign of Morgan, though. She was just… gone.

When he went to Sofia and Bas, they felt real enough, sounded real enough, even if it felt like something was missing. Everybody too far gone at this point for a show of relief, let alone jubilation. How was he supposed to bring them back to themselves? How were they supposed to bring him back? There were no manuals for this. There was only standing. There was putting one foot after another. There was holding hands and holding close. There was making your way back into the sunshine, in spite of what it showed.

It would’ve been easier if the Skull had left a note, some validation of why they were still alive. But maybe the mere fact they were breathing was all the note he would ever need: Keep doing what you’re doing. Keep looking. Like skin, there’s always another layer deeper to go.

Yeah. Like he wanted any part of that. Like he didn’t want to wipe his memory clean of everything about these past few days. Like he wouldn’t do anything to hit the reset switch and go back a week.

No, longer than that—go back two years, take those first conceptual sketches for La máscara detrás de la cara and throw them out. Hope that some intuitive voice inside would tell him stop right now, you don’t want to start looking behind that succession of masks and faces, and hope he’d have the balls to listen.

“How are we getting out of here?” Sofia said. “They could’ve at least left us one of the cars.”

All they could do was charge one of the dead phones, try using it to get a fix on where they were, then relay the information to whoever they could raise. Sebastián had a GPS app on his, so they put him in charge of finding the nearest electrical outlet. They would’ve anyway, because if Bas didn’t have something to do, he was going to keep falling apart a little more at a time.

Enrique knew the feeling. You couldn’t stand around waiting. You had to do something, anything. He pointed to the church’s open bell tower, said to Sofia come on, they should get up there, take the high ground and see if they could spot a landmark, more than they could see from down below.

They found the roof access tucked off a hallway inside, like a closet with a ladder affixed to the wall, stuffy as a chimney the higher they climbed. A trapdoor put them topside. The bell still hung mounted on a wooden headstock, no sign of the rope used for ringing it. Sofia gave it a rap with her knuckles to summon a sad, hollow clunk.

The bell sounded as dead as everything else looked, as far as he could see.

They were on an observation deck with nothing left to observe, a seared land scraped thin across a rocky world in a dozen shades of brown, barren of everything but scattered shacks and ruins. To the east, a line of green struggled to overcome, life trying to hang on beside an arroyo, maybe. He wished it well.

The sky, the blue of dreams, was the only vibrant thing to see. They hadn’t killed the sky yet. Give them time, and enough guns and blades and poison, and they would find a way.

Sofia saw it first, pointing it out in the distance, nearly at the limits of his vision. His soul knew what it was before his mind let him believe his eyes. Even lost amid a simmering hellscape stretching for the horizon, it towered against the rugged desert hills, crossed gullies and washes in a single step, this striding colossus with bone for a face and a scythe in its hands and hunger in whatever passed for its heart.

She was, he realized, too terrible and too true not to have been real all along. And he feared she wouldn’t stop until she’d visited every square inch of this land and gathered up her due.

Something had gone wrong here. Hundreds of years ago, or maybe thousands. No wonder it had always wanted their blood. That was where the memory lingered most.

They watched until its saint passed from view, beyond the farthest hills, then turned to each other again. Sofia touched his face like she’d never truly seen it before, and when he touched hers, the thing that hurt most was knowing that under the skin, the two of them looked more alike than not, and the same as everybody else.