The Big Reap

5.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s that?”

“Check the police blotter.”

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

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

It made me wonder what he’d seen, and where exactly he’d seen it.

So to Raymondville I went.

The mission was a delicate one. They don’t let people wander willy-nilly into a maximum-security prison, so my preferred method of possessing a recently dead meat-suit wasn’t gonna cut it. Guerrera was in isolation on account of his position in the Xolotl Cartel — both to ensure his safety prior to extradition, and to guard against those who might wish to break him out. So to get to him I needed access. I needed credentials. I needed a ride no one would dare question if he asked to speak to Guerrera.

I figured the warden would do just fine.

Distance isn’t a factor when body-hopping. To leap from one vessel to another, my kind must travel through the Nothingness of the In-Between, which is both infinite and membrane thin. So to us, the trip’s the same whether it’s five feet or five thousand miles.

What we do need is a target, a person in mind. Something to stretch our consciousness toward, and latch onto once we find it. And I’m not talking, like, conjure an image of George Clooney in your head and blammo — you’re there. You need a location to fix on as well, or no dice.

Which is why, once the sun came up over Guam and I stumbled, stomach churning and head throbbing, from the beach, my board shorts grit-sticky from booze-sweat and sand, I popped five damn dollars into a payphone and gave ol’ Willacy a ring, and asked to speak to the man in charge.

They don’t call him the warden, as it turns out, because to their mind, Willacy isn’t a prison. It’s a “privately managed detention facility,” and he’s the goddamned CEO. I wonder if the inmates — or “detainees,” or “involuntary guests,” or whatever the hell they call them — would agree. Maybe they could register their nomenclature-based complaints on their comment cards once their stay was finished.

We never call things what we mean anymore. The obtuse language somehow makes the sharp edges and harsh angles of life easier to swallow. A candy-coated shard of jagged glass that’s sweet on the public’s tongue before it tears apart their insides. A pat on the back with one hand while the other steals our wallets or our souls. And people are all too willing to let it happen, because any insulation from the big and scary that surrounds them is welcome, no matter how obvious a lie it proves to be.

Whatever they call the guy, they were understandably reluctant to patch me through to him, at least until I mentioned I had information on a planned break-out for one of their inmates. The corporate shill manning the phone — who called himself a “public liaison” when he answered — didn’t sound like he believed me. Maybe if I called it an “unplanned departure,” he would have. Instead I offered up a name — Javier Guerrera. And a time — midnight local.

Amazing what name-dropping a Xolotl Cartel lieutenant will do. Because if there’s one thing a big, soulless corporation recognizes, it’s another big, soulless corporation. And make no mistake, the only thing keeping the Xolotl Cartel off the Fortune 500 is the nature of the products they peddle.

The warden answered without so much as identifying himself, instead barking a gruff, “Who is this? Where are you calling from?” And I’m pretty sure, given the lag time before I was connected, there were a dozen or so people listening in on the call, some no doubt intent on tracing its source.

Let ’em, I thought. Ain’t a security camera around with a sight-line on this payphone, and in the unlikely event they manage to track down the kid whose body I’m tooling around in, all the way in little old Guam, anything he tells ’em is gonna make him sound all cuckoo crazypants.

Instead of answering him, I bleated: “Oh, God — they’re here!” and dropped the receiver. And then, mentally fixing on the voice I’d just heard on the other end of the receiver, in some bland office in some bland facility in a broad, flat patch of brown and gray just off Route 77 in Texas, I threw myself at him with all I had.

For a moment, there was a tinny, echoing nothing — like dropping off from anesthesia — and next thing I knew, I was in a tipped-over faux-leather office chair, tasseled loafers aimed soles-to-ceiling, and the back of my head smarting something fierce from where it smacked against the institutional vinyl tile floor. Been happening more and more of late — the body-hopping was getting easier, the force previously required now enough to knock folks back. Even the subsequent meat-suit nausea hasn’t been so bad, I think. But as soon as the thought arced across my mind, Mr. CEO here’s stomach revolted, and I barely made it to the dented metal trash bin beside his desk before his lunch of enchiladas came up.

It was just past 7am in Guam when I dropped my quarters into the payphone. That made it 4pm or so Texas-time. Sunlight slanted oven-hot through vinyl-blinded windows. Beyond them, ten enormous pill-shaped Kevlar tents studded the three football-fields of fence-looped gray dirt in two rows of five, with paved paths bleached pale gray linking them together like a circuit board. At the outside end of every oblong structure, nearest the perimeter fence, was a small paved yard — some empty, some milling with brown-skinned men. If there were women, they weren’t housed within sight of my new meat-suit’s office, which appeared to be housed in a low-slung building of more quotidian design than the tents outside — less funky marshmallow prison, more dull-as-dirt industrial park.

I couldn’t help but notice it was surrounded by razor-wire just the same.

Ortiz. Larry Ortiz, so said the nameplate on his desk, at any rate. If I had to guess, I’d say the Ortiz was to appease the critics of the facility, who claimed its very existence was racially motivated — and the Larry was to appease the white-faced white-hairs who kept on funding it and didn’t want anybody “too ethnic,” in their parlance, to be in charge. A portly man in a too-tight dress shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, and iron-creased jeans. The lone picture on his desk showed two smiling kids, a smiling wife, and a round, graying, florid man in a Stetson and cowboy boots, a chambray shirt and jeans.

Me, I figured.

I considered paging Ortiz’s admin or secretary or whatever, but I didn’t know if he had one. Plus, his office phone was so damned complicated, I couldn’t figure out how. So instead, I marched straight out of his office, and declared to the perfume-drenched pile of teased-up Texas hair and tits behind the desk outside, “I need to see Guerrera. Now.”

I half-expected her — or the guards she summoned to escort me — to ask me why. To tell me we had three Guerreras in custody, and they didn’t know which one I meant. To flat-out refuse to take me to him. But they didn’t.

Sometimes, it pays to be the boss.

Nor did they take me to his cell. They brought Guerrera to me. Or rather, had him waiting in an interrogation room when I arrived — handcuffed to a table, an empty chair opposite for me. There was no cop-show two-way mirror. Just a table, two chairs, a corner-mounted video camera, and one very frightened man. And then me.

The two guards who’d escorted me made to enter the room, but I waved them off without a word. They took up posts in the hall, on either side of the door, which I promptly shut.

Guerrera did not look well. His skin was pale and sheathed in sweat. His exposed flesh had the look of having been picked at, his forearms furrowed with fingernail scratches, a constellation of tiny half-moons on his cheeks a scabrous red. His hair was a mangy shock of white, as if he’d been pulling it out in clumps. His eyes darted around the room — vigilant, paranoid. His fingers drummed a rat-a-tat atop the metal table. Sitting still — being chained — was torture for him, it was clear. His finger-tapping soon spread to his feet, and as I fixed my gaze upon him, he began to rock back and forth, his breath coming so quickly through gritted teeth I actually worried for his health.

Then I remembered he was human garbage, responsible for no shortage of deaths, dismemberments, and drug-dependencies in his tenure with the Xolotl Cartel.

It helped, a little.

I approached the table. He watched — nervous, rapt — as I dragged the cheap metal chair over to the corner of the room, its legs squealing against the painted concrete floor. I said nothing to him, nor he to me. Then I climbed atop the chair and, after a moment’s fiddling, yanked the wire out of the security camera. His eyes went wide with fear of a different sort. Immediate, explainable. Human in origin. In his mind, I was a bad man, here to do bad things to him. Guerrera understood that all too well. Though usually, he was on the other side of the table. Or the ax. Or the flamethrower.

The man had quite the colorful file. Made whatever scared the piss and pigment out of him twice as oogly-boogly in my mind as I might have thought it otherwise.

When I returned from the corner, leaving the chair behind and circling the table toward him, he spat and said, “I tell you nothing.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “You don’t have to.”

My hand found his chest and reached inside. As my fingers wrapped around his corrupted soul, his eyes widened yet further — his face a mask of pain and disbelief.

The interrogation room fell away, replaced by a swirling black morass and a lifetime of experiences. A village, slaughtered. Countless women, raped and killed. Enough coke to fell an army, blown off the naked skin of men and women both. A young boy who looked like him, into whose bed he snuck a time or two while his wife slept. And countless nights of Gulf breezes and swanky parties, on yachts, in palaces, on island beaches. As if this bastard hadn’t a care. As if his conscience weren’t touched by all he’d done, his heart full in those moments of laughter and light.

Again and again, though, one memory bubbled unbidden to the surface of his mind. Of a tunnel — dirt and darkness. Of men and women screaming. A low growl. Teeth gnashing in the black. The popcorn pop of gunfire. The metallic tang of discharged firearms and blood. Cool, clean air as the dirt above gave way to starry night, but still, the creature followed. And then the wet, sticky sound of flesh ripping from bone.

And then running. And then here.

One phrase over and over, a sturdy stitch that held the tattered scraps of memory together: El Chupacabra.

I released his soul from my grasp. He collapsed, gasping, to the table, tears streaming down his cheeks. Tears streamed down mine as well, and my borrowed flesh trembled with the fresh hell of its doubly borrowed memories. Like Guerrera, I couldn’t stop the tears. My strength comes from knowing not to even bother trying.

The two of us sobbing, I slammed him backward in his chair once more. His eyes were so full of fear — all the more so for seeing the echo of it on my borrowed cheeks. Cheeks built for smiling, not for this. It was clear to me he didn’t understand. Why I was crying. What it was we shared.

I didn’t need him to.

What I needed was a location.

Memories aren’t like a road map. They’re messy. Partial. Untrustworthy. I needed him to unpack them for me. To make sense of them. So I reached my hand back into his chest and squeezed until he wailed like an injured child. Then I let go and asked him questions. He answered — mostly lies. I squeezed again. And asked again. He changed his tune. Screamed so hard I bet he tasted blood.

It took longer than I expected. An hour, maybe more. But eventually, his answer stayed the same, no matter how hard I pushed. So I stopped.

Then I remembered that little boy, and I pushed a little harder, just for kicks.

It was Guerrera who gave up this rathole bar, and Telemundo who led me to my current meat-suit. A sergeant in the Mexican Army. Once I was through with Guerrera, I spent some time live-streaming the network’s coverage of the body-dump on I-83, trolling for a decent bag of bones to tool around in. Ortiz was far too soft for what I had in store. When this guy — Solares, according to the sewn-on patch on his uniform, since my fifty words of halting Spanish couldn’t keep up with what the well-quaffed talking heads back in the studio — stepped up to the mic, all sinew and barely concealed rage, I knew I’d found my man. Because I didn’t need to know what his words meant to know from his grave expression, his unwavering glare into the camera, that he was promising the perpetrators of this horrible act would be brought to justice.

What he didn’t know was that to make good on his promise, he’d need my help.

I waited until he finished his statement and left the makeshift podium, and then I left Ortiz behind. Solares flinched as if struck as I took him, but he didn’t fall — and though his mouth flooded with saliva as it prepared to purge me, he didn’t vomit. He was too disciplined — his mind too orderly. Like entering a strange kitchen, only to find it arranged exactly as you would have done. I opened a drawer, and boom bam — there was the button for his nausea response. Anyone who saw me/him mop the flopsweat from our brow probably assumed it was simply a case of delayed stage fright kicking in.

Of course, it’s possible Solares was not as disciplined as I’m giving him credit for. That the reason the transition was so easy was me. See, historically, I’ve preferred the quiet of the newly dead to the cacophony of a living meat-suit. Only these past few days, I’ve found myself hitching rides with the living more and more, and what’s worse, I’ve not minded it. Partly because the living have access to all manner of creature comforts in which the newly dead cannot indulge. Their credit cards have not been canceled. Their homes are not off-limits to the likes of me. Their IDs and access badges afford entry to all manner of hard-to-reach places, from prison cells to border crossings, and one never has to worry one’s meat-suit will be recognized by some poor sap who’ll subsequently piss himself and run screaming to the nearest tinfoil-hat blogger about how their uncle Merle is Patient Zero in the pending zombie apocalypse.

Like I said, partly for that reason. But partly not.

See, the dead — even the newly dead, so fresh and unspoiled by autolysis and/or putrefaction you’d have to check their pulse to tell — drive like that car you had in high school with a busted muffler and no third gear. They’re all tricky. Goofy. Hard to get the hang of.

But the living — they’re Ferraris, built for speed. for handling. They ride like a dream. Only catch is, you’ve got to subjugate their owner’s will before they’ll relent to your commands. Used to be, I didn’t like that much.

These past few days, though, I’ve begun to develop a taste for it. Found I kinda sorta enjoy it, like playing a game of psychological Whac-a-Mole. Only the mole I’m whacking is the thinking, feeling, human owner of the body I’ve gone and hijacked. And the fact I’m having fun is terrifying.

This gig of mine is a punishment for a life misspent. And as punishments go, it’s a doozy. When I collect a mark, there’s this beautiful, horrible moment in which I experience every decision that’s brought them to the front door of damnation, just as surely as if I made those choices myself. And likewise, every time I abandon one meat-suit in favor of another, I leave a little bit of what makes me me behind. The sum total of those two events is that every job, my humanity is slowly eroded, until one day — ten days from now, or ten minutes, or ten thousand fucking years for all I know — I’ll be as cold and vicious as the demons who pull my strings. I used to think that I could stave it off, that I could avoid my fate.

Now, as I admire the handling of my military-tuned meat-suit — its owner howling bloody murder from the makeshift cell I fashioned for him in the back corner of his own mind — I think it’s gonna be closer to ten minutes than ten thousand years.

In fact, I was beginning to wonder if I’ve already lost too much of me to well and truly care.

All this emo-bullshit inner turmoil meant nothing to the men in this nameless, rathole bar, though. All they saw was my fully automatic rifle aimed right at them, since I’d stopped off at the address on Solares’ ID long enough to swap my olive-drab fatigues and sergeant’s bars for some jeans, a T-shirt, and a gun. These were not Mensa cardholders — they were men of action, men of violence. Given half a chance to consider their predicament, one of three was bound to roll the dice and come up shooting. And while I doubted the world at large would miss any one of them, these men weren’t mine to kill. So best to head off any such ideas at the pass.

“Any of you fellas speak English?” I asked. None of them responded. though the one nearest me flinched when first I spoke, as if surprised to hear uninflected English come from so clearly Mexican a face.

I locked my eyes on him as I continued. “I spoke to Javier,” I said. “I know what happened. I’m not here to harm you.”

The two on the other side of the pool table looked twitchier than ever, my words clearly so much nonsense to them. But before either of them could do anything rash, the one nearest me raised his hands and patted the air on either side of him in a cool-out gesture.

“Then… why?” he asked in heavily accented English. “Why do you come here?”

I took a gamble. Lowered my weapon. Held my hands out to my sides, clutching the assault rifle by its stock rather than its trigger. If these men wanted, they could have pumped me full of bullets before I could bring it around to bear again.

The fuck did I care? I’d probably just end up back in Guam.

“I need your help,” I replied, hands held up as if in surrender. “I need you to give me access to your tunnels.”

At that, the men shared a look. Apparently tunnel is close enough to Spanish for them to get the gist. “Even if I know what you mean,” said the lone English speaker, “why would I help you?”

“Because I know what’s down there,” I told him. “And because I aim to kill it.”