The Big Reap

7.

Truth be told, body-hopping back into Solares took a little longer than a cigarette.

First, I sent him out in search of supplies. Watched Castillo tend to Alvarez, his ministrations oddly sweet, while the latter slowly came around. Kept Mendoza’s gun beside me on the table the whole time, but they didn’t give me cause to use it. The fight had gone out of them. They were now victims, not aggressors, and my presence was to be weathered, not contested.

I smoked half Mendoza’s pack before Solares returned with a heavy padlock and a good eight feet of chain, the thickest he could manage. And he managed pretty thick; each clanking link was the size of a woman’s fist, the whole tangle heaped to overflowing in his ropy arms as he wrangled it through the door. He sounded like Marley’s ghost shuffling across the dusty floor while trying his damndest not to drop it. Every time the chain shifted and a portion hit the floor, he winced. I didn’t have to ask him why. Though realistically we all knew the creature could be hiding anywhere, not a one of us could shake the notion it was just below the floorboards, waiting.

Past the screen door, the night had reached full dark. This far out into the desert, there was no blue, just black; stars like chipped diamonds against the velvet of the sky. The air was cold and crisp and thin, the wild swing from the stultifying day enough to make my borrowed heartbeat quicken, lizard-brain instincts kicking in and telling me the atmosphere was thinner and more fragile a protection from the ice-sharp sting of space than by day I might’ve thought. To which I told my lizard-brain instincts chill the fuck out — you’ll be in a tidy little underground hidey-hole soon enough, the perfect burrow in which to weather the chill ache of desert night.

“So,” said Solares. “What now?”

“Now,” I told him, “we go hunting.”

I asked Alvarez if he was up to coming with us. Knew after what he’d been through, he’d be too scared of me to say no. He proved me right, nodding sweat-slick and wan, and eyeing me the whole time like if I didn’t find his answer enthusiastic enough, I might plunge my hand into his chest a second time. Instead, I handed him the remains of the tequila, which he killed in three quick glugs.

On my instructions, Solares gathered up as many guns as he could carry. I scooped up all but one of the rest with my left hand, taking the final one in my right and training it on Castillo and Alvarez. I told them to grab the lanterns and walkie-talkies that I’d found stashed behind the bar. And then it was time to head into the tunnels.

The entrance was behind a low cinderblock fireplace, which looked to be affixed to the far wall. It wasn’t. A switch flipped, a little elbow-grease from Castillo and Alvarez both, and the fireplace slid forward, some kind of runner system keeping it just off the floor so it wouldn’t scrape.

Behind it was a sad little smuggler’s notch, inside which was a rusted cash box and a couple pounds of low-grade ditch weed apportioned into eighths and quarters. I eyed the two of them like, are you kidding me? But the smuggler’s notch proved nothing more than a clever ruse, a rodeo clown to disguise the true reason for the sliding fireplace. Because Castillo dropped to one knee and looped a finger into a gaping knothole in the wooden floor, and next thing I knew, a three-by-three section of it hinged upward. A ladder descended from it into still, quiet darkness. Solares dropped in his pile of guns. I did the same. The clatter of their landing was swallowed almost immediately by the insulating earth. That done, Solares clanked down the ladder rungs. Once he reached the bottom, he called up to me, and then covered Castillo and Alvarez with one of their own weapons while they climbed down the ladder. Soon the tunnel entrance glowed like pirate treasure as they fired up their lamps.

I entered the tunnel last, yanking closed the hatch by the rusted iron loop bolted into its underside. Then I chained that loop to the ladder such that the hatch could not be opened, and set the lock. Below me, Alvarez said something in rapid-fire Spanish. I asked Solares what he was going on about.

“He says you do not need to do that. They are brave, and will not run.”

I shook my head. “He only says that cause right this sec, he’s more afraid of me than he is of what’s down here. I can’t take the chance that once I’m out of sight he’ll change his mind. So we lock the hatch, and the question’s settled.”

Solares translated what I’d said. Alvarez replied.

“He asks, ‘What now?’” said Solares.

“There are four main tunnels out of here,” I said, “and four of us. Tell him all he’s got to do is follow one of ’em right out of here. He can take whatever guns he wants — there’s no point shooting me and doubling back, since I left the padlock key topside. The only way out is through. We’ll each take a different tunnel, and a radio as well. If anybody sees anything, they’re to call me, and I’ll be there in an instant, like with Mendoza in the bar. I promise I can protect you all, so long as you give me half a chance. And I promise I can kill this thing. We do this right, and no one but the creature has to die down here tonight, okay?”

Solares translated once more. Castillo and Alvarez looked doubtful, but still, they nodded their assent. Then Solares turned to me.

“Is it time?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m afraid it is.”

He handled it like a champ. When I took over, his mind was quiet. He didn’t protest, didn’t scream. And once again, he didn’t puke, though once again, it was a near thing. When I was well and truly back in control of him, I turned my attention to a dazed and fuming Mendoza.

“You get all that?” I asked him.

“I understood your plan,” he spat. “What I do not understand is why you left my cigarettes back in the bar.”

“I need you sharp,” I told him. “That means your eyesight can’t be compromised by lighter-flicks. That means your nostrils need to pick up more than smoky full-flavored goodness.”

“When this is through,” he told me, “I will kill you for what you’ve done to me and my men.”

“You’re welcome to try,” I told him. “But you’ll have to take a number and get in line.”

We split up then. Each of us with a small camp lantern, doused for now on account of the dangling light bulbs trailing off in all directions, as well as a radio, an automatic rifle (two, in Castillo’s case), and a handgun. Castillo brandished his rifles one in each hand like some kind of gangster as he sauntered out of sight down the eastward spoke. All I could think was if he tried to fire the fucking things holding them like that, he was gonna break his thumbs with the recoil and spray bullets wide to either side. Mendoza, the most senior of the men, walked calmly but with purpose down the western one, battle-weary but determined, and he held his rifle like he meant to use it. Alvarez, clearly frightened, hugged his tight to his body to hide his trembling as he trundled reluctantly into the northeast tunnel. He was also the only one of us to fire up his lantern straight away, despite the burning bulbs. Its aperture was open as far as it would go, letting enough air in the wick glowed pure white, and he held its wire-thin handle with the same white-knuckled hand that clutched his gunstock. I worried his mind would give out long before he reached the other side of the tunnel. I — in the tight, responsive Solares once more — took the northwest tunnel, from which I was told the creature’s collapsed lair once stretched, and through which the slaughtered group had passed on their way to their brief, doomed taste of so-called freedom. I wore my automatic slung across my back, and my handgun at the ready. Seemed to me the quarters were close enough, I was likelier to get off a shot if I had a shorter barrel to bring around, and anyways, when it came to killing this thing, I had less faith in these glorified pea-shooters than I did in my own bare hands. The unlit lantern I affixed by its lanyard to my belt to keep one of the aforementioned bare hands free.

Ten paces down the tunnel, and I could no longer hear my companions. Twenty paces, and I felt alone as I had ever been, my fellow travelers a distant memory. Earth pressed in all around me. Dry dirt like cake crumbles left in an empty pan crunched beneath my feet. My tunnel smelled like a fresh grave. The air was stale and close and hard to breathe. A twinge of claustrophobia I didn’t realize I suffered from until just this moment wound its way up my spine like a millipede with needle-legs. I wondered idly if I could blame Solares for the sensation, some phobias are strong enough for sense-memory to trigger physiological reactions even in the absence of the consciousness that created them. I’ve possessed dead meat-suits that still got woozy at the sight of blood, or skin-crawly at the sight of bugs. But Solares wasn’t dead, and in an experience that proved a first for me I got the distinct impression he was laughing at me for trying to pass the buck at what apparently was my fear and mine alone.

I’ve had meat-suits wail and scream and cry and beg, but he’s the first I’ve ever had one get cheeky.

I pressed onward. The quiet between footfalls was so very, I began to jump at nothing. The subtle shift of my gun strap against my shoulder. The brittle crunch of gravel beneath my feet. The burst of static from the radio as my reluctant scouts checked in — every ten light bulbs, just like we agreed. I made that distance out to be no more than fifty yards, though the twisting of the narrow wood-ribbed tunnels ensured you could never see more than two or three bulbs ahead at a time. They sounded off with just their names, two Alvarezes for every one Mendoza or Castillo. Kid was trying to get through and into open air as fast as he could manage, and I couldn’t blame him. But his fear did more than make him quick. It made him sloppy, inattentive, which is to say I wasn’t terribly surprised when he failed to check in.

At first, I confess, I thought nothing of it. I figured maybe he’d just slowed. But then Castillo checked in twice, and then Mendoza, but still no Alvarez. So I closed my eyes, stretched my consciousness, and felt nothing where he should have been.

So, okay: dead, you’re thinking. And you damn sure aren’t wrong. But that’s only the half of it. I spend most of my time inhabiting the recent dead. Collector juju’s strong enough to restart halted hearts, and to shake the meat of mortis, rigor and livor both. So when I say I reached out and felt nothing, that meant more than Alvarez just being dead.

That means something took him apart so thoroughly, he no longer registered as viable. And that something managed to do so in a span of minutes. Not to mention it was on him quick enough that, jumpy though he was, he never managed to so much as trigger a burst of static from his radio. I hadn’t heard any gunfire, either, but I had no idea if down here the sound would carry.

Two minutes later I got my answer. It sounded like distant fireworks. The grand finale, seemed like, when they launch all the stuff they’ve got left at once. I figured that for Castillo — he of the two autos locked and loaded — a guess that was confirmed when Mendoza took to the radio, calling out to him in rapid-fire Spanish. Solares filled me in on the gist, which I could have guessed — Mendoza was demanding to know Castillo’s position. Mendoza spoke with the breathlessness of a smoker suddenly exerting himself. I knew at once he was headed toward the artery Castillo had chosen as his own, either by backtracking, or through one of the secondary tunnels.

Lucky for me, I wasn’t limited to such earthbound modes of transportation. Not when I had a meat-suit to lock onto, and an approximate location in which to look.

I closed Solares’ eyes and probed the darkness for the spark of life that was Castillo. It took longer than if I’d had a better fix on his location. I hoped it hadn’t taken too. I hurled my consciousness at him with all I had, and when my eyes next opened, they were no longer Solares’s, but Castillo’s.

The sharp reek of kerosene. My lantern, shattered beneath me, glass biting skin. I was on the ground, face pressed to dirt. A hard metal rod beneath my cheek, searing hot. Castillo’s recently fired gun barrel, blistering a brand into his cheek that will last him until his dying day. Which may well be upon him, come to think.

I vomited — possession reflex. Then I rolled over, and blinked against the dark. It was near me. I could hear it breathing, low and wet and oh so patient. But as I cast about in search of my quarry — my prey turned predator — I could not see it. There was a faint glow behind me to the west, toward the bar, toward Mexico. Nothing but pure black headed east.

Something shuffled in the eastern darkness. I patted the ground around me, trying to arm myself. Castillo’s handgun was nowhere to be found, nor was his second rifle. One borrowed shoulder was wet and burning, the corresponding arm cold and numb, my mind dull and slow to focus.

I grabbed the gun beneath me — the one that had seared Castillo’s cheek — and checked it for ammo, or tried. Couldn’t make my numb arm do anything I told it to. Pop the magazine, I said. Work the slide to check the chamber. But it wouldn’t.

Spacey as I was, it took me a sec to realize why.

Working the slide was hard to do from twenty feet away.

Castillo’s other arm lay in the faint half-light to the west. Palm down, and trailing gore at the shoulder, all wormy blood vessels and gleaming flat, white tendons. Still twitching, it seemed to me, but that could have been my vision jumping with every mutinous heartbeat, every pump hastening this meat-suit’s death.

That’s why the creature wasn’t striking. It didn’t have to. It could just wait out the clock and feast on food that wouldn’t fight back.

“Coward,” I called into the darkness.

The darkness hissed. I heard a rustle, and caught a flash of movement, too fast to track. When I glanced once more back toward Castillo’s severed arm, I discovered it was gone. Slurping noises filled the manmade cavern, like a hobo eating soup.

“I know what you are,” I said.

Another hiss, a voice like rusted hinges. “You know nothing.”

“I know you were once a Collector, just like me. I know you’re an abomination who feasts on blood and brain and God knows what else to fuel your bastard half-existence. And most importantly, I know you can be killed.”

“You lie.” A nauseating pop as Castillo’s elbow-joint separated, and then a sucking noise like a baby with a bottle. But this thing was no one’s baby, and it sure as hell wasn’t drinking mother’s milk.

“I don’t.”

“If I could be killed, I assure you my beloved mountain cousins would have found a way. They begrudge me my appetites, as if their method of procuring sustenance is any more humane. As if the very word humane applies to such misbegotten souls as we. They cast me out as they cast out poor Ricou so many centuries ago. Ever since, I’ve been forced to contend with the crushing loneliness of exile — and an endless diet of Mexican.”

“Yeah, I bet it’s hell on the digestive system,” I said, gritting my teeth against the ice-cream-on-exposed-nerve ache that built with every heartbeat in my shoulder. “And anyway, I never said that they could kill you, but I sure as hell can. You could ask your brother Simon if you don’t believe me, but you might find him a little hard to get a hold of at this point, seeing as he’s dead and all.”

At the mention of Magnusson, the creature in the dark went silent, and its breathing quickened. I couldn’t tell if it was fear, or merely anticipation of a meal. Woozy as I felt, this creature wasn’t gonna have to wait long to run out the clock. Castillo was fading fast. But when I stretched my flickering consciousness back toward Solares, he wasn’t where I left him, and weak as I was, I didn’t have the mental energy to scan the tunnels for my next meat-suit.

Then I saw a golden wobble in the darkness, and just this once, thanked God for my good luck. Because that wobble was Mendoza emerging, lantern-lit, from one of the side-tunnels just east of there and, even as weak as I was, if I could see him, I could be him.

This time, my approach was less freight-train and more newborn kitten, all shaky and timid, which means Mendoza felt me coming. As I stumbled, clumsy, into his mind and fumbled for the controls, I heard him mutter, “¡No otra vez!” and clutch his stomach in anticipating of the coming barf-fest. But hey, at least he didn’t fight me. Weak as I was, if he had, I would have wound up bounced back into rapidly cooling Castillo, which would have likely meant a one-way ticket back to Guam.

The creature misinterpreted Castillo’s subsequent collapse as he and I both lapsing into unconsciousness, when in fact I had escaped mere seconds before. It descended on him in a fury of wet tearing sounds and low grunts of effort and animal desire, eager to feast before this new light — this new snack — was upon it.

Luckily, Mendoza’s stomach was still empty, and my sudden peristaltic seizure did little more than spray the tunnel floor with spittle. He’d shouldered his rifle at some point, likely deciding he could travel faster with it on his back than in his hands, leaving him with the lit lantern in one hand, and his pistol, an outsized Magnum-knockoff, in the other. The lantern swung wildly on its hinged handle as together he and I closed the gap between us and poor, doomed Castillo, the world swaying like a boat in choppy seas by the arcing lamplight. And as its sphere of illumination blazed like sunrise up Castillo’s legs, I got my first true glimpse at the creature I’d been sent to kill.

It was a lean, spindly thing, once human in form, no doubt, but warped somehow by its environment, by its predilections, by the dark mojo that created it and demanded constant sacrifice to sustain the very blasphemy of its existence, into something… less. Something terrifying. It was naked, sickly gray-brown, and emaciated, which, its vaguely humanoid form aside, gave it the appearance of a stick-insect. The creature crouched over Castillo’s gaping chest — his ribcage split open at the middle like a clamshell — its hands buried deep inside the dead man’s viscera, its ropy forearms purple with gore. Disproportionately long legs angled out on either side, famine-skinny and liver-spotted. Flesh stretched paper-thin across its ribs, and its stomach was bloated and swollen. Its head seemed outsized for the neck on which it sat, perhaps rendered so wide to accommodate the manic grin of needle-sharp teeth that gleamed, blood-streaked yellow, back at me. Gore dripped black off its pointed chin. Its skull had warped itself around two massive, bulbous eyes — the better to see you with, my dear — which swam a liquid red in the lamplight like twin IV bags of blood, no whites or pupils to be seen. Twin slits sliced two short lines between those eyes in a hasty suggestion of a nose. As the light hit the beast, it recoiled, its leathery lids clenching shut. Then it threw its arms wide in challenge, gnarled, clawed hands stretching from one wall of the tunnel to the other and flinging offal everywhere, and roared, its mouth hinging impossibly wide.

The sound shook the very ground around us, and loosed a flurry of dust and pebbles. The stench of rot and death was carried on its breath. Some fragile, child-me portion of my psyche wanted to crawl beneath the nearest set of bed sheets and hide. Adult-me damn near pissed himself at the sight, the sound, at the perfect, wordless threat. Mendoza, hardened drug-runner that he was, huddled penitent in the back of his own mind, and rattled off over and over a mantra in hushed Spanish that even I recognized as the Lord’s Prayer.

Sure, now His name be hallowed, I thought at him. But how many times have you and your cohorts played the part of the evil from which innocent folks are begging to be delivered?

But Mendoza wasn’t taking questions from the peanut gallery at the moment. And since I was pretty sure the Big Guy wasn’t about to take his call, I figured it was up to me to take care of Captain Ugly here. It had a good three feet of reach on me, so my odds of getting past those claws to gain access to the withered lump of God-knows-what that passed as its soul weren’t great. So, as it gathered on its haunches and launched itself at me, I did what any red-blooded American who wants to keep said red blood on the inside woulda done in my shoes: I shot that fucker in the face.

Well, the eye, to be precise. And had I not been terrified at the thought of imminent violent pointy-sharp death hurling toward me, I might have curled fetal at the world of gross doing so unleashed. Hot wet chunks of mottled tissue and vitreous eye-goo sprayed the cave like the devil’s own ambrosia salad, but still the creature kept on coming. It hit me like two hundred pounds of razor-tipped clothes hangers, all knees and elbows and teeth and claws. We tumbled to the ground as one, my gun-hand aimed harmlessly away thanks to the creature’s iron grip around my wrist, my lantern dropped as I kept the creature’s snapping jaws away from the tender flesh of Mendoza’s face with a palm to its misshapen forehead.

A whoosh of hot kerosene breath, too close for comfort, Mendoza’s lantern setting the spilled fuel from Castillo’s broken one alight as the former shattered against the hard-packed earth. Our world went briefly campfire-orange and choking hot. The creature’s one good eye slammed shut against the bright, its jaw still snapping all the while. I held it away from my borrowed face as best I could, but my/Mendoza’s best wasn’t gonna cut it for long. Our smoker lungs seared, our vision went dim. Our elbow was on the verge of giving out.

Guam, here I come, I thought.

Then Solares — that beautiful, brave, stupid son of a bitch — came barreling around the corner, popping five shots into the beast quick as a drum machine. Chunks of flesh tore free of the creature, gouting green-black blood, and it howled in pain and animal fury. Then all the sudden, the goddamn thing was off of me. I watched in horror as it sailed through the air toward Solares with all the deadly grace of a jungle cat. He popped off three more shots before it tackled him. All three shots landed center-mass, but they didn’t slow the monster down a bit. He and it bounced off the rusted honeycomb of chicken wire holding back the loose dirt of the tunnel wall, and wound up a tangle of limbs amidst the mess that was Castillo. When teeth and claw found flesh, Solares didn’t even scream.

Then it ripped his throat out, and he couldn’t if he tried.

I wanted to mourn him, to apologize for dragging him into this. But there wasn’t time. Not while this thing was still breathing.

The spilled kerosene on the tunnel floor burned off, and the fire extinguished itself, leaving the tunnel full of thick black smoke and precious little oxygen.

My eyes stung. My lungs burned for cool, clean air. I crooked my elbow and breathed through Mendoza’s shirtsleeve, blinking back tears as I cast about for a weapon.

Guns were useless against this thing, they didn’t do shit. And there was no skim blade in this private hell of mine, replica or otherwise.

There was, however, rebar.

The men who’d constructed the tunnel had used it to anchor the chicken wire. It jutted from the dirt floor and walls as well. Not everywhere, just here and there. Took a good thirty seconds of fumbling in the smoky dimness to find some. It poked out cold as nighttime desert from a nearby wall, and came out reluctantly. I can’t say how long I yanked at it before I finally freed it from the wall. Long enough for the beast to disappear into the deeper dark of the eastward tunnel, I suppose, because when I looked back toward Solares, where I’d last seen it, it was gone.

It didn’t stay gone long.

I heard its ragged breathing, back and to my left. I spun, but saw nothing.

A sudden pop like a gunshot, only quieter. Then another, then another. All to the west, from whence I came, which was now as dark as was the eastern passage.

The creature had broken the nearest three light bulbs.

A rustle of scale-dry skin. A flash of slightly paler dark amidst the black. And then needles in my shoulder. Teeth or claws, I didn’t know.

I swung blindly at the creature’s point of contact with the rebar, and hit the fucker so damn hard, I heard something crack. If its reflexes had been better, that crack would have been my meat-suit’s collarbone. Instead, given the muffled yowl the beast let out, I’m guessing I took out its jaw. No telling how long that jaw would take to mend. Minutes, maybe less. This thing had been feasting, after all. Its powers were no doubt at their peak.

It retreated some, and let me stew in the black a bit. I didn’t much enjoy it. Played Babe Ruth and swung for the cheap seats once or twice with my rebar, succeeded only in tiring myself out. So little air left in this still, dark tomb of a tunnel.

I fell to my knees, then onto my back. Felt consciousness bleeding away, the choking air a pillow against my face. My eyes fluttered shut. And then it struck.

Just as I’d been hoping.

I knew I hadn’t much time left, so I figured playing possum was my best bet. A bluff’s all the more believable when it’s half true. And I’d seen this fucker’s game once or twice already. I knew it liked to cover ground all lickety-split with a well-timed pounce.

Unfortunately for it, I was ready. Got the rebar up in time. Felt the thrum of electricity through the iron as it broke through the creature’s chest, traveling from my meat-suit’s hand up the bar like Lilith had suggested was the case. I pray the Lord its soul to take. Its one intact eye gleamed wet and wide in the near-dark. Its body slackened as the rebar broke through the ancient flesh of its back. Atop the rebar, stuck like iron filings to a magnet, was the gnarled, lifeless hunk that was this creature’s soul. I could feel the vibration of it through the three feet of rebar. Weak, but still alive, though the body I’d removed it from was nothing more than empty flesh.

I lay a moment, pinned beneath the impaled creature. Then I heaved it to one side and climbed out from underneath. “You know what?” I asked its corpse as I wrapped my hand around its soul and crushed it to dust like so much chalk. “That one was kinda personal.”

The ground rumbled all around me, swinging light bulbs on their naked cords and loosing dust from the ceiling, while the creature’s lifeless figure crumbled to bone and dust. My memory cast back unbidden to the collapsing Pemberton Baths, and I feared for a moment the tunnel was going to come down around me. But whatever mystical juice Magnusson had tapped into in the length of his unnatural existence proved weaker tea in this subhuman, feral beast, because almost as soon as it began, the rumbling quieted, and the swaying lights stilled. The cave still stood. And eventually, creakily, so did I.

Then, my task completed, I left the cave of cooling dead behind, and stumbled out into the half-lit predawn of the slowly waking desert alone.