The Big Reap (10 page)

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.