The Dead Run (13 page)

 

CHAPTER 21

A
aron Seth lowered himself slowly into the tub, disappearing beneath the crimson warmth an inch at a time until only an oval-shaped portion of his face floated above the surface.

He took a deep breath and began the process of emptying his mind. He tried to picture his father, whom he had not seen in sixty years, focusing on his face as one might the flame of a candle. He presumed that Cucuy was lying in a similar tub, that both of them needed to be immersed in the same medium in order to communicate, but the truth was that Seth had no idea. There was much that he still did not know, many things he simply took on faith.

Soon there would be no need. His father's vast and ancient store of knowledge would flow into him; powers he could not yet fathom would remake his very essence, and Aaron Seth would use them to remake the world. This was the path he had forged, through discipline and fortitude. Doubt and shadow had threatened, but Seth had not faltered.

Faith had sustained him.

This humble church, this modest flock, was a bulwark. An oasis in the wilderness. Their belief had humbled Aaron Seth; they were his lambs.

Without their sacrifices, the New World could not be born.

The gods had always demanded blood. If there was anything Seth had learned and learned well at his father's feet—anything the Line of Priests had carried intact out of the rubble of the Old World—it was that.

And if the New World was built on anything, it was abject denial of this fact. Mankind had layered lie upon lie, until the fierce, beating truth had been buried, and then forgotten.

God did not die for man, as they had told themselves with such fervor, praying
to
spilled blood instead of
with
it. That was a distortion of all that was sacred, a caricature of everything their forefathers had known.

God did not die for man.

Man died for god.

That was the way of the world, whether man embraced it or ran away screaming. Man was but a vessel. His holy destiny—his and hers—was to be consumed. It was a testament to the New World's utter terror that its religion was founded on such childish perversions of the truth
. The body and blood of Christ,
the priests told the worshippers, handing out wafers and wine. It was as ludicrous as livestock claiming dominion over their farmers.

All that would change. When Aaron Seth was god—when the final sacrifices had been made and his kingdom had been realized—the cowering would end. The lies would fall away. Man would be restored to his former glory, his natural place in the world.

Worthy is the lamb.

But that was yet to come. Seth willed these thoughts of the future away, envisioned them floating off like clouds chased by a sudden wind, leaving his mind clear and blue.

Father,
he thought. He focused on the beating of his own heart, the sound amplified by the liquid in which he lay. He projected the word again, in time with the rhythm of his pulse.

Father. Father.

I am here,
Cucuy replied, the voice seeming to radiate from within Seth's head.
Have you made arrangements to receive my gift?

I have, Father. You need only tell me where to send my men.

A dagger of pain shot through Seth's mind as his father strained toward an answer, the great power of Cucuy's mind bifurcating as he reached out in two directions at once.

He is sheathed in darkness,
the old man replied at last, and the pressure mounting inside Seth's head lessened as if someone had turned a wheel.
But he remains safe. This one is strong. As he must be. For I grow weak.

The words made Seth shiver in his carefully heated bath. Never before had he heard his father speak of frailty.

An acute awareness of his own physicality flooded Seth's consciousness. It was a coarse, temporal shell, this flesh he occupied. The smell of decay seemed suddenly to waft from it. From him.

You could never be weak, Father,
Seth answered, the words sounding insipid even to him. He was relieved when Cucuy ignored them.

My power has preserved this body for five hundred years, but no more. Your hour is at hand. And if we fail, my son? Do you know what will befall us if we fail?

We will not fail, Father.

Do you think I have not failed before?
You are a fool, to be so sure. Nor can you fathom the consequences with your feeble, newborn mind. But you are my final hope. My last child. Sired in the waning hours of my potency.

Seth waited, calm in the face of his father's scorn. He did not take it personally; it was not a rebuke, any more than Cucuy was a man. Seth had been given life by something terrible and great and ancient, and one did not presume to understand divine plans, just as one did not stare into the sun. Seth was to his father as ordinary men were to Seth: simply a lesser form of life.

For now.

The silence between them lasted several minutes, and Seth knew that his father was reaching out, across vast swaths of space and time, to discern the location of the beating heart, the man who carried it, the four who flanked him.

He has found the Jaguar Trail. An ancient path. This omen bodes well.

Seth took that in. It was a smugglers' lane today, one of the countless tiny capillaries through which the flow of illicit commerce was conducted. He would inform Knowles, and the True Natives could divide themselves among the trail's hidden end points. Meet the Messenger as soon as assistance was permitted.

Two of his company have fallen, but the Messenger has not been swayed.

Another pause, and Seth waited for more. There was much he wanted to know. The ritual by which he would assume his father's power had to be executed according to precise dictates. Seth had studied them for years and still feared he did not fully understand.

But one did not ask. One listened. Seth concentrated on his breathing, his father's presence. The connection between them.

Suddenly, a spasm of pain racked his body, from head to toe. Seth thrashed in his tub, and waves of blood splashed over its walls, oozed slowly across the polished floor.

His father was pulling away, breaking the bond with an abruptness Seth experienced as violent, wrenching agony—as if his own body were being pulled apart.

It had never happened before, and through the electric fury of his pain, Seth was able to discern his father's, knew it was just as intense.

Why would he do this?
Seth screamed into the sudden void.

And then,
What could have happened?

The last transmission from the Ancient One's mind—barely discernible, like a radio station fading out of range—did not so much answer Seth's question as breed a host of new ones.

That smell . . . it cannot be . . .

 

CHAPTER 22

G
et behind me!” Galvan barked, herding the two dazed girls into his shadow, machete fisted in his hand.

Their fake mother and fake father were back in the car now, the box in the woman's lap, keys jangling in her palm. They had their prize and were blind to all else, the churning earth below them making no impression, the stink of danger wafting right past their nostrils.

The key turned in her hand, a flash of metal in the sun. The engine wheezed, flopped back to sleep.

From the roiling dirt directly underneath the driver's seat, a slender chute of arm emerged, and then a rounded shoulder.

Galvan steeled himself, dropped into a ready crouch. A Billie Holiday song spun crazily through his jukebox mind—
Southern trees bear a strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root—
and Galvan, dizzy with adrenaline, answered back.

You think that's strange
,
wait'll you get a load of this goddamn Mexican garden.

No disrespect
,
Lady Day.

Another twist of the driver's wrist, another starburst of refracted sunlight. The engine groaned to life and Fake Mom lifted her foot off the brake pedal, prepared to drop it on the gas. A routine inside the routine, minute and automated, something she'd done seventeen thousand times and never wasted a thought on once. Just a part of being alive.

Until now.

The hand fluttering up from the ground became a fist. The elbow bent, the whole arm like a snake coiling, prepared to strike. Galvan felt a chill slam through him, flashed on an old TV ad—
When I bite into a Peppermint Pattie, it's like I'm on a mountain slope, with the wind whipping through my hair
—then snapped back to reality or whatever this was in time to see the dead girl punch through the corroded floor of the station wagon, metal crumbling like aged fucking parchment.

The driver's foot never reached the gas. She screeched and kicked, the box clutched to her chest, as her attacker scrabbled at the car's floor, tearing and rending, pushing her way inside with a strength Galvan could hardly believe. The girl was still waist-deep in her grave, and although it was very much beside the point, Galvan couldn't help but note that this particular once-young once-lady was nowhere near the looker her Gutierrez-munching cohorts had been. A thick rope of braided hair swished back and forth like a rat's tail as she fought toward her prize, and a silver-dollar-sized birthmark covered half her cheek.

Guess some virgins had no choice in the matter.

Fake Dad was stomping at her with his work boot, one arm leveraged against the ceiling of the car, his legs straddling the gearshift. Fake Mom was curled up on her seat now, legs tucked under her ass as if this dead girl being born, this atrocity pushing itself out of the earth's womb, was a household pest, a mouse you could hide from atop a table.

The Virgin took one to the mouth, and Galvan watched her head snap back. The sweat was running freely down his arms and legs—
Hell, maybe I can swim away
—and he passed the machete to his left hand, wiped the right dry, passed it back.

Another kick, Fake Dad pairing this one with a primal scream, and she was gone—vanished back into her hole, like a shark breaching and lunging, missing and diving. Fake Mom fumbled with the gear shift again, Fake Dad urging her on, the two of them complicit in the fiction that they'd won some kind of reprieve, that escape was possible. She was breathing in jagged gasps, hyperventilating almost, and it wasn't helping. The two of them lasered in on the gear shift as if they could make the world beyond disappear through force of will, ignore it into submission.

They never saw the second girl burrow up out of the ground, readjusting her faded T-shirt and pulling her skirt down her hips like it was date night and her boyfriend had just pulled into the driveway, beeped his horn.

They missed her runway-worthy beeline for the car, didn't pay a whit of mind until her hand was clamped around Fake Mom's forearm, dirt-caked fingernails drawing blood, mouth open and teeth bared, a predator about to feast.

Fake Mom's instincts kicked in, and Galvan had to give it to her: they were good ones. Her legs kicked straight out, against the car door, propelling her into her husband's arms as if her body were on springs. At the same time, she remembered the one thing she had going for her, and without releasing her grip on the box, Fake Mom reached for the big six-shooter jammed into her waistband, wrapped both hands around it, and squeezed off three quick shots.

From that distance, she didn't have to be Annie fucking Oakley. Galvan watched the trio of bullets exit through the back of the dead girl's skull, saw gore and gray matter paint the ground, felt his own heart clench into a fist.

The impact knocked her flat on her newly ventilated cranium, and for a moment everybody—Fake Mom and Dad, Galvan, the two girls cowering by his side, Payaso, Britannica—stopped breathing as if in solidarity.

Even the three other Virgin Army foot soldiers who'd unearthed themselves from various hidey-holes and were strutting toward the car seemed to pause for a moment, though that might have been Galvan's imagination.

Why any of them thought a gunshot to the dome would keep a dead girl down, he couldn't have said. Wishful thinking, maybe, or some stubborn, childish belief in the laws of biology.

Whatever it was, it didn't last long.

She popped back up as if it had been a beach ball that hit her in the head, not three chunks of lead moving a thousand feet per second.

Fake Mom's eyes grew saucer-sized as the girl retraced her steps, unfazed by the clumps of tissue sluicing down her face, surfing a waterfall of blood.

Indecision was a bad look. The girl reached through the window, grabbed Fake Mom by the leg, and yanked. Fake Mom flew through the window, landed in a cloud of dust. The gun flew from her hand, skittered across the ground and came to rest paces from where Galvan stood. The box was still pressed to her chest.

Gave
heart-to-heart
a whole new meaning.

The un-girl with the ponytail was on her first, skittering from beneath the car like a giant spider. She went straight for the carotid artery; teeth tore into flesh, and a spray of blood arced like a fountain, spattering against the side of the car with the force and the sound of hail. Fake Mom bucked so hard she caught air, and now three girls were on her, tearing meat from bone as a thin trail of black smoke twirled up toward the heavens.

The box slid from her lifeless grip. It teetered for an instant on its edge, then clanked to the ground, raising a tiny scrim of dust.

The girl oozing brains was on it like it was a fumbled football. The other girls—the two crouched over the corpse, and another two just joining the party—snapped instantly to attention.

Under new management,
thought Galvan as she scooped the box into her arms. The other four huddled around the heart-bearer in a kind of protective phalanx, leaving Fake Mom sprawled, forgotten, in a pool of blood.

And off they walked.

Where were they going? Galvan wondered as he prepared to make his move. Would they eat it themselves? Deliver it to their mistress, wherever and whatever she was? Was she calling them home right now? Could she see what they did? Was she orchestrating every un-girl's every move, deciding whether pseudo-seduction or simple carnage was the proper tactic? Or was all this freestyle, the general of the Virgin Army a laissez-faire commander?

You're stalling, Galvan
.

Here goes nothing
.

He walked straight toward them, stooping to snatch up the six-shooter on his way over, better armed than un-, and stashing it in his belt.

Who would've thought a loaded gun could ever feel so useless?

“Little help,” he barked over his shoulder in the general direction of Britannica. “I'm about to do something really stupid. For a change.”

It took a beat for the old con man to find his voice. “Wh-what can I do?”

“Look alive,” Galvan replied, in lieu of a decent answer. Realizing, even as he said it, that he'd spoken more out of a desire to hear his own voice than to convey any particular information.

Or, perhaps, a desire to hear another voice.

One final time.

“Take care of those girls, if this doesn't work out.”

“You got it, boss.” Britannica sounded as jittery as Galvan felt.

He was closing in on the Virgins now, the five girls clustered tight and moving slowly back into the desert, looking like nothing so much as a clique of gossiping high schoolers.

They paid him not the slightest mind, and for an instant Galvan really did feel like he was fifteen again, trying to work up the nerve to ask out some hot cheerleader in full view of all her amigas.

Deep breath.

And . . .

“Pardon me there, chica. But I think you've got something that belongs to me.”

He grabbed the nearest girl by the shoulder, pried her away from the group. She spun toward him with a snarl, and now Galvan had their attention—every one, and every bit. His skin prickled with it. The fucking blood was sloshing around in his veins like river rapids, Galvan 100 percent white-water adrenaline right now, if that made any goddamn sense.

As they ran their eyes over him—their eyes or whatever it was that these things, these abominations, used to sense—Galvan stepped into their midst, until he stood before the brainless girl.

And the box.

She was tiny, he realized now that he was close: five-two on tiptoes, what his mother would have called a
little slip of a thing
. Without knowing why, he wrapped a hand around her neck—didn't squeeze, just held it there, as if his touch might communicate something that words did not.

Hell, Galvan was just making this up as he went along anyway.

“Give it to me,” he whispered, trying to look her in the eyes rather than the bullet holes. “I am the Righteous Messenger, and I . . .”

What was the word he was looking for?

Right.

“ . . . I
compel
you. Now hand it the fuck over.”

He took his hand off her throat. She didn't obey, but she didn't attack, either.

Gently, Galvan lifted the box out of her hands. Still, the girl did nothing.

Galvan felt the weight of the steel, listened for the gentle
tha-thunk
of the heart.

It was there, but the sound was faint, the rhythm slower than he remembered. For a moment, Galvan panicked. Was it dying? Had it been out of his control too long? Even as he wondered, the heartbeat grew louder, more robust. Galvan exhaled a cloud of relief, took a step backward, and then another. The Virgins watched him go, all that skin-prickling attention still focused on Galvan.

And then, abruptly, it was gone. They turned away, each one reorienting herself toward the grave from which she'd come.

And off they walked.

Party over. Turn out the lights.

Galvan watched them go, heart somersaulting in his chest, jukebox kicking on someplace above.

You babblin' / so your chain be unravelin' / hit you like a javelin / through your abdomen . . .

Then a blur streaked across his peripheral vision, and Galvan turned his head in time to see Fake Dad, sprinting away from the car and into the vast, yawning desert ahead. Away from the girls he'd kidnapped and drugged. The girls he planned to sell into a fate worse than death. Whose families he'd broken. Whose parents would never recover from the loss, the mystery, the faint hopes and the vivid waking nightmares. The girls whose names would be whispered fearfully, in the halls of their schools and on the streets of their towns, invoked like ghosts or curses, and then gradually forgotten.

Just running away from it all.

So he could do the same thing again.

The gun was in Galvan's hand before he knew it, muzzle tracking the man as he sprinted into the distance.

He squeezed the trigger without a second thought.

Without a first.

The clap of hammer to primer shuddered through the emptiness.

Fifty yards away, Fake Dad went down.

He wouldn't be getting up.

Galvan stared at the faint wisp of black smoke trailing from his body and felt nothing.

“Nooooo!” Britannica wailed, running toward him.

The priest or not-priest snatched the gun from Jess's hand. “What are you doing?”

Galvan opened his mouth to answer, but Britannica wasn't looking for back talk.

“The Righteous Messenger cannot kill unless his life is threatened! Look!”

The dead girls had turned around.

They were marching straight toward him.