The Dead Run (4 page)

 

CHAPTER 6

G
alvan's brain was a computer rebooting after a crash, blinking to life one system at a time.

First to come online was his sense of smell. Dank, musty air filled Galvan's blood-caked nostrils.

Unclean bodies.

Piss and shit, both old and new.

Fear.

Death.

A flurry of sensations followed in rapid, disorienting succession. A cold draft across his groin that told him he was naked. A pounding in his head that reminded him of how he'd gotten here, wherever
here
was. Galvan's eyes blinked rapidly in the near-blackness, trying frantically to adjust.

Then he noticed a hard coldness around his wrists and ankles, and Galvan's heart kicked into high gear.

He jerked his limbs, trying to stand, and was rewarded only with the piercing clank of metal, the sharp wrenching of his bones in their sockets.

The chains that bound him didn't have that much give.

Take a breath,
he told himself.
Be smart. Don't panic. If they wanted you dead, you'd be dead
.

They.

The place was coming into focus. It was an underground chamber, illuminated only by a slanted shaft of light that seemed exhausted from its journey. The walls were stone, smooth and worn. So was the floor on which he lay, shackled by four rusted metal cuffs.

Galvan heard the shallow breath of the other men before he could make out their forms. There were six or seven—all chained, all still unconscious. Payaso was one. The enforcer, Gutierrez, was another. The rest, he knew only by face.

Suddenly, a great grinding sound filled the air, and Galvan felt the chains go slack. He scrambled to his feet, a dozen cuts and bruises making themselves known, and realized that the chains binding his wrists were anchored to the ceiling, the ones around his ankles to the floor.

He was a marionette.

Footsteps echoed through the chamber, growing louder and closer. Galvan cocked his head, trying to determine the vector of the approach. Before he saw anything, a blast of scalding water knocked him off his feet, onto the other prisoners.

They came to life, screaming and clawing. Chains flailed like tentacles.

Galvan tried to shield his eyes, his balls—from the water, the flying fists and feet. Before him stood a backlit guard, stance wide, fire hose gripped firmly in his hands, length trailing off behind. He sprayed and sprayed, the water pressure strong enough to purple flesh. Then, just as abruptly, he stopped.

“Look alive!”

That awful grinding sound again. The chains around Galvan's wrists yanked him off his feet, hoisted him into the air.

Three feet, five feet, eight. Then his ankle chains went taut, arresting Galvan's movement with an agonizing jerk. He was spread-eagled, a fly caught in a web.

The other prisoners, too. All of them, lined up like a row of paper dolls.

All at once, the smell of the place reasserted itself. The air was thicker up here, as if burdened by some ancient evil, some malignancy that penetrated even the stone.

The guard with the hose turned on his heel, marched out of sight. For a moment it was quiet, except for the water falling from their bodies, fat droplets exploding when they hit the ground.

Then a new smell wafted toward Galvan, one that had no place here. It was fruity, cloying, familiar. Hanging naked from rusty chains in the filthy underbelly of a Mexican prison, Galvan found himself flashing on high school make-out sessions in the corners of basements lit with red bulbs, the party winding down, New Edition in the tape deck.

Strawberry incense.

Around an invisible bend came a boy dressed in a long white tunic, barefoot, ten years too young to be a con. He swung a metal incense burner, the kind they'd used in church when Galvan was a kid. He passed within a foot of the prisoners, looking straight ahead the whole time, the men invisible to him.

And he was gone.

For a moment, the air was sweet and still. Then a voice cut through it—a low, rough whisper, but it filled the chamber, seemed to be everywhere at once.

Including, and especially, inside Galvan's head.

“Only one of you will survive. Fight for your lives. Your very souls.”

The chains went suddenly slack, and Galvan plummeted to the ground, crash-landed in a pile of flesh and metal. A second later, another prisoner dropped.

Gutierrez.

Fuck.

The big brawler was up in a flash, roaring as he charged, chains streaming behind his arms like kite strings.

Galvan jumped, grabbed hold of his left-arm chain, and pulled himself up, hand over hand. By the time Gutierrez reached him, Galvan was ten feet overhead. The enforcer looked up just in time to see him drop, Galvan's knee slamming into Gutierrez's face with a sickening crunch.

Both men hit the floor at the same time. Galvan landed on his feet, Gutierrez the back of his skull.

Galvan felt a tiny pulse of approval—within himself, but coming from the thing, the voice. It was a physical sensation, as if a hand had reached inside Galvan and triggered some pleasure chemical, some endorphin.

Like a dog treat after a successful trick.

The whisper again, so close the speaker's lips might have been brushing Galvan's ear.

“He's still alive. Finish the job.”

He wheeled, trying to find its source, but instead the darkness spun up around him and Galvan fell to one knee, dizzy.

“Who are you?” he demanded. “Show yourself!”

“Kill him, or you will die.”

“Fuck you.”

Galvan wrapped a length of chain around his fist and rose, tensing for whatever came next.

The man who walked toward him parted the darkness like a curtain, his long, thin body faintly and bizarrely luminescent.

Like an angel, Galvan thought numbly.

He moved silently, as if skimming the ground; came to a stop before Galvan; and bent forward to peer into his eyes. Galvan felt a spark of heat, beginning at his chest and spreading quickly throughout his body. It was as if someone had switched his blood for gasoline and thrown a lit match at his heart.

But it felt good.

He opened his mouth to speak and found that he could not.

Tried to raise an arm. Nothing doing.

All he could do was stare.

The man before him was a foot taller, with straight white hair that fell past his shoulders. Necklaces and amulets wreathed his bare chest, and a lattice of tattoos covered his face from chin to forehead—a geometry of symbols unlike anything Galvan had ever seen. They didn't look seared onto him so much as pushed out from within, the markings of some cruel and ancient god.

As suddenly as it had come, the heat was gone, and Galvan was shivering uncontrollably.

The man straightened, and the corners of his mouth twitched.

“Strong, yet merciful. You have done well. My Righteous Messenger is revealed.”

He uncrooked an arm like a bat's folded wing and raised a finger. Galvan's shackles fell open, dropped away. Clattered against the floor.

“Listen well. What you will carry for me is beyond value. The hands of the wicked cannot keep it alive. The hands of the weak cannot protect it. Complete your task, and you will have your freedom, and my gratitude. If you fail me, not even death will ease your pain.”

“Who . . .” Galvan wheezed. “
What
are you?”

The dark eyes were like pools of oil. “Of late, I have been referred to as El Cucuy. Others know me as the high priest of the ancient and pure Temple of Tenochtitlán, he whose worship began with time itself and will continue to its end.”

“What do you—”

“From you, Jesse Galvan, I require one day's service. No less and no more. You are mine, from now until the sun sets again.”

Galvan tried to speak without shaking. “What kind of service?”

“A package must be delivered, and a pure man must deliver it.”

“I don't know where you get your information, Cucuy, but I'm not so pure.”

“Your opinion is of no consequence. Your suitability shall be determined presently.”

El Cucuy drifted away, into the gloom. Before Galvan knew what was happening, his hands were being cuffed behind his back by a guard he hadn't even noticed. The prod of a nightstick told him to follow El Cucuy.

A nightstick, or maybe a gun.

The passage curved and curved again. These chambers were far older, far grander, than the slapdash prison above. They had been constructed with skill, with reverence. An intention to endure the weight of time.

This is a holy place,
Galvan thought with a shiver.
A temple.

But a temple to what?

The guard paced Galvan down a set of stairs, rough-hewn but perfectly proportioned, and then down another corridor and into a small, rectangular room lit by a single torch. Incense boy stood in one corner, sickly-sweet smoke still billowing from his burner.

In the center of the room, a girl lay on a waist-high stone slab. She was gagged and bound and naked, staring up at El Cucuy with terror in her eyes.

“No!”

Galvan lurched toward her, mind reeling, the timeline of his life collapsing on itself. A chop to the neck dropped him to his knees.

Through the tears springing to his eyes, Galvan saw El Cucuy's lips twist into what, on another man, might have been called a smile. He strolled slowly toward the girl, arms clasped behind his back, snow-white mane undulating softly to the brittle rhythm of Cucuy's footsteps.

“You shall cross the desert. Pass across over the false border.” He spat the last word, as if its taste were rancid. “You shall make your way to a holy site, a place whose power has long been sealed by blood. There, you will deliver the treasure you carry into the hands of my son,” he said, circling the slab, the girl. “It is a journey of some fifty miles, all told.”

“So go yourself,” Galvan shot back, his voice thick with pain.

“I cannot.” El Cucuy traced a long pale finger up the girl's quaking leg. When he spoke, his voice was wistful—pregnant with what Galvan might have taken for sadness, had the speaker been anyone but this monster. “My life is bound to this place.”

Perhaps it was an opening, a trace of something human. Galvan modulated his voice, forced himself to meet Cucuy's eye. “Listen, I'll do whatever you want. Just, please, leave her alone.”

El Cucuy cocked his head at Galvan and blinked as if seeing him for the first time.

“Yes,” he said slowly, opening his mouth. Galvan glimpsed the flicker of a moist black tongue and looked away. “Yes. I can feel it. You will succeed where the rest have failed.”

He raised his arm, closed his eyes, and plunged four knifelike nails into the girl's chest.

Galvan wailed, and lunged. Two guards restrained him.

Her body bucked and spasmed as the old man's hand entered inch by inch, the muscles beneath the withered, leathery skin of his arm summoned to action. Trickles of blood appeared at the corners of her mouth, ran down her neck, and veined across her cheeks.

The expression on El Cucuy's face never changed. He might have been tinkering with a radio dial, trying to tune in a ball game. There was a casual precision to his movements; he had done this before.

The girl's eyes flared, bright as lightning, then went glassy. She was gone.

When El Cucuy's arm emerged a moment later, a soft, sputtering organ lay in his palm.

“Hold out your hand,” he ordered. The guards pulled Galvan to his feet, unlocked his bracelets.

Some part of Galvan that was beyond fear, revulsion, any emotion at all, had taken control. He did what he was told.

Like a chef plating a delicate entrée, El Cucuy laid the lump of tissue carefully atop his waiting palm.

“The heart of a virgin,” he said in a fierce, reverent whisper, and took a step back. “The sacred vessel of the gods. If you are pure, my Righteous Messenger, it will live on.”

“You're crazy,” Galvan managed through gritted teeth, blood sluicing through his fingers.

And then he felt it beat. Contract and expand, right there in his grip. A crimson drop flew from it, hit his chin.

Thu-thump.

Thu-thump.

El Cucuy gazed down at it and nodded.

“ ‘A righteous man, flanked by evil in all directions'—that is the dictate. We have our righteous man. Now, let us flank you.”

They climbed the stairs and returned to the antechamber, the prisoners still suspended high above the ground. Galvan stared up at them, the girl's heart palpitating in his hand. He felt protective of it, for reasons he did not understand. As if it were a field mouse he held, or a baby rabbit, not a—a . . .

He spun to face El Cucuy, towering beside him.

“Who was she?” Galvan demanded.

El Cucuy continued to regard the shackled men. “No one of importance. Her parents sold her to me. It is well-known, the price a virgin brings. And I have no shortage of funds, or of need.” He half-turned toward Galvan, the huge pupils of his bottomless eyes growing even larger. “These hearts are my only sustenance, Messenger—they are the food of gods. Nothing else has passed my lips for hundreds of years.”

He nodded toward the men. “Choose four. They will protect you. To the death.”

“You wanna protect me, give me a gun. And a car.”

“You must travel as men did in ancient times. Four, Messenger. One for each direction. The rest will die.”

Galvan stared at the prisoners. They stared back, silent, bug-eyed.

“I'll take Gutierrez.” He nodded at the enforcer, still lying on the ground.

“You almost killed him.”

“Exactly. And him.” Galvan pointed at Payaso. “Other than that, I don't care. Let the guards decide.”

“Very well.” El Cucuy turned his head a fraction of an inch and addressed his head man.

“Prepare them.”

The hidden wheel began to grind, carrying the prisoners to the floor. Two guards lifted Gutierrez, his face a bloody pulp.