The Dead Run (5 page)

El Cucuy turned to face Galvan.

“Do not fail me, Messenger. Or you will learn the length of my reach and the depth of my rage.”

And with that, he strode toward a door on the opposite side of the chamber—an exit Galvan had not even noticed—and the flickering light beyond.

“Hold on. The DMZ is a big place. How will I navigate? How will I find—”

“He will find you,” Cucuy answered without turning. “Travel north, Messenger. And keep your wits about you, lest your burdens increase a thousandfold. My enemies are legion.” He paused for the briefest of instants. “And their true strength hides itself.”

Before Galvan could give voice to any of the hundred other questions swimming through his brain, Cucuy was gone.

C
LOTHES.
S
HOES.
A
wristwatch, a gallon of water, a couple of candy bars. A compass. Galvan was beginning to feel like he could do this—like just being out in all that open space, breathing that free air, would fill him with enough strength to reach the border, win his life back.

Then came the baling wire.

“Hands over your head,” barked the head guard, one of six who'd dragged Galvan and the others down another tunnel, then isolated them in different alcoves and outfitted them with their meager supplies.

Galvan obeyed, the heart still balanced in his palm.

“Put it in here.” A black box, metal, size of a toaster oven. Corners sharp enough to poke out an eye.

“Arms up.”

He did as he was told and felt the black box pressed against his back. The guard secured it there with wire—thick, serious stuff, the kind a chain-link fence was made from—and began to tighten it with pliers, twisting until each deep breath he took pressed the metal against Galvan's skin with the force of a garrote.

The box was a champagne cork, and Galvan was the bottle. Inside the container, and just barely, he could hear the heart.

“How the hell am I supposed to move like this?” he growled. “Come on, you've gotta loosen it.”

No response.

“How many men has your boss sent before me?”

Not much for conversation, this guy.

A minute later they were in motion again, the guards pacing their charges through a curving, narrow tunnel, its walls moist and mold slicked, the only light the flashlight beam of the lead man.

At every turn, Galvan expected it to end. Five minutes turned to ten, and ten to twenty. Even taking the twists and turns into account, they had to have walked a mile, maybe two.

Finally, a set of stairs. A bulkhead made of steel. The guard swung open the double doors, and the sunlight poured in—sudden, blinding. The next thing Galvan knew, he was standing in it, sweating, struggling to breathe.

He and his four new best friends.

The prison was a tiny speck on the horizon.

There was nothing else but dirt and scrub brush, low rolling hills and dust and cacti.

“Adiós, cabrones,” called the lead guard from the top step. “Buena suerte.”

He retreated into the tunnel's cool and slammed the bulkhead doors. In the vast emptiness of the desert, the click of the lock was as loud as a gunshot.

 

CHAPTER 7

T
he ribbon of light was thin and pale, a tear in the vinyl they'd used to cover the high-set basement windows.

It was Sherry's only comfort. Her only friend.

Not her only hope—you learned about yourself quickly in a situation like this, learned what you were made of, faced the truth. And the truth was, Sherry Richards was no fighter. Those people you saw on TV, basking in their fifteen minutes of celebrity after surviving an avalanche or a shipwreck, those resourceful souls claiming they'd
never lost faith
? She wasn't one of them. When she woke up in this black room, trussed to this chair, gagged with this rag, no hitherto-unknown reserve of courage had revealed itself.

She hadn't tried to wriggle her way free of the ropes binding her wrists and ankles. Hadn't plotted her escape. She'd accepted it.

I'm helpless.

No one is going to save me.

I don't believe in anything.

I'm going to die.

Alone.

Please, God, don't let it hurt.

O
N ONE HAND,
thought Nichols, they were certainly making better time in Cantwell's Audi than they would've in his cruiser.

On the other, they'd probably be dead before they got wherever the hell they were going.

“You always drive like this?”

“You asking as a cop?”

“I'm asking as a passenger.”

She glanced at him over her right arm, rigid against the wheel. “I drive this way when somebody I care about's in trouble.”

“You didn't tell me you
knew
Sherry. She a patient, too?”

“Not officially, no. But I've tried to help her readjust. Fit in.”

“But I thought you and her mother—”

“Had a falling-out, yes. Melinda doesn't know.”

They drove in silence for a while, suburban strip malls giving way to scrub brush, open road. The billboards that weren't for Salvation Through Christ and Christ Alone advertised adult megastores or eat-the-whole-thing-and-it's-free steak houses.

Nichols took the opportunity to reflect on the various fallacies of this impromptu adventure. His radio was back in the cruiser, so nobody on his staff had any idea where he was or why he'd disappeared off the face of the earth, midshift. He'd effectively deputized a woman he knew nothing about, except her propensity for flouting traffic laws. And they were on their way to confront a man who, if Cantwell was correct, was far too dangerous to waltz up to willy-nilly and start asking half-baked questions.

On the bright side, if she was wrong, all they were doing was illegally harassing a private citizen who'd probably sue the Del Verde County Sheriff's Department for the thirty-seven dollars and eighty-three cents left in its annual operating budget.

Good times.

“Anything else you haven't told me, doc?”

Cantwell's answer snapped at the heels of his words, as if she'd been waiting for the chance.

“Plenty. Seeing as how you've rolled your eyes at half of what I've said so far.”

“Look, if I didn't take you seriously, I wouldn't be in this car. But I'm the kind of cop who deals in facts, not rumors—which is to say, a good one. And I can't help thinking that if local girls were disappearing at the rate you say, I woulda heard about it. You know”—he tapped a finger to his badge—“being sheriff and all?”

“That should tell you how powerful they are.”

“Right, I forgot—got the whole department paid off. What was the fella's name again? Spiff?”

“Aaron Seth. I've been monitoring him for years. And in my professional opinion, he's one nasty motherfucker.”

“I'm afraid you lost me with the technical jargon there, doc.”

She actually smiled. Score one for the team.

“Care to elaborate?”

“Well, like most cult leaders, Seth's past is mysterious.”

“Because he lies about it, you mean. Better your followers don't know you spent ten years shampooing carpets before becoming the Chosen One.”

“That's usually the case, yes. But Seth is genuinely impossible to trace. No tax records, no birth certificate, no social. He claims to have ‘walked out of the desert' twenty years ago—”

“Not hard to believe, around here. Half of what I deal with on a daily basis is people walking out of the damn desert.”

“—after wandering for forty years, like the ancient Hebrews.”

“Okay, yeah, that's different.”

“Oh, and he says he's descended from the high priest of an ancient god. Who's going to pass his powers down to Seth, bringing an end to the world as we know it.”

“Sounds like pretty standard stuff—a little from column A, little from column B. Where do the girls come in?”

“I've never gotten close enough to find that out. Melinda Richards was my best source, but she'd only heard rumors. I know he recruits families with young daughters. By the time the girls disappear, they've been off the grid for years.”

“And you believe he's killing them.”

“No, I think he's trafficking them. Telling their parents they've gone off on some kind of missionary trip, then selling them into sexual slavery.” Cantwell's jaw tightened, as if she were grinding her teeth. “Forget about luxury cars and villas and all that. The new status symbol, if you're a Mexican drug lord, is a harem of virgin girls.”

“I didn't know that,” Nichols said evenly, wondering where she was getting this stuff.

“Given the choice, Sheriff? I'd rather be dead.”

The sheriff glanced over his shoulder, at the shotgun lying in the backseat. “If you're right about any of this, Seth's compound will be heavily fortified. What do you think we're gonna do, just stroll up to the front door, ring the bell?”

Cantwell's eyes burned up the road. The Audi's speedometer edged past ninety.

“The one solid piece of information I got from Melinda is that before the girls disappeared, they were removed from the living quarters and brought to an old barn, far from everything else. She was terrified of that place—of her daughter ending up there. It's how I finally convinced her to get out. And unless I miss my guess, that's exactly where Sherry is right now.”

A
ARON
S
ETH'S
B
UICK
rolled slowly up the rutted road and came to a stop before the compound's meetinghouse. He shut the door without a sound and ran a hand over his thinning brown hair, carefully parted and meticulously combed.

He was a slight man, neatly attired in khakis, a white shirt, and a blue blazer adorned with an American flag lapel pin. At first glance, his most notable feature was a lack of notable features—an overall plainness so pronounced that the eyes slid right off him, made a second glance seem like a waste of time.

It was an impression he had spent years cultivating.

If one looked longer, one might notice some other things. That he never seemed to sweat, for instance—as if the brutal afternoon sun beat down on everything but him. Or that he possessed a strength and quickness remarkable for his age.

Whatever age that was. For the longer one looked at Aaron Seth, the less it became possible to say, with any degree of certainty. He might have been seventy and exceptionally spry, or forty and formerly hard-living.

Seth could not have said himself. His memories of childhood were blurred and distant, a painful morass he'd learned to shunt to the margins of his consciousness. He'd never met his mother, did not even know her name—had been taught to regard the woman as little more than a husk, a vessel. He had no doubt that his father had killed her, probably during Seth's birth as a way to increase the infant's potency. Cucuy's was a world of unapologetic horror, of chaos systematized into ritual. It had taken Seth decades of study to assimilate the ancient ways—to understand that what he saw around him was a false civilization, a façade constructed by a species that had turned its back on its gods, its nature. He had his father to thank for that. For everything.

It was Cucuy who had insisted Seth study the new religion—that pathetic children's theater of martyrdom and morality. In his boundless wisdom, the Ancient One realized that his son would need a flock, and that to gather one he must speak the tongue of the people. The very language of redemption and justice that had rendered them so docile, so blind. And thus, the faith Seth preached was deeply infused with symbolism the typical American churchgoer would find comfortingly familiar. The process of building a following had been eased immeasurably by such simple gestures; it was amazing how the mere use of the word
lamb
or
apostle
or the number three convinced a neophyte that he was on familiar ground and opened him to the long, gradual process of accepting a very different truth.

In the worn valise Seth carried were a variety of brochures, with titles like
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION: THREAT TO OUR WAY OF LIFE
and
TEN FACTS THE LIBERAL MEDIA DOESN'T WANT YOU TO KNOW
. He'd been out canvassing. Ringing doorbells, seeing who answered and what he could learn by reading their auras. He was holding auditions. Planting seeds. When the families he decided were worth bringing into the fold met him again, a couple of years later, they never recognized Aaron Seth as the door-to-door man.

He handed his valise to Marcus, the muscular young aide who met him at the door. He stepped into the cool foyer, accepted the glass of lemonade Marcus proffered, and drained it in one swallow.

“Is she here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any problems?”

“None of which I'm currently aware, sir.”

Something in Seth's countenance hardened ever so slightly as he turned toward Marcus.

“You know I hate doublespeak. Yes or no?”

“I— no, sir.”

“This girl matters, Marcus. She's not like the others. I hope I've made that clear.”

“Very clear, sir. Are you going to see her now? Shall I radio Reevus and Buchanan, tell them to meet us?”

“Please. And, Marcus?”

“Yes, Mr. Seth?”

“Bring me my knives.”

S
HERRY AWAKENED WITH
a gasp. How long had she been out? The numbness running down her arms and up her legs suggested it had been some time, that her body had chosen to shut down rather than confront what it could not handle. She looked up at the ribbon of light, as if it might provide an answer.

Then she wondered why it mattered. She was floating outside herself now, scrutinizing the prisoner in the chair with the detachment of a scientist analyzing the behavior of a lab rat.

How strange that I don't pray,
she thought.
Half my life on bended knee, and now it's the last thing in the world I want to do. Is it because I don't believe? Or because I don't want to give Him the satisfaction?

She could hear footsteps, above her. The faint voices of men.

I'm not even curious about any of this. Why I'm here, who they are. So strange.

It's like I'm already dead.

Or like I never lived.

Sherry looked up at her ribbon of light and thought she saw it move. She squinted, leaned toward it.

The ribbon became a thin rectangle, and then a square. A beam of daylight shot through the room, fell into Sherry's lap. She stared down at it, awed, feeling its warmth.

Feeling alive.

Wanting, suddenly and desperately, to stay that way.

“Sherry!”

A rough, throaty whisper.

She looked up, into the beam, and saw a body dive through it, legs first, arms over head, the shower of sunlight a cushioning waterfall.

It was the most beautiful thing Sherry had ever seen.

An angel,
she thought
. I'm already dead
,
and an angel has come to—

He was up, kneeling in front of her, pulling the gag out of her mouth. The sunbeam brushed his brow.

“Eric?”

“Shhh.” He worked feverishly at the rope around her hands, a musk of sweat and chlorine and cologne coming off him in hot waves. “They're right upstairs. We've got to hurry.”

The rope fell from her wrists, and Eric bent to free her ankles.

“How—”

“I followed you. There. Come on.”

He hauled her to her feet, and Sherry's vision went spangly from the sudden change in altitude. The numbness in her limbs loosened, became a plague of pins and needles.

Eric threw an arm around her waist, grabbed the chair with his other hand, placed it directly below the window.

Sherry looked up. Remembered to whisper, this time. “It's too far.”

Eric climbed onto the chair, measured the distance with his eyes, and jumped.

The fingertips of his left hand caught hold of the window frame, and for a moment Eric's legs dangled like a hanged man's as he struggled to swing his other arm up to the ledge. On the third try, he caught it. Then, slowly, Eric began to vanish. Head, shoulders, waist, legs.

For a moment, he was gone, and Sherry felt a stab of panic—that was it, he'd changed his mind, abandoned her. Then Eric's head reappeared, and he thrust an arm toward her. Beckoned.

“Let's go.”

Sherry climbed the chair, grabbed on to him with both hands. Eric lifted, biceps bulging beneath her weight. A moment later, she was up and out, pressed against him, the two of them curled panting in the dirt.

He stood, pulled Sherry to her feet again. She palm-shaded herself from the sun and tried to get her bearings, but there was nothing here. Just the building they'd escaped from, cavernous and looming. The distant rush of traffic. Low, flat land littered with browning scrub and tumbleweed.

Eric took her hand, and they crept cautiously along the barn wall. He paused at the corner, peered around, then flattened himself and motioned for Sherry to lean across him and take a look.