A Blood of Killers Read online

  Their silence distracted Max, but not for long. The Beast nuzzled the raw, pulsing meat of organs buried beneath ribs, and Max shot his seed into their wombs, into the spaces between fat and muscle, the hollows of their lost desires, the dry canyons of memory. The four sisters lingered beyond the time his ordinary victims survived, as if feeding on the seed that brought death to the living.

  The Beast reared back when two of the sisters slipped from life. The surviving women were left barely breathing, blood bubbling from their mouths, their exposed organs blackened by atrocity. The four should have been enough to satisfy them both. And yet, the Beast ached for more, for a deeper fulfillment, as if the pain it had caused lacked a vital nutrient.

  Max, as well, felt as if he’d been cheated by his own lust—his cock lay cold and spent against his thigh, shriveling as if he’d accidentally ruptured the stomachs and burned himself. A dull ache throbbed in his testicles, the engine of his sex broken on the unyielding wall of their silence.

  A need robbed them of the peace of their satiation. Max lay atop the corpses and licked blood from the obsidian knife, feeling its edge with his tongue. The tool might have excavated his chest rather than the bodies of the four women. His heart might have been the one ripped out and devoured raw, leaving a jagged emptiness that would never be refilled.

  Somehow, it was the women who’d found what they were looking for in him. He was the one who’d sacrificed himself, his appetites and satisfaction, to help them find their fulfillment.

  He could almost hear Osiel laughing. Are you the priest, now, the Oz might have asked, giving of yourself for my people?

  Max tossed the knife away. The Beast vomited, but it was only blood that came up, not the meat. Max’s hand fell on something hard. He picked the object, held it up against the starry sky. There were still candles lit, higher up in nooks.

  Osiel’s mask covered his fist, the black eye holes still mocking him with their mystery, the death’s head grin laughing, the scales glimmering in colors that pricked tears from his eyes.

  An odd impulse, born from the slaughterhouse stench in closed quarters and the shimmer of strange colors, made him put the mask on. It fell easily into place over his head. The scales rustled next to his ears. An owl feather ticked his neck. His scalp tingled, a stampede of spiders raced through his hair, down his neck, along his spine and legs.

  He wiped a hand across the back of his shoulders, came away with crushed spiders.

  Max looked to the sky, but his vision was constricted and all he could see were pinholes in the night. He crawled out and studied the world through Osiel’s eyes, watching the flames die at the villa, the great flaming serpent returning to the festival grounds with its vitality devoured by its hundreds of sweaty, staggering blank-eyed faces and slack jaws.

  The Beast mourned its stolen pain and clawed at the mask’s stuffy confines, searching for the greater Beast that had to have taken what rightfully belonged to Max’s demon.

  Neither the Beast nor Max found comfort in the random acts of violence occurring all around them: Manny and Carlos, gleefully executing the predators caught and returned to the festival by its attendants, showing off with single shots to the forehead; the blonde, whose husband had earlier mutilated himself to death, nailed to a cross and wrapped in barbed wire, then set on fire; a gang of young women, modern steel knives flashing in their hands, running down men of every age and slashing them until they were reduced to unrecognizable mounds of flesh.

  The savagery gave nothing to the Beast or to Max. The celebration of terror and pain fed something else.

  A phalanx of bone people broke through the milling crowd of Osiel’s collapsing serpent. Mostly children and teenagers with phosphorescent skeletons painted over their naked bodies, they marched in the same circle around the smoldering villa Max and Osiel had walked. Behind them, a man and woman followed, both covered by robes and wearing elaborate masks covering their entire heads, extending up and limp to either side with horns and a billowing array of feathers. Faces had been carved into the masks in intricate patterns resembling mazes rather than expressions, painted in luminescent colors that seemed to move like fire while gliding across the uneven terrain.

  A King and Queen of the Day of the Dead, Max thought. Mictlan, came the response, unbidden, in his mind.

  He stared at the King. He seemed too tall to be Osiel, and the robes hid any hint of tattoos, but the bulging waistline suggested the Oz. Who else could be selected King of a such a spectacle?

  Who would be his Queen?

  Max stood, hunger fueling curiosity. The Beast forgot what it had been doing and followed Max’s lead.

  Perhaps they should have passed on Osiel’s sisters and waited for better prey.

  By the time Max reached the path the King and Queen had taken, they were gone and the crowds had refilled the grounds. He started after the procession, but suddenly the mask weighed heavily on his head. Sweating, fighting for breath, Max was suddenly weary, and the Beast showed no interest in pursuing the King and Queen. All around him, the violence had subsided and the world had taken a step back into normality, though the residue of the bloodshed remained: bodies lay untouched where they’d fallen and the earth teemed with maggots in the King’s and Queen’s footsteps.

  Perhaps, Max thought, he should have been King. He had the mask. Of course, he didn’t have the necklace.

  He started back to the sisters’ storehouse, intent on a thorough search, but the Beast rose, its rage blinding. Frustration, hunger, and the gathering crowds gave it strength to break through to Max. It didn’t want Osiel. Not now.

  Max stopped, tore off the mask, lashed out at the nearest passersby.

  People evaded his wild strikes, pointed, laughed. Even applauded. Moved on to the next wonder the festival had to offer, already weary of the bloody, naked, wild gringo.

  The Beast’s rage quickly evaporated, sucked away like water into dry sand.

  Max followed in the wake of the King and Queen’s procession, fighting off the Beast, but the effort wore down the last of his strength and he wandered away, looking for a place to sleep. The slaughter of animals drew him to hastily set-up sacrificial altars, but their audiences were too noisy for rest. Women from the cooking stations tossed him raw meat but warned him away from the solitude of their storage tents with knives. He found himself back at the catafalque and considered climbing to the top. Though tired, he wanted to experience what Osiel’s body would be like at his funeral, after Max killed him. It was a way to connect with the man, to solidify a target who had proved so elusive even while standing within Max’s reach.

  He discovered someone already making the final approach to the crown. The figure waved the torch in his hand at him. Laughter drifted down, along with sparks.

  By the tattoos, the wave, and the laugh, Max knew he’d once again found Osiel. The Oz’s good fortune seemed intact, as his torch failed to set off his pyre. His death belonged to Max.

  You forgot your boots, a voice whispered, too close.

  Max let the future victim have his tricks and his funeral bed and went to the villa’s ruins. He sat leaning against a warm outer wall, the festival’s sounds and scents clearer than the torch lit fragments of motion. Several bands had started up, as had the dancing. The festival no longer held anything of interest for Max. He passed out.

  He woke with a start to the touch of hands on his body. The Beast screamed in his mind, and his arms and legs jerked and kicked in a spasm of killing intent.

  The children fell back with the speed and skill that came from having avoided violence for a long time. Boys and girls, in dirty smocks or ragged pants, the oldest perhaps eight or nine, the band had the look of war survivors. He’d come from their stock and seen enough of their kind. Made more than his share of orphans. The traces of the glowing painted skeletons they’d worn last night could have been wisps of ghost parents desperately trying to hold on to their sons and daughters. The children watched, a flock ready to tak
e off at the hint of a predator’s approach. Their hands held crimson cloths, and the water in the buckets between them was muddy and dark. The remains of his linen shirt, no longer white, were half-buried in dirt. Someone had covered his genitals with a stained rebozo. He recognized the shawl from his time with Osiel’s sisters.

  Max breathed. The Beast wanted broken necks. It wanted to eat the hands that had touched its host. But Max saw the children had only been washing the dried blood from his face, chest and arms, and cleaning small cuts and abrasions he had no memory of earning.

  He lay back against the wall. He remembered it belonged to the villa. The fire. The festival. Osiel’s sisters. A King and Queen.

  Today was the Day of the Dead, the day Osiel said he’d wanted to die.

  The Beast found new purpose in stalking old quarry.

  He motioned for the children to continue. They finished quickly, glancing at each other and at him. Another band of children appeared bearing tan hiking boots, worker’s jeans and a soft blue shirt that looked like they’d been looted from one of the tourist trailers and not stripped from a dead body or stolen from a merchant’s booth. There was even underwear and socks stuffed into a small purse. They placed a bottle of tequila between his feet, a bowl of sweet tamales next to one hand, a larger bowl of menudo by the other.

  The German approached, scattering the children. His long strides took him straight to the bowl of fragrant tripe, which he scooped up, breathing in the aroma. He’d lost his shirt, picked up a filthy yellow T-shirt that left his midriff bare. “A second helping should put a dent in this damned hangover,” he said. “Get yourself together,” he added, “he’s getting ready to leave.” The German dipped as he turned, picking up the tequila bottle, and fled to the catafalque.

  The Beast warmed to his fear. Max thought the German must have sensed he was after him last night, at least for a short while. He’d come checking to see if being around Max was safe. Max almost had to laugh.

  Max swallowed the tamales and dressed. The women tending to the cooking fires and the men beginning to clean up paid him no attention. He wasn’t the only one among the wounded just beginning to stir. Quite a few had to be prodded and kicked, Max observed, to make sure they shouldn’t be carted off for disposal.

  He felt more comfortable in the hiking boots. The Beast didn’t care. It still hungered, its rage gnawing on the bone of frustration at not being able to feed as it should have during he night.

  Max headed for Osiel’s funeral bed, reassuring his demon that the problem would soon be resolved.

  Buzzards circled overhead. Beyond the villa’s grounds, a coyote gnawed on something left behind when Osiel’s great-lighted serpent had uncoiled across the land.

  He sighted the jaguar heading for the catafalque at a trot only after enough of the early rising festival wanderers —stunned survivors of the previous night—had parted along its intended path.

  Jade scattered along the animal’s trail, gathered in its footprints like sparkling green tear drops in the dew of morning light.

  No one cried out with a warning or stooped to pick up the precious stones. It was as if the creature did not really exist. Or perhaps, people knew better.

  The Beast pulled back, growling, but refusing the challenge of another predator entering its territory. Max rubbed his eyes, trying to wipe hallucinations from his vision. He kept walking, refusing to slow his pace as the Beast demanded.

  The echoes of Osiel’s villa exploding cascaded through the festival grounds.

  The jaguar remained, apparently also knowing better.

  The cat slowed as it circled the catafalque, tail up, avoiding any contact with the piles of dead at the base of the structure. The few men, women and children weeping for their losses didn’t move, either because they didn’t see the animal, or no longer cared. There were fewer mourners than Max anticipated for the number of dead, which told him that those killed had been mostly strangers, people who needed to die, or who willingly gave themselves to the festival like Osiel’s sisters. He thought the killing had been random, but apparently it had not.

  Neither was the jaguar.

  Female. Confident. She ignored his advance, as if the only living thing moving in any consistent way didn’t matter to her. But she did glance back as Max crossed her path after she’d passed in front of him. He was careful not to step on any jade. She kept moving in her circle.

  The smell of gasoline was thick in the air, easily overwhelming the smells of early morning cooking.

  Max reached the base of the catafalque. He was alone with the dead. In the circle of onlookers, he picked out the German, grinning, and Carlos, frowning, looking uncomfortable in a track suit emblazoned with colorful and stylized graffiti and a pair of gleaming white sneakers. He carried an AR-15 over the shoulder with an ammunition satchel slung across his chest and a Glock firmly in hand. But it was Manny who surprised Max, dressed only in a loincloth; his head shaved clean, his skin painted a deep, metallic blue with bright red and yellow markings on his face, chest and arms suggesting a labyrinth in the form a face, with a wide, circular center like the maw of a ravenous monster. With an obsidian knife in one hand and an Uzi in the other, and a pair of small, fur bags overstuffed with clips hanging precariously by the cloth at his hips, he looked like the effigy of a hero from a culture that never existed—or a model of a hero yet to be born outside the pages of lurid comic books.

  His gaze remained fixed, unblinking, on the catafalque.

  The Beast growled at Manny. The jaguar, coming around again, answered with a rumbling from deep inside her, lowering her head and slowing, suddenly focused on Max.

  The voices resonated within Max, both comforting and threatening. Max and the jaguar locked gazes and the animal started, muscles twitching in a storm across her body. She sank into a stalking crouch, ready to pounce, as was Max, their deeper natures reflecting one another. Her claws and fangs were out. Max had his where he needed them.

  In Max, the pool that was his nature was a dark and restless mirror hiding terrible secrets in its depths. He felt them swimming, screaming, as the Beast, both father and mother to so many, nipped at their poisoned anatomies. Death framed the mirror, embracing all that it contained.

  The jaguar’s nature was pure and clear all the way through to a bottom beyond knowing. There was no past in the animal, no secrets clouding the well of her being. The jaguar lived in the eternal moment of a single heartbeat of existence. Life and death flowed through that moment without hindrance or limit, carrying the jaguar to places Max would never reach.

  The German giggled. Carlos took a shooter’s stance, weapon trained on the jaguar. Manny gasped.

  “You’re better than that thing,” the Oz said, suddenly at Max’s side.

  The Beast froze, shocked that it had not sensed an enemy come up on it.

  Max was more surprised by how closely Osiel had matched his clothes to what Max had been given. Jeans and boots were the exact same shade. The shirt differed only in having its sleeves cut-off, and the front left unbuttoned, exposing the Oz’s colorful markings.

  At the catafalque’s base, a slit in a fabric panel had not yet settled back into an invisible seam, marking the spot from which the great and powerful Oz had emerged out of hiding.

  The jaguar, rather than taking advantage of Max’s vulnerability, relaxed and approached Osiel, tail low, head bowed.

  The Oz met the creature, petted the great cat’s head and whispered in her ear. She licked his tattooed arm, snarled at Max, sharp and quick, then turned and headed back out. The jade vanished from the tracks she’d made as soon as she left the compound, and no more appeared in her wake.

  Osiel followed without a word.

  Max gave his target a dozen steps, enough for a few local women, older, shrunken and wizened, to intercept him without interference. The Oz smiled down on them and let each kiss him with a lover’s touch of hands, though not for long. The women stopped where he returned their kisses, and they w
atched Osiel, oblivious to Max passing them, or the German, Manny and Carlos going by to fall in step with Max. They shed their tears in silence.

  A touch of curiosity brushed Max. How long had Osiel spent in this rough country? How many children did he have? How old was he?

  Was he the reason the land had died around his home?

  The questions blew away with a breeze and the dust. He cared only that the Oz’s time was finally coming to an end.

  They walked through a stand of dead oak until they’d reached the grasslands, then turned and climbed with the sun rising at their backs over the sierra peaks. The jaguar picked her way up a mountainside, turning away from the road and any hint of trails. The way quickly became arduous, with dirt and pebbles sliding underfoot, thorns slashing at flesh, and handholds hard to reach or breaking off, unexpectedly brittle. The Oz kept pace with the animal, moving nimbly, though pausing every now and then to cough, or to bend over and breathe. Once, he tossed back a warning about snakes and scorpions in the rocks. Black, spiny-tailed iguanas scattered at their approach. Birds could be heard only faintly, from a distance, as if they were forever flying away. A huge cactus pushing through the forest canopy with wide and powerful arms as it raced trees for the sun seemed to warn them not to go further.

  Max kept close to his target, though the Beast writhed in protest, feeling itself outnumbered by the jaguar and Osiel. It didn’t like striking out into the wilderness, and strained to finish the work Max demanded had to be done. There was other prey, vulnerable and weak, it was eager to taste. Max made no promises but didn’t deny possibilities, either.