The Devil's Bag Man (22 page)

M
iguel Fuentes had lost track.

Of time.

His present physical location.

His place in the world.

The basic rules by which the universe was governed.

All he knew was that he was very, very drunk.

And hundreds of miles from anywhere he ought to be.

And totally, permanently, royally fucked.

Consider yourself bought
.

For days now, he'd tried to blot out those words. How many, he couldn't be sure. Beer didn't help, so he'd switched to tequila. When that proved ineffective, he'd tried sex; the roadhouse bar he'd stumbled into rented rooms by the hour, and a handful of working girls trickled through when the sun went down. He had a go at one the first night, and out of embarrassment at how that had gone, he swapped the booze for coffee a few hours before dusk the second night and took a different one upstairs.

But sobriety only unleashed the black-eyed monster inside.

As far as work knew—work and his wife—Fuentes was on the clock. Working a contact, trying to flip a disgruntled lieutenant and roll him up at his Barrio Azteca superiors. Just another badass workweek for the pride and joy of Intelligence Ops.

And when he rolled back into town with Herman Rubacalo's corpse in his trunk and some kind of heroic story about how it had gotten there—a story he was currently too drunk to devise, since the inspiration to double back and collect the body was the last sober-headed thing Fuentes had done—well, shit. The sky was the limit. Awards and promotions out the asshole.

Cucuy was gonna own himself one high-ranking son of a bitch.

If Fuentes managed to sack up and go home before the body rotted beyond recognition, anyway.

The odds on that were maybe three to one.

He leaned forward until his forehead touched the bar, and he raised a finger for more tequila.

When he looked up, he was staring at a basket of steaming tortillas instead.

“You should eat something,” the barkeep said.

“Fuck you,” Fuentes mumbled, already tearing into the hot morsels.

Before he could swallow, his phone chirped in his pocket and Fuentes nearly toppled off his stool. He fumbled for it, filled with dread, anticipating the flash of Marisol's name across the screen. But when he wrestled the device free, there was no name on the screen at all.

In its place was the word
Unknown
.

As if it was his future calling, Fuentes thought as he stared at it, trying to bring the word into focus, obscurely proud of the sentiment's poetry.

“Fuentes,” said Fuentes.

“Do you know who this is?” The voice was low, even, almost a purr. And yet, it made every hair on his body stand.

“How did you get this number?” he blurted, without thinking.

The empty air on the other end of the line was answer enough.

“Valentine,” Fuentes capitulated at last. “It's Valentine.”

“Tomorrow between three and four
P.M.
, a cargo plane will land at
a hidden airfield fifteen miles outside Gómez Palacio. You will meet it. You will unload it. And you will transport the contents to Ojos Negros. This will require three or four large vehicles. Police vehicles. I will transmit exact coordinates when I hang up. You will be paid upon delivery. Is all that clear?”

Fuentes's stomach plummeted, as a host of impossibilities swarmed around his head like flies. He could not put hands on that many vehicles, or that many men. Questions would be asked. Getting from here to home to there in time also posed difficulties. Particularly in his current state of shitfacedness.

And then there was the plane's cargo.

Guns or drugs if he was lucky. Fucking surface-to-air missiles if he was not.

“I don't think—”

“Do not think. Do as you are told.”

“I'd like to, Mr. Valentine, of course.” He could feel the sloppiness of the words as they rolled off his tongue, the inadvisability of each one. But Fuentes couldn't stop himself. “It's just that right now isn't really the—”

“Your wife's name is Marisol,” the procurer said, as if he were informing Fuentes of the weather. “She's thirty-nine years old, too pretty for you, and wants another child. The ones you already have are Javier, Jacinta, and fat little Federico. Shall I go on?”

Fuentes's spine went rigid, and a bead of sweat rolled down his back.

In a flash, he was stone-cold sober.

“That won't be necessary,” he said, rubbing his eyelids with a thumb knuckle and forefinger. “I'll be there. I'll figure it out.”

“I'm sure you will.”

The line went dead.

Fuentes could hardly breathe. He slapped open the bar's saloon doors, staggered into the stifling heat, and sucked down a huge helping of dusty air.

His lungs burned as he scrolled through his contacts, looking for Marisol's cell number. Fuentes pressed the phone to his sweaty ear and prayed his wife would pick up.

His heart played over the ringtone in triplicate. Just as he was about to hang up, she answered.

“Miguel?”

“Where are you? Are you at home?”

The panic in his voice was unmistakable, and that was all it took for Marisol's to jump into the same register.

“What's wrong? What's happened?”

“You've got to leave town, Marisol. Take the kids and go, right now.”

“Go where? Miguel, you're scaring me. What's happened?”

“Go to your parents. No— Go to the airport. To Alberto's.”

“In California? Miguel, please, what are you talking about? What kind of trouble are you in?”

Fuentes heaved a sigh, stared past the meager parking lot and into the sun-blighted desert beyond.

His eyes widened, and his arm dropped to his side. The phone slipped from his slack hand, dropped soundlessly to the ground.

“Miguel? Hello?”

“Mother of Christ,” Fuentes whispered.

Perhaps he was hallucinating. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, hauled off and slapped himself hard in the face like some kind of goddamn Loony Tunes character.

Nothing doing. They were still there.

Thousands of them, streaming over a hill in the distance, and down across the flat plain.

Swarming like ants. The entire landscape suddenly dark with bodies.

And those bodies were headed straight toward him. Toward the town, as if it represented no impediment whatsoever to their progress. As if they didn't even notice it, any more than a tsunami noticed land.

Fuentes felt the bile rise in his throat. He bent double, hands on his knees, waiting for his insides to knot and rebel, but still he craned his neck up at the approaching storm. The coming plague.

It didn't matter that they were young, female, dressed in rags or sundresses or nothing at all.

Fuentes knew an army when he saw one.

He could smell the stench of death in the air.

The closest ones had left the hill behind now, halved the distance to him in the scant, frozen minutes he'd been watching.

Fuentes's phone rang—Marisol trying to figure out what was
going on—but he couldn't process the sound. It entered his mind as a death knell.

Run,
he thought, but could barely stand.

A gush of vomit poured from him, splashed hot against the ground. He gagged, spat, squinted back up at the advancing army.

And found the ground erupting, giving birth to more.

There
and
there
and
there
.

The new recruits fell seamlessly into step with their sisters, joined a progression that was swift and wordless, chillingly efficient, silent except for the cacophony of footfalls.

It was loud enough to bring the rest of the bar's patrons spilling outside. A dozen others joined Fuentes in the next few seconds—first with the boozy joviality of men finding distraction in an unexpected spectacle, and then with the quiet terror of men gazing upon a scene out of some ancient, communal nightmare.

Since Fuentes had gotten there first—or maybe because he comported himself like a man who'd looked into the devil's eyes—they all deferred to him.

“The fuck is that, cabrón?” the man closest to him asked in a guttural whisper. He was a rangy dude, none too steady on his feet, and as he spoke he gestured with an almost-empty beer bottle.

“The Virgin Army,” Fuentes heard himself say. The words sounded far off and hollow, as if his mouth were a cave. There was a bitter taste on his tongue, a taste like ash.

The guy elbowed him in the shoulder, like Fuentes had made a joke.

“Yeah, right,” he said. “Tell me another one, Grandpa.”

Then he looked for himself—really looked—and shut the fuck up.

Dozens of people were standing in the street now; every business on the strip that comprised this town's commercial district had emptied out. Women with their hair in curlers stood crossing themselves in front of the salon across the street; old men stood gape jawed before the bodega on the corner.

No one ran; no one even spoke. It was as if they'd all, somehow, been waiting their whole lives for this moment. And now that it was here, there was nothing left to fear, no illusion that they had any agency in the face of it.

The girls were almost upon them now—crossing out of the desert and into the town by the score. The great river of bodies cleaved in half to stream around the back of the bar and then re-formed, whole again.

They never once broke stride. And they paid absolutely no mind to the living.

Fuentes stood still and let the endless wave of girls wash over him, and everybody else did exactly the same. They were all inside the same spell, he thought, the watchers and the walkers—or no, the opposite, it was like they occupied two entirely different worlds and one just so happened to be passing in front of the other at that moment, gliding over the face of it like the moon eclipsing the sun.

For the first minute, he didn't even breathe. At any instant, half a dozen of them were close enough to touch.

All that young, supple flesh.

Young, supple, cold, and dead.

Fuentes didn't know whether to pop a boner or drop dead from fear. But the stampede went on, thousands of them passing by as thick and swift as driven cattle, and kicking up just as much dust. And like anything, it became normal after a while.

Maybe not
normal
.

Fuentes was breathing again, though.

This too shall pass
.

Wait it out, man
.
Just wait it out
.

Rest of your problems are gonna look a whole lot better afterward, cuz as fucked up as your life is, it ain't half as fucked up as a billion undead bitches headed who knows where to do who knows what to who knows who
.

Even as he thought it, Fuentes realized he knew.

Cucuy.

Who else could it be?

Either they'd been summoned, or they were on the warpath. Hell, maybe the Virgin Army was his fucking salvation. The enemy of his enemy.

The monster's monster.

A man could dream, couldn't he?

The stream of girls was thinning; a second battalion was crossing the hill, but they weren't here yet. Fuentes and his fellow witnesses stood in the eye of the hurricane.

That was when he saw the palanquin.

It was a word he knew from reading King Arthur stories to his sons—not something he'd ever had the opportunity to use in conversation, much less lay eyes on in the real world.

Twelve girls gripped the ends of the long wood beams that supported it, three walking on each of the four sides, their pace stately, their footfalls synchronized, so as not to jostle whoever was inside the long, curtained box that sat atop the beams.

The queen,
thought Fuentes, and his throat constricted. Did one bow? Kneel? Avert his eyes? Run back inside and hide behind the bar?

No, you fuckshit
.
Just be cool
.
This too shall pass
.

The porters' bearing was regal: backs straight, chins level with the ground, eyes thousand-yard staring into a future Fuentes couldn't even fathom.

The palanquin drew closer, the curtains billowing in a sudden, slight breeze, and Fuentes braced himself.

He had to look. Lay eyes on the one whose will had set these beings in motion.

The conveyance drew parallel now. Fuentes mopped the sweat pouring into his eyes and bent forward to peer inside.

There were four people seated against the straight wooden walls. Three women and a man. But Fuentes only had eyes for one.

She was cold and radiant as the moon, with jet-black hair and skin as pale as alabaster.

When her emerald eyes met his, Fuentes felt a jolt of electricity surge through his body and knew he was in the presence of unfathomable power.

“Command me,” he heard himself say, voice husky with a desire he couldn't begin to understand. “Tell me what to do, my queen, and I am yours.”

The bearers stopped on a dime, and the entire army halted with them.

But it was not the queen's voice that rang through the air. It was the girl by her side, face smudged with grime, eyes blazing with hatred.

All at once, Fuentes realized who she was.

“He needs to die,” Jess Galvan's daughter said. “He needs to die right fucking now.”

The queen blinked.

The bearers resumed their inexorable march.

The Virgin Army fell into step ahead, next to, and behind.

Except for the six girls closest to Fuentes. They turned their heads toward him as one and saw a man where before there had been only scenery.

They fell on him together, and a moment later the arc of blood spurting from Miguel Fuentes's jugular vein painted a final monument to his life on the ground of the bar's parking lot.

M
ath had never been her forte, but right now Sherry Richards was running through calculations like her life depended on the results.

Maybe because it did.

One girl a week? One girl a day?

If it was only one a week—and even that number was staggering, if you stopped to remember that it wasn't a number but a life, snuffed out in panic and agony long before its time—that added up to fifty-two a year. Round it down to fifty, multiply it by five centuries, and you got twenty-five thousand girls.

Subtract a few thou from that number, on the assumption that not every one of them remained an able-bodied warrior. Certainly, men like her father must have cut some down over the years, and perhaps Chacanza had chosen not to roust others from their slumber to join this siege; maybe she even had favorites who were exempt from combat. There had definitely been some kind of lesbo vibe going on back at the cave.

A conservative reckoning of the force sweeping toward Ojos Negros, then, would fall somewhere in the range of twenty thousand.

That was a lot of fucking girls.

Sherry lifted her eyes and threw a furtive look across the palanquin at Chacanza, who sat rigid backed against the opposite wall.

The queen's eyes were closed, not that Sherry would have dared speak to her anyway. Her sole words to Chacanza had come untold miles back, when they'd run across Fuentes in that little shitstain of a town.

Don't get it twisted,
she told herself, watching Chacanza's eyes dart back and forth beneath their closed lids, her smooth unlined face more expressive in repose than in waking life.
Don't let looks deceive
.
She's not human, any more than that thing was my father
.

Sherry's eyes drifted to the sleeping Gum, and she silently repeated the warning.

Surrounded by monsters.

What else was new?

She flashed on Cucuy and the offer he had made.

You can live, you can die, or you can join him
.

It took her several moments to realize that the sound filling the makeshift room came from Cantwell, and another few to process the noise and realize her friend was sobbing.

Had been sobbing for some time.

“What's wrong?” Sherry asked, and instantly felt idiotic, given the circumstances of the conversation.

What wasn't?

Cantwell's hands cradled her belly. “I don't wanna lose him,” she whispered, voice ragged and hoarse.

“Oh, so it's a boy now?” Sherry said, trying for levity. The kid was Tic Tac sized, after all.

Cantwell didn't seem to get the joke. “Yes,” she said, nodding her head gravely, and then seeming to forget how to stop.

Sherry peeled away one of Ruth's hands and clasped it between her own. It was clammy, despite the overwhelming heat.

“Look at me.”

Cantwell blinked out a few more tears, then complied.

“I'm not gonna let anything happen to either one of you, okay? That's a promise.”

How the fuck she intended to make good on that, Sherry had no idea. But she felt her spine stiffen and knew she believed it.

From the look on her face, so did Cantwell.

That was something, anyway.

Just then the smoothness of the ride gave way to a rhythmic bumpiness, as if the bearers had stepped onto a more even, less forgiving surface. Sherry pulled back the curtains and saw asphalt below. She craned her neck to look forward, and there it was.

Ojos Negros. Squat and giant, shimmering in the midday sun, and by all appearances blissfully unaware of the approaching hell.

The gates stood partway open, and even from a quarter mile's remove, through the moving scrim of female bodies, the place bustled with industry. The sliver of yard Sherry could see afforded a glimpse of a line of men unloading parcels from what looked like a large military truck, and another group assembling some kind of contraption made from gleaming metal parts. The guard towers looming above all stood vacant, as if no further supervision was needed—and indeed, the yard looked like a factory floor operating at peak efficiency.

What it looked nothing like, Sherry realized, was a prison.

Nor did these men look like prisoners.

Prisoners didn't carry guns.

They didn't build cannons.

Chacanza was awake now, her energy like a frigid blast of air on Sherry's neck.

She turned and found herself eye to eye with the queen. Sherry fell back and watched as Chacanza took in the scene, the prison.

The army.

Any second, one of those men would look up, see their approach, and sound an alarm.

The battle would begin.

And sooner or later, the monster shaped like her father would appear.

The mere thought made Sherry feel like her heart was about to explode inside her chest.

“It's a trap,” she heard herself say. “We're too late. He's already got an army.”

Chacanza didn't seem to hear. She murmured something under her
breath, craned her neck to the sky. Her eyes zagged wildly across the landscape, memorizing it.

Or, perhaps, remembering.

“What'd you say?” Sherry asked.

All at once, the soldiers came to a halt. Twenty thousand girls stood motionless, and the air seemed to throb with silence. The absence of footfalls.

“This was a temple once,” the queen repeated, still gazing beyond her—beyond everything, it seemed to Sherry. Into a past far realer than any danger the present had to offer.

Something like a smile touched the corner of her lip.

“And a temple it shall be again.”

DOMINGO VALENTINE STOOD
beneath the flickering candlelight of the Ancient One's library, nestled along the deepest corridor of Ojos Negros's many warrens. His attention was in high demand elsewhere; there were takeoffs and landings to schedule, prison uprisings to coordinate in Arizona, Florida, Chiapas, and Guadalajara, monies to be couriered to various overseas accounts, cartel operations to be scheduled and consolidated, redundant personnel to be retired.

Corporate restructuring was a bitch.

His weapons of choice beckoned: the satellite phone lying atop his desk and the triple-encrypted, military-issue laptop that sat next to it. But until the Great One dismissed him, Valentine would stand right here, watching Cucuy pore through the blood-burgundy pages of his sacred book, and marvel at all that the Great One had wrought and all that was to come.

It was in this very room that he'd discovered the master's putrefying body. But had he doubted? Abandoned his belief or his post? Not for an instant. His faith had been unstinting, his work dogged.

He had prepared the way—just as John the Baptist had done for Jesus, according to the boy-fucking priests of his youth. Without Valentine, the master might not sit before him now, resplendent and reborn, ready to rise up from the depths in which he had been mired and retake the world.

His strength was a rising tide that would lift all ships.

Especially the S.S.
Valentine
.

It was time to think big, to envision his place in the new world that was coming. And in whatever spare moments he could find, the procurer found himself remembering the countless childhood hours he'd spent watching the ocean. Reading the surf as if it held the secret of his future. Gazing out at the distant ships sitting so placidly atop the clamoring, crashing waves, their bellies full of cargo, monuments to both freedom and service.

Valentine pictured himself standing on the top deck of a massive yacht, its prow jutting through turquoise waters, the ship simultaneously tranquil and perpetually in motion.

He would be the ruler of all he surveyed, his reach second only to Cucuy himself. And perhaps, just perhaps, in gratitude for all he had done to turn adversity to triumph—perhaps a door could be opened for him and Valentine could become more than a man himself. The sorcery of the Timeless One knew no bounds, now that he had cast off his weakened form as the wasp did the chrysalis. Surely there must be some way to—

With a dry slap of parchment on parchment, Cucuy shut the book and raised his head. The black of his eyes seemed to swirl, to suck the meager light toward themselves like twin black holes. He stood, the faint luminescence of his body intensifying, turned on his heel, and strode into the corridor.

Valentine scurried after, the Terrible One's light filling what had been a pitch-black passageway, the question out of his mouth before he could stop it.

“Is something wrong, master?”

Cucuy spun toward him, and Valentine instinctively threw up his arms in fear.

As if that would do anything, in the event that the master chose to strike him.

But it was not anger that played on his lips.

It was a smile.

Cruel and wide.

“She is close by,” he said, and stalked down the hall.

Valentine panted as he sprinted to keep up. Cucuy appeared to be
walking but moved at a phenomenal speed, as if the Timeless One existed in some sped-up version of reality, the glow of his body streaming out behind him like the phosphorescent tentacles of a jellyfish.

Cucuy took the steepest, most direct path, the grade forcing Valentine to walk nearly doubled over, thighs burning with the effort. The temperature rose as they left the cool, damp underground for the parched, scorching surface.

The sound so overwhelmed at first that it didn't register in the procurer's mind—the clamor filled the whole auditory spectrum, canceling itself out like the crash of surf or the blare of traffic.

And then, as the sunlight penetrated the wide mouth of the tunnel, it hit him all at once.

The bloodcurdling screams of killers, and the moans and prayers of dying men.

The staccato report of thousands of guns, the cacophony as dense and oppressive as the acrid clouds of smoke floating toward him.

He turned the final corner and braced himself, knowing he was about to look upon the face of war.

But nothing could have prepared Valentine for what he saw when he stepped into the light.

This wasn't just war.

This was Armageddon.

The besieging army poured into the prison yard unchecked—their numbers unfathomable, the desert black with their bodies. The men had commandeered the guard towers, were spraying barrages of AK-47 fire into the oncoming horde. But it made no difference; they might as well have been firing into the ocean.

The wave swept on.

And all at once, Valentine understood who the enemy was.

That they could not be killed, because they were already dead.

Each and every one of them, at Cucuy's hands.

Already, they swarmed over the men, like some time-lapse nature film showing how piranhas turned a cow into a skeleton. Their teeth were lethal weapons; their numbers overwhelming. The elaborate weaponry of the prisoners was useless at close quarters, obsolete in a battle that seemed torn from mankind's most ancient, terrifying past.

Valentine's head darted from left to right. Everywhere he looked, a tableau of utter carnage unfolded.

Two blood-spattered girls pinned down a man, his handgun firing uselessly into the sky as a third found his carotid artery and a geyser of blood arced through the air. They were up in a flash, swarming their next victim.

A pair of prisoners stood back-to-back, their faces contorted in wide-eyed, last-stand roars as they spun and fired, heedless of the comrades they might take down. The girls converged on them from all sides, as if by telepathic consensus, absorbed the shelling until they were close enough to pounce. The men disappeared in a writhing frenzy of arms, legs, hair, tits, ass.

The will of the men was at its breaking point. Utter derangement hit some full on; they tried to scrabble their way up the prison yard's unscalable walls, or turned tail and fled toward the tiered cell blocks—though even in the blind flush of their panic, not a single prisoner headed for the tunnels; either they were unaware of the netherworld of chambers that lay below the prison, or they feared it more than death.

The girls chased them down, triangulating and herding, lions after antelope. The iron scent of blood was everywhere, mingling with the gun smoke and the spreading stench of shit as doomed men's bowels voided in a last act of release.

Valentine stepped back into the corridor, the protection of shadows. He might be a killer, but he was not a soldier. This death was not for him.

The thought cleared his mind, like a sudden gust of wind dispersing clouds, and Valentine realized that the Timeless One had disappeared—charged out of this very tunnel moments before—and was nowhere to be seen upon the battlefield. His heart surged with new confidence, and he castigated himself for his momentary lapse in faith.

What were these abominations to the master?

A moment later, Domingo Valentine had his answer.

A thunderclap boomed across the sky, so sharp and deafening it felt like a slap across the eardrum. The procurer rushed forward, reached the mouth of the tunnel just as the sky went dark.

The sun had been snuffed out, abruptly and completely, casting the prison yard into a midnight blackness.

For an instant, everything stopped, as if both commanders—Cucuy and the unseen consciousness masterminding the invasion, the
she
who had brought that wicked smile to the master's lips—had agreed on a time-out, their forces frozen like the warriors adorning the frieze of some Greek temple.

And then, slowly at first, light returned to the world.

The sun had changed shape.

The sun was a man now.

He stood atop the prison wall, legs spread and arms raised to the sky. The glow emanated from his heart; Valentine could see it pulse, grow hotter.

Orange red.

Pale blue.

Pure white.

And then, as if the proper conditions for combustion had been achieved, the heat began to spread, to flow like magma through the intricate, filigreed system of his veins, each one becoming visible as it spread.