Warren Murphy - Unite and Conquer

One serpentine head rolled to fix him with its weird stone orbs.

"How will sacrifice make me stronger?"

"It is the way of Coatlicue. Your womanly strength comes from human sacrifice. Human sacrifice empowers your hearts, feeds your people and keeps the universe running."

"I must keep moving if I am to survive."

And head retracting, Coatlicue lumbered on.

Lujan skipped around to her side, realizing that if he stumbled she would stomp him into a mass of jelly under her cruel tread. That was why he loved her so. She cared not for her subjects. Her subjects must worship her, not the other way around.

"We are yours to command, O Coatlicue. Do you not understand? Do with us as you please. Break our backs, crush our thin skulls, we will follow you anywhere."

Coatlicue made no reply to that.

"O Coatlicue, Devourer of Filth, do you not know that there is safety in numbers?"

"I am the only one of my kind. There is no other than I."

"Yes. Yes. You are the exalted one. No one is greater than Coatlicue. Not that Aztec Quetzalcoatl. Not Kukulcan. Not even Huitzilopochtli, who is your true son. All are less than fleas beneath your cruel shadow."

Coatlicue walked on, unheeding and unconcerned. It stirred Rodrigo Lujan's passions to see her walk so proud and unmoved.

Then out of the west came a trio of federal army helicopter gunships, Gatling guns and rocket rods hanging off them like barbed scorpion spines.

"Coatlicue! Behold! The chilango army has come to defeat you."

Coatlicue stopped. Her serpent heads lined up parallel to one another until both regarded the approaching gunship stonily.

No flicker of emotion showed in those basalt slits.

"Coatlicue. Listen to me," Lujan pleaded. "They will soon attack. Let us be your shields."

"Yes. Be my shields."

"Command us to be your shields."

"I command you to be my shields."

And grinning, Rodrigo Lujan turned to his retinue. Truly, it was Coatlicue's retinue. But the authority to command them had been conferred upon him.

"Come. Come form a human shield. Coatlicue needs protection from the chilango army."

And they came. The men, the women, the sunbrowned children. They formed a circle that was many people deep. Some climbed atop Coatlicue to shield her stone flesh with their soft brown skins.

"Shoot, army of chilangos!" cried out Rodrigo Lujan. "Shoot if you dare! You will never harm our stone-hearted mother."

And the lead helicopter broke off from the others to make its first clattering pass.

It was armed with side-mounted Gatling guns. The multiple-barreled tubes began spinning. Everyone could see them spin.

The hot bullets came like a hard, remorseless rain.

The screams that lifted from the throat of the army of High Priest Rodrigo Lujan were screams of liberation. Liberation from oppression, liberation from poverty and liberation from earthly toil.

The bodies dropped from Coatlicue's shoulder and head like spoiled fruit. They ran as red as pomegranates, as bloody as crushed tomatoes, their juices forming scarlet pools at the unmoved feet of Coatlicue.

All around her the indios fell. The bodies formed stepping stones for others to scramble to take their place.

"Yes, yes. Fight to protect Coatlicue, the mother of us all. Come and offer yourself. Liberation is ours! Victory is ours. Manana is ours!"

The first antitank rocket left its pod in a bloom of smoky flame. The screaming device sped toward them unerringly. Its speed was breathtaking.

Men forming a human pyramid clawed one another in their heated desire to be the first to absorb the coming blow. They slithered over one another like brown sweaty earthworms.

When the rocket struck, it exploded a vertical cone of human flesh in all directions.

The cone simply vanished, only to reform in a thudding rain of arms, legs, head and separated torsos.

"Magnifico!" cried Rodrigo Lujan. "You have done it! You have saved Coatlicue from the rocket!"

Coatlicue stood as before, her double-serpent head parted, one tracking the overflying helicopter, the other focused on the third one, which hung back, poised to let fly more blood and destruction.

"The meat machines are protecting me," she said.

"Yes. We will all die if it takes that."

"I command you all to die to preserve my survival," intoned Coatlicue in an emotionless and very masculine voice. Rodrigo Lujan loved masculine women. He turned to his followers.

"Do you hear? We are commanded to die. To die is glorious. Let us all die to preserve Our Mother," proclaimed Rodrigo Lujan, who had to jump to one side so the stampede of indios could rush up and take the place of one dead and he would have an excellent view of the slaughter.

It was better than a bullfight. In the bullring, the bull dies or the matador is gored. There is only so much blood. A spot or two. A puddle at most.

Here it was a whirlwind of blood and carnage.

The indios took their places. They formed a dome of flesh. Like locusts, they swarmed over their Mother Goddess until her stone lines were no longer visible. They clung to her and to one another until Coatlicue resembled an upright beetle covered in ants.

The next rocket scored a direct hit. Hot metal flew. Flesh and bone turned to shrapnel. The screams were terrible yet beautiful. It was so incredibly Mexican. It was the most Mexican sight Rodrigo Lujan had ever beheld.

More bullets and then more rockets came, to snap and crump at the human anthill. And the more death gnawed, the more the indios strove to join it.

"Death!" they sang. "Bring us death so Coatlicue may live. We live through Coatlicue. Our blood illuminates the world!"

"Your blood illuminates the universe!" Rodrigo Lujan shouted to the dark, impersonal heavens as he crouched by the shoulder of the road, his bare skin now red from the rain that was not rain.

At length the helicopter gunships depleted themselves of missiles.

Perhaps it was also that the pilots had become sickened by the slaughter. For whatever reason, they broke formation, each retreating in a different direction.

"We have done it!" Rodrigo Lujan shouted to the cold stars above. "We have succeeded! We are Zapotecs!"

"And Aztecs," a man reminded.

"Maya," another said.

"I am Mixtec."

"We are all brothers in blood," Rodrigo said generously.

"And sisters," a woman said, licking a smear of blood off her naked forearm.

Others, seeing this and remembering tales of ancestral blood sacrifice, began eyeing the dead not as fallen human beings to be buried reverently in the earth but as something else.

The hungry look in his fellow indios' eyes gave Rodrigo Lujan the courage to say and do what in the past he could only imagine down in his deepest Zapotec dreams.

"Coatlicue has reminded us. We are no longer men. We are not women. We are not human. We are her servants. We are meat machines. And if we are but machines made of meat, we may partake of other machines whose meat is no longer of use to them."

And to show the truth of his words, Rodrigo Lujan picked up the severed arm that had only minutes before belonged to a comely Maya maiden and took a ferocious bite out of her warm bicep with his strong white Zapotec teeth.

Chapter 15

Remo made good time rolling down Highway 195 in Chiapas State until he ran into a Mexican federal army patrol.

"Uh-oh," he muttered as the patrol rounded a bend in the road.

Beside him the Master of Sinanju said, "Pretend we are innocent of any suspicion. They will not see us."

Eyeing Chiun's emerald-and-ocher kimono, Remo said, "I have a better idea."

He floored the Humvee. It surged ahead.

The oncoming armored column consisted of a toylike LAV followed by two light tanks. It slithered up the winding, mountainous road.