Chris Holm - The Big Reap

What he didn’t know was that to make good on his promise, he’d need my help.

I waited until he finished his statement and left the makeshift podium, and then I left Ortiz behind. Solares flinched as if struck as I took him, but he didn’t fall — and though his mouth flooded with saliva as it prepared to purge me, he didn’t vomit. He was too disciplined — his mind too orderly. Like entering a strange kitchen, only to find it arranged exactly as you would have done. I opened a drawer, and boom bam — there was the button for his nausea response. Anyone who saw me/him mop the flopsweat from our brow probably assumed it was simply a case of delayed stage fright kicking in.

Of course, it’s possible Solares was not as disciplined as I’m giving him credit for. That the reason the transition was so easy was me. See, historically, I’ve preferred the quiet of the newly dead to the cacophony of a living meat-suit. Only these past few days, I’ve found myself hitching rides with the living more and more, and what’s worse, I’ve not minded it. Partly because the living have access to all manner of creature comforts in which the newly dead cannot indulge. Their credit cards have not been canceled. Their homes are not off-limits to the likes of me. Their IDs and access badges afford entry to all manner of hard-to-reach places, from prison cells to border crossings, and one never has to worry one’s meat-suit will be recognized by some poor sap who’ll subsequently piss himself and run screaming to the nearest tinfoil-hat blogger about how their uncle Merle is Patient Zero in the pending zombie apocalypse.

Like I said, partly for that reason. But partly not.

See, the dead — even the newly dead, so fresh and unspoiled by autolysis and/or putrefaction you’d have to check their pulse to tell — drive like that car you had in high school with a busted muffler and no third gear. They’re all tricky. Goofy. Hard to get the hang of.

But the living — they’re Ferraris, built for speed. for handling. They ride like a dream. Only catch is, you’ve got to subjugate their owner’s will before they’ll relent to your commands. Used to be, I didn’t like that much.

These past few days, though, I’ve begun to develop a taste for it. Found I kinda sorta enjoy it, like playing a game of psychological Whac-a-Mole. Only the mole I’m whacking is the thinking, feeling, human owner of the body I’ve gone and hijacked. And the fact I’m having fun is terrifying.

This gig of mine is a punishment for a life misspent. And as punishments go, it’s a doozy. When I collect a mark, there’s this beautiful, horrible moment in which I experience every decision that’s brought them to the front door of damnation, just as surely as if I made those choices myself. And likewise, every time I abandon one meat-suit in favor of another, I leave a little bit of what makes me me behind. The sum total of those two events is that every job, my humanity is slowly eroded, until one day — ten days from now, or ten minutes, or ten thousand fucking years for all I know — I’ll be as cold and vicious as the demons who pull my strings. I used to think that I could stave it off, that I could avoid my fate.

Now, as I admire the handling of my military-tuned meat-suit — its owner howling bloody murder from the makeshift cell I fashioned for him in the back corner of his own mind — I think it’s gonna be closer to ten minutes than ten thousand years.

In fact, I was beginning to wonder if I’ve already lost too much of me to well and truly care.

All this emo-bullshit inner turmoil meant nothing to the men in this nameless, rathole bar, though. All they saw was my fully automatic rifle aimed right at them, since I’d stopped off at the address on Solares’ ID long enough to swap my olive-drab fatigues and sergeant’s bars for some jeans, a T-shirt, and a gun. These were not Mensa cardholders — they were men of action, men of violence. Given half a chance to consider their predicament, one of three was bound to roll the dice and come up shooting. And while I doubted the world at large would miss any one of them, these men weren’t mine to kill. So best to head off any such ideas at the pass.

“Any of you fellas speak English?” I asked. None of them responded. though the one nearest me flinched when first I spoke, as if surprised to hear uninflected English come from so clearly Mexican a face.

I locked my eyes on him as I continued. “I spoke to Javier,” I said. “I know what happened. I’m not here to harm you.”

The two on the other side of the pool table looked twitchier than ever, my words clearly so much nonsense to them. But before either of them could do anything rash, the one nearest me raised his hands and patted the air on either side of him in a cool-out gesture.

“Then… why?” he asked in heavily accented English. “Why do you come here?”

I took a gamble. Lowered my weapon. Held my hands out to my sides, clutching the assault rifle by its stock rather than its trigger. If these men wanted, they could have pumped me full of bullets before I could bring it around to bear again.

The fuck did I care? I’d probably just end up back in Guam.

“I need your help,” I replied, hands held up as if in surrender. “I need you to give me access to your tunnels.”

At that, the men shared a look. Apparently tunnel is close enough to Spanish for them to get the gist. “Even if I know what you mean,” said the lone English speaker, “why would I help you?”

“Because I know what’s down there,” I told him. “And because I aim to kill it.”

The tunnels were nothing short of astonishing.

I’d seen other smuggling tunnels before, of course. Flipping channels past news specials during downtime in fleabag motel rooms. Killing time in waiting rooms reading magazines before killing time. Once or twice in person on a job. But most of those were rudimentary, unfinished — straight shots of a hundred yards or less that, had the cops not busted them before completion, would have been as likely to bury alive those using them as they were to successfully convey black market goods across the border.

These were something else entirely.

Seven miles of interconnected tunnels cut into the sandy soil, all bare-bulb lit and beam-reinforced, shored up here and there with rebar and chicken wire to hold the pressing desert earth at bay. They fanned outward from the bar in four spokes — east, northeast, northwest, and west — each bisected here and there by smaller tunnels at various points. Some of those tunnels led from one spoke to another, yet others to food or weapons caches. A few were designed to confuse would-be pursuers, with camouflaged trapdoors leading to hidden chambers deeper in the earth, or booby traps that could be triggered once past that would collapse the passage behind.

They’d been carved out of the desert over a period of years — men working in secret, under the cover of darkness, carting out tons of rock and dirt hidden in containers made from jury-rigged beer kegs, lest anyone should see. First one main branch, and then another, and then another — the interstitial passageways added over time to allow cartel spotters Stateside to call audibles should there be too much heat surrounding any one outlet point. Eventually, when all the spokes were connected, the system served not only as a conduit for narcotics to cross the border, but also as a safe-house of sorts for cartel agents operating within the US. They could duck into one of the access points and lay low, leaving either from the same place they entered or somewhere two miles away. The freedom to move both across the border or laterally along the US side was key to the cartel’s business plan.