Chris Holm - The Big Reap

How long the creature had inhabited them, these men had no idea.

It began, as all things do, with stories. Hardened men, chests puffed with false bluster, recounting tall tales over shots of tequila: low growls half-swallowed by earthen walls, the dragging rasp of claws along dirt floors, a plume of hot breath against their cheeks as they navigated the wells of darkness that lapped at the edges of the dim, swinging lamplight of the dangling bulbs. By the light of day, such tales were no more than seasoning, intended to add zest to their self-perpetuated reps. But beneath the ground, in the choking dark of the tunnel system the cartel’s foot-soldiers referred to as Mictlan — after the underworld of Aztec myth — those stories metastasized into something far more sinister in the minds of the men who carried them. Those stories made them quake, though to a one they blamed that on the chill damp earth, so far removed from the sunbaked desert surface. Those stories made them cautious.

Those stories likely kept them all alive.

The first person to disappear was an illegal immigrant-to-be, who’d paid for the privilege of using the cartel’s tunnels with his life-savings before ultimately paying with his life. He was part of a small group — the first such group to be granted access to the tunnels. Sneaking migrant workers across the border wasn’t part of the cartel’s business plan; in fact, it was expressly forbidden. The tunnels were for human trafficking and narcotics, and funneling countless civilians through them — any one of whom might be rounded up by US authorities, only to use the knowledge of the tunnels’ existence as leverage — was a sure way of shutting the lucrative pipeline down. But the men manning the tunnels thought that they could keep their sideline business quiet enough their superiors would never catch wind of it, and make a goodly chunk of change while they were at it.

They were wrong.

The man who disappeared was traveling alone. He gave no name, and scarcely spoke to anyone during his brief, ill-fated journey. In truth, that was not uncommon — most of these would-be illegals were migrant workers, family men looking to send back cash enough to their loved ones to make up for the upfront investment of buying their way across the border. They had no interest in placing said family on the cartel’s radar, for although they were glad to take advantage of these men’s assistance, they were not fools enough to think they could be trusted with the information as to when and where to find women and children left unprotected. Pretty wives and daughters — and, on occasion, sons as well — had a habit of disappearing when the cartel came to town. So when this man vanished from the small group of huddled, terrified border-crossers on his way through the tunnel system, there was no one to complain, to worry, to insist he be tracked down. The tunnel’s minders assumed he must have simply wandered off, and either died down there or found himself another exit. Either way, it didn’t trouble them at all.

At least until they found his headless, eviscerated remains hanging from a cross-beam in one of the lesser-used side-tunnels, nails driven through his splayed hands as though he’d been crucified and left to drain. But the dirt beneath was not bloodied, instead it was marred with the signs of something that had rested there and been dragged off. A tarpaulin, it turned out, which when found was still blood-sticky and looked for all the world like something had done its best to lick it clean. That something left tracks — two by two like a human’s, but dotted here and there with claw marks on either side as if the beast occasionally used all fours — that led deeper into the tunnels, toward a section where it seemed the power to the lights had been disrupted.

Not disrupted, the men discovered, but bulbs broken one by one.

They sent a party of four men armed with lanterns, blades, and rifles in to find out who or what was responsible for stringing up the nameless man. That party never returned. So the remaining men decided to wait out whatever lurked in the darkness. They set guards at the tunnel mouth to ensure whatever it was could not escape, and to kill it if it tried. The guards were found slaughtered as the nameless man had been. Their heads, like his, were never found.

And that’s when Guerrera, rising star within the cartel and the lieutenant entrusted with the day-to-day operation of the Mictlan tunnel system, caught wind of his men’s ill-fated side-business, and decided to step in. Step in he did, killing anyone who’d participated in the unsanctioned border-crossing scheme, and placing charges at the mouth of the creature’s chosen lair — the fetid air that emanated from it now heavy with the sickly stench of rotting flesh, of corruption, of violent, messy death — sealing it off forever. Every corner, every chamber, every blind alley and secret hidey-hole of the sprawling tunnel system was then inspected, and no further sign of the creature or its horrid appetites was seen.

For seven months, there was quiet, and — as the war between the cartels and the Mexican government reached a fever pitch — Guerrera came to realize that ensuring safe passage across the US border could be more than simply a profitable, if risky, sideline, it could be a public relations coup. A service the cartel was in a position to provide that the government could not. A way to influence public opinion that slowly turned the populace so thoroughly against them that even fear could not be expected to keep them all in line.

His higher-ups reluctantly agreed, so long as he oversaw the operation himself.

The bodies found on I-83 represented his first shipment.

What the authorities did not realize is that one of the four main spokes to the system let out a mere hundred yards from where the bodies had been dumped, into a storm drain which ran perpendicular to the highway just below. It was as Guerrera and his charges were exiting that the creature struck. And once it took the heads and hearts it came for, it was into that storm drain, and back into the depths of Mictlan, a shattered Guerrera watched the beast return.

Which meant if I was going to kill it, I’d have to go in after it.

When I told these men — Castillo, Alvarez, and Mendoza, as it turns out, the latter being the only English speaker in the group, and therefore my de facto translator — what I needed from them, they balked. I mean, they were happy enough to sketch out a rough map of the tunnels, for no paper map existed, thus ensuring only those familiar with them could successfully navigate their winding, booby-trapped passageways, marking the location of the collapsed side-tunnel and the storm-drain outlet for me as best they could. And they seemed content to part with grenades and additional ammunition as well. In part because I’d presented myself as an American cartel operative embedded as an immigration officer, and in part because they were so scared shitless of what was down there — and of their post directly above it — that they would have clung to any method for eliminating said threat as if it were a life preserver. And you couldn’t blame them. The tunnel system had only five entrances: one here, and four on the Texas side of the border. Which meant these poor bastards stood a one-in-five chance of being this thing’s next meal once it’s stomach started rumblin’ and it caught on they wouldn’t be sending down any more deliveries.

But when I told them they were coming with me, they weren’t too keen.

Guess the way they figured it, that bumped their odds from one-in-five to sure-fucking-thing.

What they didn’t get was I wasn’t asking.

“I do not understand why we cannot simply blow the tunnels,” said Mendoza, “and bury this beast for good.”