Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

“Americano!” he screamed. “Americano!”

Nobody could’ve cared less. Nobody wanted to deal with him other than right then, right there, on the spot. They could just tell, the scariest judges of character in the world. You hear about someone getting blown out of his shoes and think no way, that’s Hollywood bullshit. But it happened. Steps away, Crispin was hit with gunfire so hard he bounced off the fender and left a dent as he went down barefoot.

All Enrique could think of was Sofia, Sofia, because she’d gone out the other side and he couldn’t see her any more. He’d forgotten how to pray, too, something about Santa Maria, but it wasn’t there anymore.

Santa Muerte, full of grace , was the only thing he had left. You don’t want us now .

Vans came roaring up from the south, the direction of the highway, this entire operation going off with military precision. Someone’s knee dropped into the center of his back and emptied his lungs with a whoosh. They twisted his arms behind his spine and he was so confused and paralyzed he let it happen, let some guy squat on top of him like a goblin and lash his wrists together with a nylon zip-tie before he realized that was happening too. Then everything went dark and stuffy when they yanked a black hood over his head, and now the world was reduced to bad sounds and worse sensations.

They hauled him upright, slinging him around like a bawling calf destined for a branding iron. Once his feet were under him, two pairs of hands rushed him stumbling toward whatever was waiting next. Then he was cargo, banging into the hard floor of a van as other bodies landed around him. Doors slammed, then the blackness shot into high-speed acceleration, and whenever any of them said anything somebody up front yelled for them to shut up, no talking, and it was a long bumpy ride before the last person was too tired to cry any more.

The only thing Enrique was sure of was that they hadn’t gone north. Whatever was coming next, they hadn’t been driven into Texas for it. No, they’d gone a long way south, or west, or both. The air felt dryer and hotter on his arms.

After hours of motion, the van finally stopped and guys hauled them out and rushed them across open ground, hardpacked earth under his wobbly boots. Then it was doorways and a fresh feeling of claustrophobia—a hallway. That opened into an expanded sense of space, the noise around them no longer confined. Wooden floors, he knew from the sound.

The ties were cut and the hoods came off and they were shoved forward. Behind them, doors slammed and locks turned. Then they were on their own in a big dark emptiness, still nothing to see because the night had followed them inside.

Head count: Sofia. Sebastián. Morgan. Olaf. Himself. In spite of the hours in the van, he hadn’t been totally sure. Free to move, Sofia hugged him. Morgan hugged Olaf. Sebastián was on his own for the moment, and that wasn’t right, so Enrique pulled him close and wrapped him up too. Everybody stank of sweat and fear, and he didn’t care, he’d never been so glad to smell anything in his life.

They weren’t alone. From the darkness came a sound of somebody stirring.

“Who’s there?” he asked. “Who is that?”

“Solamente nosotros los muertos. Acostúmbrate a la idea y cierra tu puta boca para que lo demás podamos dormir,” came the sullen answer.

Just us dead people. Get used to the idea and shut the fuck up, so the rest of us can sleep.

They staked their claims in the floor, and if he could’ve folded himself all the way around Sofia like a fort, he would have.

The two of them had known each other too long to feel like anything other than brother and sister, but there were times he wondered, man, what if, huh? They’d come into each other’s orbits as a couple of nerdy kids from bad neighborhoods, the kind it was easy to beat the shit out of, so that’s what other kids did. The kids that listened to that thing inside, telling them, This is what it takes to make your day more fun .

They listened a lot, the cruel ones. Like they knew already, nothing had to tell them anything.

And keep at it, okay? There’s a future in this. We got plans for you .

A couple of nerdy school band kids—they had targets on them early. It wasn’t much of a band, and the instruments weren’t much, either. Sofia liked to hit things, so they put her with a snare and a marching bass drum and a tom, but she never got to hit them as hard as she would’ve liked because she was scared of breaking a head, and then where would she be?

Enrique they’d fixed up with a leaky trumpet, but every spare moment he let the gravity of the out-of-tune piano in the corner pull him over to its yellowed keys. He could play more than one note at a time, plus if he held down the sustain pedal, he could pound them out and they’d keep ringing, a tapestry of overlapping noise that never had to end. The same thing he was doing now, just that with Los Hijos del Infierno he was doing it electronically, with synthesizers and sequencers and samplers, and it was way harder and louder and a lot more caustic.

So no, it wasn’t much of a school band, and the instruments weren’t much, but he always figured that without them, he and Sofia would be dead. Dead for real, or as good as dead, or wishing they were, or maybe worst of all, dead on the inside and not realizing it. There were all kinds of dead.

And Santa Muerte loved each and every one.

The dark bled out with the dawn.

He stirred awake at the first sign of it, sitting up in the floor so he could put an environment around them as things took shape. Get that much figured out, at least.

The first light came slanting in through windows set up high, near the roof. It lit up rough, bone-white walls and a gently peaked ceiling with wooden beams arching overhead, plus a few square pillars near the front and back. The windows on ground level started to brighten next. All of them were barred—no surprise.

It looked like it may have been an abandoned church or mission that had outlived its usefulness as anything but a prison, in some dusty little village where the good cops, if there were any to start with, were all dead. The mayor, dead. Anybody who’d ever said one wrong word, dead.

It was gutted of everything that might have marked it as a holy place. The pews were gone, the altar was gone, the font for holy water was gone. All that was left was a raised platform at the front where the altar would’ve been, and empty alcoves in the walls where statues of saints would’ve stood.

They shared the place with twenty-odd other people. Most were curled up on the floor, still asleep. A few others sat with their backs to the walls, looking ring-eyed and dazed, like they’d forgotten what sleep was. Men, mostly, gone grubby and unshaven. A couple of hard looking women.

“We don’t belong here.”

He turned and found Sebastián was awake now. He’d seen their singer looking this bad before, but it was only hangovers, or too many days speeding catching up with him. Nothing like this, like now he wasn’t expecting to get better.

“This is cartel shit, man. We don’t have anything to do with that. Why would they grab us? ” Bas stopped a moment, getting a freshly horrified look on his face. “You don’t think it has to do with the pictures during the show, do you?”

That was something new the past couple tours, since they’d put out the last album, La máscara detrás de la cara . They’d always gone for a projected multimedia assault whenever they played, and Sebastián had decided it was time to forget about the chaos of the world at large for their imagery and tap currents events closer to home. All the photos of carnage you could want were a few clicks away online. The aftermath of massacres and assassinations and messages sent in buckets of blood splashed across pavement. Severed heads and arms hacked off at the elbows, and death sentence by blowtorch, and rows of butchered bodies hanging from train trestles. Film clips, too, that the anonymous murder teams had posted online. This is who we are, this is what we do, this is what it takes to keep our world turning .