Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

Sebastián was everything hope looked like when it came unhinged.

The longer the day went on with nobody asking them anything, the farther Bas fell again. By dusk, he was making such a fuss at the barred windows, shouting to anyone who’d listen how ready he was to talk, that Enrique dragged him back before someone decided they were sick of listening to him squall.

It wasn’t happening.

Whatever they were here for, it was something other than money.

Later that night they got their first look at how things ultimately went here. It was just late enough for people to start getting drowsy, this holy prison filling with the sounds of people dropping off and snoring, one of them muttering from someplace deep inside a bad dream. Then reality intruded, as bad or worse, everybody rousted by the extraction team as they burst in and went straight for one of the Sinaloa guys he’d scrapped with earlier and dragged him away screaming.

Straight to Santa Muerte.

Maybe they’d picked him because he’d outlived his usefulness. Or because it was a good time to grab him, since he was fucked up from earlier and couldn’t struggle as well. Or because he’d lost a fight with a big chubby guy and this left him looking weak. Maybe it was random and there was no reasoning behind it at all.

Enrique’s nerves were too shredded to settle on how he was supposed to feel about this. Relieved? One less enemy to worry about, after all. Hours earlier he could’ve killed the guy himself. He’d wanted him dead, wanted him humbled and suffering.

Just not like this.

Enrique was the only one at the window—everybody else must have seen it all before—until Sebastián joined him like it was the last place he wanted to be except for everyplace else here.

“Don’t watch, boys,” Padre Thiago called out to them. “Why would you watch?”

Good question. With that cartel snuff footage he’d combed through online, at least Sebastián was better equipped to handle it. As for himself? Could be he needed an unfiltered look at where this could end for them. All the motivation he would need to push the schedule and make it quicker, when the time came.

The crew had enough stark white lights burning out front that it wasn’t hard to see. It took eight or nine guys to handle things—three to get the victim into place, the rest standing guard to enforce compliance if needed, then one more coming into view when the others parted and the light caught him.

“Oh shit,” Sebastián breathed. “I know that one, I’ve seen him… seen him in pictures, I think.”

This newest guy didn’t need the machete in his hand to look like walking death. He had the part down already. Tall, thin as a broomstick and without a shirt, bone and ropy muscle standing out in equally sharp relief across his tattooed skin. They covered him, maybe 20% of his hide left uninked for contrast. The rest was monochrome designs in black and dark green, cheap ink. Or maybe he hated color.

“How can you be sure?” Enrique said.

“The ones on his face. I only ever saw one of them looking like that.”

The skin around his eyes had been shaded into dark ovals. The sides of his nose were blacked out too, along with his lower cheeks and parts of his chin. His head was shaved. From a distance, and probably close-up, too, the effect was like a living, decorated skull.

“I think he’s MS-13,” Sebastián said. “They don’t even try to blend.”

Funny thing—he thought he was at rock bottom already. No more room left to feel worse about their chances. But hearing this was a reminder: There was always room to go lower.

Some may have been as bad, but nobody was worse than MS-13. Salvadorans from Los Angeles, originally, but over time they’d spread, exported, colonized, let others in. Worked with the cartels, some of them. Salvadoran, Mexican, Guatemalan… nationalities didn’t matter as much when the big thing you had in common was the ability to bury your humanity so deep you could never find it again, leaving it to rot with the worms. When you could do what they did without feeling anything more than that it had to be done. That this was what it took to get business taken care of. No different than guys who clocked in at the meat plants. They all had two eyes, two ears, and a mouth, same as the pigs and cows, but were still the ones holding the chainsaws.

The Sinaloa guy was stripped to his boxer shorts, then stretched out flat on the ground as somebody stood on each arm to keep him there. The Skull started by taking off his hands. As somebody else moved in with a propane torch to cauterize the stumps, he picked up the hands and flicked the blood from them into the dirt as he carried them over to Santa Muerte. They hacked off his feet next and made offerings of those, too. The men weighting him down stepped off to let the guy roam at will because how far could he get now, down to four stumpy limbs, nothing but charred nubs at the ends.

They seemed to find it entertaining. Nothing funnier than watching a guy in that condition try to flop away.

The Skull opened a big wooden box then, pulling out every kind of knife there was: military knives, hunting knives, fish knives, kitchen cutlery. He took his time, sticking one in and leaving it in place like a plug, because pulling the blade out would free the wound to bleed, and the Skull didn’t want that. Soft tissue, areas that wouldn’t be immediately fatal—those were his targets, and he found them one by one.

There seemed no end to it, a harder thing to watch than the amputations because of the calm, casual progression, the guy on the receiving end mindlessly trying to wallow away every time another blade skewered him, until he could no longer manage even that much, and could only lie there and take it, more and more bristling like a porcupine. The only way Enrique was certain he was still alive was because of how the handles rose and fell with each ragged breath. Every now and then, his whole carcass shuddered.

Enrique wouldn’t have thought so until now, but he found this ordeal worse to contemplate than coming apart at the joints. He had more soft tissue than anybody here, enough to keep the Skull busy for hours.

He watched when he could, turned away when he couldn’t. But he never left the window. This is what it takes to be glad to die .

Sebastián, though, had checked out a long time ago, sliding down the wall and holding himself together with both arms wrapped around his knees. Maybe it was easier to watch when it was on video. Bas could always pretend it was special effects in a movie. All he had to do was turn off the sound.

Sound was the giveaway, he’d explained once, how you knew when something was real and when it was staged. Terrified people, dying people, people in agony, made sounds that nobody could get to under any other circumstances. Once you’d heard the difference, there could be no confusing the two.

Just as there were sights you couldn’t unsee, there were sounds you couldn’t unhear, and this poor fucker out there out had made them all.

So when they finished it, the Skull tugging a wicked looking military knife free of the guy’s groin and using it to saw off his head, the sound was more a part of it than anything Enrique could see. The angle was bad, too many bristling knife handles in the way. But he could hear it, that soul-shredding crescendo of mortality the guy had been holding in reserve.

Enrique didn’t know when it happened, only that at some point Nietzsche’s old warning came to mind: If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you . This was the feeling he got every time the Skull looked up from his work and peered straight at him in the window, as if making sure Enrique was still watching.