Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

Good. You need to pay attention , the Skull seemed to be saying. I know it’s rough, but this is what it takes to get where we’re going .

He lost track of time, didn’t know if it was an hour after the slaughter or an hour before sunrise. All he knew was that he was lying on the floor next to Sofia, their arms hooked around each other’s at the elbow. He remembered seeing somewhere that otters slept this way, holding hands so they wouldn’t drift apart on the river. If he had a next life coming, that was how he wanted to be reborn. Come back as an otter, sweet-faced and sleek and holding hands while he slept, and life would be simple.

“We should have never gone to Matamoros,” Sofia said to him in the dark. “You and me, we should have voted Bas down. We should never have agreed to go to that ranch.” She moved her head closer and kept her voice low, everything just between them. “It had us then. It reached out from the past and took us.”

That was how it felt, yeah. They’d raised their heads high enough to be noticed by the dreadful thing that claimed this land, and it decided it wanted them. It opened its jaws to gobble them up and the cartel guys were its teeth.

“I was going to tell you earlier, when we were there, but I didn’t want the place listening to me, you know?” she said. “Hearing about what happened at that ranch was my first memory. The first one I can pin down.”

So much worse was going on around them, but this still hurt him straight to the heart. “That’s awful.”

“I was three,” she went on. “Something like that, kidnapping, human sacrifice, you don’t understand it when you’re that little. And you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t ever have to understand it. At the time, it was more about the effect it had on my mother, and me seeing how she reacted. Not just to what they’d found, but what they hadn’t, too, because there was talk of them maybe taking kids that never did turn up.”

Lying there, he wished for an arm of iron that they could never break if they came in to drag Sofia away.

“I didn’t understand it, but my mother did. I could see how much it scared her. How afraid she was for me. That there were people out there who would do these things. That’s what came through. And I could tell, she was afraid she couldn’t protect me, not from people like that. Because they had the devil behind them. Once that settled in, I don’t know if I ever felt totally safe again.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and meant it for everything he hadn’t been able to do for her, then or now.

“I should have never stopped believing in the devil.”

The next afternoon, at the height of the heat of the day, they came for Sebastián.

At first, weirdly enough, it was just an order, almost deferential compared to their usual methods, threat behind it but no force. When he didn’t want any part of it, only then did things get rough, Bas taking a knee to the groin so hard it brought up his meager lunch. The bones went out of his legs, the fear so overwhelming every muscle went loose.

Sofia was screaming, reaching for Bas as they dragged him across the floor. It took both of Enrique’s arms in wraparound to hold her back. Had it been just him and Bas, he would’ve done it, rushed them, made these savages shoot them both, let them bleed out quick from twenty bullet wounds apiece. But with Sofia here, he couldn’t bring himself to do it, not as long as they didn’t want her yet, and he hated himself for being like the rest of the docile herd, buying into the desperation: that as long as there was time, there was hope.

When they got Sebastián out the door, they surprised everybody by coming back for one more. Miguel Cardenas this time, the country balladeer who’d written one narco ballad too many, in his filthy white shirt and black pants with the silver studs down the sides. With him, there was no deference at all, the cartel team back to their usual routine of brutality first, orders later. Once he got over the shock, he begged all the way out the door.

You could follow their path outside by the sobbing. After Sofia hunkered on the floor with her hands squashed over her ears, Enrique forced himself to the window and saw two guys waiting near Santa Muerte, holding sledgehammers like firing squad riflemen waiting for the order to aim.

Both, as it turned out, were for Cardenas. They took out his knees first, and after he was down they smashed his elbows, then went to work on his hands and feet. They left him plenty alive, just nothing to crawl with, fight with, grab with, resist with. They reduced it all to pulp and compound fractures.

At the first couple of blows, Sebastián buckled to the ground as if he’d been hit too, going fetal as the hammers rose and fell. When the guys swinging the iron backed off, the Skull took over, squatting next to Sebastián, doing no worse than laying a hand on his shoulder, but Bas flinched anyway.

This was beyond figuring out, as long as he couldn’t hear what the Skull was saying—and there was a conversation going on. One minute, two minutes, three. He wasn’t treating Bas cruelly, only patting him on the shoulder a couple of times, as if telling him, There, there, it’ll be all right .

Then the Skull had somebody bring his box of knives and it looked to be last night all over again. Until he took one for himself and gave another to Sebastián. He pointed at Cardenas and his pulverized joints, lying on his back and howling at the sky.

Enrique clutched the bars over the window as Bas began shaking his head, no no no no . The Skull went first, sinking his first knife to the hilt into Cardenas’ thigh, then glaring at Sebastián: Your turn .

When he couldn’t do it, the Skull’s voice got louder, yelling now, discernible.

“You don’t hate him? You don’t hate his music, everything a hack like him stands for?” the Skull shouted. “Come on, man, you’re ten times the singer he is. Let it out! You sing about hate all the time! Is that just an act? What good is the hate if you don’t let it out!”

Sebastián gave Cardenas a half-hearted poke, sufficient to scratch the skin, but not good enough. The Skull badgered and threatened, then told him he’d better do it right this time or maybe Santa Muerte would get one of his eyes. He didn’t need both eyes to sing. Didn’t need either of them, for that matter.

It snapped him. Bas wailed from the ground and with a sob plunged the knife into Cardenas’ belly.

Back and forth then. One for you, one for me . It came easier each time, Bas sticking in every subsequent blade with less hesitation and more resolve. This is what it takes to crawl away . It was like watching a little more of him going dead inside each round.

Ten or twelve knives later, the Skull called a break to confer, voices too low to hear again. He had somebody bring another wooden box—like a small, low crate—and hefted something out of it, treating it with obvious care. Enrique couldn’t tell what it was, only that it looked flat and heavy and as black as outer space. It was lost from view as the Skull put it on the ground and the two of them hunched over it.

Minutes of this, while every so often, Cardenas wailed and moaned and tried to move in some way that his smashed parts wouldn’t allow.

Until it was back to the knives. Just the Skull this time, looming over Sebastián in a posture of challenge, authority. Bas kept trying to back away but was too cracked to get anywhere, head hanging at the end of a neck gone limp as he used up the last of whatever he had in him to say no. Not that. Please no. Every time he did, the Skull merged another knife with some part of Miguel Cardenas.