Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

It drank him the same as it must have drunk millions before him, the thinnest visible drizzle falling on the flat, probing slug of its tongue. It then recoiled, as if it didn’t like the taste of him. Blood was blood, you’d think, but maybe its palate was more refined than you’d expect. Maybe it could discern some difference in the flavor of him, his blood let by his own hand because he would rather do that than slaughter the man next to him.

And it spewed him from the cavern of its mouth.

The smoke billowed across the glass to obscure the gulf between once more, and the stone was only obsidian again, black glass and nothing more.

He thought it was a trick of the mind when a shadow seemed to dim the light on this patch of ground where he lay face down and bleeding. That’s what blood loss did. Made your world a dimmer place.

But did it make hardened killers, bored with watching men die, shout and run?

Did it make the ground shake under three ponderous footsteps?

Did it make a sound like an enormous scythe sweeping down from above to cut the air in two?

Beside him, Padre Thiago lifted off the ground, there one instant, then gone. It took the last effort Enrique could call on to roll over onto his back, where he saw the halves of the priest’s body fly away to either side of the enormous blade, and beyond that, looming far above, the bone face of their Santa Muerte, the skull he’d always thought looked much too real.

A red rain showered them all.

He awoke to heat and stillness and the lazy buzzing of flies. There were flies in Hell, weren’t there? Pesky, biting, pain-in-the-ass flies that never let up tormenting the sinners. So maybe he was okay. These were just hanging around, the same old everyday shit-eaters.

The inside of his left forearm burned, but that was his own fault. Enrique found it bandaged, and beneath that, stitched. The Skull and the rest of his crew—what were they, if not a unit gone to war? It made sense they’d have a medic around.

He lay on a thin mattress atop squeaky springs, staring at a ceiling scarred with peeling paint and plaster so cracked and crumbled he could see the wooden slats above it. Some rundown room in some other building that wasn’t the church. He’d slept in worse places, actually, back when the band had to take whatever it could get. Never in clothes sticky with a priest’s blood, though. There were all kinds of ways to hit a new low.

Except for the flies, he couldn’t hear a sound. There was no sound to hear.

He got up from the bed—hung over from something they’d shot him up with, it felt like—and wandered to the window. Like waking up in a ghost town. Nothing out there to see but dust and corpses and pieces of corpses. None of it seemed real. He might as well be waking up in a video game. Wounded, not a clue, and next thing he was supposed to do was find a weapon and start killing anything that moved.

Only everything was dead already. Nothing outside was moving. Just him, once he got there.

Under the hot white eye of the sun, Enrique trudged toward the bodies. They’d really cleaned house before they’d abandoned the place, hadn’t they? Finished what they’d started, wrapping it up in a hurry, then bugging out fast. Maybe this was normal for them, treating places like a landfill, and when the bodies piled up too high, they moved on.

Most were hanging by their ankles, like bloody laundry, from cables stretched between poles, more than he could count at a glance. Nobody had died easy. Some had just died harder than others. More blood for the vast grave worm that tunneled through their lives, their world, their existence. And sooner or later, all the flies found their way here.

He trembled like it was twenty degrees instead of a hundred. As he scanned the rows of the dead, he looked for clothing because he couldn’t bring himself to look at faces, and was relieved to see there wasn’t much black, and none of it meant for a stage.

Lots of black hair, though. Except for the blond guy. Except for Olaf. Olaf the photographer. Whose real name was Oliver, he’d learned in the church, the sort of thing that came out when you were sitting around killing time waiting to see who was next to be killed. Said he got more gigs as Olaf than he ever had as Oliver—a man who knew how the game was played.

Yet here he was.

Enrique checked for a smaller body, half of it hair, but Morgan wasn’t among them. He was past deciding whether something was good or bad anymore. Maybe all that was left was bad right now, and bad deferred to later.

Like that empty spot where the towering Santa Muerte had stood. Did you just pack up a thing like that and move it? Was something like that really a priority? You’d need two strong guys just to carry the scythe.

Because no way had he seen what he thought he had there at the end. That priest had found some other way to get cut in half.

He turned his attention to the church. The pair of front doors was secured with a heavy, squared-off crossbar. Before he wrestled it from its brackets, he stooped to gather what was waiting, what had plainly been placed here for him to find. Three phones, plus a charger. When he tried his own, it was dead. When he tried the others, they were dead too.

But better the phones than Sofia and Sebastián.

He found them inside huddled along the far wall. Before they saw it was him, they scurried back farther, reacting only to the opening of the door, the way you learned to live in a place like this, where a few more millimeters might mean another second of life.

No sign of Morgan, though. She was just… gone.

When he went to Sofia and Bas, they felt real enough, sounded real enough, even if it felt like something was missing. Everybody too far gone at this point for a show of relief, let alone jubilation. How was he supposed to bring them back to themselves? How were they supposed to bring him back? There were no manuals for this. There was only standing. There was putting one foot after another. There was holding hands and holding close. There was making your way back into the sunshine, in spite of what it showed.

It would’ve been easier if the Skull had left a note, some validation of why they were still alive. But maybe the mere fact they were breathing was all the note he would ever need: Keep doing what you’re doing. Keep looking. Like skin, there’s always another layer deeper to go .

Yeah. Like he wanted any part of that. Like he didn’t want to wipe his memory clean of everything about these past few days. Like he wouldn’t do anything to hit the reset switch and go back a week.

No, longer than that—go back two years, take those first conceptual sketches for La máscara detrás de la cara and throw them out. Hope that some intuitive voice inside would tell him stop right now, you don’t want to start looking behind that succession of masks and faces , and hope he’d have the balls to listen.

“How are we getting out of here?” Sofia said. “They could’ve at least left us one of the cars.”

All they could do was charge one of the dead phones, try using it to get a fix on where they were, then relay the information to whoever they could raise. Sebastián had a GPS app on his, so they put him in charge of finding the nearest electrical outlet. They would’ve anyway, because if Bas didn’t have something to do, he was going to keep falling apart a little more at a time.

Enrique knew the feeling. You couldn’t stand around waiting. You had to do something, anything. He pointed to the church’s open bell tower, said to Sofia come on, they should get up there, take the high ground and see if they could spot a landmark, more than they could see from down below.