Tom Knox - The Babylon rite

Boris was screaming.

Marco gripped Boris’s shaking head with his rubber-gloved hand. ‘I can maybe cut it out now, before it reaches your groin, before it begins to eat your intestines. And your genitals. From the inside out. You have just a few seconds.’

Boris’s voice was so thick with fear and pain it was barely comprehensible. ‘Toloriu… Toloriu.’

Marco spat on the floor. ‘Not enough.’

He turned to his men. ‘ He terminado con el. No sabe nada. Matalo. Y tambien a su amigo.’

Boris Valentine was unshackled from the pipes, the blood spattering from the wound in his torn-open leg, a sagging, dying figure, groaning with pain. The Zetas dragged him up the metal steps, and pushed him into the light. Then they did the same with Jose.

Marco departed, with a final blank yet thoughtful glance; and a keen little smile. It was the smile of ulluchu. Of pensive cruelty. Just like Ritter. The Zetas must have worked out a precise dose of the drug: enough to arouse the violent sexualized instincts of sadism, but not enough to self-mutilate. Something like that. Then they gave some to their top lieutenants.

The trapdoor slammed. The loud noise was followed by two more loud noises: gunshots. Then another. And another. The Zetas were executing Boris and Jose. A few seconds later, two loud splashes confirmed it: the bodies had been thrown in the river. For Boris it was probably a mercy, Adam reckoned. The piranhas eating his dead body was better than than the vampire fish slowly eating you inside out, as you screamed, fully conscious.

No one spoke. There was nothing to say. Apart from goodbye. Nina asked Jessica why she had called her doctor. Jessica looked at her helpless and pathetic. ‘I don’t know anyone else. He said he will call the police.’

The police? The idea of the police rescuing them from the Zetas was comically absurd. The police were scared of the Zetas. Everyone was scared of the Zetas. Except perhaps the rising force of Catrina.

An hour passed, maybe less, maybe much less: the fear was so intense it made time illegible. Then Adam heard noises, loud voices. He shunted himself back to the side of the metal chamber. Pressed his ear to the steel. The voices reverberated through the metal barge. He could hear.

‘Jessica. Listen — you speak Spanish — what are they saying?’

She pressed her ear to the steel wall. Then she shook her head in the pungent darkness. ‘No good. Worse.’

‘What are they saying?’

‘Most of the men want to kill us now. Just shoot us. And move on. The guy, Marco, wants to… torture us some more. He reckons we might still know something — and he says he wants some more fun. That is the word he used. Quiero divertirme un poco mas.’ She closed her eyes. ‘He wants to play with us a little more. That’s the ulluchu talking.’

The trapdoor opened; Marco came down. He was carrying the same plastic box. Full of hungry little fishes.

‘We were talking…’ He was wearing rubber gloves on both hands now. He looked Nina’s way and snapped: ‘You. You rather desire your friend Adam, do you not? Would you still desire him if he had no penis, no cojones, if he just had a bleeding socket?’

Nina shook her head. ‘Stop it.’

Marco ignored her. He crouched by Adam. The lid was off the box, the fish were wriggling. Grunting as he worked, he cut open Adam’s jeans at the groin. A few crude slashes of the knife and it was done: Adam’s thigh was exposed. Then Marco casually stuck the knife in Adam’s thigh, and made a sudden five-centimetre-long downwards cut. Adam refused to scream. He refused. The sweat of fear and agony made him faint, but he refused to scream.

‘Very brave. Muy bravo. I do not think you will be so silent in a minute. Mmm? Vale. Say hello to the fishes?’ Marco’s smile was quite sincere. He put down the knife, reached for the box and pulled out a jiving little fish. ‘This one, I think, is especially hungry.’

Then he paused. Because there was a noise outside. A big loud noise — people were shouting on the deck. Then gunshots echoed cacophonously around the metal hulk: an enormous and rattling hail of gunshots.

Male screams of anger followed the shots. Men were fighting on the deck. At once, Marco dropped the fish and dashed for the stairs, but even as he reached the foot of the ladder he fell back. Someone had calmly shot him several times from the trapdoor; Marco’s body slumped, blood gushing from his stomach. The sound of the bullets echoed deafeningly around the metal cell; everyone shrank from the ricochet.

Except Adam. He was staring in terror at the fish. It had fallen from Marco’s hand on to his leg. And now it lay there, wriggling, on his bared thigh. Right beside the open wound. It was sucking at his skin, urgently seeking the way in, trying to find the entrance into his body, where it could feed, and live, and grow.

Men were clattering down the ladder, he could hear them. They were in the room, snapping the shackles on the others; but Adam just stared, transfixed, at the fish: it had found the edge of the wound, and now it slipped inside. It was burrowing into his skin. He could see the shape of it. Adam screamed.

A knife flashed down, into the wound, and speared the fish, scooping it out of his thigh with a deft and practised movement. Like a gourmet skewering some buttery crabmeat. The fish wriggled at the end of the knife, then the fish was crushed under a military boot.

Adam looked up, faint with shock. He had been saved. But who were these men? The shackles on his wrists were cut by huge pliers; some wadding was applied to the wound in his leg, and it was wordlessly and hastily bandaged. He stood, unsteadily, then ran for the stairs and ran up and out, following Nina and Jessica on to the deck of the barge.

On the metal deck, in the hot sun, five more of these strange men gazed back at them. Implacable. Quite unsmiling. And very disciplined. It was the police. It had worked: Jessica’s phone call had worked. Adam turned in elation to Jessica but he saw she was staring in horror at something. The men. And their hands, clutching their guns.

All the men had dark black T-shirts and toned muscles and pressed jeans, like off-duty soldiers or elite police.

And they all had skulls tattooed on their hands.

Catrina.

Riverplane, Ucayali, Peru

They were given just five minutes to pack a few items from their rucksacks, then they were loaded, at gunpoint, on to a speedboat. The Catrina cartelistas remained silent. The boat curved the river for several minutes, until it reached a broader stretch.

Adam stared. On the water ahead was a riverplane. Dirty and white and impressively large. They were forced on board the plane and most of the cartelistas followed, wordless. Proficient. Tattooed. Muscled.

The propellers of the plane turned, shivering the wavelets beneath, then they sped across the grey-brown waters and ascended over the infinity of green forest. Strapped in his seat, Adam could just see the first rise of the blue Andes, so distant they looked like clouds. His mind drifted in despair. A little boat unanchored, heading for the terrible sea.

Is that where the true ulluchu was, then? The Andes? Is that where Archibald McLintock ended up, in some little mountain village, with shepherds in scarlet ponchos and trousers?

Or maybe it was in the high puna, the arid, bitter moorlands of Peru. He’d read about these windswept desolations, where the cold and mist and blowing rain was constant, where espeletia daisies grew tall and sad with bright yellow flowers. Like the ulluchu?

They were never going to find out. Who had betrayed them to Catrina? Nina? No, of course not. Jessica…? She was ill, she was sad, she was ambitious, but she was not a traitor. Boris? Possibly. He wanted to sell ulluchu on, if they found it; and maybe word had reached Catrina or the Zetas or both. Then of course, there was the captain, the drunken captain, was someone paying him? If so he’d paid the final price in return, along with his deckhands.