The writing in this pinche book had gotten too dense. Tomás wanted to rip The Twin Dawn in half and set fire to the pages. It wasn’t the sentences. It was the goddamn girth of the world, the bottomless mythology Julian Renfield had created. As soon as Tomás thought he had the lay of the land—lands—Renfield would unveil another kingdom or secret order or astral dimension, and Tomás had to read yet another dozen pages of clan genealogies or ancient wizard wars.
But the bitch of it was this: he couldn’t quite quit the thing either. When they emptied Visitación in the Topo Chico prison for him, Tomás didn’t mind being cooped up—the clouded chicken-wire windows, the cigarette smell, the little red phone—because he had the book. There was a sweet regicide in the offing. When the Twin tossed an infant king off a parapet, “extinguished with no more racket than an egg slipped from a maid’s skirt,” Tomás had to set the book down.
Goddamn. That was so good.
Didn’t matter it was backstory. Didn’t matter it was sidestory or digression. Shit like that stopped Tomás cold. Renfield somehow knew exactly how death conducted itself, and page on page kept evoking things Tomás had done or seen done. Like the jefe de policía thrown to the boss’s tiger in Morelia. The thing with that Sinaloa mistress. Those teenage snitches lit afire at the gas pumps—
He looked at his watch. Thirty-five minutes now, like some peasant for a bus!
He berated the penal functionary, demanded fresh air and a view from the tower.
Once inside, he dog-eared his place. Regarded the unfinished aggregate concrete, looked out the big windows onto the yard. He went out onto the observation deck that overlooked everything within the walls and the depressing vista beyond, empty countryside the same pale shade of the sky. A cage of steel fencing and razor wire, waves of noise from the teeming mass below, as loud and varied a racket as an El Tri match. Prisoners yelling, laughing, talking shit. Dozens of weight lifters on plywood benches hefting wrought-iron pipes attached to bumper plates of concrete repurposed as weights. Corridos bounded from a sound system somewhere, accordion, bajo sexto, synthesized drums, vocal harmonies, but overlaid with the dull roar of the crowd, it was impossible to make out the tune. The scene was almost like a saint’s day or Carnival, except everyone was male, all in the same baggy prison-issue jumpsuits. Brown skulls and black hair in a sea of orange. Dudes could barely walk around, they were so packed in. Reminded him of Rensfield’s Horde. To be honest, the Twin’s run with that jodido crew was getting a little tired. Sure, war and plunder were cool—Tomás was a soldier, after all—but it was all hack and slash. In the real, soldiers wind up in a place like this. Caged. There was no way he could do real time in a place like this. Rather be dead.
He tilted his head back to feel the sun through a thin skin of cloud cover. Remembered one of Renfield’s digressions in The Twin Dawn about a sky god. Said to appear in multiple forms—a cloud, whispering rain—the sky god was usually chill and gentle, though sometimes he’d get pissed and turn into a scorching sunray on a cloudless day, hurtling spears of lightning from on high. Legend was, a league of knights went around doing deeds and shit for him. Tomás hoped the Twin was headed for that crew. A sky god was something you could lay it all down for.
The door inside banged open. El Supervisor at last. A white polo shirt and khakis, his hair slicked back. Tomás left the deck and met him inside the tower. He ignored his outstretched hand and sat in the chair.
“Señor.” El Supervisor grinned sheepishly. “I’m sorry I’m late. I came as fast as I could. You see some men out there you want?”
“In the yard?”
“I assume you are here for men, yes?”
“I came for Zetas. Not these losers.”
El Supervisor listened, grinned. He smelled a little of alcohol, and his shirt was sweat-stained like a greasy paper bag.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Señor?”
“Why you grinning like an asshole?”
El Supervisor swallowed and flattened his expression. It was petty to scare this peon, but fuck it. Tomás felt not a little like the Twin. Huge. Imposing. Badass and mean.
“I thought they told you.”
“Told me what?”
El Supervisor tried to gather his words.
“Speak, man!”
“The Zetas and El Motown, they are—”
“El Motown?”
“Their leader. El Motown and his men, they are holed up in Fallujah.”
“What Fallujah? Like Iraq? You’re telling me they’re in Iraq?”
“Block D!” he stammered. “It’s called Fallujah, and I cannot get to them.”
“El Motown? Fallujah?” Tomás shook his head. “I’d like you to concentrate, speak clearly, and make sense now.”
El Supervisor held out his palms plaintively, a gesture that seemed to come all too naturally.
“What I am trying to say is that between here and Fallujah are three cell blocks. A and B are no problem. Everyone housed there is in the Commons on recreation break.” The words spilled out of him now. “But C Block is the problem. It is no-man’s-land. Los Trece Locos, Los Caballos de Hierro, and a few others run that block. They are all at war with Zetas. The whole prison is, really.”
“Ah, I see the problem now,” Tomás said, smiling, “Why didn’t you say so?”
El Supervisor visibly relaxed.
“I’m sorry. You make me very nervous—”
“Yes, the problem is very clear,” Tomás said. “You think this is a prison.”
“Señor?”
“But it’s not a prison. It’s a bank. And you know what the Golfos deposit in this bank? Convicted Zetas. They spend a lot of money in bribes to make sure that their best men are put here in Topo Chico. And now you’re telling me that I cannot make a withdrawal. Which is no different than stealing.”
“It is not so simple to get them,” El Supervisor said, panicked. “See for yourself how easy it is!”
Tomás scowled at the man’s tone, and he cowered and pressed his hands together. He had the look of someone who knew he’d made things worse and was used to making things worse and knew that he would go on making things worse. Especially for himself.
Tomás, still holding the book in both hands against his lap, remained seated as he had the entire time. “What do you do here?”
“I am very sorry,” El Supervisor said.
“I did not ask if you were sorry. What do you do?”
“I am the supervisor,” he said quietly, as if it might be an insult to say something so obvious.
“I know your title. What do you do?”
“I keep the prisoners inside,” he said. “The deposits, I mean.”
“The walls keep them from leaving the prison. Am I talking to a wall? I asked what you do.”
Tomás sat still, waiting for the answer they always gave.
“I don’t know,” El Supervisor said, surrendering. “You tell me.”
“Exactly. You do what I tell you.” Tomás opened his book. “Get your men together. Take me to this Fallujah, this El Motown.”
He watched the guards don their riot gear, and even helped them cinch their body armor, tighten their helmet straps. They were, to a man, scared shitless. They were not warriors, and they knew it.
Tomás was, though. Soldiering, warring—that’s what he loved. Being part of something greater than himself. The simplicity of every day ordered and leveraged. He was a natural fit as soon as he enlisted. It was obvious he’d be promoted quickly, and soon enough he was in Las Fuerzas Especiales, the Mexican Special Forces. He even went to Fort Bragg for nine months’ training with the Americans’ Delta Force. Learned the latest ways to subdue and kill. How to manipulate chaos, to work in silence. How to end a life quietly, painlessly, bloodlessly. How to make someone talk. How to make a terrifying spectacle of ordnance.
And that’s how pinche Tomás cabrón, straight outta Monclova, became one of the baddest motherfuckers to walk the earth. Cocksucking wizards and elves could daydream him.
He got fifteen confirmed kills his first year hunting narcos, more if you counted the chopper strikes he called in to obliterate their strongholds. Soon he and his team were keeping trophies from these monsters. Pistolas del oro. Jewelry. Jacked-up F-350s and Silverados. Soon the Fuerzas Especiales started collecting narco ears. Wearing bandoliers of them into battle. Finishing off a room and locking the door and doing all the coke. Soon they were pocketing the cash. Taking the weapons. Selling the drugs.
It wasn’t long before the Golfos flipped the colonels in Fuerzas Especiales. Understandings were reached, agreements brokered. That’s how it worked. Pretty soon they just paid you outright, put you to work for services rendered. Running security. Taking out rival cartels. They made double their yearly wages in a weekend. Not a one turning down mordidas, not ever. It was like living under a spell, magic words uttered, and they’d all been transformed. Soon they were just doing hits for the cartel, rolling up in the DN-IV Caballo to shoot up a house, a car. The orders coming from who knows where, for whatever reason, nobody can tell, nobody cares, you were paid to do this, the answer is cállate and take the money, pendejo. Cash is the chain of command. Money gives the orders.
Pretty soon everyone quits the Fuerzas Especiales, joins a new Golfo army: Los Zetas. Dudes who used to be real soldiers, special forces gone over to the dark side to work for the Cartel del Golfo. Me vale madre, you’re a sicario, bro. Straight-up working for the worst hijos de la chingada in the country. It wasn’t like in no book, not like the Twin walking out of the castle to join the Horde. It was more like the Horde absorbed you.
Which is what was happening to these prison guards. They thought they were workaday dudes, held the keys, guarded the joint, poked the laundry carts for escapees. But now, looking Tomás in the eye as he tightened and slapped their helmets, they realized that they worked for Golfos, they were in now and there’s no getting out.
El Supervisor locked the exterior doors after they’d bunched into the access room, then unlocked the door and let Tomás and twelve armed guards into A Block. It was empty, quiet save the creaking of their belts and gear, the clomp of their boots. They passed rows of cells, watched by a few wary stragglers who’d stayed inside during rec time. Tomás marched with the men in riot gear, conspicuous in his shirtsleeves. They passed through A Block and entered the guardhouse and then into B Block unmolested. This one much the same. Mostly empty, mostly quiet, utterly subdued.
When they entered the guardhouse before C Block, El Supervisor locked the door behind them, stowed the keys on a retractable cord inside his pocket, and pointed.
“Los Stop Signs,” he said.
Eight prisoners waited for them in front of the guardhouse. Arms crossed, some craning to see who was in the guardhouse. El Supervisor looked like he expected Tomás to see this and turn around.
“Open it,” he said.
El Supervisor swallowed and hemmed and unlocked the door, and Tomás shoved the men into the block. Though they outnumbered the prisoners, the guards halted. Despite their clubs and armor. As though their bodies would not allow them forward.
“Don’t stop for them!” Tomás yelled. “Go on!”
The men looked at El Supervisor, who struggled to see them from under a helmet askew and too large for his head. No one moved.
Tomás walked up to Los Stop Signs, addressing the thin man up front.
“Who are you?”
“You can’t go any farther,” the thin man said.
“Your name. I’m not asking again.”
“Armando Araya Hernández.”
“Maybe I recognize you,” Tomás said. Dude was probably CDG. Everyone in here was, or in a subsidiary. “I have Golfo business in D Block.”
“No one goes there.”
“I do.”
“You a Zeta?”
“I am.”
The man looked at the others, back at Tomás.
“Then you can’t go.”
“A Zeta goes where the CDG sends him. And anyone in my way dies.”
Araya shrugged.
Tomás looked at everyone, the guards and these men blocking their way both, as if to canvass their hearts and daring. All were scared. What they would do with that fear was the question.
“We are together, Zetas and Golfos,” Tomás said. “The bosses will not like to hear how Armando Araya Hernández is sowing division between us.”
Araya looked at his men now in much the way Tomás had, as though taking a vote.
“The bosses can fuck a goat.”
Tomás lifted his shirt so they could see the pistol in his belt.
“Stand aside.”
Araya shook his head and stepped to the side and the men parted, but hardly.
There was an irritating hesitation on the part of the guards, and Tomás reached back and yanked the nearest one forward.
“Go!”
Tomás shoved another guard forward, and another and another. He continued manhandling them ahead, and a melee began and escalated quickly, predictably, the Stop Signs descending on them, fists flying. The guards huddled in groups of two or three, batons rising and falling in terror as they beat the men back. Tomás kept pulling the men forward until the last, and they finally found their courage and lurched ahead, swinging and missing and hitting. The prisoners dodging or falling, some bleeding and crabbing backward, more coming, appearing from everywhere, cells disgorging men with shivs and bats.
Tomás drew the pistol on the prisoners, and they yowled like outraged dogs. The guards in their fear began to jog ahead in a rough formation. The block exploded with noise, utter rage.
“Move!” Tomás shouted as the men bunched and then spread out, bunched again. “MOVE!”
El Supervisor hid inside the chevron of guards cleaving ahead, batons now hissing in the air at the japing prisoners who lurched out at them in improvised charges. The march devolved into a headlong flight, burning and curling toilet paper rolls and heavier items wrapped in flaming sheets coming at them in long arcs. Tomás walked ahead as if in a dream, as if he’d been here before, wondering where he’d seen this before, and realized that it was like a scene from the book.
Renfield knew his shit.
The block filled with men and noise. The guards bunched again and swiveled and swore and halted and started in a herd. Full panic now. Fire raining down. Chaos.
Tomás fired his subcompact 9 mm up at the higher levels. The bullet whanged off the railing. A shout went up and the fire ceased falling, save a few red ashes. They moved on, running now. A prisoner lunged out from under a stairwell, and Tomás put a bullet in his forehead and the man’s head tossed back and he toppled down. Another came out of the new smoky murk in front of them and the now frantic guards clubbed him down and strode over him, stomping. Tomás saw lighters flicking above and ahead of them, and he fired several rounds into those upper reaches again, scattering the pyros for another moment.
Spotting the guardhouse, El Supervisor yelled “There it is!” and the men broke ranks like the abject cowards they’d become and sprinted and clustered at the door. Tomás hung back in the smoke like a specter and found a spot along the side wall between two empty cells as prisoners dashed past him and in packs of three or four began to drag off individual guards, screaming. It was as if he were invisible, prisoners looking right at him as they took their quarry into cells.
A single flaming projectile arced down like a small comet and exploded in a spray of pure fire in front of him, igniting guards and prisoners alike, who fought flame and one another, slapping and punching and wiping fire and blood from their eyes. One such man ran toward Tomás, a guard, and he shot him in the chest and stepped aside from the man’s dying burning momentum. He strode through the guards, who were now clubbing at bodies in ridiculous windmill swings. He addressed El Supervisor, fumbling with his keys at the door, told him calmly, “Open the door.”
The idiot couldn’t seem to get it right.
Tomás took the keys.
“Is this the key?” he asked.
The man’s eyes were wild and darting as in a songbird’s skull, like a small animal whose great ambition was to be overlooked.
“Is this the key!” he shouted this time.
A large battery struck El Supervisor’s naked forehead, and blood poured into his eyes.
Tomás shoved the key into the lock and it had started to turn open when a hand clapped onto his. He fired into the man who’d grabbed him and the hand clung harder and Tomás fired again and the grip weakened and Tomás opened the door and pulled El Supervisor inside the empty guardhouse. He grabbed at two nearby guards who were screaming and swinging clubs. With arcs of fire exploding on the walls around him he felt no fear, only marveled at the Renfieldian quality of the scene as he stepped inside. The last of the guards budged after in twos and threes like terrified cartoons, and Tomás fired once more out the door before the last man swung it closed with a bang.
Seven guards slumped against walls, sat on the floor. Breathing heavily. Crying. Mumbling, bleeding, and drooling. One guard puked. The rage outside pounding the door, all attention warily turning to see if it would hold.
“You bastard,” El Supervisor said through a bloody face to Tomás. “You have killed all of us! We’re not getting out of here!”
The guards’ faces clenched and soured. They might have even killed Tomás were he not armed and they not exhausted and fundamentally coward. Tomás for his part looked through the meshed reinforced windows into the cell block ahead. The windows were covered with cardboard.
“Let’s go see this El Motown,” Tomás said.
El Supervisor held a wrist to his head, his hand bloody, looking at Tomás like he was crazy. Tomás hefted him by his chest armor to his feet. Then he addressed the men.
“If you would like to live, get up.”
They walked into a fenced-off area past a generator roaring like a jet engine, so loud they couldn’t even hear it exactly, just felt it beating their organs. Guards wept and prayed. El Supervisor ran ahead and opened the iron door. The grateful men went through.
They passed now into an altogether new space, the sound of the bootheels rising as the noise of the generator diminished behind the closing, now closed door. The Zetas of Fallujah stood quiet, fiercely still like a tribe. The guards, missing helmets and gloves, were momentarily baffled by this apparent peace. No waves of corridos from the commons, no cries and calls from bestirred and vespid prisoners, no war. Not even the flat-screen televisions or refrigerators issued a sound. Just a ring of faces, eyes glazed at them, calmly taking in this foolish band that had somehow made its way to them.
Tomás took in the place. Kegs. Freezers. Bags of dried food. Pallets of beer and Jarritos. A huge gas range constructed out of corrugated metal, house turbines, and grill irons. The smell of soup and beans cooking and cigarettes. Men sat on couches and beds, holding glass pipes, cigars. Some held pool cues. A few with hand towels draped over their shoulders in the large kitchen among the propane tanks, blue-flame stoves, and outtake chimneys spiderwebbing up into the ceiling. All of the prison Zetas regarding Tomás and the guards with remorseless eyes. Far fewer men than he expected. Not a hundred, not many more than fifty perhaps.
No one came over to them. There was neither greeting nor defiance.
“Where is El Motown?” he asked.
It was as if he hadn’t even spoken. Tomás scanned the crowd for the Zeta lieutenant. He didn’t know who he was looking for—he wondered if he was called El Motown because he was dark-skinned. Or maybe it was that he’d been in charge of cocaine distribution in Detroit.
They watched like animals watch. With interest. Without apparent emotion. Their stillness entered like smoke, made a man wonder and speculate and dive deep into the horribles of his imagination. Tomás couldn’t help but be somewhat proud of that. Even these hemmed-in prison Zetas holding beer bottles and glass pipes made you a victim before the fact.
“They’re going to kill us all,” El Supervisor hissed.
Tomás leveled his pistol at the man’s head. This was no time for manifest anxiety.
“Shut up?” he asked. “Please?”
A man near the kitchen wiped his hands on a rag, yes, darker than everybody else, a little more fit, his arms swollen with bench presses and curls, a pot belly like a drum. Completely bald. The others parted for him. El Motown, presumably.
Tomás stepped forward.
“Commander,” he said, not knowing the man’s old rank. Not knowing what ranks existed in here.
The man’s face was pitted with scars that couldn’t be seen until he was close up. He looked closely at Tomás.
“Fuerzas Especiales?”
“How’d you know?” he asked, returning the man’s handshake. His hands, his grip, were tremendous. The room went at ease, after that. Talk. Games. Music. Tomás was one of them. He belonged.
“Come on, brother,” El Motown said, jutting his chin. “Follow me.”
They stood on a thick Persian rug, among framed pictures of classic cars, a decent-sized TV, a fridge and microwave, a butcher-block table splotched with white paint. Lightbulbs in wire baskets on the wall.
“Whiskey?” El Motown asked.
“If you are.”
From a cupboard on the floor in the corner, El Motown took a handle of Jim Beam, poured some into coffee cups. They drank. Tomás sat in a folding chair, El Motown on the bed.
“I need some men,” Tomás said.
“There are plenty of men on the outside.”
“Zetas.”
“Again, there are plenty. But you come here.”
“Topo Chico is on my way.”
“Why do you need Zetas?”
Tomás hesitated. He’d never been asked such a question. Zetas did what they were told. But this El Motown was acting like these men were his to dispense. Unbeholden to the cartel. How strange that would be, to question the orders. Not that he didn’t think about it, not that he didn’t bitch to himself. But he never questioned an order. He could hardly imagine it.
El Motown waved him off before he decided how to answer.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We don’t work for the Golfos anymore.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m not talking about anything,” El Motown said with a wry grin.
“No one quits the Golfos.”
El Motown took a drink of whiskey. He seemed to be considering how to respond. He had to know that Tomás would relay whatever he said back to the cartel. This strike or insurgency or whatever it was. He had to know that once the Golfos found out, they wouldn’t stand for it.
Assuming he let Tomás go.
He didn’t dwell on the thought. Death was always around the corner. Or perhaps sitting right in front of you, drinking whiskey.
“You know I have to tell El Rabioso about this. El Esquimal won’t allow it.”
El Motown smiled, though his eyes remained humorless. “You might be here one day.”
“Or dead. No one knows the future,” Tomás said. He sipped and the whiskey burned too hot in his throat to be the real thing and he held the cup in his lap.
“I know the future.”
“Then you know what happens,” Tomás said.
“More Zetas,” El Motown replied.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Compared to more doctors, maybe.”
“Soldiers make doctors necessary.”
“So does malaria.”
El Motown laughed. “This is true. But we are much more dangerous than malaria,” he said, looking out the door of the cell.
All Tomás saw was Zetas moving about, and El Supervisor and the guards in a little separate huddle. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” he said.
El Motown laughed again. He drank and poured more whiskey into their cups, even though Tomás no longer wanted his.
“What happened here? Why did the others try to stop us from coming?”
“They aren’t keeping you out of here. They are keeping us in.” He watched to see how Tomás would react to this. “They are afraid you will open the gates and let us devils out.”
“But how do you survive? What do you eat? Where do you get the whiskey?”
“They bring us what we want.”
“Why?”
“Because otherwise we would kill them.”
“But why?”
“Because we are Zetas.”
“You’re making no sense to me.”
El Motown set his cup down on the butcher block. He turned it slowly around with his finger as if it could be oriented in some meaningful way.
“Let me show you something.”
He rose, and the two of them walked through the block. Zetas played pool, dozed in the splash of rotating fans, opened beers, and played dominoes. They walked over broken glass. Somewhere a tattoo gun buzzed, and he looked into a cell where a man tied off and shot up. These soldiers had all gone to seed. A lorn aura of the shipwrecked hung over the place.
El Motown led him through a curtain made of shower rods and bedsheets. A half-dozen green oil barrels. Traces of black and burgundy seepage from the sealed lids. A pungence that made his bones, his balls, ache. El Motown held his palm out, like a showman introducing a magic trick.
“Those Golfos would sneak into Fallujah, kill us, steal from us,” he said. “They even planted a bomb once. We’d kill them whenever we caught them, of course, but when we did this, they came to heel.”
He realized what he was looking at. He’d heard of the practice, but never seen it. He’d cut people, beat people, shot many people . . . but he’d never burned a man alive in an oil drum.
“You stewed them,” Tomás said.
“And we sent video over to the fuckers.” El Motown stated this as if it were the obvious strategy. “Now there is peace, you see.”
Tomás imagined the Stop Signs watching their comrades being burned alive in these drums. Even hardened men had a tough time seeing such things, someone you knew, someone who could have been you, who could be you, suffering in that way. No wonder they tried to kill him and the guards.
El Motown thumped his fingers on the barrel idly. The fumes were visible, and the man shimmered in Tomás’s vision.
“So you’ve turned on the Golfos.”
“This is the future. Zetas in charge. What happens here will happen out there. You’ll see.”
“A civil war?”
“How many Golfos did you kill on your way to see me?”
“There was no choice,” Tomás said.
“Spoken like a Zeta. That’s exactly what I’ve been saying to you, ’mano! No choice. Your mind doesn’t understand yet, but your mouth already knows. You were made for this, you were trained for it. There’s really no choice . . .”
Tomás grew suddenly dizzy and could not listen. The fumes. This talk. El Motown now going on about chaos and war and how in the future chaos wouldn’t be just a tool but the norm. The war coming from President Calderón and the Americans, the Always War, a world of soldiers and soldiers only. It was all churn, he said. New players and old. Cartels and gangs and bosses and alliances. He talked Tijuana, Sinaloa, Beltrán-Leyva, fucking Juárez, Golfos, Zetas. Tomás reeled.
“Please—”
“There is even rumor of a group nobody knows anything about except that they are called El Problema! The Problem? They are naming names like that now?”
A fucking Renfield story. Realms within realms within realms, as inside so outside, and so hard to understand.
“Please, may we . . .”
Tomás rubbed his eyes, started coughing. El Motown led him into an open area, patting his back, and Tomás breathed deeply and held his knees and then stood and looked up at the sun coming through the milky skylight. No clouds or sky gods, just the weak light of an occluded sun.
“The Golfos have been around for a long time, friend,” he said. “But Zetas are newer, stronger, and more vicious. As are you. One cannot hide from his nature. Not for long.”
Tomás couldn’t get the smell out of his nose. He rose, taking deep breaths. They stood there against the wall for a while, watching the guards tend to their wounds, the Zetas getting high. One group of soldiers on the battlefield, the other on some kind of shore leave. El Motown handed him a slip of paper like a waiter handing over a check.
“What’s this?”
“Call this number when you need help,” El Motown said. “Now let’s get you some men.”
Tomás looked at the number and at El Motown. Maybe the fumes had made him stupid. But none of this made any sense.
“Why are you helping me, when I’m working for the Golfos?”
“I must help you,” El Motown replied, as if the answer were obvious, slapping him on the back of the neck, squeezing with his massive hands. “You’re a Zeta, compa.”
From the passenger seat of the van, Tomás looked at the road, pissed he’d forgotten the book somewhere in the prison. On the last page he’d read, the Twin had boarded a trireme with the ragged remainder of the Horde, and when they set off into the placid waters of the Loch, he’d marched up to the deck and beheaded the captain and quartermaster, announced that he would be commanding the vessel, and set course for the purple thunderheads, heading right into the storm.
Apt, that. He didn’t need a book. The Zeta driving took a long hit from the meth pipe and held it out for Tomás, who declined. He’d never much liked speed. The driver shrugged and passed it to the back of the van, where his fellows were cleaning their guns and chattering and laughing. They’d come from a prison within a prison, they were ripping high, they were headlong for trouble, they were the trouble itself. As they headed to Tampico, the sunset behind them was blood red in the side mirror. And the air had a bloody tang as well, and to Tomás, it felt electric and bristling, it smelled like death and rain.