Twenty minutes past the border, Enoch finally spoke up. It was strange the way he seemed to vanish when he did not want their attention, as if they had all somehow managed to forget he was among them. Zeke doubted that the Mexican border guard had even glanced at him, though he’d been right there in the front row, a little man sitting with his hands in his lap, quiet and still as a meditating monk.
“Get off here,” he said. “On the left.”
Vickers did not argue. Many eyes glanced out into the darkness, but no one questioned Enoch. The bus shook as they traveled along a rutted, narrow road through a small town that seemed to be nothing more than graffiti-covered shacks and a boarded-up gas station. Four or five miles farther, Enoch told Vickers to turn left again, but this time there was no road at all, only a rough dirt path that deteriorated until it vanished completely.
Moments later, Enoch said, “Okay, stop here,” and the bus groaned to a halt. Zeke stood in the aisle and looked out the window on the right side. An ominous black SUV sat in the darkness, moonlight glinting off of its surfaces. As Zeke watched, all four doors opened and a quartet of grim-faced men climbed out.
Vickers opened the door of the bus and Enoch rose, turning toward them.
“Stay here,” Enoch instructed. “Not a word.”
Two rows up and across the aisle, Aaron Monteforte buried his face in his hands. “Jesus Christ.”
Zeke took a deep breath, waited for Enoch to step off the bus, and crouched in the aisle beside Aaron. He put a hand on the young man’s arm.
“Hey, brother. Take a breath.”
Aaron glanced at him, swallowed hard, and nodded. “I’m trying, Mr. Prater.”
Beside him, up against the window, his dead sister had left a streak of drool on the glass. Zeke had to fight to keep from recoiling at the sight, telling himself that it was good, that body fluids meant life, but his stomach roiled in disgust.
“Zeke,” he managed to say. “Call me Zeke.”
Through the window beyond Trish Monteforte’s drool, he saw Enoch talking with one of the men as the others unloaded two heavy gray plastic boxes from the back of the SUV. Enoch reached inside his jacket and handed over a thick envelope that Zeke realized must be cash, and then two of the men carried the plastic boxes on board the bus. Neither of the men, both young and dark-eyed Mexicans, so much as glanced up at the passengers as they set the boxes down in the aisle.
And then they were gone.
Enoch climbed back onto the bus as the SUV tore away across the ragged, dusty plain, headlights popping on, brake lights like devil’s eyes in the dark.
Zeke took his seat as Vickers first closed the bus door and then rose to help Enoch open the crates. Enoch had told them what would be expected of them, so Zeke knew what was to come—they all did—but the sight of moonlight glinting off gun barrels still made him catch his breath. He’d been trained to use a gun since childhood and knew the same would be true of nearly everyone on board the bus, but these were no hunting rifles or protective sidearms. The guns in the cases were Herstals, Belgian-made pistols that fired armor-piercing rounds, so popular with the cartels that they were more commonly known by their street name, Mata Policias. Cop Killers.
Either Enoch had just bought guns from the same people who supplied the Matamoros cartel, or he’d bought guns from the cartel itself. The little man had told them as part of the plan that they’d be picking up weapons on the Mexican side of the border—trying to sneak them across would be idiotic—but the presence of the Mata Policias on the bus gave the moment a terrible, weighty reality.
“You’ll each take one of these,” Enoch said, a golden glow in his eyes that could not be attributed to the moonlight. When he spoke, his upper lip curled back like a wolf’s. “We’ll wait until it’s time for us to abandon the bus, and then you’ll take one gun and give it to the person you came here for. Remember why you’re here and you won’t hesitate. There are enough guns that you can also take one for yourself, but if you do as I ask, there should be no reason for it. Once you’ve played your pipes and given instructions, you’ll just wait for it all to be over.”
Lester cleared his throat, sitting up a little straighter in his seat, trying to regain some of the dignity stolen by riding in a school bus.
“What happens if one of them doesn’t come back?” he asked. “If I send my boy in there and they shoot him full of holes—”
“I told you, he’ll heal. Whatever damage they do—”
“—heals eventually,” Lester interrupted. “But what about tonight? If he’s too damaged to come back to where we’re waiting?”
Enoch stared at him, the glow in his eyes seeming to brighten. Zeke knew that there must have been others on the bus who had questions, but Lester was the only one who had dared to ask. This close to satiating his thirst for revenge, Enoch did not want to deal with their trifling doubts and fears, that much was clear.
“Then you go in and get him,” the little man said. “The cartel members inside the compound will already be dead.”
Lester started to speak again, but Enoch ignored him, turning to Vickers. “Drive.”
As they started moving again, bumping across hard terrain, Zeke turned to check on Savannah, whose condition seemed unchanged. He decided that was for the best. If she started to get her mind back now . . . he didn’t even want to think about it.
Glancing back toward the front of the bus, the desert moon casting the interior of the bus in a pale, ghostly light, he saw Aaron Monteforte shifting uncomfortably in his seat and caught a glimpse of the reason—a pistol jutting from Aaron’s rear waistband. Zeke frowned, wondering what the hell Aaron was thinking. Bringing his own weapon could have blown the whole operation if the border guards had been more vigilant.
He opened his mouth to speak, but Aaron beat him to it.
“Turn the bus around, Mr. Vickers,” he called, head bowed so that his voice was slightly muffled.
“Oh God, Aaron, don’t,” Linda Trevino said.
Enoch turned to glare at the young man.
“Fuck you and your spooky eyes, man,” Aaron said, growing more agitated. He shook his head and turned to look at his resurrected sister, reached out to touch her cheek, and then shot a hard look at Enoch. “We can’t do this. You’ve got to turn this fucking thing around.”
“Shut your mouth, son,” Lester growled.
Enoch stood but made no move toward the back of the bus. He seemed to ride the juddering rumble of the bus without needing to steady himself. In the moonlight, his eyes began to turn oil-black, gleaming with a terrible, deep malignance, as if the night itself began to glow from within him.
“You agreed to this,” Enoch said. “You bled for this. The bond has been forged. You can’t break it now.”
“Bullshit!” Aaron barked, jumping to his feet, one hand clamped on the back of the seat in front of him. “There’s no way a bunch of half-dead zombies are going to kill this fucking Carlos Aguilar. He’ll have a couple of dozen guys with guns around him. My sister can’t even speak! She can barely make eye contact, and she’s supposed to—”
“Sit down, boy,” Enoch said. Three words, but they reverberated through the bus as if the metal itself had spoken, the windows rattling with the power of his voice.
In that moment he did not seem like a little man at all.
“Sit down, or I will cut your sister into pieces the way they did my daughter.”
Aaron sat.
No one spoke.
Enoch’s chest rose and fell with barely contained fury, but at last he sat as well, turning to stare straight out the windshield. In the driver’s seat, Vickers’s hands gripped the steering wheel tightly. The bus’s headlights showed nothing ahead but scrub brush and desert but Vickers kept driving, with Enoch quietly urging him onward.
* * *
The bus shook mercilessly, and once Savannah struck her head on the window. Zeke saw her wince and his chest ached with cruel hope. If she had felt that—if it bothered her—then surely she must have been getting better. Such thoughts were the only things that kept him from screaming.
Vickers had driven through a rough no-man’s-land for nearly half an hour when, at last, Enoch commanded him to bring the bus to a creaking stop. When he killed the engine and turned off the headlights, their eyes quickly adjusted to the moonlight. Zeke blinked and rubbed at the bridge of his nose and when he looked up, Enoch had stood again.
“The compound is three miles due south, on foot. If we get any closer, they’ll see the headlights,” he said. “So we walk from here.”
Again, this was nothing they hadn’t been warned about, but even if any of the proxies wanted to complain, none of them would have dared. Not now. One by one, they took out their pipes and began to play, breaking off only to issue instructions to their broken loved ones, who staggered to their feet and shuffled off the bus, trapped halfway between the living world and the land of the dead. Vickers had gotten Martha off first and Enoch had put the gun crates on their seat, so that the proxies could each take a weapon as they climbed out into the cool night.
Zeke took one of the Mata Policias and stuck it into his waistband. He took a second gun, intending to keep the first for himself, and then blew a few extra notes on the pipe, just to make sure that he had Savannah’s attention and that she wouldn’t fall on the steps. For a moment, his mind went back to the hour of their departure, when he’d seen Skyler standing by the roadside with her hopeful, handmade sign. COME BACK, she’d written. But out there in the Mexican desert, home had never felt so far away. The future he hoped for, days of peace and laughter for himself and Savannah, seemed little more than a dream.
Out in the middle of nowhere, the day’s heat quickly vanished. Zeke saw many people shivering with the chill and it took him a moment to realize Martha Vickers was one of them. He exhaled a quiet thank-you to whatever powers might have been watching over them—if she could feel cold, maybe she really was creeping nearer to being fully alive again.
Savannah’s hand brushed his. Zeke turned toward her, heart pounding. She had been standing next to him, but had she touched him on purpose? He stared at her for several seconds as more people climbed off of the bus, guns stuck in pockets or carried in hand, aimed at the ground. It struck him that he had left her sweatshirt on the bus and he started back toward it, frustrated that he had to wait for the rest to get off and not wanting to leave Savannah alone for too long. Again, he thought of Skyler and her sign. COME BACK. Zeke stood at the bus door as Arturo Sanchez climbed off. The man stroked his graying mustache and played several notes on his blood-smeared pipe, and then Zeke found himself face-to-face with the resurrected corpse of Arturo’s mother. Her glazed eyes blinked and then narrowed, focusing on him, and Zeke found himself smiling at the dead woman. She’d seen him. Was aware of him. Another hopeful sign.
He had turned to say that to Arturo when the night erupted with the roar of multiple engines. Bright lights bathed the pitiful school bus from all sides.
“Mother of God,” Arturo whispered, turning and trying to push his mother back onto the bus.
Zeke tightened his grip on his second gun—the one intended for Savannah. He spun and ran toward her, instinct kicking in, knowing the thunder of those engines could only mean danger, and he would not allow her to die a second time. People were screaming around him, some picking up the barely alive and struggling to carry or drag them back toward the bus while others drew guns and aimed at the oncoming headlights.
“What the hell is this?!” Lester shouted at Vickers.
But Vickers’s eyes had gone wide like an animal’s and he drew Martha to him and began to cry, surrender etched deeply into his face.
Zeke reached Savannah. He stared into her eyes for a second. He knew she was in there, fanning the spark of life back into a flame, if only he could give her the time. He kissed her forehead, put one arm around her, and waited, gun ready.
“Enoch!” Lester shouted, rushing at the little man, whose eyes were once again alight with a golden glow. “What’s going on?!”
“Are you blind, Mr. Keegan?” Enoch said, his words dripping with venom. “It’s an ambush.”
“No,” Lester said, shaking his head as he backed away, running to his son but twisting around as the five raised pickup trucks charged toward them. “This ain’t happening!”
“Lester!” Zeke shouted. “Get your shit together!”
He saw Lester freeze, nod, and then raise his pistol.
“All of you!” Lester shouted. “Guns up. Shoot the first son of a bitch who—”
A bullet blew out his left temple, spraying brain and bone shards onto his dead son. The gunshot echoed across the desert as Zeke screamed his friend’s name and turned to see that Aaron Monteforte had fired the shot, using the gun that had been tucked into his waistband. Sweating, eyes frantic, Aaron took aim at Zeke.
“Guns down, Mr. Prater,” Aaron said. “I don’t want to have to kill you.”
One by one, the pickups skidded to a halt, caging them all in a lattice of headlight beams. The men who jumped out of the backs of the trucks and climbed from the cabs carried assault rifles instead of pistols.
Zeke had watched his daughter die once, and he’d die himself before he would witness her murder again.
He raised his gun and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
Around him, others had done the same. Arturo Sanchez ejected the magazine, trying to figure out what the hell went wrong, but it was too late. If there had been a moment when Zeke could have punished Aaron Monteforte for his betrayal, it had already passed.
The cartel gunmen surrounded them, gun barrels taking aim, promising death.
Zeke moved himself in front of Savannah. He could feel her reedy breath against the back of his neck and prepared to die for her.