Don’t be a hero, Zeke told himself, thinking only of Savannah. But as they were all herded together at gunpoint, their weapons torn violently from their hands, he realized that there would be no heroes that night.
The cartel gunmen stared at the resurrected dead amongst them and he caught several of the hardened killers crossing themselves and muttering quiet prayers. A few others laughed in amazement. One poked a finger through the bullet hole in Big Tim Hawkins’s neck and Alma shoved him away, leading to amazed chatter among the gunmen.
“Hold up, amigo,” Aaron Monteforte said, trying to extricate himself from the other pipers, all muscle and scruff and just enough bravado to veil his terror.
Aaron held his gun with the barrel aimed at Linda Trevino, who hugged her undead son, Ben—Ben, whom Savannah had once had such a crush on—and shielded him with her body. Tears streamed down Linda’s face, but she did not beg to be left alone. She was smart enough to know there was little chance of that at this point.
“Put it down, asshole,” one of the gunmen said to Aaron, the moonlight making the jagged scar on his left cheek look like mother-of-pearl.
“Whoa,” Aaron said. “I’m with you guys.”
Zeke felt bile burning up the back of his throat and his fingers flexed, either wishing for another weapon or wanting to be wrapped around Aaron Monteforte’s throat, or both.
The man with the gleaming scar raised his assault rifle, braced it against his shoulder, and took aim. “Gun on the ground, chingado. Now.”
Aaron held up his left hand and gently lowered his weapon to the dirt. “Okay, all right. But take a breath, man. I’m with you, I said. All this shit wouldn’t be happening if it wasn’t for me. Ask Carlos—”
A cluster of cartel thugs scattered, parting like the Red Sea as a tall man strode amongst them.
Unlike the rest, the newcomer carried no gun, only a hunting knife sheathed at his hip. His white cotton shirt and brown dress pants had clearly been tailored to fit his slim, powerful physique and seemed out of place amongst the denim and leather of the others. The shoes on his feet were of a soft leather that must have cost a fortune. With his thick mane of hair slicked back, curling at the ends, and his beard trimmed to a stylish severity, he looked as if he had just walked out of a business meeting and into a nightclub.
“Ask Carlos what?” the man inquired.
Aaron exhaled. “Carlos . . . Mr. Aguilar . . . tell ’em, please. Tell ’em I helped you.”
Aguilar nodded emphatically, spreading his arms wide as if in a spirit of generosity.
“Did he help me?” Aguilar said, turning a radiant smile on his prisoners, both living and not quite. “Absolutely, he helped me. You should all know that. Your friend, here . . . he’s been working for me for more than a year.”
“You son of a bitch!” Alma Hawkins cried, pushing forward to loose a wad of spittle that did not reach its target. She had one hand on her roundly pregnant belly as if she could protect the baby inside . . . just as Linda Trevino held Ben and Zeke stood in front of Savannah. Behind her, Big Tim Hawkins stood numbly, his gaze following her the way it might a hypnotist’s pocket watch.
Aguilar gestured the scarred man away from Aaron, walked over and picked up Aaron’s gun from the ground.
“I agree with you, lady,” Aguilar said, nodding again. “He is indeed a son of a bitch. Running drugs through your town. Selling to kids. Giving up the names of the motherfuckers on the Texas Border Volunteers, the guys putting my business on video for the border patrol . . . it’s just un-American.”
The cartel enforcer tried to keep a straight face but couldn’t manage it, and his men all laughed along with him. Looks of hatred and despair appeared on the faces of the herded pipers who were clustered together with the resurrected.
“Look at that, hermanos. It’s true.” Aguilar turned to grin at his men. “I see dead people.”
More laughter raced around the circle of killers. Aguilar’s eyes lit up with dark intelligence and unsettling hunger.
“I mean, I’ve heard of this kind of shit but never thought I’d see it,” he said.
Zeke felt the others closing in around him and Savannah, everyone wanting to move as far away from the guns as they could, and he pushed back, trying to keep her safe. He glanced up and caught Tommy Jessup gazing at him with desperate eyes, silently imploring him to do something. Zeke turned away; there was nothing to be done except ride it out.
“Mr. Vickers, please,” he heard someone say, but when Zeke glanced at Vickers, he saw that the man still hugged Martha close, his eyes as dead as his wife’s.
Zeke glanced around and saw redheaded Harry Boyd holding the hand of his grown son, Charlie, the way he must have done when Charlie was a boy. His expression was stern, his eyes steel, just waiting. Zeke pushed past the Jessup kid and guided Savannah toward Boyd.
“Look after her, Harry,” he said, giving her a last shove. Savannah shuffled enough to get to Boyd and Zeke kissed her temple without looking at her face. If he had, he knew he wouldn’t have had the courage to turn away.
“We’ll make a deal!” Zeke called out, pushing his way through the herd.
Half a dozen weapons swung toward him, the dark holes of their barrels almost seeming to dare him to take another step.
“What are you doing?” Arturo Sanchez hissed.
But standing out there, outside the circle of his friends and neighbors and the risen dead who comprised all the hope they had ever mustered, he could see the corpse of Lester Keegan lying in the dirt. Lester had been his best friend—he had come out here to save his son and been murdered for his trouble.
But we can bring him back, Zeke thought, feeling the pipe in his pocket digging into his hip. If we’re still alive to do it.
Aguilar stroked his narrow beard, smiling beatifically. “Well, well. Which one are you?”
“Ezekiel Prater.” He kept his chin up and his eyes locked on Aguilar’s when he said it.
The devil arched an eyebrow. “One of the ranchers.”
“That’s me. One of the Border Volunteers, too. Aaron just killed Lester Keegan. Vickers and Boyd are here, too. Cassaday didn’t lose anyone back in October, but we can speak for him.”
Aguilar glanced at his men and then at Aaron before turning back to Zeke.
“All right, Ezekiel. Speak.”
“We never wanted to come here,” Zeke said, heart pounding, trying to hide his hatred of this man and his comrades. “We knew it was crazy—suicide—but we had no choice.”
“Your friend Aaron told us all about it,” Aguilar said, waving Aaron’s gun around. “We knew you were coming, ese. Knew about the guns you were buying.”
“Which is why the first couple of bullets in every magazine are dummies,” the scarred gunman said, grinning. “Click click. Nada.”
Aguilar laughed softly. “Yeah, that was Guillermo’s idea. Pretty funny, actually. And it helped get you all the way out here.”
Zeke felt like throwing up.
“The school bus was a nice touch, though,” Aguilar said appreciatively.
“Please, just let us go,” Linda Trevino begged.
Aguilar shot her a hard look, so Zeke shifted to block his view of the woman.
“Hold on, here’s my offer,” Zeke said. “Full access to all four ranches. We’ll cover for you with the Border Patrol, make it a hell of a lot easier for you to get whatever you want across the river. Guns. Drugs. People. Anything.”
“Really . . . ?” Aguilar said, eyes widening, impressed. “And what about the rest of your people? They’re all going to go along with this?”
Zeke glanced around at the others, waiting for an argument, but nobody dared to say a word.
“They are,” he said firmly.
“Well. This I’ve gotta think about,” Aguilar replied, a jaunty sort of amusement coming into his eyes.
He turned and shot Aaron Monteforte in the head with his own gun.
Screams burst from the herded pipers as Aaron crumpled to the ground. Zeke flinched, but somehow he found it within himself not to cry out or run back into the cluster of familiar faces. Unlike his father and grandfather, he’d never been to war, but those men had taught him a thing or two about fear and cowardice. Fear was the real enemy, the one foe that had to be defeated. For himself—for his own safety—Zeke could do that.
It was his fear for Savannah that he could not overcome.
“Ah, damn it,” Aguilar said, looking down in dismay at the spots of blood on his expensive white shirt. “Messy. But . . . if we’re going to make some kind of deal, we couldn’t have him around. A man who will betray his friends cannot be trusted. His sister died that night in your town, you know? She wasn’t supposed to be there. He thought she had gone to Hidalgo to visit friends. My men murdered his sister, and he still called to tell me what you were all planning. What a pal.”
Aguilar spit on Aaron’s ruined face, the second time he’d been spit on in mere minutes. Zeke saw that Aaron had fallen on his left side, baring the Reaper tattoo on his right biceps and burying the angel on his left, and that seemed only right.
“He used to work on my ranch,” Zeke said, gazed fixed on Aguilar. “I was fond of him back then, but as of this moment, I can’t say as I’m sorry the son of a bitch is dead.”
Aguilar began to walk, gun pointed at the ground as he circled the cluster of prisoners. There were more than forty of them and half that number of cartel killers, but the gunmen were ranged about them in a circle like a pack of wolves. Aguilar moved through the open space that separated the wolves from their prey.
“I’m not going to lie to you, Ezekiel,” Aguilar said, his voice carried on the desert wind though Zeke couldn’t see him from the other side of the circle. “I’ve just been having a little fun with you. We spend so much time on business that when we get an opportunity to play, it’s hard to resist. You of course know that if word got out that we let even one of you live . . .”
Prayers went up from the group, and curses followed in equal measure.
“Listen to me, Carlos,” Zeke said. “If you’re worried about how it’ll look, what kind of message you’d be sending, think about how it will look when word gets out that you’ve staked a claim in Hidalgo County, that you’ve got an open pipeline into the U.S. Or how it’ll look that you turned such a thing down.”
Aguilar had made it three-quarters of the way around the circle and come back into view. Zeke glanced at the faces of his friends and neighbors and the vacant gazes of the dead and he held his breath.
“It would be an interesting experiment,” Aguilar admitted. Zeke exhaled, glanced over in search of Savannah’s face and did not see her. “But if we were to negotiate, there is only one place to start.”
“Where’s that?”
Aguilar’s smile vanished and the amusement bled from his eyes, revealing only ice beneath. He turned to his prisoners with a snarl.
“Which one of you is Enoch Stroud?”
Zeke blinked several times and shook his head. It felt as if he’d just woken up from a dream in which Enoch had never existed. Until the moment Aguilar had mentioned his name, he had forgotten all about the little hoodoo man. Enoch had come to them, had raised their dead and dragged them all down here to Mexico, and yet for a few minutes it was as if he had been erased from Zeke’s mind.
A ripple of confusion went through the pipers and they began to shuffle aside, expanding the circle, nudging and guiding the blank-faced undead until a path had formed among them leading to a circle within the circle. At its center, alone, Enoch stood staring at Carlos Aguilar with murder in his eyes.
“How the hell . . . ?” Harry Boyd said. “For a minute there I didn’t remember the little creep existed.”
Aguilar aimed his gun at Enoch and the pipers and their dead scuttled farther away. The cartel killers raised the barrels of their weapons and barked orders in English and Spanish, making sure no one tried to make a run for it.
“You?” Aguilar scoffed. “You’re the great brujo? El nigromante?”
Enoch said nothing, but Aguilar walked toward him, pausing to look more closely at the resurrected dead. He glanced at Charlie Boyd and Big Tim, but when he got to Martha Vickers, he reached out and ran a finger over the strange new fontanel skin growing over her head wound.
“Oh, you’re going to teach me how to do this,” Aguilar said, turning to stare at Enoch. “Whatever it is, I want to learn. When one of my people is killed, I want to be able to bring them back.”
Enoch’s gaze glimmered with a familiar yellow light, but it was as if an eclipse were taking place in his eyes. They turned black and the little man seemed to darken, as if the moonlight could no longer find him.
“Chingate,” Enoch muttered.
Aguilar sneered, pointing the gun at Enoch’s forehead. “Fuck myself? Fuck you, chilito. You want revenge because I killed your daughter? Big deal. I killed a lot of people’s daughters, and their sons, too. That’s what we do, asshole. You get in the way and you get dead.”
He gestured toward the people gathered around them.
“Maybe you got some black magic in you, brought these people back to life. But now you got a chance to keep them alive . . . them and the rest of the idiots you brought down here with you. You’ve got five seconds, man. You gonna teach me, or am I going to put a bullet in your heart?”
Zeke caught a glimpse of Savannah, standing behind Harry and Charlie Boyd. He mentally urged her to retreat, to hide herself more deeply among the others. For a second, he thought she had seen him, that she had returned his gaze, but then Aguilar started marching back and forth in the gap, counting.
“One. Two. Three.”
Aguilar glanced over at Zeke and shrugged as if to say he was trying his best here.
“Enoch!” Zeke shouted. “For God’s sake—”
“Four!” Aguilar barked, turning on Enoch with a venomous glare. Then he sniffed, as if he couldn’t quite summon a laugh, and shook his head. “Ah, fuck it.”
He shot Enoch twice in the chest.
“No!” Zeke roared, rushing toward the widening gap between the two frantic groups of prisoners and then staggering to a halt, staring in astonishment.
Enoch had barely flinched. Blood began to soak through his shirt.
“You want to talk about making deals?” Enoch said, eyes so black they made the night seem bright. “I made a lot of them, Carlos—deals with every devil who would listen. You cut my daughter into pieces and I’m going to do the same to you, first here, and then down in hell, for every minute of eternity.”
Aguilar shot Enoch twice more in the chest and then once in the forehead. The force of the gunshots knocked Enoch down, blood flying, as Aguilar rapidly pulled the trigger on an empty chamber.
Enoch lay on the ground, half curled into a fetal position, chuffing with laughter as blood drooled from his lips.
“Guillermo!” Aguilar shouted, and the scarred man rushed over to hand him an assault rifle.
He turned the gun on Enoch, bullets erupting from the barrel, blowing holes in the little conjuror at close range, turning his body to bloody wreckage. When the gunfire stopped, it echoed out across the desert and the smell of oil and cordite floated on the air. The good citizens of Lansdale, Texas, now so very far from home, wept and prayed, and Alma Hawkins fell to her knees and sobbed loudly, cradling her belly in both arms.
Zeke felt tethered to Savannah by some invisible umbilical. Carefully, not wanting to spook Aguilar or draw attention to his daughter, he started moving toward her. Harry Boyd stood by Savannah with his son, visibly struggling against the urge to fight back.
No, Harry. No, don’t do it, please don’t do it, Zeke thought.
“Damn. That’s too bad,” Aguilar said, scanning the faces of his prisoners and then looking beyond them, to his men. “It would’ve been pretty useful, being able to bring you sad culeros back from the dead if necessary, but I guess we’ll have to make use of the dead folks we’ve got right here.”
Ice ran through Zeke’s veins. He couldn’t breathe, could only stare at Aguilar’s grinning face.
“Nothing like slave labor,” Aguilar said, admiring the size of Big Tim Hawkins. “Especially when the rest of the world thinks they’re dead anyway and nobody’s gonna come looking for them.”
Aguilar’s grin turned sly. He approached Harry and Charlie Boyd and Zeke froze, trying to will the killer away, wishing him upon anyone else, damning any of the others to whatever suffering might be in store as long as Savannah could live.
Not again.
But Aguilar waved Harry aside with the assault rifle and—eyes downcast with shame—Harry gave Charlie a shove and let the devil pass.
“Beautiful,” Aguilar said. “Some of them might be more useful than others.” He reached out with his left hand to caress Savannah’s brown cheek, tracing a finger along the freckles on the bridge of her nose.
Zeke was sure he saw her wince. It felt like a trigger in his heart.
“Don’t you fucking touch her, you son of a bitch!” he roared, rushing at Aguilar. “You killed her once! Isn’t that enough?!”
A big hand grabbed his arm, holding him back, and Zeke whipped around to see that Vickers had finally woken from the fog of his grief. Vickers shook his head, eyes pleading with Zeke to say nothing more. But Zeke knew nothing he did would make a difference in the end.
“Enough?” Aguilar said. “I guess not.”
Zeke screamed as Aguilar shot Savannah in the chest and belly.
As she crumpled to the ground, he tore free of Vickers’s grasp and lunged. Aguilar turned and the gun barked again, three or four rounds stitching across Zeke’s chest; the pain searing through him was nothing compared to the anguish in his soul.
He fell face-first, kicking up dust as he skidded in the dirt on his stomach. The smell of his own blood filled his nostrils, his vision already dimming.
Unable to do more than twitch and loll his head to one side, he watched as Aguilar backed out of the gap among his prisoners. The rest of the cartel killers tightened the circle, wolves finally drawing near at the scent of blood.
“Fuck it,” Aguilar said. “Kill them all.”
The gunfire seemed almost quiet compared to the screams.