Track 13

Santiago arrived with the Los Cambiantes in tow—a couple dozen men, some of them riding double. Shotguns bristled from saddlebag scabbards, and half of them were wearing pistols.

Monica didn’t bother to approach him. Thomas behind the bar didn’t say a word as Santi checked the bathrooms and kitchen, and then the back office. The owner, Aaron Fuentes, had already been by for his morning managerial rituals, but even if he were there, he wouldn’t challenge Santi either. Not while the Los Cambiantes charged them a protection fee.

“Where is he?” Santiago growled softly to the waitress.

“Gil?”

“No, Waldo, you fuckin’ blowup doll. Gil Delgado—where’d he run off to?”

Monica clutched her clipboard to her chest as if it was a shield. “Went out with those folks that were here earlier. They ordered food, but as soon as Gil talked to ’em, they left without eating it.”

“What about Joaquin?”

“He left before they did.”

“Did they have my wife and daughter with them?”

No point in lying. Santi had her dead to rights. Monica’s hands scrunched into protective fists. “I thought they were friends from out of town or something. Are they not?”

“See what they were driving?”

“No, I haven’t been outside.”

Santiago resisted the urge to judo-flip her over the bar and headed back out into the midday heat. He wore a white T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off to bare his brown shoulders. The leering Texas sun draped across his neck like molten gold.

Tuco and Maximo stood by the entrance, their fingers in their hip pockets.

“Which way’d they go?” asked Tuco.

Which way’d they go, boss, which way’d they go? Santiago had to swallow a crazed laugh at the mental image of a Looney Tunes character. “Gil took them outside after Joaquin called me. I don’t know if they did something to Joaquin or what, but I know Gil didn’t go with them, because his bike is still here.”

Their eyes cut over to the mint-condition motorcycle at the end of the parking lot.

“That means he’s still here somewhere,” said Tuco. “And he ain’t gonna get far with that ’Nam shrapnel in his leg.”

Panic built inside of him as Santiago paced in frustration. They have my wife and daughter, he thought, his fists on his hips. Barely aware of the heat now. God almighty, I’ll forgive them for everything, just don’t take them away from me. They’re all I have.

You know where Gil went, said a voice.

A brightly colored bird perched on La Reina’s handlebars.

A toucan.

The bird’s beak clattered like bamboo wind chimes. At the same time, Santi could feel that long banana-boat beak scraping the inside of his skull in long, languorous, excruciating strokes. He could almost hear it.

Sccccccratch.

Black stains ran in rivulets down the corners of his eyesight, pulsing in time with his heartbeat. Santi stared. Follow your nose, said the voice inside the motorcycle.

The toucan flew away in slow motion.

Invisible currents flowed into his sinuses as Santiago’s nostrils flared, so cold it made his teeth hurt, like icy mountain air. The atmosphere there in the secluded, open desert—the middle of nowhere, really—was so clean and clear, he could smell fucking everything. Broiling sunlight softened the pavement into the consistency of a granola bar. The exhaust from their bikes was a noxious swamp of dirty poison. Breath from the men standing around him puffed out in raunchy volumes: Tuco had had a liquid lunch but Maximo had eaten a hamburger. Santiago could smell the mustard and onions somewhere in that beefy miasma.

“Jesus Christ.” Tuco backed away from Santiago, eyes locked on his face. “You see that, Max?”

Men made alarmed noises. Everyone watched him with wide-eyed expressions—some of them a baffled sort of amusement (Is this some sort of elaborate prank?), and some of them outright fear. Santi ignored them, pushing through the throng. Something else, something behind their combined sweat-musk and the funk of asphalt and halitosis … to the east-northeast, he sensed the astringent undertone of Gil’s aftershave, Pinaud Clubman—citrus, jasmine, lavender, rubbing alcohol.

Also a thready, milky odor. Fear.

He started toward the end of the parking lot, where a side road went past Heroes into a subdivision sprawling across the desert. The men followed.

“What’s up with his face?” someone asked.

“Cap, no offense,” said Tuco, “but you look like a gorilla got face-fucked by a bag of Cheetos.”

They don’t remember, said the voice in the back of Santiago’s head. His teeth ached. Pain rimmed the orbital bones framing his eyes. They’ve been at the edge of humanity with us, but they don’t remember, do they? They’ve danced with us out here, but they don’t remember the steps. That voice diminished as he walked away from his motorcycle. The feeling that La Reina was home base in a game of tag or second base in a ball game got stronger and stronger; the farther he strayed from it, the weaker the signal got, and the more anxious he became. Sooner or later, someone’s going to put the ball on him and then he’s OUT. OUT LIKE GOUT, OUT LIKE TROUT, OUT LIKE—

“You okay, Cap?” asked Maximo. “Where are you going?”

They don’t remember the dance, thought Santiago, or perhaps it came from somewhere deeper, somewhere darker. They don’t remember the wild, the nights when we made them like me, and we ran under the full moon for the first time. They don’t know their secret desert hearts. They don’t know how they can rip and tear like El Tigre.

“I’m fine.”

El Tigre? The sun beat on him.

Do you remember, Santiago? Do you remember, El Tigre, how it was to rip and tear and dance?

Their road captain walked around the corner of the sports bar and started down the street, following his nose. Turning his head was like dialing an FM radio up and down the band: every angle introduced him to a new smell, and if he stayed tuned into a specific station, he could follow it to its source.

Men lagged behind and dropped away, heading back to Heroes. A few minutes later, he only had Tuco, Max, and a handful of other guys. Fine. He didn’t need many, if any at all. You’ll remind them, said a voice that might not have been Santi’s own. You’ll give them back their claws and teeth, and we’ll ride a merry chase. Tonight, we’ll dance again, and we won’t let them forget this time.

Claws? Teeth?

Gil’s fear-stink and citrusy aftershave slowly came into focus as Santiago traveled into the neighborhood behind Heroes, down a dusty, patchy street that hadn’t seen a fresh paving in decades (Santi, in fact, stepped into a rather deep pothole and almost fell). It carried them into an arrangement of ranch homes on patchy brown lawns. Many of them sported FOR SALE signs in the yard or FORECLOSURE NOTICE taped to the front door. Santi followed the scent-trail to the end of the block, took a right, to the end of that block, then crossed the street. The house he found there—a Brady Bunch kinda place with yuccas out front—was foreclosed as well.

Outside the crusty old dog turds studding the dead grass, the property reeked of Gil and Joaquin.

The front door was kicked in.

Tuco headed in that direction, but Santiago stopped him. “He’s not in there. Thought he could outsmart us.”

Smell Radio led Santi around the side of the house where stairs curled down to a basement door set in the exterior wall. Santi went to open it but Max put a hand on his broad chest.

“Hold up.” He directed Santi to the side and pressed his back to the wall.

Reaching over his shoulder with a Miyagi backhand, he knocked on the basement door. Several gunshots rang out from inside and bullets punched through the door with the hard knocking of a judge’s gavel, spraying splinters out into the brown grass.

A moment of silence.

Max knocked again. Pock, pock, pock—more bullets tore holes in the wood.

“What you doin’ with that peashooter, vato?” asked Max, talking out of the corner of his mouth. “You ain’t got enough bullets for all of us. We can wait you out.”

“No, we can’t,” said Santiago. “I ain’t got time for that.”

Gil shouted from inside the cellar, “I ain’t tellin’ you where they went, Santiago. Not giving you a chance to beat that woman again. She ain’t done nothing to deserve that shit. Ain’t neither one of ’em have.”

“I’ll decide what she deserves. I’m her goddamn husband.”

“What kinda man—” Gil started to say.

“She’s my wife, old man,” said Santiago. Anger swelled in him, anger at the situation, anger at Gil for withholding information, anger at Marina for running off, anger at whoever these people were that took her.

Tuco gave him a weird look.

“Got something on my face, Tuc?” Santiago accidentally bit the inside of his mouth as he spoke, and a bolt of pain flickered down his neck. Saliva flooded his mouth.

Tuco’s eyebrows jumped. “No. No, man. Ain’t nothin’ on your face.”

Santiago grunted. Teeth felt funny. Sinus headache getting worse, spreading to his cheeks and eyes. Mental note to hunt down some Tylenol when he got back to the house. “Old bastard only got the one mag on him,” said Joaquin Oropeda from inside the cellar. “If you’re quick, you can—”

“Did I say you could talk?” asked Gil. “You ain’t shit, son. I killed Viet Congs that was more man than you. One more word and I’ll paint the ceiling—you got me?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Brought this on yourself. If you’d just kept your mouth shut—”

While Gil was distracted, Santi took the opportunity to go for the door. But when his hand hit the doorknob, the knob snapped off as if it were made of chocolate. Gouges across the front of the cellar door—four claw-marks separated by Gil’s bullet holes. He examined his hand. Seemed … bigger? Longer, somehow. The palm looked larger than it ought to, and his fingers tensed unnaturally, the tendons standing out. Both hands had developed this weird, strained tetanus appearance. Fingernails were definitely longer, two inches long, maybe, hooking forward in pointed spikes.

Claws, he thought.

Claws, thought the deeper mind.

On top of all that, the snowy white arm hair was back. This time, it was frosted with orange.

Santiago eyed Maximo. The slab of beef was looking at him with open concern. “Man—” he started to say, but Gil unleashed another volley of bullets through the door. Two of them missed by inches, but the third one tore Santiago’s ear to shreds. All the rage came to a head and Santiago’s body welled with a searing internal light. Euphoria and pain rippled down his arms and his skin seemed to tighten. Stitches popped in his jeans. He threw himself at the cellar door and it imploded around him, caving in and disintegrating as if it were little more than balsa wood.

As he entered the cellar, something roared in the darkness—a dragon? It sounds like a dragon; what the hell is that?

Both Gil and Joaquin screamed. Gil pushed Joaquin and Santi shoved him out of the way, his fingernails catching in the man’s clothing.

Blood spattered across the cellar wall.

“Jesus shit!” cried Gil Delgado, running for his life. He scrambled to pull open a casement window in the back so he could climb out, and Santi caught him, snatching his leg and dragging him out of the shadows. The road captain turned and flung Gil across the cellar as if he were nothing but a bag of trash.

The old man smashed into a pegboard, and a collection of tools fell off the wall in a cascade of junk. Santi was immediately on him, slapped the 1911 out of his hand before he could fire and lifted him up, holding him against the wall. The pistol clattered underneath a worktable.

“WHERE ARE THEY?” bellowed Santiago. Rich, cloying, saline, like popcorn butter, a smell told him that Gil had pissed his pants. “WHERE DID THEY GO?” The white-orange arm hair was now a fin of shag the color of mango-flesh, hanging from Santi’s arms. The agony in his face was intense, as if his nose was broken. Salty blood filled his mouth.

“Santi.” Gil writhed in fear and pain, his Hunter S. Thompson glasses hanging off his face. “What’s happening to you? What is this?”

“What is what?”

Look at you, man! What the hell are you?”

Santi bounced Gil’s head off the wall. “Tell me who has my wife and where they went!”

“Some chick with a Mohawk and a vet! Big blond guy!”

“What are—” Santi began, but then he caught sight of his reflection in Gil’s sunglasses.

Two tiny monsters gawked back at him. In just five minutes, he’d grown a beard, eggshell-white, cropped, silky. His eyes were bleeding, running down his face in twin harlequin trails. Yellow teeth jutted from his bloody mouth: too big, too many, all of them pointed. Black pinstripes rippled outward from his lips and eye sockets in a dozen concentric half circles. His face was a tiki mask of feral rage.

Teeth.

“Jesus,” Santi said in shock, backing away.

Do you remember now?

Collapsing to the floor, Gil scrambled around for purchase on some kind of weapon. Snatching up a hacksaw, he held it at port arms, shaking with the palsy of terror.

Do you remember the dance?

No one else was in the cellar with them. The thin sour-milk smell of fear drifted around the room on a lazy breeze, and Santi realized the gangbangers outside were all afraid to come in. “What is wrong with me?” The orange-white hair had climbed onto his knuckles and hung like a dandy’s lace sleeves.

Nothing wrong with you, said the voice from far away, a weak signal, almost just a current in the air. Do you remember the dance? Do you remember the night?

“What am I?” Santiago asked, reeling around the cellar. He found a tall red tool chest and jerked drawers open, rummaging through tools. The third drawer had a pair of pliers in it. Santi used it to grip one of his demonic-looking fingernail-hooks and pulled.

Pain shot up his finger. He cried out.

“That goddamn Enfield.” Urine made a dark stain on the front of Gil’s Wranglers. “It’s doin’ something to you, kid. Got the damn devil in it, maybe. Got its claws in you.”

“Got the devil in it?” said Santi, throwing the pliers at him.

Gil flinched; the pliers went wide.

“Do you know how stupid that sounds?” Santi paced. His own voice sounded exhausted, bewitched.

“Yeah, yeah, it sounds stupid, yeah.”

Scrrrrratch. Santi pulled open a drawer and found a pair of scissors. “It’s that bitch,” he grumbled, cutting off the strange hair growing out of his arms in a horrified frenzy. Locks of Creamsicle-colored hair littered the floor. “She’s doing this to me, you know? My nerves. She’s got me so stressed out, I’m losing my mind, Gil. I’m seeing shit.” Tears spilled down his cheeks, mingling with the blood to make red tracks. The words were almost sobs. “Got laid off, man. Laid off. I’m fuckin’ broke. My daughter hates me. She turned my little girl against me. What am I gonna do?”

“We’ll figure s-something out.” Gil was in full-on negotiator mode, hands up, speaking in an ingratiating tone. “I know you don’t like it, and I don’t either, but, hey, maybe we can get Bobby back out here and we can push again. Move some product east, for a little while. Just to get you back on your feet—”

Santiago rounded on him with the scissors. “Told you I wasn’t goin’ back to that shit. I don’t want my daughter anywhere near it. Heroin, cocaine, meth, I don’t—I don’t want her near that. I’m done. I told you.” Then, as he paced around the basement, he seemed to come out of a trance. “My daughter.” His beastly face darkened. “What are they driving?”

“Driving?” asked Gil.

“The people that took my family,” Santiago snarled, and went at him. Gil yelped and stumbled back; Santi caught him by the throat and pinned him to the wall again. He held the scissors against Gil’s cheek, pointed at his eye. “What are they driving?”

“A-a-a wuh, a Winnebago,” stuttered Gil. “Shitty old brown Winnebago. Looks like an ice cream truck.”

Standing there holding the scissors to Gil’s face, Santiago just breathed. He finally spoke again. The first several words were muddled because his lips were dry and stuck together. “How d’you like being president, Guillermo? Noticed you don’t wear the rank patch on your vest anymore. You ashamed of being president of Los Cambiantes?”

Gil glanced down at where his PRESIDENT tab used to be and shook his head. The scissors poked a dot of blood out of his cheek. “No, not at all. It’s just a, a security th—”

Hooking Gil’s glasses off with the scissors, Santiago tossed them aside. “High time you retired, grandpa. Been thinking I’d make a pretty good president. What you think? I’ll give road captain to Maximo. Max’ll make a great rocap.”

Do you remember, El Tigre? Do you remember the night?

“Sounds g-good to me,” Gil smiled nervously. Tears rolled down his face. “M-maybe I’ll even move out to the beach. Get out of you guys’ way. Yeah, I think I like that.” The soon-to-be-former president of the Los Cambiantes still had his hands up in surrender. Santiago braced Gil’s wrist against the pegboard and slammed the blades into the palm of his hand, nailing him to the wall with a scissor stigmata.

I remember.


Noises came out of that cellar like Maximo had never heard outside of a horror movie. Screaming, growling, crushing, rending, tearing, splattering. The Mexican Mountain winced, his eyes cutting over to Tuco. Slimy bastard stood there with a placid, lizard-like expression on his face, eyes inscrutable behind his Kadeem Hardison flip-shades.

Five or six men stared at the doorway with cold anxiety. “What the hell is going on in there?” one of them asked.

He was answered by the sight of Santiago Valenzuela coming out of the cellar. Their road captain was plastered in gore, his hair stringy and lank. Gobbets of flesh speckled his shirt, and his teeth—normal, chisel-edged human teeth instead of the pointy goblin teeth he’d had a few minutes ago—were stained red. He looked like a pot of marinara had exploded in his face.

“Congratulations,” said Santi, clapping Maximo on the shoulder. “You just got a promotion.” He ripped the Velcro ROAD CAPTAIN tab off of his vest and affixed it to Maximo’s. “Enough of this goat-rope. Let’s roll out.”

Maximo looked down at his new rank tab (noticing the bloody handprint Santiago left on his shirt) and then up at Tuco’s easy reptilian grin.

“Congrats, big guy,” said Tuco, and he followed after their new president.

Maximo watched them all funnel out of the foreclosed property in a loose crowd of dazed, fearful expressions. Faces of men who had been dragged into a strange but not wholly unwelcome darkness.

On legs that didn’t feel like his own, Max wandered into the cellar and into the green stink of deep shit.

Hanging from a scissor plunged through one hand was a mauled corpse. The marionette that used to be Gil was unrecognizable. His face—and hell, the front of his skull—was gone, leaving nothing but the bottom rim of teeth and a pulped cavity. His sinuses were a pink pit under the white cauliflower of his ripped brain. His throat was torn out and so were his guts, intestines draping over his lap in wet gray loops.

Max stared at the dead man, his hands trembling. Nothing ever made this behemoth shake.

He wasn’t disturbed so much by the fact that he was looking at a mangled dead guy. Wasn’t the first time he’d seen one. Neither was it that one of his closest and oldest friends apparently ate the parts that weren’t here. Yeah, that’s messed up, he admitted, but when he looked at the corpse, it felt as if his brain was packed in a box of Styrofoam peanuts, insulated from the enormity of the tableau in front of him. He could feel the terror and disgust, but it was outside of him, like looking out at a burning-hot sun from inside an air-conditioned house. Something had put down a wall between him and reality, it seemed like—something wanted him divorced from what he saw, what he did.

An invisible thought-finger dragged a jagged nail down the inside of his skull.

Ay, Boo-Boo! I see a pic-a-nic basket!

One eye twitched.

No. Max tracked bloody boot-prints back into the sunshine. Part that disturbs me, he thought, as he stumbled across the crunchy grass, is that it’s makin me fuckin’ hungry.