“You’re fucking kidding me.”
“I assure you, I am not. In all your years, you must have wondered why hell would employ lowly monkey middlemen to do their dirty work when every demon in creation is chomping at the bit to get their cloven hooves on a real, live human soul. The fact is, they physically cannot access a living soul. If they could, it would be a bloodbath, which is why Collectors are employed. Your kind are mediators of sorts — final arbiters, so to speak. Or at least that’s how the role was envisioned to be. Ever since the last Great War, and the shaky Truce that’s followed, the autonomy of Collectors has been on the wane. Hence you having me.”
“So you’re saying only a Collector can kill a member of the Brethren.”
“That’s right.”
“And what? We’re gonna mount up a Collector army and march on the remaining three?”
“Something like that,” she said, “with only two corrections.”
“What’s that?”
“Correction the first: there is no army. It’s been decided the assignment falls to you and you alone.”
“Are you out of your goddamn mind? I barely killed one of these crazy fuckers, and in case you failed to notice, I managed to get myself evicted from a perfectly good skin-suit doing it. How the hell am I supposed to take on three?”
“Actually, that brings me to correction the second,” Lilith said, pursing her perfect lips a moment before continuing. “I’m afraid in light of recent events, we’re no longer merely targeting those three.”
“Come again?”
“What I’m saying, Collector, is it’s been decreed that you’re to kill all nine.”
5.
When I kicked open the flimsy screen door that marked the entrance to the dingy, nameless bar, the doorframe parallelogrammed a moment, its joints squealing in protest. My shadow projected against a field of sunset-orange as I stepped across the threshold. Then the rusted hinge caught and slammed it shut behind me with a nail-on-chalkboard creak.
A bracket hung above the door, the kind you’d hang a bell off of to announce the arrival of new customers. But all that hung from it was a frayed piece of twine, knotted at both ends. The topmost knot was a frizzy-haired bun jutting through the bracket. The twine was kinked above the bottom knot — thanks, I’d imagine, to the erstwhile bell — so that it hung off to one side, the idle strands poking through the bunny-hole to form the knot and feathering down to nothing just below. It put me in mind of a strung-up voodoo doll. I wondered if somewhere in the world there was a full-sized hanged man to match.
The absence of a bell didn’t matter much. The door itself announced me fine. But even if it hadn’t, the three men inside the bar — for they were all men, and all burly, stress-jumpy, and armed, shooting pool beneath a ceiling fan that shook, palsied, as it spun — would no doubt have noticed me. This was their bar, after all, or, at least, their employer’s, and to own the truth, it wasn’t even a real bar. A careful observer would note that no one ever came or went from the property but for they and their cohorts, and the neon Open sign might well have been dead when they purchased it, for all the use it got. The bar itself sat empty and unused — no old-timers thousand-yarding the bottoms of their glasses, no dolled-up women preened and plucked and perched atop the barstools in front of it, eyeing their lipstick in the soot-streaked, dirt-specked Sauza mirror mounted crooked on the wall. The men here were not interested in the women or the drink that any bar worth frequenting promised, or at least heartily suggested. What they were interested in was underneath. A system of tunnels, leading deep into the desert in four directions from this squat adobe structure plopped smack in the middle of hot dry nowhere, each popping out a mile or two past the sad, desperate mud-caked trickle that is the Rio Grande. See, this glorified tent of mud and rough-hewn beams sat smack in the middle of a small, landlocked peninsula of Mexico that jutted northward into Texas thanks to the meandering line of the river that marked their border, which meant that the United States lay just north and east and west from where I stood. The men inside the bar were here to see the tunnels leading there were well-protected — and the local officials who stopped by well-bribed — so they’d stay open to serve as pipeline for the parade of drugs, guns, and strung-out little girls the Xolotl Cartel provided to the fat wallets and bottomless appetites of their American neighbors.
Come to think of it, it might have made more sense to possess one of the aforementioned local officials. Then maybe they wouldn’t be looking at me so bug-eyed for showing up unannounced. Eyes wide in purple-gray hollows. Sallow skin, sickly-hued and grease-shiny from lack of sleep, pulled taut across their cheeks and their wifebeater-bared shoulders. Muscle-corded arms rigid at their sides, fingers splayed and twitching as each in turn calculated the odds of getting to their piece before I could put them down.
Oh, did I not mention I was carrying an assault rifle? Well, I was. Which might explain these fellas’ wiggins.
It was a Mexican-Army-issue FX-05 Xiuhcoatl carbine, which made sense, on account of my new meat-suit being Mexican Army, though he and I were in civilian clothes at the moment on account of I’m not completely stupid. He was a dark-skinned, wiry thirty-something man with hard eyes, a black bottle-brush mustache, and a jagged scar that traced his cheekbone from right eye to age-lined dimple. Given all he’d seen in his years at the front lines of the drug war, it’s hard to believe that dimple came from smiling. His gun was a boxy, industrial, matte-black carbon-fiber motherfucker with thirty rounds in its magazine, and though it was capable of going fully automatic, at present it was set to three-round bursts. If it weren’t, and I were forced to pull the trigger, the magazine would likely be empty before the first shell casing hit the ground, and these lovely gentlemen would wind up a fine paste. Since I needed them alive, three rounds a pop was as much stopping power as I was willing to risk, and even still, I was aiming for their knees.
These men were not Brethren. But I had reason to believe they might know where I could find one. And that reason’s name was Lilith.
“Take a look at this,” she said to me back on that beach in Guam, producing a paper from God-knows-where. It’s disconcerting, I’ll tell you, spending one’s days with beings whose physical form is simply a projection of how they wish to look. From where I’m sitting, Lilith doesn’t look a day over thirty, her flawless porcelain skin on ravishing display thanks to a bikini so small that if it were made of postage stamps, it wouldn’t get a four-page letter around the block. And yet she’s been around since the dawn of time, since Paradise was a for-serious place and not a pitch to sell time-shares, and somewhere on her person, she’d secreted an entire fucking newspaper. Best to not ask where, says I. Point is, out it came just after she said I’d have to make with all the Brethren-killing as if she’d been just waiting for the moment, and when she saw me squinting by the pale light of the rising moon as I tried to read it, she snapped her fingers and conjured a steady orange flame. It gave off no heat, and despite the ocean breeze it never flickered, so my guess was, it wasn’t a magic trick so much as showing off. A flame appeared because Lilith elected to project one, not because she’d conjured fire.