Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(32)
The car wobbles, hits something in the road and goes end over end like something out of a bad, seventies TV show. Whatever. I’ve been here before. I sit back and enjoy the rollercoaster.
Because whatever is happening here, it’s going to suck so much more when I wake up.
___
I come to, my right eye snapping open, my left too crusted over with blood from a cut on my forehead to do more than twitch. I’m lying on the bone ground staring up at the ceiling of some kind of tent that, it takes me a moment to realize, is stitched together panels of human skin.
Where the jade hasn’t covered me, bruises and scrapes have. There’s a goose-egg of a knot on my forehead where I took that femur to my skull. It takes a few tries to sit up and when I finally make it I wish I hadn’t.
“Manuel,” I say, seeing the dead Bustillo sitting cross-legged in front of me, skin sallow, the upper left side of his head from the cheekbone up sheared away from when I shot him with the Browning. And he ended up here. Huh. Guess he really is a true believer. “You’re looking good.”
He smiles, a sick rictus that only goes up on one side, his push-broom mustache twitching. “Better than you, I bet,” he says.
“Yeah, I get that a lot. Little surprised to see you here, though. Shouldn’t you be a little further back in line for your journey to the Promised Land?”
I’m also surprised to see I’m still breathing and haven’t been tied up. My bag is missing, as is the shotgun, and I can’t feel the weight of Mictlantecuhtli’s blade in my pocket. But nobody’s shanked me so far, so I’ll call that a win.
“I’m told it normally takes a few years to get to this point,” Bustillo says, “but as you can see there is a certain lax enforcement of protocol. Quite the cottage industry has sprung up at the gate from Mitla to get souls this far. And I am resourceful.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt that.”
We sit under a makeshift pavilion constructed from long bones wrapped in tendons and flaps of skin for a tarp. Around us are bone buildings that look like they were put together by a toddler with a poor understanding of architecture. They have no doors, windows are thin, crooked slits.
And then there’s the twisted pyramid to Huitzilopochtli.
Up close it’s even more messed up than I thought. The stones aren’t just poorly cut and ill-fitting, they sag as though they’re made less out of rock and more out of Jell-O. A thick green slurry drips from the cracks and it has a faint but undeniable stink to it. But it’s the perspective that really does the trick. Like an Escher drawing it seems to twist in on itself, angles folding into other angles that don’t make sense.
“You probably don’t want to look at that too closely,” Bustillo says. “It gives even me a headache. And I don’t have much of a head left.”
I tear my eyes away from it, turn back to Bustillo. Behind him I can see men and women, some in far worse shape than Bustillo here, wandering around the area. Some look lost, aimless, others are tending to the bone vehicles. Old and young, some killed violently, others from disease or old age. Most of these people look modern, but a few are wearing loincloths or skirts and simple cloaks.
A few wear the armor of Aztec Jaguar or Eagle warriors, macuahuitls, wooden swords with flat slabs of razor sharp obsidian embedded in the sides, hanging from their sides. I even spy a few men wearing dented Spanish cuirasses. Every one of these soldiers shows the wounds that killed them.
I scan the crowd for Tabitha. She should stand out like a neon sign, but I can’t see her anywhere. I guess that hole she jumped into really could keep them out. “Quite the crew you got here. Kind of surprised, though. Shouldn’t the warriors and soldiers be with Huitzilopochtli? Riding with him to the sun?”
He cocks an eyebrow in surprise. “You’ve done your homework.”
“When you take a trip to Hell it helps to read the brochure. How’d you pull this together? You’ve been here, what, all of two days?”
“Has it been?” Bustillo says. “Seems much longer than that. Years, even. I think time moves differently here. Or we perceive it differently.” He stands and holds his arm out to help me up. I’m wary, I did put a bullet in the guy’s head after all. He obviously wants something. Otherwise why not just shank me while I was unconscious? Finally, I take his hand.
I stand, wincing from the pain in my left leg. It’s not broken but it’s pretty banged up. My left knee is swollen, making it hard to bend, and the bottom of my pants leg is stiff with blood. I wipe at my eye, clearing some of the crusted blood away, but it’s still too swollen to open.
“Some of these people have been here more than half a millennium,” he says. “Up the mountains is Izmictlan Apochcalolca, the blinding fog. It’s their final challenge before they reach Chicunamictlan. This is as far as any souls have gotten in the last five hundred years. They enter the mists, and they’re spit back out. Mad, lessened. Every time they try to pass through it takes more from them. So many have stopped trying or have not made the attempt at all out of fear.” He walks toward the row of bone vehicles and I follow him, limping.
“Isn’t that the point of a challenge? That it isn’t easy?”
I catch the souls giving me furtive glances. Anger in their eyes, fear. I know they’re not ghosts, or they would have eaten me already, but I don’t know what they’re capable of. I shift my weight and feel a sharp pain in my ribs. Well, I know some of what they’re capable of.