“Leave him alone,” Carlos said.
Alexander lifted the dead man’s face from the blood. The man had a bristly moustache and thick jowls. His mouth hung open. “This guy, your friend,” Alexander said. “I believe he is that stupid. He has a stupid face.” Alexander slammed the dead man’s face into the floor of the truck, and Carlos jumped.
“Or this guy.” Alexander touched the second corpse, and then the third. “Or him. They all look like stupid little men.”
Carlos snarled, just a little. Alexander was getting to him.
Alexander smiled as he stood. He gave one of the bodies a hard kick for good measure. “Your friends, stupid. But you do not look stupid.” Alexander approached Carlos. “You look disciplined. Smart. Maybe ex-military, no? Or a former federale?”
Carlos gave a hard stare, his eyes full of anger.
“Anyway,” Alexander said, “You are a man who follows orders. We only want to know whose.” He paused to give Carlos an opportunity to speak, which Carlos didn’t take.
Alexander walked in a slow circle around Carlos.
“We know that Toscano and his friends do not like what Papa Calderòn is doing,” Alexander said. “But Papa Calderòn has ended his past relationship with Toscano. That won’t change. We are…what did you call yourself? We are independent of Toscano’s organization now. And if Toscano doesn’t want to do business on our terms, this is fine. But he must leave our men and our shipments alone. Do you understand?”
Alexander knelt beside Carlos and spoke directly into the man’s bloody, bullet-nipped ear.
“I will tell you a secret thing,” Alexander said in a lower voice. “We do not need your confession. Papa Calderòn knows who sent you. He simply wants you to deliver a message back to your boss. Can you do this?”
Carlos looked back at him, but didn’t answer.
Alexander held out a hand toward the three dead men.
They began to rock side to side in their own blood.
Carlos watched them with wide eyes.
“You know what name they call me, don’t you?”
“El Brujo,” Carlos whispered. “Papa Calderòn’s witch.”
“They call me this for a reason.” Alexander lifted his hand a few inches, and the dead men rose to their knees. “It is because I am a high priest of the devil. A necromancer, and a wielder of black magic.” Alexander lifted his hand higher, and the three dead men stood, swaying like palms in the wind, unsteady on their feet. Alexander backed away from Carlos.
The three corpses shuffled around, bumping into each other as if drunk, until they all managed to turn and face Carlos.
Alexander crooked his fingers, and the bullet-riddled corpses advanced on Carlos, one sluggish dragging step at a time, heads lolling and limp, eyes blank, mouths open and drooling.
Carlos began to whisper a prayer to the Virgin Mary, and the two machine-gun men, Papa Calderòn’s foot soldiers, crossed themselves.
“And so, Carlos, here is the message,” Alexander said. “If the raids against Papa Calderòn do not stop, I will unleash horrors on Toscano and all his friends. I will send an army of demons to their homes to eat their families.”
The reanimated corpses closed in around Carlos, grabbing and clawing him, biting at his face. Carlos screamed.
“Tell your boss that God has been banished from this land, and the Devil walks among us,” Alexander said.
Carlos cried out as the corpses of his friends bit and tore at his flesh.
“You tell him I am here, and I will come for him.” Alexander snapped his fingers. The three corpses fell to the ground like rag dolls.
Carlos remained on the blood-spattered truck floor, curled in a fetal position, weeping softly, bleeding from bite marks all over his body.
“Release him,” Alexander said to the men with machine guns. “Let him go back to his boss, and don’t cut his tongue out. We want him free to talk.”
Alexander stepped down from the truck. Outside, a scorching wind blew through the arid Mexican countryside. The box truck was parked inside a weathered old barn that was missing much of its roof.
Alexander walked to his own car, a black Mercedes convertible, parked in the huge empty doorway of the barn.
He was running late. There was a girl up north he needed to find, if he was going to do what Papa Calderòn wanted him to do. Alexander had been waiting his entire life to meet her.
The rural highway took him through vast open pastures with sparse grass and skinny cattle. The hot, dry pastoral landscape was broken only by an occasional farmhouse or old church, with a graveyard full of huge pastel sculptures.
His name in this lifetime was Alexander, but he’d had a thousand names, and if he had to, he could list them all. He was twenty years old, but his memories spanned all the way back into the deep primeval world, long before the dawn of civilization.