Chapter XIX; Definitive Edition

The driver kept the speed at a steady hundred kilometers. He didn't use the brake lights when we passed the dark transport stops outside Nuevo Laredo.

I sat in the front passenger seat with my hands flat on my knees, watching the high beams cut through the black country. In the back seat, my brother was curled against the door with his canvas bag of cash pulled tight against his ribs. His breathing was heavy and uneven.

"How long to the turn?" I asked.

The man at the wheel did not turn his head. His eyes stayed fixed on the two lanes of buckled asphalt running straight into the scrub country.

"When the sun comes up, we are past Saltillo."

By four in the morning, the heat started to climb through the floorboards despite the dark. The dirt along the shoulders turned white like salt under the headlights, dead scrub stretching out into nothing. The air inside the car grew thick, smelling of old leather, sweating vinyl, and the stale sulfur dust stuck to my wool suit from the East Texas plant.

We hit the mountain grades before dawn. The flat brush disappeared, replaced by grey limestone cliffs that rose straight out of the dark like broken teeth. The engine labored on the long switchbacks, the temperature needle on the instrument panel climbing steady into the red zone. The man at the wheel feathered the throttle with his boot, shifting the transmission with short, harsh jerks of his wrist.

In the high passes of Durango, the crosswinds caught the side of the heavy sedan, shaking the frame. We passed three burnt-out freight rigs turned over in the canyons below the shoulder. Nobody had cleared them. They lay in the rocks with their frames twisted black, their tires long burned off to the rims.

"There is a checkpoint at the state line," the man at the wheel said. "They are not federales. Do not look them in the eye. Give them the folder from the glove box."

I opened the compartment, pulled out the stiff leather folder containing the signed company audit draft, and held it on my lap.

The checkpoint appeared around a sharp bend three commercial flatbeds parked sideways across the blacktop under a single unshielded bulb. Two men in mismatched green wool uniforms stood beside an oil drum fire, their rifles slung barrels-down against the high mountain mist.

The sedan stopped. The man at the wheel left the engine idling rough and wet. He reached across me, tapped the window switch, and rolled my glass down two inches.

I pushed the leather folder through the gap. A hand took it rough skin, dark, the knuckles swollen from the cold. We waited three minutes while the idle hunted up and down. Through the glass, I watched one of the men hold a flashlight to the draft, his thumb running over the rival's dark, cramped signature at the bottom.

The folder came back through the window, empty. The man in green didn't say a word. He waved his light toward the gravel shoulder, showing a space just wide enough for the sedan to pass.

We cleared the ridge as the sun hit the sky a flat, bleached white daylight that turned the 100°F air to dust. Below us, the western slope dropped away into the coastal plain outside Culiacán.

At four in the afternoon, the asphalt ended at twenty-foot security walls made of rough grey cinder block, topped with spiraled concertina wire. Heavy red iron gates blocked the road. Two men in dark tactical vests stood by the concrete post, their faces bare under the glare.

The driver pulled the car up to the red iron, put the transmission in park, and cut the ignition. The engine died with a wet clunk.

"We're here," he said.

My brother stirred in the back seat, clutching his bag. "Where are we?"

One of the guards walked to my door, reached through the open window, grabbed the inner latch, and pulled the door open into the heat.

"Welcome," the guard said.

I stepped out. My brother stepped out. We entered the town.

Corpses hung from the electrical wires, cardboard signs marked TRAITOR strung around their necks, while flies swarmed over them in dense, black clouds. The smell of rotten eggs and raw sewage hung thick over the street, cut through by cheap aerosol perfume.

Beneath the hanging bodies, children kicked a plastic soccer ball through dust and red, white, and orange petals scattered across the cobblestones like neat vines. Above the alleyways, festive paper banners fluttered between the rooftops. In the open storefronts, the town bakers slid loaves into brick ovens while men in bloodied aprons heaved slaughtered pigs into a charcoal pit.

We walked through the lower settlement without stopping.

At the upper gate, two armed guards pulled the iron bars open and signaled us toward the inner compound. The road climbed a sharp grade, leading directly toward the main manor.

In the open courtyard, an instructor was breaking in a squad of young, malnourished men. Dark rings bruised the skin beneath their eyes, their ribs standing out sharp against their skin.

There were two dozen of them, dressed in faded tank tops, torn shorts, and jeans; a few were shirtless. Their skin was darker, burned by a different sun, their dialects belonging to the southern coast hundreds of miles away. They were pulled off intercity buses or dragged from the fields of Michoacán and Oaxaca, brought up into the high country.

The instructor wore green fatigues under a black tactical vest bearing a faded GAFE patch on the shoulder.

"If you wimp out, I will force-feed you your own flesh," the instructor said, pacing the line. "I will pit you against another man with a machete. If you win, you get recorded on a tape for breeding. Then I will kill you, hang you in the town square, or dissolve your body so the pigs can eat what's fucking left."

He stopped in front of the line.

"You think you are men?" he said. "You are mud. You are the shit scraped off the boots of people who matter. Look at you, shaking like dogs in the rain. I have killed better men than you just to clear my throat in the morning."

He paced the row, his combat boots kicking up yellow dust that settled over the bare chests of the recruits. He stopped inches from a boy who could not have been older than seventeen, whose knees were knocking under his worn denim.

"You want to cry? Cry," the instructor said. "Call for your mothers in Michoacán. Call for the priests. Let us see if they can catch a bullet. If you look down at the dirt one more time, I will carve the eyes right out of your skull and make your friend swallow them."

He turned around and gestured down toward the valley.

"The town below thinks they are safe because they bake bread and hang paper banners. They are alive because we let them breathe. And you will serve us, or you will rot under them. Pick up the wooden rifles. Pick them up or I start shooting legs."

The silence that followed was heavy, broken only by the distant hum of flies from the street below.

Then came the sharp, metallic click of a slide racking.

It did not come from the instructor. One of the recruits shorter than the rest, his chest hollowed out beneath a soiled tank top stood with both arms extended. His hands shook, but the barrel of a black 9mm pistol, lifted from a wooden crate by the shade overhang, was pointed dead at the center of the GAFE patch.

The instructor did not reach for his sidearm. He did not step back. He simply stared at the boy and began walking straight toward the muzzle.

Before the boy could pull the trigger, a gunshot cracked from the rank behind him. Another recruit shot him through the thigh.

Four more shots hit the traitor’s lower legs until his knees buckled and he slammed face-first into the gravel. Before the smoke cleared, the rest of the recruits surged forward, pulling short blades from their belts and stabbing him methodically. One blade caught him across the abdomen, and grey intestines spilled onto the sand.

The instructor held up his hand.

"Stop wasting ammo," he said. "Your aim is improving. Good job."

He turned toward the barrel facility without looking down at the body. "Get the cleaning crew out here."

Semi-tactical men the same kind who guarded the gates escorted the boys toward a ranch set up with cameras and machetes.

Four men in hazmat suits placed the corpse into a blue bag and shoved it inside a barrel. They carried it across the sand, past the chemists moving batches of product toward a wide warehouse stacked with barrels and iron shelves, just as the next truck rolled in with another batch of recruits.

Beyond the yard lay the shallow trenches where the earth was choked with feces and the gray loath of uncounted dead and the trucks came on through the white dust and they unladed the boys from the interior like pigs to be butchered and rendered down into the nothingness of the desert where no god watched and the sun rose small and bloody over the bonecolored plain the barrel workers obscured them and placed them in the cylinder.

The recruits swallowed the pills with no water and took their rifles out to the ditch. One hundred men from nowhere were sitting in the dirt with their hands tied behind them with wire. The recruits stood in a line and fired into the ditch until the men stopped moving, then they changed magazines and fired into them again.