V-Wars

He propelled the girl in front of himself and pushed her down onto the couch. Thompson gazed at the teenager and gave his head another shake. When the boy sat down, he kept his hands on his knees, letting Thompson see them. The old man did the same. If Bobby thought they were acting strangely, he didn’t indicate it.

Johnny Rocket and Fug stayed out back until Moncho drove up in a white panel van, followed by the other two men in a beat-up Ford Ranger. Moncho was young and tall. His passengers looked dried up, sunburned, eyes rheumy. After Monster and Poison searched them, Thompson and Fug herded them into the house. The living room was very crowded. Moncho lived there alone, and said he had inherited some money. More likely, he made a living ferrying folks across the desert.

“I will drive them to Phoenix, sir,” Moncho said to Bobby. “They’re looking for work. The girl is my cousin. We have more cousins in Phoenix.”

“Thompson here is from Phoenix,” Bobby said. “He owned a shop, what was it called? Sunbird Motorcycles?”

“Oh, maybe,” Moncho said, cocking his head, then nodding. “Maybe I know it.”

“You’re a liar,” Bobby shot back. “That wasn’t what it was called.”

“Phoenix is a big town,” Moncho replied, which was exactly what Thompson was thinking. There probably was a chop shop called Sunbird. He cast a sidelong glance at Bobby. Things were not adding up with him today.

“I just want to take them to Phoenix, please,” Moncho said.

“Illegally,” Bobby replied.

Moncho hesitated. “There’s no one left in México who can do the papers.” He pointed at the older woman, who had been given permission to pour water and make sandwiches for the new people. “That lady, Amalia, her visa was granted, but there was no one at the office when she got there. Everyone was gone. Please, they all nearly died in the desert.”

Thompson looked out the window. The sun was setting, casting washes of lavender and orange against the walls of the house next door. The colors transformed it, making it almost pretty. The loss of daylight was not an issue. According to Bobby, vampires could walk in full sun. They could walk into the Shaft and order a drink, and their reflection would show in the cracked mirror. They could go to the grocery store, attend Mass. Have sex. They couldn’t turn into bats or rats or fly. Luther Swann had told the world that vampires didn’t look any different from humans until it came time to feed. Then their canines extended so they could pierce an arterial wall. The victims died from blood loss.

Chickens, goats, cows and sheep had been dying from blood loss in Sonrisa for six months before Bobby executed the Mendozas. Folks kept livestock on their land and in common areas where some vegetation had managed to grow — the town was just too depressed to get excited over land rights, but they did get riled up when they found drained carcasses lying in the sand. A few of the browner persuasion did some Mexican witchcraft shit — nailed up pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe, burned herbs, put eggs in jars of water inside stalls and pens. None of it did any good.

After the Mendozas were buried, the deaths had stopped for a while, then resumed. Walker thought it was chupacabras — “goat suckers.” Winged, red- eyed monsters, lizard men, aliens — no one knew for sure what they looked like because the “facts” surrounding their existence were fodder for Coast to Coast, maybe, but nothing you’d learn in school.

The dude who ran the liquor store swore he’d seen one swooping down behind the church, but Father Patrick said he hadn’t seen anything. Then there was a piece on the TV about vampires in Eastern Europe who recoiled from crosses and holy water. That was new information, and that freaked everyone out. There were some other vampires that hopped, and wasn’t that weird shit? There were outbreaks all over the world, but each kind was different. So those morons on TV kept saying.

Thompson had thought about exhuming the Mendozas in secret to see if he could tell if they had been vampires, but there really wasn’t any reason to. Besides, he didn’t know what to look for. He was willing to bet the fangs gave it away. Bobby hadn’t examined the bog man, which told Thompson that either Bobby didn’t know how to pinpoint a vampire, either, or that there was some other way he’d known the Mendozas were the real thing.

“Please,” Moncho said to Bobby. “Let them stay in America. Mexico isn’t safe. It’s going to hell.”

“Go get two trucks,” Bobby said to Thompson and Monster. “The Chevy and the Bronco. We’ll have them ready to go by the time you get back.” Ready to go, like they were processed cheese, or sheep.

“Ay, no,” Moncho said in a hushed, despairing voice. The older woman crossed herself. The girl burst into fresh tears. The four illegal men stared at each other.

Thompson was the only one who knew about the gun in the couch. His D.E.A. mind ran down multiple scenarios that included shootouts, massacres, and miracles. He reminded himself that he was undercover, and that he was not a social worker. He was aware that he was reminding himself of that more and more often.

He and Poison went outside, got on their bikes, and went back to the compound. Walker was standing on the porch of his house, smoking a cigarette. He never smoked inside.

“We need two of the trucks,” Poison said. “Bobby says.”

“The keys are on the peg,” Walker informed him. “Thompson, stay out here with me.”

Poison went into the house. Thompson supposed that not being allowed inside was some kind of comment on his status — or lack thereof — so he stayed neutral, compliant. He wondered if Walker wanted to talk about something, open up.

Walker held out his pack of cigarettes. Thompson took one, and accepted a light off Walker’s. The tips glowed in the looming darkness. The large cross on the turquoise door was like a shadow.

“Do you think any of those people are vampires?” Walker asked Thompson.

Thompson figured Walker wanted to place him in the middle between Bobby and himself. It was not a good spot to be.

“I don’t know,” Thompson said, taking a drag on his cigarette. It felt good. He had quit smoking two years before, but what the hell. “But they definitely are illegals.”

Walker inhaled, held the smoke like it was weed, exhaled. His brow was furrowed. He took a second long draw and held it for a longer time, then blew it out. He picked some tobacco off his tongue. Nervous.

“Is Bobby going to kill them?” he asked Thompson.

“I don’t know,” Thompson repeated. “We’re going to drive them out of here.”

“Yeah. Good idea,” Walker said. “They might be vampires. Or infected.” He stared down at his cigarette. “I’m not sure I believe what they said about how somebody becomes a vampire.”

“Yeah,” Thompson said. “I still say chupacabras.”

Walker nodded dubiously.

“We’re driving them out in the trucks,” Thompson added, “even though Moncho has a car and a van.” That enraged him. Bobby was dumping them in the desert without a lifeboat, even.

“They’re criminals,” Walker said, but he sounded upset. “What they did is against the law.”

“We should go the Shaft afterwards,” Thompson said. “Blow off some steam.” He had cell reception there. Maybe he could get through to his handler this time, figure out an exit strategy. He imagined the Phoenix office boarded up like the police storefront. Imagined his call going to voicemail inside the pocket of a dead man inside a coffin. With the way things were going, his cell phone was likely to wind up inside a coffin, too. Maybe he shouldn’t leave. Maybe he could do something, stop something. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do anymore. He thought about the dead man in the desert.

If I had thought he was still alive, would I have done something?

He thought about the girl and the other about to be dumped at the border — if that was really Bobby’s intention — at the mercy of whoever was still there — guard, coyote, pimp.

“The Shaft would be good,” Walker said. “I’ll talk to Bobby about it.”

— 4 —

Thompson and Poison drove the trucks back to 12 Vega. The Mexican women were crying and there were two males lying down on the living room floor and two males on the floor in the kitchen. Moncho was sitting on the sofa with Bobby’s .38 pressed against his temple. Moncho was crying, too. The smells of blood and gunpowder permeated the air like wet gauze.

The dumbass teenager had gone for the gun in the sofa. Bobby shot him through the shoulder and when the older woman tried to staunch the flow with her bare hands, Bobby wagged his gun in her face and told her to back off. The teenager was bleeding all over Moncho’s linoleum kitchen floor, but that wasn’t going to be a problem for Moncho anymore: Bobby was going to force him over the border as well, even though Moncho was a U.S. citizen. He had been born in Sonrisa twenty-three years ago. Went to the same high school all the bussed kids attended. His mother lived in Albuquerque, where she had been born.

Bobby didn’t care. Moncho was part of the plague, the pestilence. If he loved the Mexicans so much, he could go live with them.

“I have no family there,” Moncho protested, as he was herded into the truck beds, to be guarded by O.M.s. Bobby made Moncho walk with his palms against the back of his skull, like a POW. “No home. No job.”

“Not my problem,” Bobby said, watching as Thompson and Poison hoisted the unconscious teenager into the bed. All the men were going in one truck. Bobby had directed that the two women be put into the other truck bed, to cut down on the hysteria. Thompson was going to drive the bitch truck. Bobby would ride shotgun. Maybe Bobby sensed Thompson’s wild hair: a crazy part of Thompson that wanted to careen into the darkness with his cargo of human misery and go someplace, anyplace, better.

If they had let Moncho take his car, his registration would be enough get him back across to America. Bobby was such a shit.

A few people came out of their houses as the two trucks trundled down the street. Most of them were Caucasians, but there were a few browner folks in the mix. The O.M.s had left their bikes at Moncho’s house. Thompson assumed no one would dare to touch them. Or maybe today would be the day the revolution began.