CHAPTER THIRTEEN

 

 

At breakfast, Alexander gave Jenny a blank postcard featuring the Space Needle.

“To send your father,” he explained. “You said you didn't want to worry him.”

“What do I tell him?” Jenny was feeling sickly from the wine and liquor, and embarrassed at how she'd thrown herself at him during the party. She hoped he didn't bring it up.

“Anything,” Alexander said. “Tell him the open road beckoned. Tell him you're alive and fine. Just don't tell him where you really are. It'll be postmarked Seattle when he gets it.”

Jenny took the pen he offered and wrote a quick note to her dad, assuring him he was fine. Alexander passed it off to Manuel, who carried it out of sight.

Jenny poked at her eggs, then sipped coffee. “I don't feel like eating. My stomach's all, you know.”

“I bet. You were wild last night. Do you always hit it that hard?”

“Only when I'm in Mexico, on the run from the law. What are we doing today?”

“Visiting the zombie farm.”

“Sounds creepy,” Jenny said.

They left the breakfast for the staff to clean up. In the front drive, Manuel had parked a pick-up truck with a tarp covering the payload. As they approached it, Jenny heard snarling and growling from under the tarp.

“What's under there?” she asked Alexander as he opened the passenger door for her.

“Just walking the dogs. Need a boost?”

“I drive a truck bigger than this back home.” Jenny climbed up into the passenger seat and opened the driver-side door for him. “Need a hand up?”

“Very funny.” Alexander took his seat and started the truck. “You might want to hold on to something.”

“I'll be fine.”

Alexander punched the accelerator, and they roared out through the front gate. Jenny grabbed the door handle as he turned sharply onto the winding dirt road through the heavy growth, then picked up more speed. Soon they were doing more than ninety miles an hour over steep, uneven, muddy roads.

“Aren't there are any, you know, speed limits out here?” she asked.

“Speed limits, yes. People to enforce them, no.”

The roads grew steeper as they climbed into the foothills of the Sierra Madre. Alexander parked the truck at a small ranch, where he spoke with the owner in Spanish. The man provided them with two horses, saddled and bridled and ready to ride.

Jenny gaped at the huge animals. “I've never ridden a horse,” she whispered to Alexander.

“It's easy,” he said. “Just hold the reins and don't fall off. Everything else is easy.”

Jenny's horse was white with large brown spots, and it regarded her with huge black eyes. She felt nervous. She checked to make sure her sleeves were pulled down to her gloves, her ankles covered by her socks and jeans. She didn't want to poison the poor creature with her touch.

The horse stepped closer to Jenny, trying to sniff at her hair. She backed away and patted his head.

Jenny looked at Alexander and the ranch owner, a wrinkled man who must have been in his sixties.

“Okay...so how do I get on?” she asked.

“Just put one foot on the stirrup and swing your leg over.” Alexander indicated a leather loop at the height of Jenny's chest. She looked at it doubtfully.

“I think I left my go-go-Gadget legs at home,” she said. “How do I get up there?”

“When you're comfortable enough, you'll jump.” Alexander took her around the waist and picked her up. He guided her foot into the stirrup, then seated her in the saddle. “How's that?”

Jenny petted the horse while she looked around. It was strange to be so high off the ground, relying on the huge mammal beneath her not to freak out and throw her off.

“Too scary for you?” he asked.

“Oh, whatever. I can handle this.”

Alexander placed the reins in her hand, and Jenny held them loosely while she watched Alexander walk back to the truck. The snarls from under the tarp grew louder, and something punched upward against it, but Jenny still couldn't see what was back there. Then Alexander lowered the tailgate.

Jenny held her breath and tightened her grip on the reins. She was expected some huge dogs to come rushing out of the darkness under the tarp, but nothing emerged. The growls grew louder, though.

Alexander left the tailgate open and jumped into the saddle of his huge black stallion. He pressed his knees into the horse's sides.

“Yah!” he said, and the horse began to trot away, towards the jungle at the edge of the ranch.

“Yah?” Jenny asked, and her horse took off after Alexander. Jenny clung tight as it bounced her up and down. Her hair blew out behind her.

A wall of tropical vegetation stood just behind the rail fence at the edge of the ranch, as if the little valley had been slashed and burned from a dense rainforest. Alexander was riding towards a trail that led up into the rainforest, towards the next mountain.

Alexander whistled. Jenny looked back to see a pair of huge beasts leap out from underneath the tarp on the truck. They weren't dogs at all, but huge cats with golden coats and dark spots. They thudded as they hit the ground—they must have weighed at least two hundred pounds each.

Jenny watched the animals race to the fence and leap over it, then disappear into the jungle.

“Jaguars?” Jenny asked. “You trained jaguars?”

“Don't be silly. Nobody can train a cat.”

Alexander led the way into the jungle, where the dense canopy turned the daylight green. Insects, birds, and monkeys chattered overhead. Jenny watched a few giant mosquitoes land on her wrist, then immediately crumple up and die from her Jenny pox.

In the rainforest around them, she caught an occasional quick glimpse of the great cats darting through the foliage.

“So, if they're not trained...” Jenny said.

“Look closer.” One of the jaguars leaped onto a thick tree limb overhanging the steep trail. It walked until it was directly above Jenny, then sat and licked one paw.

Jenny looked closer. The jaguar had a number of deep gashes in its skin, revealing stripes of gray muscle and bone, but none of these were bleeding. Its coat was matted and dirty.

“They're dead,” she said. “You made zombie jaguars.”

“Great security against man or beast,” he said. “Took a while for the horses to get used to the smell.”

“Do they have names?”

Alexander smiled. “I call them Pekku and Pukuh. They're named after the god of thunder and the god of death.”

“Mayan gods?”

“That's right.”

“You're really adapting to the locals here.”

“It's not so hard,” Alexander said. “We've been Mayan before.”

“You and me?”

“There were great stone cities in those days,” he said. “You can still find the ruins of them, here and there.”

“What happened to their civilization?”

“The same that happens to all of them,” Alexander said. “Men can't live in peace together. We are designed to compete, and fight, and kill.”

“And what about women?” Jenny asked, with half a smile.

“Women are twice as dangerous.”

Jenny snickered, thinking of Ashleigh. Behind them, the jaguar who'd posed for her leaped off the limb and disappeared into the jungle.

The trail grew steep, rough and choked with lush growth. The jaguars stayed well ahead of them on the trail, where their presence flushed out brightly colored, squawking birds that retreated high into the canopy.

“Do you control everything they do?” Jenny asked.

“I can set them to one repetitive, simple task,” Alexander said. “Like walking. Anything else requires some extra focus.”

“That's amazing,” she said. “Your power's so much better than mine.”

“I've seen you wipe out an entire army in a day. I have nothing compared to what you have, Jenny.”

“It's no good for anything but hurting and killing people,” Jenny said. “There's nothing positive I can do.”

“Sometimes destroying the right people is a positive thing,” he said. “Everything depends on the situation.”

“What was I like, in my Mayan life?”

“Beautiful. Powerful. Intriguing. Frightening. Godlike. Just like you are now.”

“I'm not any of those things. Well, maybe frightening.”

“You were believed to be divine,” Alexander said. “Which you are, of course.”

“What do you mean?”

“We keep coming back, lifetime after lifetime. We wield power over everyone else. We are, in our way, immortal. We aren't entirely wrong to consider ourselves godlike.”

“I don't know. I would think of a God, or gods, as being sort of wise, and kind of above everything, not stuck in the world and trying to figure things out and being clueless most of the time.”

“I've never encountered such a being,” Alexander said. “There is only us. We are the natural rulers of the humans, because we are so much stronger. They are the sheep. We are the shepherds and the wolves.”

“And which are you?” Jenny asked. “Shepherd or wolf?”

He laughed. “I'm a builder. I despise the love-charmer because she is only a taker.”

“You mean Ashleigh?”

“She's a vulture who preys on others and creates nothing herself. A scavenger with no vision.”

“And what do you build?”

“It depends on the age. I had constructed for my tomb in Egypt a step pyramid, which was quite influential on later kings. I have built canals, roads, temples, arenas, harbors, depending on the age. I always leave a mark behind.”

“And what mark are you making in this lifetime?”

“When you see what lies ahead, you'll see what we can accomplish.”

“With cocaine?”

“That will only be the beginning of our revenue. Start-up capital. In time, we will build whatever we like. And your vision will be as important as mine.”

“My vision? So what am I, if she's a scavenger, and you're a builder?”

Alexander grinned. “You're just in it for the adventure.” He urged his horse on, and the stallion galloped fast along the trail. “Try to keep up!”

“Yah!” Jenny yelled, kneeing her horse. The brown and white mare picked up speed, and Jenny lowered her head. She found horseback riding came naturally, as if she'd done it a million times before.

They raced up the narrow rainforest trail, Jenny's heart pounding in her chest. The trail was mostly uphill, except for a few switchbacks along the way.

Jenny lost track of time—it might have been thirty minutes before Alexander slowed down, and Jenny did the same.

They rounded a bend in the trail and came upon a pair of men with rags tied over their faces, hiding everything but their eyes. They pointed AK-47s at the jaguars, who stood side by side on the trail, like statues.

“Hola,” Alexander said, as he and Jenny stopped their horses just behind the jaguars.

“Hola, El Brujo,” one of the men replied, lowering the cloth to reveal his face. The two armed men stood aside, allowing them to pass. The jaguars darted ahead on the trail. Alexander chatted with them, in a mix of Spanish and Mayan, as he and Jenny rode past.

“Why are they wearing masks?” Jenny whispered when they were out of earshot.

“If another cartel finds us, we don't want them going to their villages. Tracking them down, threatening their families.”

“Threatening their families?”

“Papa Calderon has many enemies,” Alexander said. “But if our work here were discovered, he would have many more.”

They reached a sloped clearing, where dense, overlapping rows of coca plants grew in the shadow of ancient rainforest trees. Workers picked the leaves and dropped them into woven baskets. They moved at a painfully slow pace, but there must have been thirty or more of them harvesting the crop. They were men and women and children, their skin decayed, many with an empty eye socket or missing limb.

Jenny caught her breath. She thought she'd been prepared to see this, but it was still a horrifying sight.

“You okay?” Alexander asked her. “You just went a little pale.”

“It's so weird,” Jenny said. “I expect them all to turn around and attack me, like in Army of Darkness.”

“Good movie,” Alexander said.

“Not you, too.”

“What's wrong with the Evil Dead movies?”

“Nothing. It's just my boyfriend...ex-boyfriend got obsessed with them. Towards the end of our relationship.” It stung Jenny's heart to talk about Seth that way, but then she reminded herself of how he'd cheated on her, the first chance he got. Knowing Jenny could never cheat on him, because she would kill any other boy she touched.

A warm, moist wind blew through the trees, and a collective groan went up from the zombie workers as it passed through their rib cages and skulls.

“Do you think they're in pain?” Jenny asked.

“I don't think they feel anything.” Alexander dropped from his horse, then helped Jenny down to the ground.

Among the workers, there were three men with cloth masks over their faces and AK-47s slung over their backs. They each held a long wooden pole. Jenny watched one of them use the pole to herd a zombie woman from one plant to the next. She shuffled sideways, her hands still plucking at the empty air, until she was positioned in front of the next plant and resumed harvesting leaves again.

Alexander walked from row to row, chatting with the three living and masked overseers as he inspected the zombies. Jenny saw a few decaying children among them, tugging the lowest leaves from the plants. She shuddered.

When they reached the highest row of coca plants on the slope, Jenny saw a pair of little monkeys shrieking and chasing each other through the trees overhead.

Alexander put a finger under her chin and turned her head to look back at the zombies. “Pay attention,” he said. “Watch what happens.” His fingers remained on her face, and Jenny felt the pox rush out of her, the way it did on those rare occasions when she intentionally used it against someone.

The zombies accelerated, their hands darting from plant to basket and back again. The overseers had to hustle to keep the zombies moving along the rows, but the zombies were more responsive now—one quick tap from a pole would send a zombie a few steps sideways to work on the next plant, no more need for extensive wrangling and prodding each time.

“You've got them moving,” Alexander said. “They'll finish this patch in a day instead of a week.”

“The Jenny pox,” she said. “It's zombie fuel.”

He grinned and tousled her hair. “Exactly.” His hand moved to the back of her neck, maintaining his contact with her. Jenny felt tingly wherever he touched her.

Jenny reached across the row of plants to touch one of the zombies, who looked like a teenage boy with half his face decayed, leaving only grimy blackened skull. Her finger brushed his arm, and he immediately doubled his speed, stripping the plant in front of him. An overseer reached his pole from two rows away and tapped the boy to the next plant.

“They like me,” Jenny said.

“You're the zombie queen.”

Jenny watched the harvest quietly, feeling her connection to Alexander deepen as he drew the pox from inside her. She found herself reaching an arm across his back, feeling the muscles under his shirt. She leaned against him, her head against his chest, wanting to touch him more, suddenly frustrated by her gloves and her long sleeves. He smelled like sweat and tropical humidity and horse and cotton.

“We have to keep all this a secret,” he said.

“Yeah, I'm sure,” Jenny said. She looked out at the rows and rows of coca. Her father had grown a small patch of bad outdoor pot on some long-foreclosed farmland outside Fallen Oak, but it was nothing on this scale. “This is like the most illegal thing you can do.”

“The Mexican feds are a concern, but not our biggest one. The real danger is the other cartels.”

“Why would they care?”

“The Mexican cartels sell to the United States. They buy from cartels in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia,” Alexander said. “The growers. But Papa Calderon has invested in botany, and his people developed a good strong plant that thrives here, in the extreme south of Mexico. We're not too far from Guatemala. Scattered through these mountains, we have the largest coca crop ever grown in Mexico. We can cut out the South Americans and control our own production and distribution. And that would make everyone angry. The Calderon family would be more profitable than their competitors, and the South Americans would all come down on them for setting a dangerous precedent.”

“And you don't have any problem working for people like that?” Jenny asked. “Drug cartels? Violent gangs?”

“What is a government but a violent gang with a flag?” Alexander asked. “In fact, all of this violence is created by the human governments. They could end it all with a wave of their hands, simply make all the drugs legal. Then the trade would be peaceful, like the buying and selling of any legal product.”

“I guess...”

“But governments feed on violence and discord, conflict, people living in fear,” Alexander said. “People looking to their rulers for protection. Peace and tranquility starve the state. If the world does not offer enough threats, the state must manufacture them. With violent drug gangs in the streets, the state grows more powerful. It is the prohibition itself that slowly destroys the society, and the rulers know this, yet they like the power it grants them.”

“But why are you doing this?” Jenny asked.

“The opportunity arose, and it interested me,” Alexander said. “You see how I use my share of the revenue to help the local people. I listen to their needs and do what I can to meet them. I've told you, I'm a builder.”

“Schools and clinics,” Jenny said.

“Just simple groundwork. There will be greater things in time. And so far as the violence...Papa Calderon is a man of the old school. He uses violence only where necessary, to defend his business and his people. His competition is the cartel run by Pablo Toscano out of Juarez, which is the largest cartel in Mexico. Toscano is truly insane. Bombing newspapers. Heads on stakes. Entire towns pillaged and burned to make a point. So long as the world is what it is, many people would benefit, many lives would be saved if Calderon took over the market from Toscano. There are many shades of gray between good and evil, Jenny, and the lighter shades are to be preferred, if we cannot have pure white.”

Jenny digested this. She still wasn't sure she agreed with him, but he clearly had a sense of morality about what he was doing, and a vision for helping to making things better for the local people.

“This all sounds pretty dangerous,” Jenny finally said.

“I know. Exciting, isn't it?”

“Doesn't any of it scare you?”

“Jenny, I've suffered every terrible death you can imagine,” Alexander said. “Drawn and quartered. Burned at the stake. Torn apart by tigers in front of a cheering crowd. There's nothing left on this earth that can frighten me.”

She found herself gazing up at him, as if hypnotized by his dark amber eyes. She didn't move when he leaned his face close, or when his lips touched hers.

It was like an electric jolt—Jenny jumped, and had a sudden memory of Alexander in a different body, purple cape lashing around him in fierce wind, walking a battlefield by spotty moonlight. He picked among the fallen, touching one here and one there, and they raised up on their feet, wearing their bloody leather armor and broken helmets, and they hefted their shields and swords, undead warriors ready for another day in the grisly march of conquest.

Jenny opened her eyes and staggered back from him. “Wait,” she said.

“Too much for you?” He smiled.

“I don't feel like myself,” she said. “I feel like I'm losing control.”

“You're not. You're just remembering who you really are.”

Jenny took a deep breath as she looked out on the rows of workers scrambling to harvest every ripe coca leaf. Put a shovel in their hands and they could dig a ditch. Put a sword or a gun in their hands, and they became unstoppable killers.

She felt sick to her stomach, and a little dizzy. Jenny plucked a few of the coca leaves, shoved them in her mouth, and chewed on them. Alexander removed one of her gloves and took her hand in his, watching her. Soon, her head cleared and she began to feel better.