“Which way?” I say.
“Back the way we came.” The barge glides through the river of blood.
Tabitha sits on the gunwale staring silently out at the shore, frowning at the landscape. I can’t tell what she’s thinking. I try not to care, but I’m having trouble with that. I leave her alone and don’t say anything.
Occasionally I see something break the surface behind us, a fin or a piece of flotsam. I can’t tell. I don’t want to know what could possibly live in this.
“Think you can push the barge a little faster?” Tabitha says, eyeing a patch of bubbles in our wake.
“This boat isn’t the most stable thing to stand in. I’d really rather not fall in and have to swim through a river of blood, thanks.”
“No, you really don’t.” Tabitha puts her hand out and a few long bones disengage from the side of the boat and click into another barge pole. She dips the pole into the river and shoves.
“Should I be worried?”
“You ever hear of the Ahuizotl?”
“Sounds vaguely familiar,” I say.
“It’s a sort of cat-dog with hands instead of paws and a prehensile tail that ends with another hand. About the size of a jaguar. It’s pretty unpleasant.”
“And that’s it behind us?”
“If we’re lucky.”
I don’t want to know what it might be if we’re not lucky. I put my back into pushing the boat faster, my eyes on the bubbles frothing behind us. Between the two of us we gain some distance and soon the bubbles disappear. Whatever’s been following has lost interest. I spend the rest of the time watching out for anything that might come leaping out of the blood at us.
We come ashore at a dock that juts out into the canal. Bleached white bone like everything else here except for the red stain from the blood lapping at its pilings. Further back is the Mictlan version of the streets we drove through to get here.
When we get out onto the dock Tabitha gestures at the boat with her hand and it rapidly deconstructs itself and sinks beneath the blood.
We walk through the bone streets, past buildings that would make H.R. Giger cream his jeans. Our feet crunch through shards of skulls like gravel. The heat is more oppressive here than out on the boat. Sweat spreads black soot from the island fire streaking down my face, soaking my shirt. Great. I get this far and I’m going to die of dehydration. I pull off my coat, roll up my sleeves. I catch Tabitha looking at my arms when I do it, no doubt wondering how much more of me has been invaded by jade.
“Shouldn’t there be, I dunno, more Dead here?” I say. “Seems kind of empty.” We haven’t seen anyone since we came through the portal. Even when I drove through the part of Mictlan that extended up to L.A. there were souls around. Not many, but enough that I noticed them. Here there are just empty buildings, silent streets.
“Trust me, that’s a good thing. There are some things we don’t want to run into out here. I told you Mictlan is broken. Just because Santa Muerte rules doesn’t mean she has complete control over it.”
“What, like the locals do? They’re dead.” I try to keep the tone light, but after the Ahuizotl in the river I know this is serious. Besides the challenges I’ve read about, I don’t know what else is here. And if Mictlan is in as bad a shape as she says it is, there’s no telling what kind of nastiness is running around.
I don’t know how much of my magic I can tap into. I can feel a trickle of power in the area, but it’s faint and tastes sour, like spoiled milk. I’m not sure what will happen if I tap it and I don’t trust Tabitha to tell me the truth.
Plus there’s the problem that if I only have my own power to use that won’t last long if I have to do anything big. It’ll come back, but slowly. And if I pull too much and end up inadvertently grabbing Mictlantecuhtli’s power things will go south in a hurry.
“Most of the dead who came in after everything went to shit are Aztecs killed in the war with the Spanish,” she says. “Lately, it’s been devotees of Santa Muerte. But with Mictlantecuhtli out of the picture they can’t reach the end of their journey. So they wander, waiting for things to get better.”
“They don’t sound so bad.”
“Dead warriors?” she says. “The Narcotraficantes, or even the police who follow La Se?ora? Some of them are here, too. We do not want to run into them.”
“And you said I wouldn’t need the shotgun.”
“Shotgun’s gonna do sweet fuck-all, Eric. They’re already dead. You’re not.”
We come out past the buildings, through the narrow, winding streets and onto a wide road heading toward the pyramids in the distance. Bone trees grow thick on either side.