I feel a weird rumbling through my feet. Does Mictlan have earthquakes? No. It doesn’t feel like that. Too steady, too low. I can see a thin cloud of dust further down the road. “Anything else we need to worry about?”
“Too many to list. This is why Santa Muerte needs you. Look at this place. Before the Fall this was filled with souls on their journey to their final rest in Chicunamictlan. It was a rough existence for them, being judged by your gods is never easy, but it was more like the world outside than this. There were plants, water. Servitors of the dead to help the souls on their journey. Now look at it. Discarded scraps of flesh and bone. The rivers are blood for fuck sake.” She bends down and picks up a fragment of a skull and tosses it into the distance.
Does she really care? It’s not like Tabitha is old enough to have seen it. How much of this conversation is Tabitha and how much is the piece of Santa Muerte grafted to her soul? Is there any difference?
“And having a king in place would solve this?”
“This place needs two rulers,” she says. “Mictecacihuatl and Mictlantecuhtli had their own duties in taking care of this place. They can’t do each other’s job.”
That dust storm is really starting to kick up. Tabitha hasn’t noticed it, yet, and I’m not sure if it’s something to worry about. I nod toward it. “Should we try to find cover or something?” Not that there’s any I can see besides the trees. And though there are a lot of them, their threadbare trunks won’t offer much protection. Maybe we can dig a hole in the road and cover ourselves with bones.
Tabitha squints at the cloud. “Shit.”
The dust is spreading in a wide column on the horizon. Instead of the whistle of wind there’s a rumble that sounds like car engines. It takes me a second to realize that that’s because it is the sound of car engines.
“What the hell is that?”
Tabitha starts running toward them. “The narcos I was talking about. Probably some of the Aztecs they’ve roped into joining up with them.”
I break into a run and follow her. Oddly, we’re running toward the column of dust.
Of all the things I was expecting about Mictlan, this is so not one of them.
“They’re in cars? Where the fuck did they get cars?”
“How the hell should I know? I told you things have gone to shit around here.”
She cuts sharply to the left through a break in the trees, kicking up pieces of skull that clattered behind her. Not far off I can see a low hill. At first I think it’s just another bone pile, a wrinkle in the landscape, but there’s a hole in it that becomes apparent the closer I get to it.
“Jesus, Tabitha, what is this? Mad Max?”
“In some places, pretty much. Hurry up, we’re almost there.”
Wherever we’re going we better get there fast because the people chasing us are almost on us. I look over my shoulder and see five vehicles that can only be called cars from the fact that they’ve got wheels and move fast. They burst through the trees, scattering the trunks like tenpins.
The cars look handmade. Sheets of stitched together skin lashed over bone struts. Wheels made out of, shit, I don’t know what the hell they’re made out of, but it’s sure as hell not rubber. Black smoke belches out the back. The cars are bone and sinew like everything else in this nightmare land. And for all that they’re terrifying, there’s an absurdity to them I just can’t wrap my mind around. These things are more Flintstones than they are V8 Interceptor.
“You know, if they’re looking for us,” I yell over the noise of the engines, “the only hole that’s visible for miles might be one of the first places they look.” The engines are getting louder. What the hell do they use for fuel?
“It’s an entrance,” she yells. “To the shortcut. They won’t be able to go in there.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re not us.” She ducks into the hole and the blackness swallows her up. Behind me the cars are speeding closer, throwing up a wake of shattered bone behind them, the engines a deafening roar.
I don’t know what I’m doing, but I know I don’t want to deal with a bunch of post-Apocalyptic cosplayers with war wagons. I jump after her, but a line shoots out from one of the cars and wraps around my ankle, biting deep into the skin, pulling taut. I hit the ground about a foot short of the entrance and get yanked back as the car fishtails into a U-turn.
More trees go over, the car dragging me along and back onto the road. I pull together a small fire spell that I hope won’t cost me too much power and tip me over the edge. A pinpoint of the line holding me begins to smolder.
It’s hard to concentrate when you’re being dragged across a field of broken bones by a car that looks like it should be driven by a nightmare Barney Rubble, but I make do. The spot begins to glow, then flame. As the line burns I can smell cooking meat. Of course. This stuff is made out of flesh.