My head is really starting to throb. I press the heels of my hands against my eyes. Christ, when I wake up this is gonna suck. “Okay, so why are you here now?”
“At the moment you being unconscious is the only way I can talk to you. The longer you’re here in Mictlan, the faster we’ll sync up. Eventually I’ll just be a voice in your head. And then we’ll be one mind. Anyway, I wanted to talk before you kill real me in the hopes that you’ll flush out fake me and stop turning into a yard ornament.”
“Figured that out, huh?”
“I’m in your head,” he says. “Mictlantecuhtli Lite, remember? Everything you know, I know.”
“You gonna try to stop me?”
“Well, duh. We both know the second I can connect to the real me outside of your skull, I’ll do it in a heartbeat.”
“Fantastic.”
“I think so,” he says. “But that’s not really why I’m here.”
“Oh? Do tell.”
“Quetzalcoatl.”
There’s no reason for playing coy or trying to deny I know what he’s talking about. If this piece of Mictlantecuhtli’s soul knows about my plan to kill the real Mictlantecuhtli, then he knows about my arrangement with Quetzalcoatl. “I did make a deal with him. And I try to keep my promises.”
He laughs, a braying, mule-like guffaw that goes on so long he starts to wheeze. “Oh, that’s rich. Promises. You.” He wipes a tear from his eye. “Have you stopped to think what burning down Mictlan would do?”
I look out at the bone road speeding by in the headlights. “Raise the property values?”
“You’ll destroy hundreds of thousands of souls.”
I stare at him. How had that not occurred to me? The answer comes to me immediately. Because I didn’t want it to. I’ve been thinking of any souls I might run into as the same as ghosts. Just remnants that haven’t moved on to their respective afterlives. Only this is their afterlife.
I came here to save myself, exact revenge for my sister’s murder. Fully prepared to take out anything that got in my way. But this? I burn down Mictlan, I destroy everything in it. I destroy those souls forever. This is mass murder.
But if I don’t burn down Mictlan, then when I get out of here Quetzalcoatl’s going to make my life a living hell. Scratch that. If I get out of here.
“Shit.”
“And here I thought you didn’t have a conscience,” he says.
“What the hell is Quetzalcoatl’s deal, anyway? Why’s he got such a hate on for this place?”
“Oh, the usual. Jealousy, ambition, he’s a dick.”
“Sounds like there’s a story there.”
“There always is.”
“Christ, I hate talking to you.”
The car shudders. I know what that means. The last time I had this vision the car crashed, and I woke up covered in blood, in a storage room of an electronics store, a couple of demons arguing about whether they should eat me or not.
“I think you’re going to have to wait on that story,” he says. “I’m sure I’ll see you again soon, the next time you get the shit kicked out of you.”
The car rocks as something unseen hammers it from the side, it goes into a skid. Mictlantecuhtli pulls hard on the wheel, looking suitably surprised. Is he really, I wonder, or is it just my brain’s interpretation of things?
The car wobbles, hits something in the road and goes end over end like something out of a bad, seventies TV show. Whatever. I’ve been here before. I sit back and enjoy the rollercoaster.
Because whatever is happening here, it’s going to suck so much more when I wake up.
___
I come to, my right eye snapping open, my left too crusted over with blood from a cut on my forehead to do more than twitch. I’m lying on the bone ground staring up at the ceiling of some kind of tent that, it takes me a moment to realize, is stitched together panels of human skin.
Where the jade hasn’t covered me, bruises and scrapes have. There’s a goose-egg of a knot on my forehead where I took that femur to my skull. It takes a few tries to sit up and when I finally make it I wish I hadn’t.
“Manuel,” I say, seeing the dead Bustillo sitting cross-legged in front of me, skin sallow, the upper left side of his head from the cheekbone up sheared away from when I shot him with the Browning. And he ended up here. Huh. Guess he really is a true believer. “You’re looking good.”
He smiles, a sick rictus that only goes up on one side, his push-broom mustache twitching. “Better than you, I bet,” he says.
“Yeah, I get that a lot. Little surprised to see you here, though. Shouldn’t you be a little further back in line for your journey to the Promised Land?”
I’m also surprised to see I’m still breathing and haven’t been tied up. My bag is missing, as is the shotgun, and I can’t feel the weight of Mictlantecuhtli’s blade in my pocket. But nobody’s shanked me so far, so I’ll call that a win.
“I’m told it normally takes a few years to get to this point,” Bustillo says, “but as you can see there is a certain lax enforcement of protocol. Quite the cottage industry has sprung up at the gate from Mitla to get souls this far. And I am resourceful.”