Warehouse of the Dead

 

“I'm not going in there first,” Gregorio said, turning up his nose.  “It's dark and it smells bad, like something died.”

“What do you expect, it’s an old mine,” I said.  “Besides, I’m right behind you.”

He was right, though.  The smell was so strong that I could taste it.  We were ten miles out of town.  The afternoon sun was about halfway down in the sky, but the heat and humidity were suffocating.  I hated Mexico.  The people were okay once you got past the customs and the language thing, but the country would never be the same for me since Gregorio and I had found the Almacen de la Muerte, which means “the Warehouse of the Dead” as they now called it in the Mexican papers.

Gregorio wiped his wide, dirty forehead with his shirtsleeve.  “How come you always go in last?” 

He was twisting his shoe in the gray and red dust like he was exterminating a cricket with his cuffed and stained work boots.  For once, he had the laces tied.  He did that for good luck, and for some reason that bothered me.

“You got a gun so he’s not coming at you from the front.  He’ll try to hit us from the back.  Don't worry about me, though,” I said.  “I’ll just duck.  Maybe you should duck, too.”

“Asshole.  What if he hits us from the side, like from a branch tunnel we don’t see?”

“Get moving,” I said.  “We go in, see what's there, and get back to the air conditioning. That a plan or what?”

“You know, we should take some more men.”

Gregorio wasn't afraid, he just liked to argue. It was how he worked himself up.  He was a solid man and bigger than me, maybe six feet two or so.  He had a broad nose, wide forehead, and looked like some kind of Aztec warrior minus the dirty jeans and wide leather belt with the Caterpillar Truck logo.  His shoulders were like a construction worker’s, with a narrow waist. His hands were big enough to crush a melon or snap a neck.

We smelled pretty ripe since we’d been out in the sun all day scouting the fields, but neither of us smelled as bad as what was coming out of the tunnel.  I read somewhere that the average temperature in Mexico was 81 degrees Fahrenheit.  They must have averaged that during the Mexican Ice Age.  The average humidity is always too wet.

“You want an army, Gregorio?  I’m telling you, this guy works alone.”

He turned to me and shook his head.  “He’s connected.”

“Come on, will ya?”  I said.  “We're wasting time.”

He did have a point, but I just wanted to keep it simple: find the kids, dead or alive, go home, report in, and collect the cash.  There were worse ways to make a living, but they didn’t pay as much.

I raised the barrel of the twelve gauge to my forehead and pushed back my hat.  The metal was almost as warm as my skin.  I looked directly into Gregorio’s dark eyes and found no fear or hesitation, only a hard shine.

Finally, he shrugged, and slid his red-checkered bandanna up and over the lower half of his face making him look like a Mexican bank robber.  He had his police flashlight in one hand and the black Glock in the other, hanging easily in his grip.  People that are scared squeeze a gun handle so hard their knuckles almost pop through their skin.  I had never seen Gregorio scared.

While he kept an eye out, I pulled my bandanna up over my mouth and nose too.  It didn't stop the greasy smell, but it cut it down a little.

The tunnel, an abandoned silver mine, was set into the side of a small hill of hard-packed red-brown dirt just outside of Guadalajara.  Weeds clung about the mouth of the entrance, their roots like thick fingers grasping the ground.

Gregorio flicked on his flashlight and began walking into the shadows, the beam cutting through the darkness like a light saber as he played it back and forth.

The halogen lamp strapped across my chest sent a circle of white forward and onto the back of his white cotton shirt.  The shadow of my shotgun barrel cut across it, making it look like he was wearing a “No Smoking” sign on his back.

By my calculations, our target was most likely gone or dead, but we walked as quietly as we could anyway. Gregorio had a point.  People died in Mexico and were never heard from again.  It wasn't as bad as in Chile, but it happened. 

Guadalajara was a bad town, even for Mexico.  But the way I looked at it, any country whose favorite vehicle was the Volkswagen Beetle deserved what it got.  You couldn't drink the water unless you'd been vaccinated.  Couldn't sleep with the women unless you'd been vaccinated.  And mordida—graft—was the basic currency of business.  Nothing got done unless you juiced the right people.  If you thought about it, it was a lot like Detroit, only hotter.

We were the only noise and movement through the heavy air except the occasional rustling of thin leather wings beyond the bobbing haloes of our lights.  The odor grew stronger and I could feel it coating the lining of my mouth.  I had to alternately tense and release my muscles to keep from throwing up into my bandanna.

It wasn't much of a mine.  A couple of four by four by eight wooden braces the color of well-done meat, and crunchy pebbles that ground between the metal rails and our boots with hard dirt walls too low for comfort.  Rusty lanterns hung from spikes pounded in by someone long since dead.

“Used to run train cars in and out of this place, no?” asked Gregorio.

“Looks like,” I said.

 “Pretty crappy mine, eh?”

Gregorio had a pregnant wife and a five-year-old boy named Bruno.  That bothered me as we walked.  My own life was kind of empty since the accident, except for the hit and run types.  I turned a valve a long time ago in a factory now dismantled and sold for scrap.  It killed half the town.  It was like Bhopal, India, except on a smaller scale.  Two hundred and twelve dead taxpayers and twenty-one plant workers all dead except for me.  Hard to hang with a good woman after that.

“You see anything move, you shoot it,” I reminded Gregorio.

“Si, Madre,” he said without looking back.

We found them twenty suffocating minutes into the mine.  There were seven bodies in various stages of decay, bound by chains and manacles and lined up against the packed dirt wall in the cut-away as though they were on display; gruesome, bloated mannequins profiling the latest in death apparel.  They were so swollen from internal gas that their clothes had cut into their skin.  Their necks were truncated in disgusting stumps, with their heads resting between their purple and black bloated legs. I could tell that the skin from the eyebrows up had been cut and peeled back like I had seen before.

Someone had posed them carefully and was proud of his work.  The cut-away was a carved-out space to the side of the tunnel, dug in maybe six feet, and was braced and supported.  I turned and scanned the area constantly while Gregorio checked the bodies.  It was like being a human lighthouse with the lamp strapped across my chest as I turned and turned looking for someone to shoot.

Gregorio was bent over the third body from the left, hunkered down on all fours.  The smell emanating off the bodies that were now rotted carrion, chewed and eaten by cave animals as though they were just meat, was too much for him.  I heard him retch as he pulled down his bandanna, and turned my head as he threw up on a body.

He yanked away from me as I took his arm.  There wasn't any reason for him to be ashamed.  He and I knew it and we both felt like shit, but there it was.  As he struggled to get to his feet, I bent over once again and reached out for his arm, realizing too late my mistake.

The shadows out of the corner of my eye were moving.  Black against black in motion, big and coming toward us quickly.  As I turned, I fired upward at a slight angle, shooting completely by instinct.  The flash blinded me while the noise deafened me.

Later, when I got out of the hospital, I would learn that I had shot him squarely in the crotch, which was some consolation for the miner’s pick that he’d stuck into my right arm.