Our Lady of Holy Death Read online

  Gary Gibson

  Our Lady of Holy Death

  First published by Brain in a Jar Books 2020

  Copyright © 2020 by Gary Gibson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  Gary Gibson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book and on its cover are trade names, service marks, trademarks and registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publishers and the book are not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. None of the companies referenced within the book have endorsed the book.

  This short story is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Our Lady of Holy Death

  Our Lady of Holy Death

  Note: This story takes place several years before the events of Devil’s Road.

  “Hey!” Something cold and hard nudged Dutch in the ribs. “Wake up, chele.”

  Dutch opened her eyes to see a man looming over her where she lay sprawled across a hotel bed, still wearing the same clothes from the night before. Tattoos covered his shaven skull. She found her attention drawn to his right hand, which held a pistol.

  He poked her in the ribs a second time with the barrel of the pistol. “You’re Dutch McGuire, right? My boss sent me to fetch you.”

  From out of the corner of one eye Dutch could see an empty bourbon bottle lying an inch or two from where her hand trailed on the floor. She could still taste horchata laced with whiskey on her tongue.

  The tattooed man leaned back, lowering his pistol slightly so that it was pointing away from her. Dutch moved swiftly, bunching her left hand into a fist and slamming it into the man’s balls, which were protected by nothing more than a pair of baggy nylon shorts.

  He folded up, enough early morning sunlight worming its way past greasy-looking curtains that she could see the flowers and gravestones tattooed across his forehead. Dutch pushed her advantage, snatching up the bourbon bottle and swinging it hard against the side of his head. It made a loud thunk, and her attacker went crashing to the floor, the pistol slipping from his grasp.

  Rolling up off the mattress and onto her feet, Dutch snatched up the pistol and aimed it down at him. When the man saw it, he froze in the act of struggling back upright.

  By now she was breathing hard, adrenaline flooding her bloodstream. Being attacked in your hotel room, it seemed, made for a great hangover cure. And judging by the sweat already prickling her shoulders, it was going to be another blisteringly hot day in El Salvador. A weather report she’d heard on the way down said it hadn’t rained in weeks.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Dutch demanded. “What is this, ‘rape a tourist day’?”

  The tattooed man put both hands up in a gesture of surrender. He had much the same look on his face as her high school sweetheart on the evening when, instead of getting hot and heavy with her in the back of his car, he had confessed he was gay and explained their promised night of debauchery wasn’t going to happen: a mixture of alarmed confusion and outright terror.

  “Okay, okay!” the man pleaded. “My boss sent me. Your friend Miles is his guest.” He glared at her. “I heard you were trouble.”

  You got that right. “Who’s your boss?”

  “Shorty Carreras.”

  Shorty Carreras. The name was familiar, and not in a good way. “So what did Miles do that has you looking for me with a gun?”

  “Look,” said the man, still nursing his balls with one hand, “I’m just the messenger. Besides, you were expecting me, right?”

  “I was expecting Miles.”

  “Yeah, well, Miles asked me to come get you.”

  “Bullshit.”

  The man shrugged. “Take it or leave it. But he is expecting you, and so is my boss. Matter of fact,” he added, “he’s kind of a fan of yours.”

  Dutch had received an urgently worded email from Miles just a few days before, begging her to help get him out of some mess he’d got himself into down in El Salvador. She’d thought of ignoring it, but knew if she did she’d never forgive herself when she still owed him, and big-time, no matter how much of an asshole he was.

  “What’s your name?” Dutch asked him.

  “Eddie.”

  “I’m going to hang onto this for now, Eddie,” said Dutch, holding the pistol up. “What does your boss want with Miles?”

  “I’m not allowed to say,” Eddie replied. Moving slowly, he stood back upright, keeping his hands in full view.

  Dutch shook her head. “That’s not good enough, Eddie.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Eddie. “If I told you any more, my boss’d cut my tongue out.” He gestured at his pistol in Dutch’s hand. “Can I have my gun back?”

  She gave him a long, hard stare. “I’ll think about it.”

  Eddie’s mouth formed into a thin line and he stepped towards the door of her hotel room, easing it open. “Fine. Guess I don’t have any choice but to wait for you to make your mind up. My ride’s parked outside the Casa de Loros,” he added, naming the bar next to the hotel, then wrinkled his nose. “Don’t take it the wrong way, chele, but you need a shower.”

  “Why the hell should I go anywhere with someone who just pulled a gun on me?”

  “Up to you,” said Eddie, “long as you don’t mind never seeing your friend alive again. You’ve got twenty minutes, and then I’m gone.”

  He exited, closing the door with a click. Dutch swore under her breath, then pulled the edge of her T-shirt up to her nose and grimaced.

  He was right. She did need a shower.

  * * *

  Dutch emerged from the hotel fifteen minutes later, a pair of cheap sunglasses concealing her eyes. Dogs chased each other across a park opposite the hotel. Eddie waited as promised outside the Casa de Loros next to an expensive-looking SUV that looked like it had been modified for manual drive.

  Dutch had remembered where she’d heard the name Shorty Carreras halfway through her shower. Really, she should have figured it out from the moment she saw Eddie’s gang tattoos. These days, drug gangs practically ran El Salvador, and Carreras was in charge of one of the biggest of the gangs. She’d heard stories about how he liked to feed his rivals to lions he kept in a private zoo.

  This is the last time, Miles, she thought, getting into the SUV next to Eddie. After this, you fix your own damn messes.

  * * *

  Eddie proved to be a halfway decent driver, a skill few people retained these days. Elegant villas with whitewashed walls soon gave way to hovels with corrugated iron roofs. A few miles outside of town Eddie guided the SUV down a side road. They drove past well-tended gardens, and ahead she saw a domicile of which an emperor might have approved. Parked outside of a mansion that burned white beneath the midday sun, Dutch saw a long row of cars, mostly sports models, including one that looked a lot like Miles’ Ford Falcon Coupé; the same car he’d been driving when he’d rescued her halfway through a Run.

  Eddie pulled up outside broad stone steps that swept up to a grand entr
ance. Dutch got out and looked around, seeing that amongst more conventional potted flowers were species otherwise found only on Teijouan and, hence, thoroughly alien in appearance. A servant came down the steps and took the SUV’s keys from Eddie.

  Dutch nodded up at the mansion. “We’re going in there?”

  Eddie snapped a glare at her and shook his head. “This way.”

  He led her away from the mansion toward tall wire enclosures separated from each other by broad paths and more gardens. Carreras’s private zoo, she thought with a chill. They passed through a low gate and Dutch saw a leopard within a cage, a gold collar around its neck. The roar of a lion came from somewhere nearby. There were more plants and flowers here, both conventional and Teijouanese.

  They eventually arrived at a wooden chapel big enough to house a congregation a hundred strong. Rather than the usual saints, its stained glass windows featured a robed skeleton. Santa Muerte, Our Lady of Holy Death, beloved of gangsters and drug dealers. Dutch swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry.

  Two broad-shouldered men in tight suits clasping machine guns stood on either side of the chapel’s entrance. Like Eddie, elaborate tattoos covered their faces.

  Eddie paused at the entrance to the church. “Going to need my gun back, chele,” he said with a nasty smile. “Or these gentlemen will kill you.”

  Before Dutch could answer, one of the two men had aimed his machine gun at her. The other slung his machine gun over his shoulder by a strap and searched her thoroughly, quickly divesting her of Eddie’s pistol. Dutch glared past him at Eddie, who grinned in apparent satisfaction as his weapon was returned to him.

  Satisfied, the man who had searched her pushed open tall wooden doors, and Eddie led Dutch inside.

  Within, Dutch saw a raised dais where an altar and pulpit would normally be, but in place of the usual crucifix above the dais there was instead a statuette of the same skeletal figure wrapped in a hooded robe. Rows of lit black candles sat on a cloth-covered table directly beneath the statuette’s feet. An old woman was busily clearing away the remains of burned-out candles and replacing them with fresh ones.

  There were also bundles of dried flowers in upright vases and heaped on the table before the candles. Dried leaves crowded the floor at the foot of the table. And instead of rows of benches, most of the floor space was taken up by flat steel bars laid over the mouth of what appeared to be a huge pit with concrete-lined walls.

  Stepping closer, Dutch saw that the steel bars were driven into the concrete, with a gap of a few inches between each bar. A circular concrete bench surrounded the pit, which had to be nearly forty feet across.

  A corpulent figure in a white suit sat on the bench, gazing down into the pit and smoking a cigarette. He had his back to the skeletal figure, the head of which was angled so that it, too, gazed into the pit. A zippo lighter and cigarettes lay on the bench by the man’s side, the lighter’s brass body engraved with another image of Santa Muerte.

  The man looked up, studying Dutch for a moment. “Good work, Eduardo,” he said in lightly accented English, and stood. “I’m delighted to meet you at last, Miss McGuire. I’ve heard so much about you.” He stepped towards her, grinning. “I bet on you a couple of times in the Devil’s Run, you know.”

  “Sorry you lost your money,” said Dutch, fighting not to show her nerves.

  “Dutch?” She heard a voice call out from somewhere nearby. “Dutch! You came!”

  A moment passed before Dutch realised the voice came from beneath her. She looked down into the pit and felt her stomach constrict in horror; a Toothgrinder, a mid-sized kaiju massing about the same as a small truck, stared back up at her. Narrow, reptilian eyes were set above a long, broad snout bristling with teeth.

  Dutch drew in a sharp breath and stepped quickly back from the edge of the pit. Toothgrinders had a suitably fearsome reputation. She’d seen one chew its way through the chassis of another racer’s car on her second Run.

  The kaiju blinked at her, a deep grumbling sound emanating from somewhere deep in its throat, but otherwise remained motionless.

  “Dutch!”

  There was, she realised with mounting horror, someone down there in the pit with the Toothgrinder. She could see him crouching in the shadows, next to a grating…

  “…Miles?”

  “So you weren’t lying, Mr Gonzales,” the man in the white suit said, directing his comment to Miles. “You do know the great Dutch McGuire.”

  Dutch snapped her head around at the man sitting on the bench. “Who the fuck are you, anyway?”

  Eddie stepped up to Dutch and slapped her across the face with one open palm. “You be careful how you speak to Mr Carreras. Show some respect!”

  Carreras? Shit.

  She glared at Eddie. “You want me to give you another spanking like I did back at the hotel? Just try that again.”

  Carreras raised an eyebrow. “What’s she talking about, Eddie?”

  Eddie shot Dutch a look that could have burned the sun out of the sky. “Nothing.”

  Dutch turned back to Carreras and pointed down into the pit with one trembling hand. “Miles is a friend of mine,” she said. “I don’t know what he’s done to piss you off badly enough that you’d put him in there with that thing, but if you give him to me, I’ll drive him up north and you’ll never see or hear from either of us again, I promise.”

  Carreras smiled in a way Dutch didn’t like at all. “I wish it were that simple,” he said. “Unfortunately, me and Mr Gonzales have some unfinished business regarding my new acquisition.” He nodded down at the Toothgrinder. “Mr Gonzales,” said Carreras, leaning forward slightly to peer down into the pit, “perhaps you could enlighten Miss McGuire as to the details of our business arrangement?”

  How the hell, thought Dutch, could Miles still be alive? The Toothgrinder should have eaten him the moment they put him in there with it.

  Except… it was clear something wasn’t quite right with the Toothgrinder. Every such kaiju she had encountered during the Devil’s Run had done its level best to eat both her and her car. Never before had she seen one just…sit there like a stoned puppy, ignoring a fresh meal.

  Dutch glanced back up at Carreras. “What if that thing tries to eat him before he can talk?” She glanced at the steel bars covering the pit which, she suspected, weren’t remotely adequate to contain the beast. “Or if it tries to break out?”

  “For reasons I hope will soon become eminently clear,” Carreras replied with a feral grin, “I would be delighted if it did eat him. And those steel bars are four inches thick, Miss McGuire. The beast cannot possibly escape.”

  Dutch had her doubts about that, but turned her attention back to Miles without saying anything more on the subject. “Maybe you’d better hurry up and tell me what’s going on, Miles.”

  “Mr Carreras paid me a lot of money to deliver a live kaiju to him,” said Miles. “Except, well…” he nodded towards the Toothgrinder, which filled half the pit. “You can see it’s not exactly acting like any other kaiju you’ve ever seen.”

  “I understand from Mr Gonzales,” said Carreras, “that you’re something of an expert in kaiju biology, Miss McGuire, as well as being a regular participant in the Devil’s Run. You see,” he continued, gesturing down at the kaiju, “Mr Gonzales was good enough to fulfil his side of our agreement by delivering an egg from which this creature hatched right here in my chapel. Unfortunately,” he continued, “the kaiju is clearly sickly. That makes me very concerned that Mr Gonzales has sold me, as you say in the United States, a lemon.”

  She glared down at Miles. “What exactly did you say I could do?”

  “That you, you know, know stuff,” said Miles, grinning up at her like a lunatic. “Like you told me one time about the biology of the kaiju’s and the flora and fauna on Teijouan’s like nothing else on Earth? So I figured if anybody knew why it just sits there doing nothing, it would be you.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Dutch shouted down at him, “did
you think about maybe looking on Wikipedia? It’s not like there’s a lack of information about kaiju, Miles! Why not ask a fucking biologist?”

  “Only the public stuff is online!” Miles shouted back. “And I don’t know any biologists or anyone else I could trust to keep their mouths shut. And besides, you said the stuff you told me was classified!”

  Dutch opened her mouth to frame another retort then shut it again. She had said that, she remembered now.

  “I’m curious,” Carreras asked her as he lit another cigarette. “You don’t especially seem to like Mr Gonzales. So why come to his aid?”

  “Because I owe him,” she said with a tired shrug. “He pulled me out of a burning wreck in the Run a few years back.”

  “I see.” Carreras nodded gravely. “I think I remember something about that. It’s very exciting, watching the race from here. All those monsters roaming the island.” He shivered with school-boyish excitement. “Life in El Salvador can be, well, dull by comparison.”

  Dutch glanced around the chapel and suspected Carreras had all kinds of unpleasant ways to keep himself and his friends entertained.

  Something caught her eye—long-stemmed orchid-like flowers with a pinkish-green hue gathered in vases. The only other place she’d seen them was on Teijouan. They were sometimes called zombie roses for their resemblance to bloodless human arms with grasping fingers, and were assumed to originate from whichever hellish dimension had also spawned the kaiju.

  Dutch glanced back down at the Toothgrinder. While it wasn’t moving, neither was it asleep; rather, its attention appeared fixed on the edge of the pit closest to the zombie roses.

  Just then its nostrils flared as if scenting something particularly delightful, a wistful grumble emerging from deep within its monstrous gullet.

  While the idea she was any kind of expert on Teijouan’s unique biology was utter bullshit, neither was Dutch entirely unaware of some of the scientific findings made on the island, even if half of them had been overheard in a bar and the rest she’d learned during a drunken fling with a biologist who didn’t give a shit about government NDA’s.