It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles by Stephen Graham Jones

Ciudad Acuna, yeah?”

    The pens were just where the hand had told me they were. And they were just like all the other pens in the world: the fences and gates up on packed mounds of dirt, at least in comparison to the wallowed-out places a hundred years of cattle had been pushed through. There was an old wooden windmill, too, with a concrete tank and chipped trough. I didn’t need it anymore, though. From the bunkhouse refrigerator, I had a sackful of cokes and three sandwiches. When most of them were gone, I occupied myself peeling skin from my burned shoulders, arranging it on the board I’d been using as a plate. From the grey trees between me and the main house, a big horned owl was either watching me or sleeping with its eyes open.
    I tried to make my skin look like a snake shed, but my breath kept moving it.
    By four, I heard my ride coming.
    Fifty miles away, even, people were probably stopping, cocking their heads over to the sound.
    Manuel’s cousin was driving a dune buggy. Not just a converted bug, either, but a full Baja-looking frame, complete with stickers and chrome you’d have to be able to see for miles, even by starlight. And the exhaust, it was pointing straight up, for all the world to hear. No muffler.
    The cousin slid sideways to a stop, raised his goggles to me, shrugged.
    “Uvalde, señor?” he said.
    He was being funny.
    Behind his seat, strapped in with the kind of metal you use to hang mufflers, was a pony-keg-as-gas tank. The engine sounded like it was running on methanol, maybe, if not just straight nitrous. Manuel’s cousin patted the black leather bucket seat beside him and I grinned as if this hurt, climbed down into it.
    “Uvalde,” I said, nodding, and he smiled and jammed the shifter back hard, the sand paddles spraying an unnecessary roostertail behind us, the two runners up front going weightless for a few feet. I was paying twenty thousand dollars for this.
    Provided Manuel wasn’t just going to take the whole ammo box.
    Part of the deal had been payment in full, whether I made it back this time or not. Which came down to payment now. I didn’t have any choice, though, and, obvious as Manuel’s cousin was here, it was him or nothing. And he was fast. I had no complaints there.
    At the first fence, he reached behind my seat, handed me the bolt cutters, and I snapped the barbed wire apart. The first of six sets of it for us, and he’d probably cut three or four more just getting to me, so that we made a line, I was sure. From Del Rio to Uvalde. Or even as deep as Ciudad Acuna.
    I couldn’t worry about any of that then, though. What I had to do, mainly, was hold on, and keep counting the canisters warm against my chest. I was supposed to be at the other warehouse no later than dusk. Just to be sure, the client rep had informed me of the exact time the sun was going to duck under the edge of the earth.
    At this rate, I’d have to find something to do until then. Maybe whittle a toothpick, push all the fillings back up into my teeth. At top speed, the buggy could stand up and run on the paddles. Getting up to speed, though, on the packed dirt of a pasture, it was like riding on square tires.
    The cousin was oblivious to all of this. For twenty minutes he smiled, until his teeth were brown with dirt. If I could have seen his pupils, they probably would have been dollar signs. It was definitely time to get out of the business, I told myself. If I was having to depend on people like this for my life.
    For nearly three years of crossings now, I’d seen a grand total of three people. This trip, though, it was like I’d sent out invitations a month in advance, and everybody came.
    Looking back on it, of course I regret not calling Laurie from that bunkhouse like I should have. What I console myself with is that she probably would have been next door with Maria anyway. It was my last chance to talk to her, though, that’s the thing. To hear her voice when she still knew I was alive