Alexander Death (The Paranormals, Book 3) (16 page)

“They're dead,” she said. “You made zombie jaguars.”

“Great security against man or beast,” he said. “Took a while for the horses to get used to the smell.”

“Do they have names?”

Alexander smiled. “I call them Pekku and Pukuh. They're named after the god of thunder and the god of death.”

“Mayan gods?”

“That's right.”

“You're really adapting to the locals here.”

“It's not so hard,” Alexander said. “We've been Mayan before.”

“You and me?”

“There were great stone cities in those days,” he said. “You can still find the ruins of them, here and there.”

“What happened to their civilization?”

“The same that happens to all of them,” Alexander said. “Men can't live in peace together. We are designed to compete, and fight, and kill.”

“And what about women?” Jenny asked, with half a smile.

“Women are twice as dangerous.”

Jenny snickered, thinking of Ashleigh. Behind them, the jaguar who'd posed for her leaped off the limb and disappeared into the jungle.

The trail grew steep, rough and choked with lush growth. The jaguars stayed well ahead of them on the trail, where their presence flushed out brightly colored, squawking birds that retreated high into the canopy.

“Do you control everything they do?” Jenny asked.

“I can set them to one repetitive, simple task,” Alexander said. “Like walking. Anything else requires some extra focus.”

“That's amazing,” she said. “Your power's so much better than mine.”

“I've seen you wipe out an entire army in a day. I have nothing compared to what you have, Jenny.”

“It's no good for anything but hurting and killing people,” Jenny said. “There's nothing positive I can do.”

“Sometimes destroying the right people is a positive thing,” he said. “Everything depends on the situation.”

“What was I like, in my Mayan life?”

“Beautiful. Powerful. Intriguing. Frightening. Godlike. Just like you are now.”

“I'm not any of those things. Well, maybe frightening.”

“You were believed to be divine,” Alexander said. “Which you are, of course.”

“What do you mean?”

“We keep coming back, lifetime after lifetime. We wield power over everyone else. We are, in our way, immortal. We aren't entirely wrong to consider ourselves godlike.”

“I don't know. I would think of a God, or gods, as being sort of wise, and kind of above everything, not stuck in the world and trying to figure things out and being clueless most of the time.”

“I've never encountered such a being,” Alexander said. “There is only us. We are the natural rulers of the humans, because we are so much stronger. They are the sheep. We are the shepherds and the wolves.”

“And which are you?” Jenny asked. “Shepherd or wolf?”

He laughed. “I'm a builder. I despise the love-charmer because she is only a taker.”

“You mean Ashleigh?”

“She's a vulture who preys on others and creates nothing herself. A scavenger with no vision.”

“And what do you build?”

“It depends on the age. I had constructed for my tomb in Egypt a step pyramid, which was quite influential on later kings. I have built canals, roads, temples, arenas, harbors, depending on the age. I always leave a mark behind.”

“And what mark are you making in this lifetime?”

“When you see what lies ahead, you'll see what we can accomplish.”

“With cocaine?”

“That will only be the beginning of our revenue. Start-up capital. In time, we will build whatever we like. And your vision will be as important as mine.”

“My vision? So what am I, if she's a scavenger, and you're a builder?”

Alexander grinned. “You're just in it for the adventure.” He urged his horse on, and the stallion galloped fast along the trail. “Try to keep up!”

“Yah!” Jenny yelled, kneeing her horse. The brown and white mare picked up speed, and Jenny lowered her head. She found horseback riding came naturally, as if she'd done it a million times before.

They raced up the narrow rainforest trail, Jenny's heart pounding in her chest. The trail was mostly uphill, except for a few switchbacks along the way.

Jenny lost track of time—it might have been thirty minutes before Alexander slowed down, and Jenny did the same.

They rounded a bend in the trail and came upon a pair of men with rags tied over their faces, hiding everything but their eyes. They pointed AK-47s at the jaguars, who stood side by side on the trail, like statues.

“
Hola
,” Alexander said, as he and Jenny stopped their horses just behind the jaguars.

“
Hola, El Brujo
,” one of the men replied, lowering the cloth to reveal his face. The two armed men stood aside, allowing them to pass. The jaguars darted ahead on the trail. Alexander chatted with them, in a mix of Spanish and Mayan, as he and Jenny rode past.

“Why are they wearing masks?” Jenny whispered when they were out of earshot.

“If another cartel finds us, we don't want them going to their villages. Tracking them down, threatening their families.”

“Threatening their families?”

“Papa Calderon has many enemies,” Alexander said. “But if our work here were discovered, he would have many more.”

They reached a sloped clearing, where dense, overlapping rows of coca plants grew in the shadow of ancient rainforest trees. Workers picked the leaves and dropped them into woven baskets. They moved at a painfully slow pace, but there must have been thirty or more of them harvesting the crop. They were men and women and children, their skin decayed, many with an empty eye socket or missing limb.

Jenny caught her breath. She thought she'd been prepared to see this, but it was still a horrifying sight.

“You okay?” Alexander asked her. “You just went a little pale.”

“It's so weird,” Jenny said. “I expect them all to turn around and attack me, like in
Army of Darkness
.”

“Good movie,” Alexander said.

“Not you, too.”

“What's wrong with the
Evil Dead
movies?”

“Nothing. It's just my boyfriend...ex-boyfriend got obsessed with them. Towards the end of our relationship.” It stung Jenny's heart to talk about Seth that way, but then she reminded herself of how he'd cheated on her, the first chance he got. Knowing Jenny could never cheat on him, because she would kill any other boy she touched.

A warm, moist wind blew through the trees, and a collective groan went up from the zombie workers as it passed through their rib cages and skulls.

“Do you think they're in pain?” Jenny asked.

“I don't think they feel anything.” Alexander dropped from his horse, then helped Jenny down to the ground.

Among the workers, there were three men with cloth masks over their faces and AK-47s slung over their backs. They each held a long wooden pole. Jenny watched one of them use the pole to herd a zombie woman from one plant to the next. She shuffled sideways, her hands still plucking at the empty air, until she was positioned in front of the next plant and resumed harvesting leaves again.

Alexander walked from row to row, chatting with the three living and masked overseers as he inspected the zombies. Jenny saw a few decaying children among them, tugging the lowest leaves from the plants. She shuddered.

When they reached the highest row of coca plants on the slope, Jenny saw a pair of little monkeys shrieking and chasing each other through the trees overhead.

Alexander put a finger under her chin and turned her head to look back at the zombies. “Pay attention,” he said. “Watch what happens.” His fingers remained on her face, and Jenny felt the pox rush out of her, the way it did on those rare occasions when she intentionally used it against someone.

The zombies accelerated, their hands darting from plant to basket and back again. The overseers had to hustle to keep the zombies moving along the rows, but the zombies were more responsive now—one quick tap from a pole would send a zombie a few steps sideways to work on the next plant, no more need for extensive wrangling and prodding each time.

“You've got them moving,” Alexander said. “They'll finish this patch in a day instead of a week.”

“The Jenny pox,” she said. “It's zombie fuel.”

He grinned and tousled her hair. “Exactly.” His hand moved to the back of her neck, maintaining his contact with her. Jenny felt tingly wherever he touched her.

Jenny reached across the row of plants to touch one of the zombies, who looked like a teenage boy with half his face decayed, leaving only grimy blackened skull. Her finger brushed his arm, and he immediately doubled his speed, stripping the plant in front of him. An overseer reached his pole from two rows away and tapped the boy to the next plant.

“They like me,” Jenny said.

“You're the zombie queen.”

Jenny watched the harvest quietly, feeling her connection to Alexander deepen as he drew the pox from inside her. She found herself reaching an arm across his back, feeling the muscles under his shirt. She leaned against him, her head against his chest, wanting to touch him more, suddenly frustrated by her gloves and her long sleeves. He smelled like sweat and tropical humidity and horse and cotton.

“We have to keep all this a secret,” he said.

“Yeah, I'm sure,” Jenny said. She looked out at the rows and rows of coca. Her father had grown a small patch of bad outdoor pot on some long-foreclosed farmland outside Fallen Oak, but it was nothing on this scale. “This is like the most illegal thing you can do.”

“The Mexican feds are a concern, but not our biggest one. The real danger is the other cartels.”

“Why would they care?”

“The Mexican cartels sell to the United States. They buy from cartels in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia,” Alexander said. “The growers. But Papa Calderon has invested in botany, and his people developed a good strong plant that thrives here, in the extreme south of Mexico. We're not too far from Guatemala. Scattered through these mountains, we have the largest coca crop ever grown in Mexico. We can cut out the South Americans and control our own production and distribution. And that would make everyone angry. The Calderon family would be more profitable than their competitors, and the South Americans would all come down on them for setting a dangerous precedent.”

“And you don't have any problem working for people like that?” Jenny asked. “Drug cartels? Violent gangs?”

“What is a government but a violent gang with a flag?” Alexander asked. “In fact, all of this violence is created by the human governments. They could end it all with a wave of their hands, simply make all the drugs legal. Then the trade would be peaceful, like the buying and selling of any legal product.”

“I guess...”

“But governments feed on violence and discord, conflict, people living in fear,” Alexander said. “People looking to their rulers for protection. Peace and tranquility starve the state. If the world does not offer enough threats, the state must manufacture them. With violent drug gangs in the streets, the state grows more powerful. It is the prohibition itself that slowly destroys the society, and the rulers know this, yet they like the power it grants them.”

“But why are
you
doing this?” Jenny asked.

“The opportunity arose, and it interested me,” Alexander said. “You see how I use my share of the revenue to help the local people. I listen to their needs and do what I can to meet them. I've told you, I'm a builder.”

“Schools and clinics,” Jenny said.

“Just simple groundwork. There will be greater things in time. And so far as the violence...Papa Calderon is a man of the old school. He uses violence only where necessary, to defend his business and his people. His competition is the cartel run by Pablo Toscano out of Juarez, which is the largest cartel in Mexico. Toscano is truly insane. Bombing newspapers. Heads on stakes. Entire towns pillaged and burned to make a point. So long as the world is what it is, many people would benefit, many lives would be saved if Calderon took over the market from Toscano. There are many shades of gray between good and evil, Jenny, and the lighter shades are to be preferred, if we cannot have pure white.”

Jenny digested this. She still wasn't sure she agreed with him, but he clearly had a sense of morality about what he was doing, and a vision for helping to making things better for the local people.

“This all sounds pretty dangerous,” Jenny finally said.

“I know. Exciting, isn't it?”

“Doesn't any of it scare you?”

“Jenny, I've suffered every terrible death you can imagine,” Alexander said. “Drawn and quartered. Burned at the stake. Torn apart by tigers in front of a cheering crowd. There's nothing left on this earth that can frighten me.”