So it didn’t seem exceptional at first, that sound. This was a little after twelve noon, maybe eighty degrees out, a warm day for November, the sun baking straight down
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i the wrecks to recook the spoiled food and crap inside em, raising a stink into the air that got the rats sali- ting. You could spend the rest of the day trying to atter them, banging new dents into the already battered bodies with bats and crowbars, risk getting bitten * you weren’t careful. And for what good reason? Bearing this in mind, Cesar was initially inclined to verlook the skritch-scratch of their claws and the gnaw; of their teeth, having been headed toward the office aler for the phone number of this guy who repaired : heavy equipment, wanting to call him down to look
forklift that had gone kaput. But then he’d hesitated and found himself turning to- the noise. No question, a lot of rats were making Very definitely a whole lot. It gave him the creeps, king about them teeming somewhere just out of sight hind the wall of cars. Maybe some other kind of an- had wandered into the yard and dropped dead. A a cat, a fucking coyote, Christ only knew. It had ened in the past, and what you wanted to do in that was clean things out, torch the car if need be, or fore you knew it, a whole section of the yard would swarming with all kinds of vermin. Worms, flies, aggots, a disgusting situation.
H’.So what Cesar had done was reach into his pocket for flip phone, buzz Jorge over at the recycling plant, tell him to haul ass over with his niner. It took him maybe ten minutes to show, a crowbar in hand, his pistol in a belt holster under his hanging ttails. And when he did, Jorge agreed Cesar’s feel- gs were merited.
“Sounds to me like there’s a lot of goddamn rats back e,” he’d said, and passed the crowbar to Cesar. “Bet215
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ter clean it out or we gonna have some kind of infestation.”
Which was, of course, almost word for word what Cesar himself had been thinking.
The noise leading them forward, they inched their way between twisted front panels, jutting bumpers, partially unhinged doors, and fallen wheel covers. It was like being inside an oven here, heat shimmers above the stacked auto bodies. The scratching was very loud, and you could hear the rats squealing excitedly. And the stink, Jesus, that odor of broiling garbage was enough to make Cesar’s stomach clench.
Suddenly Jorge grabbed his shoulder and steered him to the right. He had his gun in his free hand and was pointing it at the back of an old Buick sedan.
But Cesar had already seen the rats. There had to be dozens of them. Fat ones with pale, slopping bellies that dragged underneath them. Smaller ones not much larger than mice. They were squirming over, under, and around the trunk. Crowding on its closed lid, climbing on each other’s backs, a frenzied jumble. They did not seem to notice the two men. Or maybe they were too worked up to care about them.
A sound of horror and disgust wringing from his throat, Jorge swung his pistol downward and pumped three rounds into the carpet of rats on the ground. Cesar saw a rat explode as it flopped into the air. The rest that had been clustered near the rear wheels and bumper went scrambling away, but a few of them still clung to the trunk lid, pawing at its flaked, peeling finish.
Jorge raised the gun and fired. Another burst of fur, blood, and guts. Something warm splashed Cesar’s cheek, and he winced with aversion. And then the rats
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springing from the trunk, tumbling from it, scat- ng in every direction. “We gotta see what’s inside!” Jorge yelled, his face aty, gesticulating at the trunk with his niner.
crowbar against his thigh, Cesar stepped reluctly toward the Buick. He glimpsed a hairless tail slip : of sight under its chassis, shuddered, and stopped. “Yo, c’mon, open the fuckin’ thing!” Cesar nodded without saying anything. He worked the : end of the steel bar under the trunk lid between the fch and corroded rubber weatherstripping. Then he I down on the crowbar with both hands, using his weight for leverage, took very little prying to disengage the trunk’s
latch. The lid popped creakily. $The stench that rose with the moist, warm air that had trapped inside was sickening. Cesar gagged and his palm over his nose and mouth. Then Jorge ched across his chest and pushed the lid open the rest the way.
pThey stared into the compartment as another blast of illness gusted over them.
corpse was saturated in a reddish stew of blood other juices. Its clothes were gummy, and the fluids seeped into the trunk’s lining. Cesar and Jorge saw ipale hand, a bloated stomach under the scrunched-up and jacket.
large rats had managed to burrow through to the apartment. They withdrew their smeared, gummy uts from inside what was left of the skull and inted out into the bright daylight. The dead man might not have been recognizable ex217
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cept for his clothes. The same familiar clothes he’d been wearing when they’d last seen him.
Their eyes wide, Cesar and Jorge exchanged a glance of shared incredulity.
Felix Quiros’s whereabouts had been discovered, and Tijuana this sure as hell wasn’t.
Blood for blood. That was how he felt it had to be.
Enrique Quiros sat alone in the San Diego office with the words Golden Triangle Services fronting the outer hallway, his designer glasses folded in his shirt pocket, elbows propped on his desk. He was leaning forward into his hands, eyes closed, the balls of his palms pressed against their lids.
Never in his life had he felt so tired.
It had been an hour since he’d returned from the salvage yard and seen the ghastly remains of his nephew. Dumped inside that trunk. Packed into that trunk with his own blood. And the smell. It seemed to linger in Enrique’s nostrils even now, so strong it was almost a taste at the back of his tongue. In his car driving back downtown, he had found an unopened roll of breath mints and popped one after another into his mouth, chewing each in seconds, crushing them between his teeth. That hadn’t helped. He’d stood by the car just briefly. A minute or less. But he thought the stench of Felix’s decomposing flesh would stay with him for a very long time to come.
Head in hands, he massaged his eyes. On the desktop near his right arm was a small leather case that he had withdrawn from a concealed safe elsewhere in the office suite. Inside it was a plastic ampule and a wrapped, sterile syringe. His reward from El Tio for having relayed
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atching kit to Palardy, and a sure means for revenge linst the man culpable for his nephew’s death. Although Enrique was not a scientist, he had a solid an’s understanding of the incredible biological mi he’d been given. The clear liquid sealed inside : ampule was a neutral, harmless medium for transport administration of the microscopic capsules sus- within. But a single drop held a concentration of is, perhaps thousands of microcapsules. And each of those capsules was a tiny bomblet packed trigger proteins that would allow the Sleeper virus cting every human being to “awaken,” that drop id be sufficiently potent to kill the target of an attack times over. All that was required for the virus to ate into its lethal form, attach itself to a specific ge- feature, and amplify, was its victim having a sip 5 water that had been implanted with the trigger, a bite food,… or, Enrique thought darkly, a mint of the : he’d been crunching down in the car.
the fluid medium was only one among many is of getting a trigger into the human body. If your s was to take out a single individual, you could luce it to whatever he was having for lunch. If you to be rid of his family as well, you might inject Thanksgiving turkey before the holiday dinner, jfiden the bull’s-eye to include a larger group of people, you’d distribute the trigger across a sweeping num of routes. Instead of the food on the table you could urate an entire population’s food supply-and be- Spread it over their farm soil, dump it into their ervoirs, float it through the air they breathed. Turn eir environment into an extension of your weapon. Enrique supposed the release of a powdered or aerosol
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medium would give the best shot at effecting a mass exposure. In fact, he had heard El Tio had done exactly that with the Sleeper virus itself. Just as whispers had reached him that Alberto Colon, who had died from mysterious causes last month, was El Tio’s first pigeon to die from a precision bio-strike.