Tell My Sorrows to the Stones by Christopher Golden Read Free Book Online Page B

his pants and shot Austin in the face. The mules screamed and the echo carried across the Sonoran desert. For an instant, Weston could do nothing but listen to those screams and the echo of the gunshot, and he remembered the other screams they’d heard, right before the whole op went off the rails. Out there in the darkness of the border . . . not far from here.
    “Fuck!” Brooksy shouted.
    He put three rounds in the cartel guard’s face and chest at close range. The back of the guy’s head exploded, spattering a teenaged girl beside him with blood and flecks of bone and brain matter. She screamed, closed her eyes tightly, and crumbled to the ground as though wondering when she’d wake up from this nightmare.
    Weston trained his M16 on the other guard. “Drop it.”
    The coyote let the gun fall to the dirt. Brooksy rushed over and picked it up, stuck it inside his jacket, then smashed the guard in the face with the butt of his M16. The guy went down hard and didn’t get up again. He was still breathing.
    “Beautiful,” Brooksy whispered.
    “You’re psycho, Brooks. We got a guy down, and this is beautiful?” Weston slid off the roof of the Jeep.
    Brooksy sniffed. “Border Patrol, man. Sorry to see him go, but he ain’t one of ours.”
    A chill ran through Weston.
    Then the screams began again, from behind them this time—from beyond the border fence. Weston stepped to one side, trying to keep his weapon trained on the illegals even as he moved around the Jeep to get a look across the border.
    Something thumped against the Jeep. He heard the chain link fence shake and a scrambling against the vehicle, and then a face came over the top.
    “What the fuck?” Brooksy shouted.
    A young guy, no more than twenty, crawled onto the roof of the Jeep. His face had been slashed, long wounds that pouted open, weeping blood. His eyes were wide with madness and fear—had to be crazy to try to cross the border by scaling a Border Patrol vehicle. But this guy wasn’t even seeing the Jeep, barely even seeing them.
    “Stop right there!” Weston shouted. “Alto! Alto!”
    The wounded man noticed the guns, then. He stared at Weston, lower lip quavering in shock or terror, then glanced over his shoulder. With a low, Spanish curse, he turned toward them again, brought his legs up beneath him, and tensed to lunge at them.
    Weston pulled the trigger.
    The dead man staggered backward and fell off the Jeep. Weston heard the body hit the ground on the other side, then he turned to Brooksy.
    “Cover them.”
    Brooksy nodded, training his weapon on the twelve or thirteen illegals they’d rounded up. He stood right beside Austin’s body, one boot sunken into parched soil made wet by the Border Patrol officer’s blood, but didn’t seem to notice.
    The whole thing was fucked. Weston hesitated only a second and then went around the Jeep. The last thing he needed was an incursion into Mexican territory. But there was a space of about two feet between the Jeep and the fence. He hesitated a second and then slipped through that space to the opening in the fence. The corpse lay in the moonlight, and Weston saw that he’d suffered more wounds than the gashes in his face. The dead man had landed on his belly with his arms and legs splayed out. The back of his shirt had been torn to bloody ribbons, and it looked like the skin beneath it was just as badly damaged.
    What the hell happened to this guy?
    He remembered the other screams, the ones that had come from down here right before the op started going bad. Standing on the border, he looked out across the moonlit Sonoran. The Mexican side looked no different from the American side. It was all hellscape, no matter what country you were in. But the moonlight picked out dark forms crumpled on the ground. He counted at least six bodies out there, and there might have been more. One of them looked like only part of a person. If he’d had any thoughts that some of them might still be alive,