House Of The Scorpion

  One of the most amazing things about Saint Francis and his followers was how they gave away their possessions. Saint Francis couldn’t wait to strip off his shirt and sandals whenever he saw a poor person without them. Brother Juniper, one of Saint Francis’s friends, even went home naked a lot of the time. Matt thought El Patrón would have a heart attack if anyone told him to give away his belongings.

  Once Matt passed through the hole in the rock, it was as though he’d arrived in another world. The hawks circled lazily in a bright, blue sky, the jackrabbits crouched in the shade of the creosotes. Fish nibbled bread from Matt’s fingers, and coyotes darted forward to gobble down chunks of his sandwiches. None of them cared whether he was a human or a clone.

  Matt laid out a sleeping bag under the grape arbor and used a rolled-up blanket for a pillow. He placed a thermos of orange juice within reach and selected a book. This was living! The air smelled faintly of creosote and the yellow sweetness of locust flowers. A large black wasp with scarlet wings ran over the sand, searching for the spiders that were its prey.

  “Hello, Brother Wasp,” Matt said lazily. The insect dug furiously in the sand, found nothing, and scurried on.

  Matt opened A History of Opium, one of the books Tam Lin had left him in the chest. He expected it to be a manual about farming, but it was something quite different and exciting. Opium, Matt read, was a whole country. It was a long, thin strip of land lying between the United States and Aztlán.

  One hundred years ago there had been trouble between the United States and Aztlán, which was called Mexico in those days. Matt vaguely remembered Celia saying something about it. Many thousands of Mexicans had flooded across the border in search of work. A drug dealer named Matteo Alacrán—

  Matt sat up straight. That was El Patrón’s name! One hundred years ago he would have been a strong and active man.

  This person, the book went on to say, was one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, even though his business was illegal.

  Drugs illegal? thought Matt. What a strange idea.

  Matteo Alacrán formed an alliance with the other dealers and approached the leaders of the United States and Mexico. “You have two problems” he said. “First, you cannot control your borders, and second, you cannot control us.”

  He advised them to combine the problems. If both countries set aside land along their common border, the dealers would establish Farms and stop the flow of Illegals. In return, the dealers would promise not to sell drugs to the citizens of the United States and Mexico. They would peddle their wares in Europe, Asia, and Africa instead.

  It was a pact made in hell, said the book.

  Matt put it down. He couldn’t see anything wrong with the plan. It seemed to have done everything it promised. He looked at the title page. The author was Esperanza Mendoza, and the Anti-Slavery Society of California was the publisher. Now that he looked more closely, he saw the book was printed on cheap, yellow paper. It didn’t look like something you could take seriously. Matt read on.

  At first, the book explained, Opium was simply a no-man’s-land, but through the years it had prospered. Different areas were ruled by different families, much like the kingdoms of medieval Europe. A council of Farmers was established, which dealt with international problems and kept peace between the various Farms. Most families controlled small areas, but two were large enough to dictate policy. The MacGregors ruled the land near San Diego, and the Alacráns had a vast empire stretching from central California all across Arizona and into New Mexico.

  Gradually, Opium changed from a no-man’s-land to a real country. And its supreme leader, dictator, and führer was Matteo Alacrán.

  Matt stopped reading so he could savor the words. His heart swelled with pride. He didn’t know what a führer was, but it was obviously something very good.

  A more evil, vicious, and self-serving man could hardly be imagined, wrote Esperanza on the next line.

  Matt threw the book away as hard as he could. It landed in the water with its pages open. How dare she insult El Patrón! He was a genius. How many people could build a country out of nothing, especially someone as poor as El Patrón had been? Esperanza was simply jealous.

  But Matt sprang up to rescue the book before it was entirely ruined. Tam Lin had given it to him, and that made it valuable. He dried it out carefully and packed it away in the metal chest.

  On the way back Matt stopped at the water purification plant and talked to the foreman. Since Tam Lin’s departure, Matt had thought long and hard about the excellent education he’d been given. It didn’t make sense for him to spend the rest of his life as an exotic pet. El Patrón didn’t waste money like that.

  No, Matt realized, the old man meant him to have a higher destiny. He could never reach the status of Benito or Steven, not being human, but he could help them. And so Matt had begun to study how the enterprise of running an opium empire worked. He saw how opium was planted, processed, and marketed. He watched how the eejits were moved from field to field, how often they were watered, and how many food pellets they were allowed.

  When I’m in charge— Matt quickly adjusted his thought: When I’m helping the person in charge, I’ll free the eejits. Surely opium could be grown by normal people. They might not be as efficient, but anything was better than a mindless army of slaves. Now that Matt had observed Rosa, he understood that.

  He asked the plant foreman about the underground river that flowed from the Gulf of California hundreds of miles away. It was used to supply water to the Alacrán estate, but it smelled—before it was purified—terrifyingly bad.

  The plant foreman refused to meet Matts eyes. Like most humans, he didn’t like talking to clones, but he also didn’t want to anger El Patrón. “Why does the water smell like that?” Matt asked.

  “Dead fish. Chemicals,” the foreman replied, not looking up.

  “But you take those out.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where do you put them?”

  “Wastelands,” the man said, pointing north. He kept his answers as brief as possible.

  Matt shaded his eyes as he looked to the north. A heat haze shimmered over the desert, and he saw a series of ridges that might be buildings. “There?” he asked doubtfully.

  “Yes,” the foreman replied.

  Matt turned the horse and started heading northward to get a clearer view. The smell was so vile, he feared he might have an asthma attack. He felt for his inhaler.

  They were buildings. They stretched in long rows with doors and dark little windows every so often. The roofs were so low, Matt wondered whether a person could stand up inside. The windows were covered with iron bars. Could this be where the eejits lived? The idea was appalling.

  The closer Matt got, the stronger the stench became. It was a compound of rotten fish, excrement, and vomit, with a sweet chemical odor that was worse than the other smells put together.

  Matt grasped the inhaler. He knew he should leave at once, but the buildings were too intriguing. He could see skeletons of fish and seashells embedded in the dirt around them. It seemed the whole place was built on waste from the Gulf of California.

  Matt circled around the end of one of the buildings and rode down into a depression that must have been used for waste. The evil smell made Matt’s eyes water, and he could barely focus on the dense yellow sludge on the bottom. The horse stumbled. Its legs collapsed beneath it, and Matt had to throw his arms around its neck to keep from being catapulted into the sludge.

  “Get up! Get up!” he ordered, but the horse was incapable of obeying. It sat on the ground with its legs folded up under it. Then Matt felt himself getting dizzy. He threw himself off the horse and sucked desperately at the inhaler. His lungs filled with liquid. A terror of drowning swept over him, and he tried to crawl away from the trough. His fingers dug into the rotting, fish-slimed soil.

  A pair of hands yanked him up. He was dragged a short way and thrown into the back of a vehicle. Matt felt the mo
tor start. The vehicle moved away in a plume of dust that made him cough. He tried to get up and was instantly slammed down by a boot on his chest.

  Shocked, Matt stared up at the coldest pair of eyes he’d ever seen. At first he thought he was looking at Tam Lin, but this person was younger and leaner. He had the same wavy, brown hair and blue eyes, the same physical alertness, but none of the good humor Matt was used to seeing in the bodyguard’s face.

  “Where’d you get a horse?” the man demanded. “Where’d you get the brains to make a run for it?”

  “He’s not an eejit, Hugh,” said another voice. Matt looked up to see another man, similar to the first one.

  “Then you’re an Illegal,” snarled Hugh. “I reckon we’ll run you to the hospital and let ‘em put a clamp in your brain.”

  “You do that,” Matt said with his heart beating very fast. He was afraid, but Tam Lin had taught him it was foolhardy to show weakness. Act like you’re in control, the bodyguard had said, and nine times out of ten, you’ll get away with it. Most people are cowards underneath. Matt realized these men belonged to the Farm Patrol and thus, judging by Celia’s stories, were very dangerous.

  “You do that,” Matt repeated, “and I’ll tell the doctor how you treated El Patrón’s clone.”

  “Say what?” said Hugh, lifting his boot from Matt’s chest.

  “I’m El Patrón’s clone. I was visiting the water purification plant and got lost. Better yet, you can take me to the Big House and I’ll send a message to him.” Matt was very far from feeling confident, but he’d observed El Patrón give orders many times. He knew exactly how to reproduce the cold, deadly voice that got results.

  “Crikey! He even sounds like the old vampire,” said the second man.

  “Shut your cake hole!” snarled Hugh. “Look, we weren’t expecting you out there, Master, uh, Master—what do we call you?”

  “Matteo Alacrán,” Matt said, and was gratified to see the men flinch.

  “Well, Master Alacrán, we weren’t expecting you, and you were by the eejit pens, so it was a natural mistake—”

  “Did it occur to you to ask what I was doing out there?” Matt said, narrowing his eyes as El Patrón did when he wanted to be particularly menacing.

  “I know we should’ve, sir. We’re really very, very sorry. We’re taking you straight to the Big House, and we’re most humbly begging your pardon, aren’t we, Ralf?”

  “Oh, yes, indeed,” said the second man.

  “What about my horse?”

  “We’ll fix that up.” Ralf banged on the cab of the truck. A window opened, and he shouted instructions inside. “We’ll radio for a Patrol to collect the nag. It was in a bad way from the dead air, sir. It might not survive.”

  “Dead air?” said Matt, startled enough to drop out of his El Patrón act.

  “It sometimes happens around that trough,” said Ralf. “The air doesn’t move, and the carbon dioxide builds up. It’s like being in a mine.”

  “I lost a brother like that,” remarked Hugh.

  “You can’t tell until it’s too late,” said Ralf. “The nearby pens are usually okay, but on still nights we make the eejits sleep in the fields.”

  Matt was amazed. “Why don’t you clean up the trough?”

  Ralf seemed honestly puzzled by the idea. “It’s how we’ve always done things, Master Alacrán. The eejits don’t care.”

  Well, that’s true, thought Matt. Even if the eejits knew about the danger, they couldn’t flee unless they were ordered to do so.

  Now that Matt appeared to accept the men’s apology, they became almost friendly. They didn’t act like most people did when told Matt was a clone. They were wary but not hostile. In fact, they behaved a lot like Tam Lin.

  “Are you Scottish?” Matt asked.

  “Oh, no,” said Hugh. “Ralf here is from England, and I’m from Wales. Wee Wullie in the cab is Scottish, though. But we all like to play soccer and thump heads.”

  Matt remembered something El Patrón had said long ago about Tam Lin and Daft Donald: I picked up this lot in Scotland, breaking heads outside a soccer field. Always choose your bodyguards from another country. They find it harder to make alliances and betray you.

  “Soccer sounds a lot like war,” Matt said.

  Both Ralf and Hugh laughed. “It is, lad. It is,” said Hugh.

  “The fine thing about soccer,” said Ralf, with a distant look in his eyes, “is that you enjoy both the game and the trimmings.”

  “Trimmings?” Matt said.

  “Ah, yes. That which surrounds the game—the buildup, the crush of fans in the trains …”

  “The parties,” said Hugh, with a dreamy look on his face.

  “The parties,” agreed Ralf. “You crowd into a pub with your mates and drink until the owner throws you out.”

  “If he can throw you out,” Hugh amended.

  “And then, either before or after, you run into the fans on the other side. So of course you have to set them straight.”

  “That’s when the head thumping occurs,” Matt guessed.

  “Yes. Nothing finer, especially if you win,” said Ralf.

  The truck followed a zigzag course through the poppy fields. Matt saw the same eejits he’d observed that morning. They were still bending over the ripe seedpods, but he felt no impulse to call them brothers. They weren’t brothers and never would be until they lost the clamps in their brains.

  “If you liked it so much, why did you come here?” Matt asked Hugh and Ralf.

  The men lost their dreamy expressions. Their eyes became cold and distant. “Sometimes …,” Hugh began, and then fell silent.

  “Sometimes the head thumping goes too far,” Ralf finished for him. “It’s okay to kill people in a war; then you’re a hero. But in soccer—which is every bit as glorious—you’re supposed to shake hands with the enemy afterward.”

  “Kiss his ruddy backside, more like,” said Hugh in disgust.

  “And we didn’t like that, see.”

  Matt thought he understood. Hugh, Ralf, and Wee Wullie in the cab were murderers. They were the ideal candidates for the Farm Patrol. They would have to be loyal to El Patrón, or he would dump them into the arms of whatever police were looking for them.

  The lush gardens and red tile roofs of the Big House were visible now. Nothing could have been further from the long, low dwellings where the eejits lived—that is, when they weren’t sleeping in the fields to keep from being gassed.

  “Did Tam Lin kill anyone?” Matt said. He didn’t much want to ask, but this might be his only opportunity to find out.

  Hugh and Ralf exchanged looks. “He’s in a class by himself,” said Ralf. “He’s a bloody terrorist.”

  “Can’t think why El Patrón trusts him so much,” said Hugh.

  “They’re like father and son—”

  “Put a cork in it! Can’t you see who we’re talking to?” Hugh said.

  The house was near, and Matt was afraid they’d let him out before he learned what he wanted to know. “What did Tam Lin do?” he urged.

  “Only set a bomb outside the prime minister’s house in London,” replied Hugh. “He was a Scottish nationalist, see. Wanted to bring back Bonnie Prince Charlie or some other fat slug. He wasn’t motivated by beer like the rest of us.”

  “No, he’s a cut above,” Ralf said, “with his fancy ethics and social conscience.”

  “It’s a shame a school bus pulled up at the wrong moment,” said Hugh. “The blast killed twenty kiddies.”

  “That’s what social conscience gets you,” Ralf said as he helped Matt climb down. The truck drove off at once—the men seemed eager to get away, or perhaps they were forbidden to show themselves around the civilized halls of El Patrón’s mansion.

  18

  THE DRAGON HOARD

  Wake up!” said Celia, so close to his ear that Matt fell out of bed with his arms flailing.

  “What’s wrong?” he cried, trying to untangle himself from th
e sheets.

  She yanked the sheets away and pulled him to his feet. Even though Matt was as tall as Celia now, she was stronger. It must have been all those years of lugging pots of stew around the kitchen. She pushed him into the bathroom.

  “Should I get dressed?” Matt asked.

  “There’s no time. Just wash your face.”

  Matt splashed water on his face in an effort to wake up. He’d gone straight to bed after the Farm Patrol had brought him home. He’d felt sick from the bad air at the eejit pens.

  He was disturbed by the conflicting images he had of the Farm Patrol. Before he had met them, Celia had filled Matt’s head with enough stories to make his blood run cold. They were creatures of the night, she said, like the chupacabras. They infested the trails that wound out of the Ajo Mountains, and they hunted their prey with heat-sensitive goggles.

  Matt remembered Hugh’s cold eyes as the man slammed him onto the bed of the truck. To Hugh—at that point, at least—Matt was only a rat to be crushed underfoot.

  But once he’d revealed himself as Matteo Alacrán, the Farm Patrol had transformed themselves into good-natured boys, out for a drink at the pub with a little head thumping for dessert.

  Yeah, right, Matt reminded himself. And Tom’s the angel Gabriel.

  “Hurry up! It’s important!” shouted Celia from the other side of the bathroom door.

  Matt dried his hands and emerged.

  “Have a quesadilla before you go.” Was it Matt’s imagination, or was Celia’s hand shaking as she handed him the plate.

  “I’m not hungry,” he protested.

  “Eat! It’s going to be a long night.” Celia planted herself at the table and watched as he mechanically chewed. She made him finish every bit of it. The salsa tasted funny, or perhaps it was the aftereffects of the bad air. Matt still felt sick. He’d gone to bed with a metallic taste in his mouth.

  The minute Celia and Matt emerged from the apartment, they were met by a pair of bodyguards and hustled through the halls. It must have been very late, because all the corridors were deserted.