"Austin," said the Border Patrol man. He drove past the last Humvee and then they were in open desert, headlights illuminating the ground straight ahead but somehow making the rest of the landscape around them even darker.

"That your first or last name?" Brooksy asked.

"We on a date?" Austin snapped.

He picked up the radio he'd tossed aside and got his boss on the line, told the guy he had two Guardsmen on board and they were running down the last of the coyotes the cartel had sent to protect the coke. He had the accelerator pinned. The Jeep jittered in the ruts and bounced across the ground, closing the gap between Paradise and the Mexican border. They passed a bunch of backpacks full of cocaine that had been tossed aside in favor of getting the hell out of the U.S.

Austin's boss told him to carry on, inter-agency cooperation, and some other bullshit that meant any pissing matches that were going to happen would take place above their pay grade. Let the DEA, Border Patrol, and the Guard work it out after the op was over and they jostled for credit or blame.

The first of the strays came in view up ahead. They should've rabbited in either direction but they kept going in a straight line, which confused Weston until he remembered the fence. They went right or left, they'd never get back across the border before they were caught. The opening in the fence was dead ahead.

An old man stumbled. A younger guy collided with him from behind, managed to stay on his feet, grabbed the old man by a fistful of white hair and shoved him out of the way. The old guy fell in a tangle of arms and legs, probably breaking something-bones were brittle at that age. The one who'd tossed him aside had a 9mm in one hand and was shouting to some of the other mules. Two young women and a small boy were just ahead of him. He raised his gun and fired once like he was trying to get them moving faster.

Instead, they stopped short.

"What the fuck?" Austin barked.

But Weston understood. The young guy-one of the guards-ran between them and kept on running. He'd commanded them to stop or he'd shoot them, made them stand still, block the Jeep to buy him a few seconds.

It worked. Austin hit the brakes, swerved around them, then gunned it again.

"We want that guy," Weston said. "Probably at least one more. But let's do this the easy way. Go right past him."

"What?" Brooksy snapped.

"Shut up." Weston glared back at him, then turned to Austin. "Just do it."

Austin held the wheel tightly, went around the guard. They caught a glimpse of his confused expression and he seemed to slow down, wondering what the hell was going on. They passed maybe a dozen others, all mules, some of them still wearing their backpacks.

"There's the fence," Austin said.

The headlights picked up the hole that had been cut in the border fence instantly. They caught just a glimpse of a few Mexicans returning to their homeland through the opening.

"Block it with the Jeep," Weston said.

"My thought exactly." Austin actually smiled. He'd been uptight about working with them, but now he was on the hunt, doing the job he'd signed up for. Weston thought maybe he wasn't an asshole after all.

The Jeep hurtled across the sand. Brooksy let out a rebel yell.

Austin hit the brake and cut the wheel. The Jeep slewed badly to the left and skidded on the desert sand, bumped right up against the fence, and then was still. Austin killed the engine and had the door open instantly. Weston knew he shouldn't even step across the border, which didn't leave him many options. The window of the Jeep was open but the door was almost up against the fence. He pushed himself out the window and climbed onto the rack on the Jeep's roof.

Brooksy and Austin brandished their weapons at the exhausted, pitiful, starving people who had already had their worst night ever. Weston had nothing against the Mexicans. They were breaking a shitload of laws, bringing coke into the U.S., never mind crossing the border illegally. If he lived their lives, he'd do the same goddamn thing. But the coyotes worked for the scum who couriered the drugs into the States and were taking advantage of desperate people at the same time. He would've loved to get his hands on the bosses, the guys who actually hired the guards. But since that wasn't going to happen-those guys weren't running coke mules across the border themselves-he'd make do with the guards.

The one they'd passed-the one who'd shoved the old man-had slowed to a walk and now held up his 9mm, hands raised in surrender. The mules dropped to their knees in exhaustion, knowing it was all over, that they'd likely be shipped back home, where they'd try to cross the border again as soon as possible.

In the moonlight, Weston studied one of the mules. He had no backpack, but a lot of them had dropped the drugs while running. But this guy wore a decent shirt and, though he had stubble on his cheeks, he'd had a haircut recently.

"Better watch-" he started to say.

The guy-a guard pretending to be a mule-pulled a pistol from the waistband of 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 M-16 on the other guard. "Drop it."

The coyote let the gun fall to the sand. Brooksy rushed over and picked it up, stuck it inside his jacket, then smashed the guard in the face with the butt of his M-16. 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. He heard the body hit the sand 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 sand 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 sand. 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 still be alive, that banished them.

Something moved out there in the desert, a black silhouette that crouched like an animal, running from one body to the next. Weston stared at that strange, slender figure as it bent over a corpse. It moved its head in curious dips and sways like an animal, but walked on two feet. In that crouched position, it lifted a dead man from the sand with ease, as though the body weighed nothing. In the moonlight, Weston saw its head rear back and a long, thin tongue dart out. The sound that carried to him across that killing ground was the dry crack of bone, followed by a terrible, wet slap.

The thing had driven its tongue right through the dead man's skull, and now it began to suck. The noise made him retch, but he forced himself not to vomit, not to look away from the horror unfolding out there on the desert. These people had to have been the source of the earlier screams. This thing had murdered them and now it was moving from body to body, feasting on the dead.

"Weston, what's up?" Brooksy called from the other side of the Jeep.

The creature froze, cocked its head, listening. It thrust out its tongue, tasting the night air. Slowly, it turned to look right at Weston.

He couldn't breathe. Long seconds passed while the thing stared at him. At last it turned away, dropped the body, and scurried across the desert to the next corpse to start the whole process again.

Weston raised his M-16 and sighted on the creature, but his finger paused on the trigger. If he missed it, somehow, or if there were more of them, he would be endangering the civilians now in his care. They might be illegals, but they were still people and were his responsibility.

Silently, he slid once more between Jeep and fence and moved around the front of the vehicle. It felt like stepping between worlds. Brooksy looked up sharply.

"Where you-?" he started.

Weston silenced him with a look and a raised hand. "Get them in the Jeep," he whispered, gesturing to the Mexicans and then to the vehicle. He glanced again toward the other side of the border and when he looked back, Brooksy had a dubious expression on his face, like he might challenge that order or take it upon himself to go see what they were running from.

"Go," Weston whispered.

Brooksy must have heard the edge in his voice, then, for he started moving as quickly and quietly as he could. A fortyish guy tried talking to them in thickly accented English, but Weston hushed him and gestured for him to get into the vehicle. The man did, and others followed. Quickly enough, the Jeep was full, leaving six illegals still on foot. The girl who'd nearly been killed by one of the cartel guards looked at him in confusion and fear, her face still dappled with drying blood.

"You drive," Weston whispered to Brooks. "I'll escort the others. Don't rev it. No lights. Roll out quiet and dark."

"What's going on?" Brooksy asked, a little twitchy but not smiling.

Weston shook his head. "Later. Just go."

"What about Austin?" He pointed to the dead Border Patrol officer.

"We'll come back," Weston whispered.

Brooksy shrugged. He got behind the wheel of the Jeep, closed the door as quietly as possible, then fired up the engine. To Weston, it seemed the loudest thing he'd ever heard. But then it dropped to a purr and he heard Brooksy put it into gear.

"Vaminos. Let's go," he said, using the barrel of his M-16 to gesture toward Paradise. He put a finger to his lips and shushed them. "Quietly."

The Jeep pulled away from the opening in the fence and for a second, Weston was sure one or more of the Mexican men with him would bolt for the border. The girl wasn't going anywhere, and he didn't think the older woman would try to run it out. But the men . . .

He glanced back toward the bodies scattered on the desert and saw that slender silhouette again. It crouched by a corpse with its head cocked and in the moonlight he saw the glint of its eyes, watching the Jeep pull away.

His pulse raced and his finger twitched on the trigger. Weston forced himself not to run, instead urging the others on. They were focused on him, and he had to keep them from panicking. They all fell in step alongside the Jeep, which rolled slowly back toward the ghost town. The sound of helicopter rotors came from that direction. The headlights of Jeeps and Humvees had made a circle, like a wagon train preparing for attack. If they could just get back there, they would be safe.

Finally on the move, he snapped the mouth piece of his comm unit into place. "Weston for Squad Leader. Weston for Squad Leader."

Seconds ticked by and he was about to radio again when he heard a pop on the line. "What the hell are you whispering for, Weston? It's all over but the paperwork."

"Maybe not, sir."

"What happened? You didn't catch the coyotes?"

"Got 'em, sergeant, but it's a mess." He glanced back, saw the thing-the scavenger-framed in the opening in the fence, standing in the very same spot he'd been in just a minute ago, watching them. Fear ran up the back of his neck and prickled his skin. "And there's . . . there's something else over here, sarge. We're not alone."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

Weston thought about that a second. He looked back again.

Only that gaping hole across the border remained, and beyond it the scattered dead. The creature had vanished.

It darted out of the night so swiftly that he barely had time to aim the M-16. The creature came from the left, a paintstroke of fluid black across the moonlit landscape, grabbed hold of the Mexican at the front of their little march and tore open his throat and abdomen in a single pass.

The screaming started.

Weston ran past the others, up to the front of the Jeep, and squeezed off a couple of rounds without a chance in Hell of hitting the thing. It blended too well with the desert and the dark.

"What the hell?" Brooksy roared from behind the wheel of the Jeep.

"Weston. Do you read? Are you under fire?" Ortiz barked in the comm in his ear.

"Under attack!" Weston snapped back. "Not under fire. That was me shooting."

Ortiz asked half a dozen questions in as many seconds, but Weston wasn't listening anymore. He pulled the comm from his ear and tossed it to the sand. They were three or four hundred yards from the lights and vehicles and weapons of the DEA and Border Patrol. Not far at all.

Not far, he told himself.

But those Mexicans hadn't made it very far, back at the border. They'd been picked off one by one, the stragglers, killed quickly. The thing only slowed down to start its banquet when they were all dead and the screaming was over.

Weston swung the barrel of his M-16, searching the darkness all around, knowing the thing could come from anywhere. The Mexicans not inside the Jeep huddled nearby him. Afraid as they were, no way were they making a break for the border now.

"Damn it, Weston, what was that?" Brooksy asked.

"I don't know," he said, without sparing the other grunt a glance.

"Fuck this."

Brooksy gunned it. The Jeep's engine roared and the tires spit sand as the vehicle leaped forward.

"God damn it, no!" Weston yelled.

Two of the Mexican men started running after the Jeep, shouting. The others hesitated only a second before following. Weston yelled for them to stop, but they were beyond listening. Exhaustion, starvation, and despair had plagued them earlier-people who'd been taken advantage of by nearly everyone they'd encountered-but now fear drove them to madness.

Weston pursued them. The night loomed up on either side of him. He could feel the vulnerability of his unprotected back, but knew that they were all vulnerable. The darkness shifted. Every shadow, every depression in the desert floor, seemed about to coalesce and take shape and rush at him with its claws out.

The illegals were stretched out in a line, scattered in their pursuit of the Jeep. The thing came out of the night and killed the woman, punching a hole in her chest. Weston brought up his weapon and fired at it. Two bullets hit the woman as her corpse fell. The thing flinched and he thought he'd winged it, but it rushed off into the dark again, merging with the night.

The taillights of the Jeep grew smaller.

Weston swore, catching up with the four survivors. The teenaged girl fell to her knees beside the dead woman, and Weston heard her saying "Tia" over and over, and knew she had been the girl's aunt.

They all clustered around the sobbing girl. Weston heard the Humvees revving. One of them pulled away from Paradise, headlights turning their way.

"We'll be all right," he said. "They're coming."

But his fingers felt frozen on his weapon. Ortiz would be coming to get them, maybe with inter-agency backup, but seconds counted. He swung the M-16 around, jerking at every sound-real or imagined-from the desert. The survivors stayed low, out of his way. Maybe they hoped the thing would come for him next.

One of the men had begun to cry with the girl.