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  The two of them never had a chance. El Fundidor emerged like a ghost from the shadows. They had time to respond, but instead froze in fear. The machete El Fundidor used to separate joints struck them down with two efficient blows. They hadn’t thought to scream.

  He dragged them onto the pile, now eight corpses ready for disposal. Whoever took over his job would start with a backlog that would take weeks to catch up on. And that was only if the regular influx of new bodies died down. He didn’t envy his replacement.

  El Fundidor managed to close one of the barn doors undetected, but as he pushed the second door closed, a man in the yard pointed and yelled. Another fired a shot that chipped the wood near his head.

  The commotion on the compound rose as he got the doors closed and locked. El Fundidor poured gasoline in a line along the base of the door. He dropped a lit match, flames rising quickly. That would give him enough time.

  El Fundidor had prepared the mix in advance. He stepped into the warm acid bath, at first a tingle and then a sting.

  He heard the men at the door, but the fire kept them back. Two gunshots fired near the far wall. Men pounded on the wood, the ends of their axes splintering the boards.

  Pinpricks stung his entire body. A heat enveloped him. He could feel the skin on his legs melting, liquefying, sliding down.

  Part of the barn wall exploded. A half dozen armed men entered the barn and circled around El Fundidor. They froze when they saw him in the fuming barrel, unsure of what to do, no instinct for this scenario.

  El Fundidor made eye contact with the men in front of him. He wanted there to be no doubt that it was him.

  He couldn’t decide if it was better to hold his breath or end it sooner by taking the acid into his body. His curiosity ended up being greater than his impatience. He grabbed the lid and took in a big inhale. El Fundidor submerged himself in the barrel and placed the lid above him.

  The acid burned the sight from his eyes, the sound from his ears, and the smell from his nose. He entered into the comfort of his own pain. It was excruciating, but it was his. And then there was nothing.

  Suso lifted the sheet over the dead girl’s face. He didn’t know her name or anything about her. He only knew that her brother had tried to help her. And even though he had failed, her final contact with another person was a man who made every effort to be her savior. That had to mean something.

  The girl had had no pulse when he had checked, but Suso hadn’t had the heart to tell Cesar when he had been in the room. He didn’t see the point in turning his victory into a defeat.

  Suso had promised to take care of the girl and he would. He would bury her in the cemetery next to his parents. He would use Cesar’s plot. His brother wouldn’t need it. When the cartel eventually caught up with Cesar—and they would—there would be no body. That was a dead certainty. Everyone knew about the horrors of the man they called El Fundidor.

  AMERICAN FIGUREHEAD

  Shannon Kirk

  We passed the point where jokes were okay. Even biting satire became improper. Regardless of our insistence on First Amendment rights, only vicious verbal rejections and fact recitations became appropriate to speak. We turned literal in our divisions, and uncompromising in voicing the extreme justice we sought to impose, in order to course correct. We were screaming about horrific injustices, at the injustice of everything. As history had taught us many times before, we came to a place where law was not followed, nor norms nor established decencies. Everything had been blown to fuck, crimes out in the open, flagrant. And so, I do not regret my actions nor the flaunting of my oath to be an officer of the court.

  There was no court.

  I joined the judge and jury of The Maples.

  I’m in hiding now. A woman is screaming outside my French cave to be let in. A band of soldiers not far behind, I can hear their commands and whistles, the pop, pop of their guns in the distance, hot on her trail and closing in like a slick, cold, black and strong, fisherwomen’s net. I may not let her in. I don’t foresee me letting her in. We are past the point of forgiveness and understandings. There is no valid “other side.” In short, she’s too late for absolution.

  Besides, the First Oath of The Maples is an uncompromising commitment to “merciless eradication of the complicit.” We don’t want any smoldering embers of what we just went through to flare again.

  I suppose it began two years ago, with my rage. Or two years before that when the then American Figurehead came to power.

  Maybe my rage has been boiling since I met her in our Texas law school twenty years ago. Kristine Nelson—the same exact one from Torts class—is the same exact one screaming for help outside my French countryside cave.

  Here now, I move to extinguish the last flames on the entrance’s bolted-to-limestone torches.

  “Please! Your lights, they’ll see. Please snuff them out, let me in,” Kristine pleads.

  I extinguish the torches to allow myself to weigh the options in front of her, give her pause, allow her to stall in her screaming. These are my options: Let her in or leave her for the soldiers. There is a stone barrier around this cave opening, which some ancient ancestor of mine erected thousands of years ago. This is my family’s land, and no person may trespass that granite moa—a full two-feet thick and four-feet high—unless I utter one specific word. She knows this is Undeniable Law, as this is the law everywhere now, on every property, the whole world wide. In fact, it is mandatory, and my requirement as landowner—and certainly as a decorated officer of The Maples—is to eradicate her even if she falls off the granite wall and onto my property before I say the one magical, legally-mandated, word aloud: Enter.

  I do not say enter. I am still weighing options.

  If she jumps off the wall and onto my land, I must shoot her, decapitate her, butcher her, boil her, draw and quarter her, tie her to a tree and leave her for bees and bears, tar and feather her. Drown her. Dissolve her. In any which way I choose, I must—I’m required to—eradicate the infection of her completely. I must take everything that has any meaning to her and sell it to the highest bidder.

  We are a world of lawless rule. And I am in high command in this cave. A throned empress presiding over my walled-in world.

  She stands on the flattened top. She is barefoot, her toes bleed, parts of her wounds matted black, some seeping crimson, all of which is visible under a full moon. Kristine must have fled Texas after the Big Event, not long after I fled, which was the very day of the Big Event. She must have been struggling, scraping and begging, hiding on ships and walking, crawling, scurrying like a cockroach in the cover of night, slinking like a snake, finding her way here for two years. I assume this is the only place left for her to run, my French property, where I brought her once to study for our third-year law school finals. That was twenty years ago. Eighteen years before my rage flared to unrelenting heights and Kristine’s and my entanglement truly began to backslide. She must have assumed I’d forgive her, as none of the revolutionaries who know of her and her kind would forgive her.

  I, she must assume, am her last chance.

  Or did I ensnare Kristine? Sometimes it is difficult for me to untangle all that has led up to this moment. Two full years of rage will do that. Four full years of rage will do that.

  Kristine is careless, reckless, to be standing so bare, so high, on my rock wall, between the V opening of foliage canopy, full fat of deep, dark greens and bursting with leaves in this hot August. Any soldier worth her ration of baguette could sneak up and snap her neck, sniper her brains from the moonlit ridge above the nighttime lavender field, aglow in a ground cloud of purple haze. Mist and steam and humidity, green and purple and slate. Everything glows at night in France.

  Kristine is the months-old-bottled-blonde kind of arrogant. So arrogant, always so arrogant of roots and light and laws—as if she could defy or deny them. She never learns, which is odd, since her downfall already came. Her screaming now is her begging for more p
unishment.

  My rages started four years ago when the then American Figurehead came to power. It was wrong, and we all ached, millions and millions of us ached. My true red rages began two years after that—two years ago—after eighteen years of corporate defense practice at an Am-Law 100 firm. Read: high-stakes white collar crime. Meaning, I was a big-wig, fancy-pants female partner at a major international law firm. I was the ruler of my kingdom then, too, with a corner office in Austin, Texas, and access to all the corporate secrets. I was a watcher to the machinations of unchecked capitalism, convoluted schemes that would seem more fictional and concocted than Mission Impossible plots, but were all true. All true.

  Kristine was in-house counsel, Head of Compliance, in fact, at Stranderham Equity, LLC, a private equity firm, also based in Austin. And she was my client. I mean, that’s how it works. College and law school relationships are how the monied class manipulate the “trickle-down.” Manipulated. Past tense—manipulated before the Big Event.

  Two years ago, I walked into Stranderham’s freezing-cold conference room. The wall-sized windows looked out over Austin’s downtown cityscape. I sat near the head of the table, as I was the one presenting to my client, Kristine—then Head of Compliance—and to her internal clients, the General Counsel and the CEO, who took the head of the twenty-person, heavily lacquered conference table. It was made from a grove of mahogany ripped out of a South American jungle, and displaced several tribes, making for wide-spread corruption between loggers and local governments, pushing populations into overcrowded cities, fueling drug running and gang violence, and thus feeding into a constant northern migration of innocents. The bloody river of consumption for consumption’s sake. Four years ago, the then American Figurehead, before the Big Event, blamed the South Americans for unlawful migration. A laugh riot of a gaslight. But you know what? We don’t speak in code or jokes or satire or metaphors or euphemisms now. We are literal, so I’ll say this: The fucking asshole was a disgusting liar and you either knew that or you chose to not know that. And it’s insulting to have to spell out all the reasons why, so I won’t.

  My hands were blue from the arctic air-conditioning in Stranderham’s conference room. The lukewarm meeting coffee in a poorly-insulated, double-gallon pump thermos did nothing to warm me. Not even adrenaline or nerves helped, that’s how cold I was. Kristine—in an unlined shift dress with no sleeves—seemed impervious to the male-set temperature—because she’s a vapid, cold-blooded bitch. And true, perhaps back then I didn’t realize, or admit, she was a vapid, cold-blooded bitch and this is my historical perception painting my characterization— which is a true characterization—but I would note she was also wearing the most complacent shoe choice: sling-back kitten heels with gouges in the heels from stomping in sidewalk cracks. I will afford myself such flippant, shallow, woman-corporate-lawyer thoughts now, as I stare down my archenemy, who currently begs for my forgiveness from atop my stone moat in France.

  She put us in this situation.

  But back then…back before I was a merciless, cave-dwelling officer of The Maples. Back then. Back when I suffered cold conference rooms and canister coffee, plumbing and electricity. Lined suits and wine in crystal goblets. Back before the Big Event. Two years ago.

  I’d just finished my outside counsel role of conducting an internal investigation into some…odd…historical financial transactions Stranderham’s new accountant flagged in a whistleblower letter. Given the circumstances, Stranderham was obligated to investigate the accountant’s claims that funds were being sent to an offshore company with ties to a possible future justice of the Supreme Court, a senator, and the then incumbent American Figurehead, then routed back, in depleting sums, through other disconnected corporate strands, cleaned subtractions, to dozens of unnamable Stranderham acquisitions. If true, if the lines between the known dots could be drawn, and other speculative dots identified, Stranderham would have a potluck of federal and state offenses on its hands: money laundering; tax evasion; mail fraud; violation of campaign-finance laws; bribery; extortion; straight-up fraud. And those were just the immediately obvious legal violations. The whistleblower didn’t have access to all the records. Unless you were a forensic accountant, holding the actual corporate records and books of all of these various entities in between, there’s not a chance you would see the connection, or the implications, was the whistleblower’s point. And somehow, he saw enough to see those implications. When I first read the whistleblower letter, I did not think anything of such a salacious nature could possibly be true, or if true, proven.

  Then I read the emails we’d collected from several Strandherham executives. Bold outright statements of complicity and fraud, the whole scheme, right there in emails. Not hiding a thing. And I became irate when I saw one of the ending points: a particular entity I’d been battling for a pro bono asylum client for almost two years at that point. And Kristine had known. She fucking knew. We were friends on Facebook, law school classmates, and I’d posted about my attempts to get this South American child asylum in the United States.

  I presented my investigative findings about the whistleblower’s letter in Stranderham’s cold conference room by way of a slick PowerPoint, loaded up with .jpegs of the most egregious emails, right there, presented straight up, unvarnished, naked, bold, to one of the offending parties himself: the fucking CEO sitting at the head of the conference table. I shivered as I spoke, rubbing goosebumps that felt like pulsing mountains on my arms. Perhaps, yes indeed, the freeze was from nerves and not air conditioning. The CEO didn’t blink.

  I plowed ahead, straining and pushing myself to pull up my big girl litigator pants and suppress all emotions. Be robot. Be a Big Tough Sociopathic CEO-type Man. A no-conscience clinician. I said everything I’d found, how I’d substantiated the whistleblower’s accusations. Simply put, the entire leadership team at Stranderham wanted a certain justice on the Supreme Court, come hell or high water and no bodies to care for in between, because certain cases were percolating in the lower courts regarding tax havens and shelters for corporate entities. Also, it was good political capital and good business for money to end up at a certain end-point acquisition of Stranderham’s—the very one I’d been battling for my pro bono asylum client. A privately-owned jail on the Texas border.

  The CEO slammed his palm, flat, on the corrupt mahogany table. Stood. Walked out.

  The General Counsel stood. Walked out.

  Kristine remained. Her face had inextricably sucked flat into some retractable point in space, aligned in a one-dimensional plane with her neck, like a dormant accordion. Her eyes were the size of poker chips.

  Then the GC barged back in, crashing the heavy conference room door against the marble wall. The wall-sized windows opposite shook, and a pyramid of K-cups for an unplugged Keurig toppled, spilling onto the light-gray vacuum paths in the dark gray carpet.

  “I thought you said this wasn’t a problem, Kristine!” He shouted. “And how the damn hell, damn fuck, fuck, fuck, Kristine, did you get Arnold’s emails! That was never authorized!” (Arnold being the CEO who’d flat palmed the table and stormed out.)

  Kristine looked to me, and shrugged in an aggressive manner, suggesting I was to blame for whatever breach was brewing to overshadow the actual breach of law presented in my PowerPoint.

  “Arnold’s emails were not collected from the company server,” I said. “However, he emailed with Stan and Roger quite a bit, actually, and from a personal email account, so that is how we saw the ones I used here today.”

  The GC shook his head, his nostrils flared. “And you didn’t think to warn me before accusing the fucking CEO of fucking fraud? Kristine, did you know this was the finding?”

  Abandoning any connection we may have had as law school friends, study-mates, forgetting too how I let her cram for a week at my family home in France, she crossed her arms and snorted. “I absofuckinglutely did not, Jim. This is an ambush. Very unprofessional,” she said, turning to
me.

  I stood.

  “I had hoped,” I said. “This would not be your response. I did hope. But the world has gone to shit, hasn’t it, Jim? Hasn’t it, Kristine? Unraveled. And you’re just another set of architects. This scheme was so outright flagrant once you took a moment to look, I highly doubted you didn’t already know. But I had hope. Son of a bitch, I had one last thread of hope. Did you think I wouldn’t find all this because you sent my firm over ten million emails and gave me a week to do the investigation?”

  They both looked to the gray carpeted floor.

  “That’s what I thought. Kristine, you’re a fool. You never listen. I’ve told you a million times, our technology weeds through millions of emails in days. There are clear violations of law here. Ones the company is required to report.”

  “You will keep your fucking mouth shut, you hear me? I’ll have your license if you break attorney-client privilege,” Jim the GC screamed. “Kristine, clean this up. Close this out.”

  He turned and left the room, toe-kicking fallen K-cups and smashing some in his stomp-slide to leave. He pulled the door shut with the same venom as when he entered. I swear, the glass panels almost shattered.

  Kristine, the still accordion-faced version of her, stared at me. “Holy shit. You couldn’t give me a heads up, Lacy?”

  “A heads up to what? You’re in the thick of it.”

  She looked away, not denying anything.

  “So brave of you to make me think things were clear and done, setting up this meeting so, with no alarms. No warnings. You’ve always been, you, just so fucking…pure.” Her sarcasm was tangible, like a thorned blanket thrown down from the ceiling.

  “Don’t be saccharine, Kristine. How dare you try to whitewash this through my firm, as if I’d give a clean bill of health. You used me. And why? Why would you put your own license on the line for obvious violations of law? Why?”