Read Online Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters by Clive Barker, Robert McCammon, China Miéville, Joe R. Lansdale, Cherie Priest, Christopher Golden, Al Sarrantonio, David Schow, John Langan, Paul Tremblay - Free Book Online

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