The rain came down like God himself had decided Alabama needed to drown.

  This wasn't the usual shower, or even the kind of early-autumn downpour that would make any sensible person stay indoors and wait it out. No, this was something entirely different—sheets of water so thick and heavy that visibility dropped to maybe fifty feet at best, a freak storm that was almost deafening. It was the kind that turned dirt roads into rivers and made flash flood warnings actually mean something for once.

  Despite the adverse conditions, two men worked inside a covered carport attached to the side of the compound, loading an old white cargo van with enough film-wrapped bricks to make any DEA agent salivate. The overhead fluorescent lights cast harsh shadows across the only refuge as the men moved back and forth from the building's side door, sprinting through the rain to get the loads into the cargo van.

  The packages contained the usual narcotics seen distributed within the continental United States. They were handled with very little care, unceremoniously tossed in, and simply shoved against the back. However, among your bog-standard bricks of low-quality cocaine or heroin, weren't the only things being loaded.

  Among the usual filth were strange, otherworldly plants, still in their plastic pots, but each of them had water jugs that had been sawed in half and fitted over the plants like makeshift terrariums. These were layered inside the van and braced with bricks of drugs to keep them from shifting during transport.

  The plants themselves looked fundamentally wrong in a way that made your eyes want to slide away from them.

  One species had leaves that looked almost jet black, with veins running deep among its stems, arterial crimson that pulsed as if it had a heartbeat. These weren’t painted or dyed, but seemed to be part of its biology. It was as if the plant had evolved to have its own circulatory system. Even these leaves were strange, layered thick and waxy, almost leathery, and they curved inward like grasping fingers. When a worker got close, the strange leaves fluttered and stretched toward the man as if trying to grasp at them.

  Another plant had fronds that looked similar to marijuana, except each individual leaflet was covered in what seemed to be fine, downy fur that was white and soft like a rabbit's hair. The workers knew not to get too close to this one; when a poor guy had accidentally brushed against it a few months ago, the ‘fur’ had stuck to his skin like fiberglass insulation. He hadn’t told anyone, even though he was explicitly instructed to scream for their ‘consultants’ for help and guidance. Hours later, the man’s skin had fully absorbed the fur, leaving him a drooling, unrecognizable mess, his body twisting and writhing as if he were on fire. However, instead of pain, the man was overwhelmed with euphoria, and his senses were completely overloaded.

  For almost an entire day, the worker endured the high until he finally started to calm down, but after such a concentrated dose, he was never the same. Now, the workers made sure to stay away from the damn thing without some kind of barrier to protect them, whether that be a plastic water jug or a full-body painter's suit. Regardless, they knew to treat the plant that swayed gently despite being inside a protective jug with a great deal of respect. Or more like fear, as it kept moving along with a breeze that didn't exist.

  Trotting through the rain and puddles to stay dry, a short, stocky man finally ducked into the dry safety of the carport, holding his extremely short AR-15. A Sicario. His rifle looked like someone had taken a hacksaw to it with malicious intent: no stock, just a buffer tube and foam pad, a drum magazine that probably held a hundred rounds, and a Chinese-manufactured red dot seemed more like an aesthetic choice rather than a practical one.

  The Sicario himself seemed more or less unassuming, save for the over-the-top weapon and a badly faded neck tattoo that denoted he belonged to the Los Errantes and the Dallas Cowboys snapback pulled low. After shoving the gun into the passenger seat, he shook the rain off his arms and looked over his shoulder at the two men struggling with the cargo.

  ?Ayy, Tortuga, güey!" The Sicario called out, his voice cutting through the rain's assault on the metal roof. "?Apúrate y carga todo, no quiero estar atrapado aquí afuera!"

  The two men poked their heads out from around the cargo van with pure unadulterated agitation on their faces. For a moment, they just stopped what they were doing and snarled in frustration at the fact that this random, useless idiot was talking instead of working.

  "?Cállate, cabrón!" the fatter worker growled, water dripping from his beard as he hoisted another bundle into the van. "?Tú estás parado ahí sin hacer nada mientras nosotros hacemos todo el trabajo!"

  His partner, a skinny, wiry guy wearing an oversized poncho, jerked his head aggressively toward the van. "?Si quieres que esto vaya más rápido, trae tu culo estúpido, flojo y feo pa'cá y ayúdanos, pendejo!"

  The Sicario started to say something back—probably something equally colorful—but movement from the main building's door cut him off.

  Another individual emerged into the rain, casually strolling through the deluge with an umbrella held over his head like he was taking a leisurely walk through a park instead of fleeing a drug operation in the middle of a monsoon.

  He looked... wrong. Out of place in a way that made your brain stutter trying to process it.

  He was extraordinarily pale... Not Caucasian pale but truly pallid, as if he had been dead for a long time and blood had completely stopped flowing through his body. His shaggy black hair hung past his shoulders, frayed at the ends as if halfway burned away. Most striking of all were the long, pointed ears that swept back from the sides of his head, denoting that he wasn’t human. He looked more at home in a fantasy novel than a cartel grow operation in rural Alabama.

  The juxtaposition was truly jarring. Here was a bona fide, honest-to-God elf, standing in the rain at a narcotics production facility as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

  Ignoring the bickering cartel members completely, the elf didn't even glance in their direction as they hurled Spanish obscenities at each other. Instead, he folded his umbrella, opened the rear passenger door of the cargo, and slid into the back seat with the kind of fluid grace that suggested he'd done this a thousand times before.

  The door closed with a solid thunk, and through the rain-streaked window, the elf could be seen settling into his seat with a heavy sigh. His expression was one of profound exhaustion mixed with resignation and dread. He wore the look of someone who had given up questioning how his life had gone so catastrophically off the rails and into the gutter.

  "?Ya estuvo!" the Sicario at the front of the vehicle smacked his palm hard against the hood in an effort to speed up the workers. "?ándale, vámonos antes de que se inunde!”

  The men at the rear of the vehicle grumbled as they finished securing the rest of their load. Luckily, the majority of the work had already been done. Now, they just had to make sure their more precious cargo wasn’t going to shift and slam the rear doors shut.

  When the workers finally got into the van, each of them shot a quick, uneasy glance at that unnaturally pale figure. He resembled La Llorona—tall, deathly pale, and wearing gown-like robes. His skin wasn't just white; it was a disturbing shade of ashen, devoid of any visible veins or warmth, as if the blood had curdled or been completely drained from his body. Even the sicario assigned to the run shifted uneasily. He usually laughed and bragged about shootouts and whom he would murder, but this unmoving, bloodless statue made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

  The cartel members who worked around this... elf... always found him to be deeply unsettling—not just because he wasn't human, but because of the way he moved, the way he looked at you with those colorless eyes like you were something that had already stopped breathing.

  They got into this situation the same way most people do—money. A lot of it. More than they had ever seen in their lives just by smuggling fentanyl or cocaine across the border. The local Jefes had connected with these... people... through secret channels nobody talked about, and suddenly the organization was dealing in a product that made their usual narcotics look like Ibuprofen.

  At first, they'd thought there would be some random guy acting as a translator when dealing with these fantasy freaks. Maybe some Gringo who had learned their language, or hell, maybe the elves would speak broken Spanish like everyone else trying to do business in their territory.

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  They'd been very… Oh, so very wrong.

  None of the strange beings they worked with spoke even a lick of English or Spanish. Not a single word. They communicated through... intermediaries. And those intermediaries weren't people. At least not anymore.

  The Sicario remembered the first time he'd seen it happen.

  They had been told to bring bodies to the compound—addicts, overdose victims, people who wouldn't be missed. The kind of corpses that end up in abandoned buildings or dumpsters in the bad parts of town. Easy enough. The cartel had never been squeamish about death, and if this pale bastard wanted to use the bodies for whatever strange ritual stuff they practiced, well, that was their business.

  Except it wasn't a ritual. It was something far worse.

  The pale, deathly-skinned elf sitting in the back of the van right now was one of the few who could reconfigure the bodies into these… things. The Sicario didn't have words for what he'd witnessed that day, and part of him was grateful for that. Some things shouldn't have names.

  It had started with the bodies being dumped into a pit—maybe six or seven of them, all fresh and whole. The elf had slipped into the pile of bodies and decided to lie among them, trailing those long, skeletal fingers across cold flesh, whispering in that sing-song language that all those pointy-eared freaks spoke. However, this time, the words made their ears ring and heads pound even after he stopped talking. There was something off about what he said that felt as if their mortal souls were screaming at them to get away; everyone who was there felt it.

  No one there really knew what the freak was doing, but whatever it was made everyone want to run away. And that’s when the bodies started to... move. Not like waking up. Not like resurrection. Something incomprehensible and beyond what any language could describe.

  Even the hardened Cartel members—men who had tortured rivals, executed families, and committed atrocities that would make most people vomit—had immediately started crossing themselves as if they were back at mass. Muttering prayers half-remembered from childhood.

  “Dios te salve, María, llena eres de gracia…” One quite bloodthirsty Sicario’s hand reached into his shirt and pulled out a rosary he'd kept hidden as his fingers worked the beads with desperate intensity.

  All around, the scene was the same: Sicarios, cartel workers, smugglers, coyotes—all doing something to invoke the name of God. Because what they were witnessing was a violation of the natural order so profound that even men who'd long abandoned the church, driven by power and self-gain, found themselves invoking saints and the Virgin Mary for protection.

  The Skin of the bodies started to rip and tear as bones cracked and reformed with wet, grinding sounds that echoed throughout the compound. Flesh flowed like melted wax, merging where it touched as individual corpses lost their definition while pressed together. Limbs elongated or shortened. Faces morphed into expressions of terror on random parts of this new whole's surface, and the boundaries between one body and another dissolved until it was impossible to tell where one began and another ended.

  And after it was all over, the thing began to speak to them in a broken, unnatural tone that made people's skin crawl. But the garbled English or Spanish seemed to be the least of their concerns as the cartel member looked up at the unholy vessels that pale monster created.

  After all was said and done, somehow word got back to the upper echelons of their organization. Patrones and Patronas who operated from mansions in Culiacán and private compounds in Sinaloa were somehow shown everything. No one knew who or how, but there were brief conversations between the Jefes. The Jefes in Sinaloa got their hands on detailed reports on exactly what was happening at the Alabama compound, and they immediately cut off all communication with this specific local branch.

  No explanation. No warning. Just silence.

  But that didn't matter right now. Not to the Sicaro, nor to the others trapped in this nightmare. The mid-level guys who were too small to matter to the El Toro and the Jefes but too invested to just walk away still gave them orders: transport the product, move the inventory, get the elf and his cargo to the new location.

  With the bickering over, everyone decided to focus on the truly important part of their job—making sure the rear cargo didn’t shift during the drive. Sure, the real product was wedged between drug bricks, but the last thing they wanted was to hit a pothole and have one of these damn things tip over, coating the interior of the van with their shit. Never mind the environmental disaster of it spreading throughout the forest—they were much more worried about their own safety. Coming into contact with the wrong plant or breathing in that damned fur? No fucking thank you.

  No matter how much they didn’t want to be near these damn plants or that... THING sitting with them, they still had to move their operation. This entire location was becoming increasingly untenable by the day.

  They hadn't heard from El Toro in over a week. No calls, no encrypted messages via Signal, no couriers delivering instructions or cash. Just radio silence. In their line of work, that was never a good sign. It meant the bosses could be dead, arrested, or had decided to cut ties. None of those options inspired confidence.

  Every hour of no communication made everyone in the compound more spooked. It got to the point where the Sicarios were jumping at shadows and checking over their shoulders every five minutes as if something was watching them. But they couldn't quite find who or what was watching them, no matter how much they patrolled.

  Each of them knew they were probably just imagining it, but they felt it was just a nagging feeling everyone was experiencing. They wanted to get up and go, but they couldn't just pack up everything overnight—that’d cause a huge stir, and that's how you get noticed. So instead, they were carefully leveraging everything out slowly and methodically.

  They'd already moved half of the brujos—the magical freaks who actually grew and processed this otherworldly garbage—to a new location deeper in the Appalachian foothills. Most of the finished product had been moved too, along with the equipment and the more dangerous specimens. But there was still work to do here, still product to extract, and still plants that needed careful transport because you couldn't just yank them out of the ground and toss them in a cargo van.

  Now it was their turn to get the hell out of here before whatever bad thing that was coming finally arrived.

  When they slowly pulled out of the carport, the driver noticed that visibility was terrible. The headlights barely pierced through the sheets of rain, and they could maybe see thirty feet if they were lucky—and that was being generous. The dirt road leading from the compound to the highway was already turning into a nightmare, with puddles forming into pit traps in every depression, and mud trying to trap the tires.

  The Sicario driving kept the speed down to maybe fifteen miles per hour, and his windshield wiper cranked to the max as he tried to navigate more by memory than sight. One wrong turn, one missed curve, and they'd end up in a ditch or worse—sinking into a newly formed river with untold millions of dollars' worth of magical narcotics dumped into the forest.

  In the back, the wiry worker and the elf sat in complete silence. The cartel member kept his eyes fixed on the seat in front of him, refusing to acknowledge the pale figure beside him, fearing that with just a few words, he too would turn into a jumbled mess of flesh and bone. The elf, for his part, seemed content to stare out the rain-streaked window at the blurred shapes of passing trees, his expression unreadable.

  As they drove on, the minutes started to crawl by at a snail's pace. Five. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty.

  The road, along with time, seemed to stretch on forever as they wound through the forest like a snake, each turn looking exactly the same as the last. Tortuga's shoulders were starting to ache from the tension of gripping the wheel so tight that he thought he might rip it right off. All he wanted was to get out of this forest and get this damn demon away from them, but they were making slow, agonizing progress. Still, it was progress nonetheless.

  They'd be on the highway soon. Another thirty minutes, maybe an hour with the weather. Then it was a straight shot north to the new location, and they could wash their hands of this cursed operation and start fresh somewhere else.

  "?Cuánto falta?" the wiry guy asked how much longer it would take, breaking the silence.

  "Maybe ten minutes to the highway," The Scicario replied, his eyes burned from squinting through the rain. "Then we're home free, hermano. Just gotta—"

  "Wait." The wiry guy's head tilted slightly, his brow furrowing. "Do you hear that?"

  "Hear what? The fucking monsoon trying to kill us?"

  "No, güey, listen." He held up a hand, and suddenly everyone in the van went quiet. Even the elf turned his head slightly, his pale eyes narrowing.

  For a moment, there was nothing but the roar of rain against metal and the rhythmic slap of windshield wipers.

  But then, underneath it all, a sound barely audible over the storm…

  Something rhythmic and distant that was slowly starting to grow louder.

  "What the hell is that?" the wiry man asked from the back, leaning forward. "Do you hear that buzzing?"

  The Sicario’s blood ran cold. Because that wasn't a buzzing. That was something much, much worse, and it was getting close. A lot closer.

  "No," The Sicario breathed, his hands tightening on the wheel until his knuckles cracked. "No, no, no, ?chingada madre, no!"

  "What?" the wiry guy demanded, his own panic rising. "What is it?!"

  But The Sicario didn't need to answer, because a second later, the sound became unmistakable, rising above even the storm's fury.

  Helicopters.

  Rolling down the window and shoving his head out, the Sicario caught the glimpse of something that made his stomach drop.

  Two small black egg-shaped aircraft that were rushing toward them at breakneck speed just above the treetops.

  "?MIERDA!" he screamed, slamming his foot down on the accelerator. "?NOS CHINGARON!"

  The van lurched forward, tires spinning in the mud before finally catching traction. But it was too little, too late.