Pig Sticker Part 1 by Kevin Wikse.

Keeping a low profile at the Dream Catcher RV in Demming, NM, I remained hidden inside a rough-looking 90s C-class RV, letting my travel companion drive and arrange all the needed accommodations. Like a vampire, I would emerge to hunt only at night, cloaked in shadow and covered by darkness. 

Blood and tears stain the I-10 E, a corridor of misery for the abducted on their way to be sold and traded, either coming up from or down into Mexico. In 2018, the I-10 E was a low-visibility red-market supply chain feeding Phoenix, AZ, and Las Vegas, NV. I had been summoned to break a particular link in that supply chain. 

It was becoming increasingly commonplace for human traffickers using the I-10 E to pad their load with natives from the surrounding reservations, primarily infants and toddlers. In response, a coalition of private financiers who, for many reasons, could not be sanctioned by official Tribal Governments began hiring sympathetic and morally aligned outsides to act as phantom tomahawks against their people's enemies. 

"El Cerdo" or The Pig, a large, reportedly powerful brute whose face and sexual fetishes, of limited appeal, earned him his moniker, would be my target. He was a known pedophile, rapist, and murderer suspected of engaging in necrophilia and cannibalism. A former member of a defunct 1%er motorcycle club that used to ride in Arizona, El Credo established a network of drug and arms dealers from his club connections, moving into sex and human trafficking in the early 2000s. 

The nebulous financiers who hired me had marked El Credo as a high-priority target. My companion was a fierce-looking Apache woman with sharp, thorny features but still delicate and beautiful like a cactus flower. When she was 15, her baby was taken from her at the hospital right after delivery. She never got to hold her little him or her. The doctor said she'd tested positive for methamphetamine, and CPS was called to place the baby in protective custody. She was encouraged to forget the incident, as the legal system was not her friend. She didn't, and the wound only festered.

Not only did our stars and planets align, but so did our morals and ideologies.

The aged and weathered outside of our RV belied it's inside—clean and nearly new everything. The warmth of her body next to mine, slightly off-set by the efficient AC unit, circulating her floral perfume throughout the small, dimly lit rear cabin, her soft, dusky eyes captivating my time and attention until we drifted off within each other's embrace. 

An earthen vessel is buried near Shiprock Peak, a massive rock formation standing over 7,000 feet from which Shiprock, NM, takes its name. In this vessel are the bones, hairs, feathers, skins, teeth, claws, leaves, thorns, and seeds of my animal and plant allies, intermingled with parts of myself. I was told the story of a great and terrible bird who once made its nest on Shiprock Peak. A loud flurry resounded as it took to the air. It would return with sheep, deer, and even people clutched in its talons. The bird would toss its prey smack into the cliff face of Shiprock Peak and let them fall a thousand or more feet before retrieving the carcass.

This bird, called a Teratornis, having had over a twenty-plus foot wing span, lived atop Shiprock until a little over a hundred years ago. The knowledge of this creature struck a cord in me. I dreamed of it relentlessly for months on end. My initiator, who passed me the obsidian knife, told me of her. A great queen of the sky and chieftess of the four winds, she rivaled Eagle and made even Raven cautious. She would be my mother, and in my second life on this earth plane, I would hatch from her egg, a thunderbird's egg. For this reason, I buried a mighty artifact of Curanderimso in Shiprock, irrevocably tethering myself to her, the place, and its ghosts.

From this towering pinnacle, I take spiritual flight, soaring over the astral and shadow realms, hunting my quarry under the auspices of a grand feathered predator. On assignments, I naturally gravitated to this power spot with little effort. Laying beside my companion, however, I found an astonishing sense of ease in shifting between liminal spaces and achieving spiritual flight inside various grades and dimensions of non-physical reality. Gliding over Demming's and the surrounding area's shadow side, I could see an accumulation of angry earthbound souls and shadow people steadily gathering below me. Like heralds, they preceded his arrival. The Pig was on his way. 

She and I would stalk the streets at night. I would stake out the bars and strip clubs El Cerdo was known to frequent. She would walk the streets, and truck stops pretending to be a junkie and sex worker. Giving her number out and claiming she was a friend of The Pig's, wanting to know if he was around. On the morning of our fifth day, her phone rang. 

The voice on the other side of the phone was deep and gravelly but muffled and wet, like it was cutting through a lot of phlegm. The speaker launched into a one-sided conversation and just kept rambling. She looked at me quizzically, and I could tell she was having difficulty understanding what was being said. 

"Ask who it is." I silently mouthed to her. She nodded, "Piggy, baby, is that you?" she asked sweetly. An awkward silence followed as the voice stopped. She and I looked at each other and waited. "Yeah, it's me. I got a big load I need to dump. You come and fuck me." He said, his words slurred and slow. "Sounds good, baby, where you at right now?" She responded, the corner of her lip turning sly, and coyly nodded at me. "Uh, I am at the Deluxe room 19. Get your slut ass over here." His voice grew a little in strength and clarity. She looked at me and shrugged her shoulders. I shook my head "no" at her and mouthed, "Tell him you will call back."

 "Ok, babe, I'll call you back soon." She ended the call without waiting for his reply. 

We didn't know if that was really El Cerdo or if he was alone. No rash moves. I needed eyes on him. Throughout the morning, she played with him over text messages. She picked one particular girl from back-page ads in Tuscon, Arizona, and catfished him with her face and nudes. In return, we got the dick pic, but it was not what we wanted. An hour or so of troubling sexting later (he enjoyed activities like scat, dungeon torture, keeping women in small cages for weeks, abusing animals, psychological torture, etc.), she got him hot and bothered enough to give up the face pic. There was no mistaking it. That was the face of a nasty, ugly, evil Pig. 

However, we were just as suspectable of being catfished ourselves. It wouldn't be the first time I found myself in a situation of betrayal. Although "we be weaving spiders", Ive seen in nature that spiders can get stuck in another spider's web. Someone had made contact, claiming to be El Cerdo and providing evidence. The face pic was El Cerdo, but we couldn't verify when and where it was taken. It is either El Cerdo or someone privy to sensitive and restricted knowledge, which would, in many ways, be worse. The danger was now very real. 

With our limited resources, we ran his number. It was a burner phone purchased at an El Super in Albuquerque. Back to square one. Sending him a text, she agreed to meet him at the Deluxe around midnight tonight, and "party favors" would be greatly appreciated. El Cerdo assured her it was going to be quite the party. We settled down in bed together. She had this intoxicating scent. A blend of tilled soil with a soft, warm breeze over sunflowers. I couldn't place where I smelled it before. Southern California, Chino, maybe. Something deep inside me stirred in response to it. I closed my eyes, and as I faded away, I let myself go there, wherever there was. 

I realized I was dreaming as I rounded a hallway corner to find my old childhood home. A ranch-style house with a large fruit orchard for a backyard and in the shadow of the penitentiary. The house had been gutted and striped. There was no more roof, just crumbling brick walls and floors of shattered tile. I could hear screaming. Screaming was so visceral it had a deep guttural accompaniment. The expelling of vomit. Now actively lucid dreaming, I pulled out my obsidian knife and skulked down another hallway to find the source. 

Peaking around and into a room I don't remember existing was a dark-skinned woman chained to a wall. She was naked, beaten, and sobbing. Smoke wafted from her head. She turned and looked in my direction. Half of her face was charred, like red hot embers and ash. El Credo stood before her, brandishing a welding torch; he ran the flame over her face and breasts. She roiled and trashed in agony as he roared in laughter. The passage of time slowed and paused. She turned toward me again. Her eyes locked on to mine. "Avenging Angel...you may do your worst, and God will see it as your best," she told me.  

Time resumed. 

A woman now stood on the other side of her. The woman's face glowed a soft radiance of golden pink. Gently placing her hand on the tortured woman's shoulder, a sense of deep peace washed over her battered and burned face. Her body went limp. A fire then engulfed her motionless body. The volume of El Cerdo's laughs increased in equal measure with the flames. "Time to put his bitch out!" El Cerdo exclaimed, exposing his dick and pissing on her corpse. The shining woman paid El Cerdo no attention and kept her gaze on me. 

Nearly a year before, I had been in Mesilla, NM, just outside Las Cruces. I got lost walking around its many backstreets. I opened a fence door, thinking it led to a public park when the smell of roses saturated the air around me. I felt like I entered another world. I followed the sidewalk and up to a small shrine being tended to by a beautiful older Mexican woman. I attempted to explain why I was there. That I got lost, but she stopped me mid-sentence. Amused, she said, "You are here because she brought you here, the Mystic Rose," pointing at the central statue of Mother Mary. "She is the rose among the thorns." I would learn what that truly meant, and this woman would be my initiator into those sacred mysteries.

I recognized her now. Standing amid the horror, the Mystic Rose wanted to see if I would be the thorn I promised her I would be. For what El Cerdo had done to this rose and many others, if there was no blood, that would invalidate her mystery. No, there would be blood. I stepped into the room and met El Cerdo's gaze. Seeing me and my obsidian knife coming straight for him, he ignited his welding torch and brought his arm up. I rushed him, and we collided with the clapping force only two lumbering heavy weights could. Using my left arm as a meat shield, protecting my face from the torch, I plunged my obsidian knife into his chest. I charged forward until El Credo stumbled back. I followed, driving the blade and twisting it in deeper and deeper.

I pulled my knife free and displayed the obsidian blade, dripping with El Credo's blood, to the Mystic Rose, but she was gone. A pile of rose petals occupied where she once stood. Turning back to El Credo, his body now appeared like a mannequin. I cut him open and found a strange red gelatine instead of blood. I sunk my hand into the jelly and felt around. I pulled out a thick hunk of meat where his heart would have been. It looked like three rotten ribeye steaks bound together with barbwire, zip-ties, and duct tape. 

I untangled the barbwire and cut the ties, pulling it apart and opening it. Inside was jagged writing scrawled on the steaks, a crumbled paper bag with something in it, and writing on the outside. On the steaks was a language I could not read. It was something I had never seen before. On the brown paper, in a child's handwriting, was "for the devil." I poured the bag's contents into my hand, and another piece of rotten-looking flesh slid out. It started to move. It was the tiny body of a small baby bird, barely hatched, eyes still closed and no feathers. It was injured and languishing like it fell out of the nest. 

Intuitively, I knew it was El Credo's soul. In a decision genuinely born out of pity, I placed the baby bird on the ground and crushed it under my heel. At least the Devil could never collect it; if anyone could fix it, God could. An explosion of scratching sounds immediately began. I knew this was the tabulation of Heaven in response to my actions. Grand mathematical equations calculating moral decency and weighing good against bad now marched across all the watchers' chalkboards. Good or bad, a terrific sadness overtook me, and I awoke crying. 

My companion was already awake, watching me. She touched her forehead to mine and rested her hand on my cheek, wiping away the tears. "I need to kill that fucking monster," I whispered to her. She quietly nodded in agreement. 

-Kevin Wikse

TO BE CONTINUED