It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles by Stephen Graham Jones Page B

reassigned to the Del Rio region. Because he had a good record, and Del Rio was a bad stretch of land, where experienced border cops were in short supply, his request was granted. He didn’t care about immigration or narcotics, though.
    He was looking for me.
    Finally he hooked up with the hand who’d given me a ride. For two hundred more dollars, the hand let Refugio ask questions, so long as it didn’t interfere with work. What the hand was doing then was building a new stock tank and trough, right beside the one I’d slept in, like a mirror image. Because the cattle still wouldn’t drink from mine. And Granger Mosely had had the water tested over and over, had even considered drilling a new well.
    In the end, it was cheaper to just replace all the pipes, and the tank and trough. The cattle still blew into the water in disgust before finally drinking it, though. They knew. Refugio did too.
    I’d intrigued him. My bandoleer of moon rocks. What would they be worth? As far he knew, I’d never delivered them — had never walked up out of the pasture he’d left me in. Granted, fences had been cut clear to Uvalde, but that had to be something different, because I was on foot.
    He went to the pens at the end of the draw but didn’t find any of my coke cans or chip bags, or the board I’d arranged my dead skin on. For him, I was a ghost, moving a few months ahead of him. Taking all the same steps. But he wasn’t giving up, either.
    Because what I had — he’d heard things. Very specific things. My moon rocks weren’t moon rocks.
    Two years before, some graduate anthropology student had uncovered a mass of molten metal and rock deep underneath a Mayan ruin of some sort. Not a pyramid, like for worship, but more like the way you cap off a well.
    There was nearly a thousand pounds of the stuff. And none of the tests they did on it made any sense — even the Geiger counter never gave the same reading twice. The backhoe that tried to pull it up stopped working, and the truck they tied to it, it threw a rod, and nobody’s watches or flashlights would stay working around it.
    As near as the grad student could guess, it was an old meteorite, maybe. The find of a career, of a lifetime, he thought. He wasn’t far off.
    Soon enough all the noise he was making drew the attention of certain farmers, the kind who carried AK-47s and wore night vision goggles. They moved in, interrogated him, and then made him part of the historic record he so loved.
    And, when the properties of the metal rock were checked, it turned out to be even more than he’d said. In cartel-terms, if plutonium at the center of a bomb was dangerous, then this was hell on earth. Times twelve. They put it on the market by the milligram.
    What I’d been muling north, then, was the first shipment of the new empire. They’d given me the new world in a case, and paid me to carry it into America. It had to be by foot, too, because, in amounts more than an ounce, nothing mechanical would keep working around it.
    The reason it had to be carried by somebody disposable but punctual was because it killed whoever was around it. In a very specific timeframe. Evidently, the canisters I’d had were the only shield that even somewhat slowed down the radiation, or fumes, or microbes, or whatever. They were a silver-aluminum alloy. Like the case. Just thick enough for me to make it to Uvalde.
    What they never planned on, though, was a mule who’d sucked on enough sticks of silver nitrate that it had probably accumulated in my glands. It didn’t make me immune, but it made me different, let the stuff slow-cook its way into my DNA or something.
    All Refugio knew, though, was what his informant had told him: I’d walked into the night with millions of dollars, and never walked out. Meaning the canisters were still out there, a few feet from my sun-bleached bones. And, for twenty-six hundred dollars, he’d given them up.
    It kept Refugio up at night, rolled him out of bed