The Bolillo (December 2025)

“I can't forgive myself for what I did.”

The short obscure message had been baked into a bolillo by A. Cruz, a volunteer with a Caritas mission serving border communities in Nuevo Mexico.

Cruz hand-delivered the bolillo to Frankie, a defrocked Franciscan living in a wild cave near Carlsbad.

Months earlier, Cruz had befriended a Peace Corps worker and fallen in love. During their liaison, he had carelessly shared sensitive information about Mexico's new border with America.

Within days of their breakup, as Cruz later learned, recons from the paramilitary group, Demonios Americanos, appeared in Frank’s neighbourhood.

Under contract with the U.S. military, they were equipped with prototypes of advanced weaponry that can destroy mountains. However, in previous tests, many of the weapons had misfired when deployed in the field. This was to be a crucial test.

Recon had been unable to assemble precise target coordinates owing to the unclimbable topography, but it was good enough. The new weapon sliced through the mountain rock causing massive landslides as entire cliff walls sheared off and triggered rock avalanches that swept everything in their path to the bottom of the canyon. Any habitable caves would have collapsed under the barrage of weaponry.