A Vial Upon the Sun

by James Codlin

  Dennis angrily flicked off his microphone. “Goddamnit! This guy does not stay on script!”

  “Isn’t that why you got into this business, Dennis? No scripts?” Gina asked.

  Dennis glared at her.

  Gina put her hand on Dennis’s shoulder. “There’s no more planning from here on out. Marty’s life depends on our actions over the next minutes. We’ve got to work the problems as they come.”

  Dennis looked at his friend and nodded. “No pressure, eh? Well, as I told you before, I’m a hell of a lot better than you print journalists at meeting deadlines.”

  Gina smiled. “Prove it. Save Marty and give me a 20,000 word feature I can offer to the highest bidder while you’re at it.”

  Dennis smirked and then his smile faded as he rubbed his head. “Gotta get a comm circuit… anything!”

  “So, what’s the specific problem we’re working through here? Talk it out and maybe I can help.”

  “Our radios can’t penetrate all that concrete and steel above the metro. We’ve gotta have a way to relay or amplify the signal.”

  Gina thought. “Dennis, does Mexico City’s metro have an underground cellular network? Something you can tap into?”

  “I like your thinking,” Dennis said as he pulled up Google and typed in a few phrases. The search results popped up, and after scanning for a few seconds, Dennis groaned. “Nothing in service yet. TeleMexico said they’d have one installed and operational two years ago, but you know how that shit goes. It’s still at least a year away.”

  “Any chance that the infrastructure already put in place as part of the build would be useful?” Gina asked.

  “Probably not. If it’s down there and not active and powered up, there’s no way for me to— wait a second! The New York subway has an emergency communications system that relays radio transmissions from above ground and rebroadcasts them underground, and it works both ways. Maybe they have that system here too. What the hell was the frequency?” He pulled up an app and started spinning through the frequencies. After a minute they heard the abrupt cadence of two-way radio transmissions.

  “What are they saying?” Dennis asked.

  “One guy is asking for a visual check for vagrants on a station platform,” Gina said. “The other guy said he’s on his way.”

  “That’s got to be it. Now I need to tie our TV camera as a sideband to that frequency… we may need visuals.”

  Dennis worked furiously for several seconds.

  “Nico, are you at the station?” Dennis asked into his microphone.

  “Yeah, we’re waiting for you,” Nicolás said.

  “Go down the stairs, and keep talking as you go.”

  “Okay, I’m walking… one… two… three… four… five… six…”

  Nicolás and Lenin walked quickly down the steps, taking them two at a time, and stopped in the lobby.

  “We’re in the station,” Nicolás announced.

  “Hot damn,” Dennis said. “I’ve got you loud and clear. You’ll hear other calls on this frequency though. With any luck they’ve got enough to deal with right now and won’t come looking for us while we’re intruding on their band.”

  Nicolás vaulted over the turnstiles and kept running. Lenin stood at the stainless-steel gate, puffing hard. Finally he crawled under the metal arm and trotted after Nicolás.

  *

  Dennis turned up the sound and stared at the video transmission he was receiving. Clergymen walked around the platform swinging incense burners while an ornately dressed priest chanted a long prayer in Latin. The camera scanned the crowd in the grandstands, panning in on the faces of the men and women in attendance. They all sat in sullen silence, watching intently.

  Through Martín’s microphone they could hear his rapid breathing, and in the background, the booming amplified voice of the priest.

  “Don’t worry, Marty,” Dennis said. “We’re working on something right now, mate.”

  *

  “Here!” a voiced hissed at Lenin.

  He looked to his left and saw Nicolás standing inside a steel door. Lenin stepped into a space thrumming with electric motors and rapidly moving air. They walked quickly up a flight of stairs to another door. Inside was a large sheet-metal cabinet bristling with ducts headed out in every direction.

  Nicolás knocked on the sheet metal with his knuckles. He was answered each time with a clang, until at one location the sound that reported back was muffled. He got down on his knees and felt around with his hands. Nicolás twisted some butterfly-shaped tabs and a panel gave way. He laid it on the concrete floor and looked inside.

  The cubical cabinet was an air plenum with an enormous fan—10 meters in diameter—horizontally mounted at the top. The fan drew air from various areas of the station and siphoned it through the ducts and into the plenum, where it was expelled through the grating at the top.

  Nicolás cupped his hands around Lenin’s ear and shouted through the noise generated by the fan and rushing air. “Got to shut it off! Find a switch!”

  They both looked around the inside of the plenum but saw nothing. Lenin ducked out the door and found a control box mounted on a wall. He grasped the lever on the side and pulled it down. The roar of air tapered off as the electric fan wound down. After a few seconds there was silence.

  When Lenin went back into the room, Nicolás pointed upward at the bottom of the grate next to the stage. The glow of bright lights shone through the steel slits, and they heard an amplified voice fulminating against religions that were contrary to God’s laws.

  Nicolás climbed the metal rungs welded to the sides of the plenum and made his way between the now-stationary blades. Through the grate he could see the leg of the platform standing on top of one of the steel panels. He studied the clamps used to secure the panels and began to work one of them. Lenin saw what Nicolás was doing, climbed the rungs on the opposite end of the plenum, and began to loosen a clamp at his end.

  “Dennis, we’re directly under the west side of the platform,” Nicolás said. “There’s a steel grate, and we’re going to get it open. We’ll have to get Martín off the platform and into the opening. Once he’s down here, we can disappear into the maze of subway tunnels and figure out a place to rendezvous on the fly.”

  “Got it,” Dennis said. He turned to Gina. “So how do we get Marty off that platform and through that grate?”

  *

  Father Serrano took over the ceremony and announced with great flourish the name of the first heretic.

  In the fog within Martín’s mind, something sounded oddly familiar. Of course, the priest’s voice was familiar, but… something else.

  Then he heard Father Serrano’s voice intone the name once again, and Martín’s blood ran cold. “No,” he said softly.

  “Sister Maria Trinidad,” Father Serrano said. “Her sins, among many, include her failed and blasphemous attempt to aid a Jew and heretic!”

  Martín bolted forward in a wild attempt to bull rush Father Serrano, but was quickly grabbed by two pairs of muscular hands that effortlessly pulled him back. Ahead of him, he heard the soft, heartbreaking sound of a young female voice crying in terror.

  “Sister!” he cried out.

  “Mr. Ibarra,” Maria sobbed. “They told me all the terrible things you have done! Why did you do this to me?”

  “No, Sister!” Martín wailed, but his feelings betrayed him. He was a sinner and a heretic who had admitted to his horrible crimes against God, and he had brought this woman into his profane plot. By doing so, he had desecrated her. This was his fault, and his fault alone.

  Father Serrano began reading from Revelation.

  “You monster!” Martín bellowed. “She’s innocent! She didn’t know!”

  “Spoken from a fellow heretic!” Serrano sneered. “Your words carry no weight, and your turn will come.”

  He returned to the ceremony, intoning that God would now purify this heretic by cleansing her with fire that symbolized the flame br
ought to Earth by the Fourth Angel and that resulted from the Fourth Angel’s vial being poured upon the sun. As he spoke, Sister Trinidad was strapped to the stake.

  “Do you sincerely repent your heresy?” Serrano asked.

  The question reverberated throughout the plaza as the crowd gawked.

  There was no audible reply. The crowd had gone utterly silent. All Martín heard were Sister Trinidad’s choked sobs, and all he could see in the darkness behind his blinded eyes was her sweet, innocent face and how she had trusted him and believed that it was God’s will to help him. And he had allowed her—no, encouraged her—to do so. His attempt to escape had been a failure, and this was the result. Nothing had changed other than that this innocent woman was going to die. All because of him.

  “You are no longer Sister Maria Trinidad,” Father Serrano said. “You have desecrated your vows to your order and they are hereby annulled. I excommunicate you and banish you from the bosom of the One True Faith and the One True Church. You, Maria Anita Perez Moreno, are cast out, anathema. As written in Revelation, you blasphemed the name of God by your actions and repented not. You shall now be scorched by the vial of the Fourth Angel, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

  *

  Dennis and Gina watched the monitors in horror. They didn’t understand why Martín had charged the priest, but for a few terrifying moments they thought that he was going to destroy any chance they had of saving him.

  One of the cameras zoomed in on Sister Trinidad’s face. A wide band of red light emanating from each of the triangulated lasers played across her head as their operators swiveled them into place. One of the bright red lights flashed into the sister’s wide eyes and she jerked her head around wildly. There was a murmur from the crowd in the grandstands. Sister Trinidad shrieked and then yelled something incoherent, struggling against the restraints on her arms and legs.

  The three laser beams locked on the nun’s head and immediately smoke began to emanate from her skin. She jerked her head, but the beams remained on her, scorching her face. She began crying hysterically and yelling in desperation, “No! No! No! I repent! I repent!” Her howls were nearly inhuman.

  The priests prayed, clutching their Bibles close. Sister Trinidad shrieked and turned crimson as her face contorted and burned. Her eyes rolled wildly and spasms wracked her body. She screamed again and again until blood sprayed from her mouth, choking off her wails into a weak gurgle. Finally, with a cough, she slumped forward. In the cool night air, steam rose from her motionless and unrecognizable head. A small flicker of flame lingered in her hair.

  From Martín’s audio feed, Dennis and Gina heard soft, whimpering cries. They were the sounds of a man whose mental collapse was complete.

  Two guards stepped forward with the priest, who held out a crucifix toward the body as the guards untied the still smoldering prisoner.

  Dennis concentrated on his work in an attempt to mentally push past the atrocity he had just witnessed, adjusting the gain from his antenna and clearing the pictures on the monitors. “How’s it coming?” he asked Nicolás through his microphone.

  “We’ve got five more grate locks to remove. Tell him that in a few minutes we’ll need for him to get to the west side of the platform—um, his… left—and be ready to jump.”

  Dennis relayed the information to Martín, but was unable to tell whether it registered. All he could hear was weeping.

  Chapter Twenty-EIGHT

  Dennis had the raw feeds from four different television cameras in the Zócalo giving him various views and close-ups. Several times the cameras had captured Martín Ibarra’s face and he and Gina could see the muscles of his neck and jaw corded and working. They watched the guards and priests while trying to devise a means to move Martín down to ground level where he could get to the steel grate.

  “The fastest way is for him to just step off the side of the platform and drop straight down through the grate and you two get him out of there,” Dennis transmitted to Nicolás.

  “It’s a good five-meter drop and he can’t even see!” Nicolás said. “He could easily break a leg blindly falling that far. We’d never be able to escape with him hobbled. Once we get him through the grate, we’re already going to have our hands full negotiating him through fan blades and then getting him down a two-meter ladder. We need him fully mobile.”

  “There’s four guards up on the platform and at least ten surrounding it,” Dennis said. “But they never closed off the gap that the processional up the stairs created. His best bet will be to make a break for it and run down the platform stairs and then jump into the grate opening.”

  The radio crackled back with barely controlled rage. “Dennis, he’s blind! He can’t make that on his own! Someone’s got to get out there and help my brother… now!”

  “But Marty’s used to hearing my voice,” Dennis said. “If we change—”

  “No time!” Nicolás hissed. “Do it now!”

  Dennis looked at Gina. “He’s right,” she said. “We’ll have to take a chance. Get out there, Dennis, do something.” She moved his hands aside and nodded at the control panel. “These are the switches I use to talk to Marty and Nico, right?”

  “Yeah,” Dennis said as he grabbed an earpiece from a table next to the console and jammed it into his ear. A wireless microphone was hurriedly affixed to his shirt collar as well. “You’ve got me now, too. The switch to the right of Nico’s will let you talk to me, and my audio is on the third slider.”

  “Got it,” Gina said.

  Dennis stuck two pistols into his belt, went to the door, looked back at Gina with wide, frightened eyes, and then disappeared through it at a run.

  Gina turned around and studied the monitors. The male prisoner preceding Martín was now being strapped onto the stake. The feed cut to a tight shot of Martín’s face. She took two deep breaths and keyed the microphone.

  “Martín, this is Gina. Tap twice over the mic if you hear me.”

  *

  Nicolás and Lenin sweated heavily as they worked to unscrew the clamps holding the grate in position. They each had one more clamp to remove. Nicolás’s wrist trembled from the exertion as he gripped the locking ring and twisted. It started to rotate.

  Lenin did the same, but the ring on his side didn’t move. He flexed his hand several times and gripped it again, grimacing in pain as he tried to turn it.

  Nothing. He looked desperately at Nicolás. The revolutionary scrambled down the ladder rungs and climbed up next to Lenin. He gripped the side of the locking ring opposite Lenin’s hand and they both pulled with everything they had. The ring refused to move.

  Lenin looked down at his watch. From the noise directly above, he knew that another prisoner’s execution had just commenced. Martín would be next.

  *

  From the tumult around him, Martín knew that the second prisoner was dead. In a few seconds they would begin leading him to his fate.

  He heard a voice in his earpiece, but this time it was a woman’s voice. The voice of a dead woman. The voice of the woman he loved. The voice that had whispered so many intimacies in his ear—but also the voice that had shouted “Jew!” at him with loathing and hatred.

  His head spun with dizziness and he sank to one knee. The dreamlike memory washed back over him—Gina leaning from her towering witness stand and accusing him over and over: “Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew!”

  But now the dream was slightly different. This time, underneath the voice that was spewing hatred at him from above, there was another version of Gina’s voice. This one was soothing, quiet, and urgently pleading. It was saying something about… tapping? And unlike the dream voice, this voice had the feeling of immediacy. It was happening now, through the same earpiece he had been receiving instructions from.

  It was impossible.

  Was this somehow a trick orchestrated to make his final moments even more horrific? His inner voice shouted a warning: “Don’t listen!” It drowned out Gina’s v
oice in his ear. His mind flashed through a series of images with Gina demonstrating her loathing of him.

  But there it was, still… Gina’s faint voice in his ear saying, “Martín, you’ve got to listen to me. We don’t have any time.”

  Martín began to sob.

  *

  Dennis pushed through the crowd toward the grandstands. He wondered what the hell he would do when he got there. He strained as hard as he could to move forward, but his feet felt sluggish and heavy—bogged in the pavement. Sweat poured off of his face and his lungs burned in the thin air of the seven-thousand-foot-high, smog-choked city.

  *

  Gina watched as Martín’s head snapped back and his limbs splayed out as though he had been jolted by a cattle prod. His vacant eyes rolled in their sockets and he dropped down on one knee. She heard his anguished voice coming through the speakers crying, “No, Gina, no, not you! You’re dead. Why so much hate, Gina? Why the hate?”

  Gina swallowed hard, and steeled her resolve. “Martín, you’ve got to believe me. Your brother Nico and Teodoro Lenin and a man named Dennis Prinn—they’re all trying to save you from these fanatics. You have to do what I tell you.”

  In the monitor she could see him clamping his hands over his ears. From the speakers, she heard him moaning, “Lenin hates me… Nico, they’ve broken him… Gina hates me… and I have killed a nun!”

  “No, Martín, I love you. You have to believe that! I never stopped loving you. Listen to me now, and do what I say so that I can tell you that in person.”

  She saw him doubled over with his hands squeezing his ears, tears streaming down his face. On the main feed they were broadcasting Martín’s admission of heresy. He was begging for forgiveness before the Inquisition court. Gina wondered what she could possibly say to bring any sense of reality back to the man she loved.

  *

  Dennis slumped against a leg of the bleachers. “Lenin, Nico, I’m at the grandstand. Do you have the grate open yet?”