by Land, Jon
Locaro shifted positions again, stretching his arms high over the wheelchair to better ready the draw of his machete, his chosen instrument of death since he’d killed his first man while working citrus fields as a boy in Texas.
* * *
In that moment, Ana Guajardo was thinking about that very same day. Remembered because it was just after her seventh birthday, in 1980. Ana had watched as the man, a newly hired American work foreman, had pushed her mother. Then slapped her. Then shoved her to the ground. Then dragged her off into the nearby fields.
Her father had been taken away a few weeks before by la policía. Ana didn’t know what her father had done, and refused to cry when her father had been arrested and handcuffed to prove she was brave, eyeing the uniformed figures with contempt. Locaro had come to her then, wrapping an arm knobby with muscle for a boy around her shoulder and leaving it there to reassure her she was safe, that he would protect both her and her mother.
The day the man had dragged her mother off into the citrus fields was hazy, more like a dream than a memory. Ana remembered following them into the groves of thick stalks that smelled like skunk, clinging to the hope that Locaro would somehow follow to keep his promise. She remembered looking about for Locaro, thought of crying out his name but didn’t.
Her mother and the new foreman whose clothes smelled like piss were mostly lost to the shadows cast by the thickly congested plantings that shifted slightly in the breeze. He was lying prone over her, Ana following his strangely gyrating motions. As he moved up and down over her mother, an old shriveled orange appeared amid the plantings, sent rolling toward her until it came to a halt against the sandaled foot of her brother, Locaro.
He held a finger to his lips to signal her to be quiet. Then Ana watched through the strange haze as Locaro moved soundlessly into the thick foul-smelling grove. Watched as he stooped to retrieve a machete another worker had left behind. Watched him bring the machete, which looked absurdly large in his grasp, overhead and lash it downward.
It stuck in the neck of the new foreman who stank of piss and Locaro pulled it out, the man jerking a hand up to the bloody gash. Ana remembered that Locaro’s next strike partially severed the hand, and his third strike found the original gash and dug deeper.
The blood became a spurt, a fountain, the new foreman falling over sideways when he tried to rise. Ana watched Locaro leap over their mother onto him, slicing down with the machete again and again until he was covered with the blood and what was left of the man no longer moved. In the haze of memory today, Ana remembered wiping blood from her own face and clothes, wondering how it had sprayed so far. She had no recollection of her mother from that point, only of Locaro leading her back to their small shack that seemed so empty since their father had been taken away. Her mother had taken her out back and hosed off the blood, Ana figuring she must have done the same to herself first. So brave and strong, the way Ana would be someday too. Locaro had hovered nearby the whole time, her protector then and forever.
Ana often dreamed of that day but never recalled all the details upon waking. As if her brain sought to hide it from her to spare her further pain. What happened that day remained cloaked by a sheer curtain that revealed only shapes. Ana supposed she should be grateful for that much, and yet sometimes she woke at night screaming with some terrible truth revealed by the dream lost before she caught her next breath.
* * *
Locaro was only just beginning to realize how different he was from other children when he’d killed the new work foreman, how much bigger and stronger he was than they. But there was something more, something Locaro found in the mirror in the wake of killing for the first time with the machete he’d washed in the clothes trough and hidden under his bunk. His head looked funny even to him; block-shaped with a ridged, almost simian forehead that seemed to hang out over his brow. His neck was too small for his squat, barrel-like frame, making it seem as if his head was an extension of his shoulders. His fingers were short, stubby, and strangely gnarled. One of his eyes hung noticeably lower than the other and always drooped.
Only the older boys dared make fun of him and, after killing the work foreman, he began responding to their insults with unbridled attacks, launching himself on them in unrelenting fashion until others pulled him off. Locaro learned then the lesson that size was not nearly as important as will, translating desire to action without hesitation. It was a lesson that stayed with him all the way into an adulthood that saw his appearance neither change nor worsen, but merely stay the same. A blown-up version of the very same frame and features that made him reviled as a boy, save for the unfortunate addition of a skin condition that left his face marred with oozing boils and the pockmark scars left behind when Locaro picked at them with a knife.
His sister was the only one who viewed him without revulsion. From the day that he’d killed his first man, they became inseparable. But even Ana couldn’t grasp how much he had enjoyed the feel and smell of blood upon him. He began to thirst for it, never happier than when it spilled or sprayed from his victims.
Blood was life, after all.
“Fuego,” he ordered his snipers, hand at his mouth, finally ready. “Fire.”
Just as the Torres boy whipped another blistering shot with his webbed stick into the goal.
75
SAN ANTONIO
Caitlin and Cort Wesley joined the rest of the crowd on its feet, cheering for the goal that put St. Anthony’s up two to nothing.
“You need to explain this game to me again, Cort Wesley.”
But Cort Wesley’s eyes had darted back toward the school building to their right, gaze canting upward.
“Something’s going on up there,” he said without looking back at her. “Someone’s on the roof. Something’s wrong.”
Then he was in motion, shoving his way through the crowded row still celebrating Dylan’s second goal. Caitlin reached over to Luke to take him in tow with her to follow, when a shape from the row above lunged over her for the boy.
* * *
Something was wrong, Locaro realized.
The sniper fire hadn’t started, even as a commotion broke out in the stands right around the location of the other Torres boy.
Locaro looked to his men gathered in wheelchairs, dressed as American Army veterans, which had provided them field access to view the game. They had been saluted instead of searched, the players on the home team making a show out of shaking all their hands in a kind of reception line before pregame warm-ups.
The unexpected gesture had unnerved Locaro, especially when he shook the hand of Dylan Torres, though not as much as the current state of affairs here and now did.
Something had happened to his snipers. His plan had gone to shit.
Which meant it was time for a new plan. His snipers were gone, taken out. But he had his men. He had his machete.
And Guillermo Paz was somewhere about.
It could only be Paz, Locaro thought as he lurched out of his wheelchair, yanking the machete from beneath his fatigue jacket and charging toward the playing field.
His men fell into a surge behind him, whipping out their guns.
* * *
Jesus Christ, Cort Wesley thought, recognizing what was coming in the last moment before the men disguised as disabled veterans launched their attack.
He’d reached the aisle by then, thundering down it with Glock drawn, the crowd just starting to realize that something was about to go terribly wrong, rising to its collective feet, prepared to flee en masse when the staccato din of automatic fire sounded from high in the bleachers. The entire crowd forced downward, the attackers steadying their weapons as they charged over the edge of the field.
Cort Wesley’s thoughts came in fragments, snippets. He felt his feet stop churning amid the jostle of bodies around him, saw his own pistol coming up, thought having yielded to instinct, trying to find Dylan amid the burgeoning chaos.
Ready to fire when he thought of Caitlin and Luke now
trapped somewhere behind him.
Ready to fire as a pickup truck with double rear tires crashed through the fence surrounding the complex from the near side and tore onto the field.
* * *
Caitlin intercepted the figure in midair, the blade he held glinting in the bright stadium lighting just inches from Luke. She grabbed him by the hair and shoulder at the same time and flung him backward, where he crashed into seated patrons not yet aware of the maelstrom about to consume the field.
She lost her grasp on him, but never lost sight of the knife, lunging up and over her row of seats as gunfire erupted somewhere below.
* * *
Cort Wesley was living the nightmare. Again. It came to him often in the uneasiest nights of his sleep when worry over the future of his sons consumed his thinking. He’d finally slip off to find himself in a firefight with the Iraqi Republican Guard back in the Gulf War. In the dream, they kept coming no matter how many he shot or how many fresh mags he jammed into his M16. It was like being trapped in a video game, only the ground was sinking beneath his feet and Cort Wesley found himself fearing the eternal promised darkness more than the Iraqis’ Russian-made bullets or shrapnel.
Tonight the stands remained firm beneath him as he fired, emptying the Glock’s magazine toward the dark-clad men disguised as disabled veterans. He thought he counted seven in total, including one who looked like the base of an oak tree in motion, reddening blotches on his face shimmering in the stadium lights.
From this distance he managed to drop only two of the seven, taking them in the face or skull above their body armor. Their fall had no effect on the remaining five, neither slowing nor stopping them from opening fire into the sudden rush of panic that had overtaken the field with St. Anthony’s home burgundy jerseys and the white uniforms of the visiting team.
Where was Dylan?
That thought formed as breath bottlenecked in his throat and misty froth burst from several visitors’ uniform tops as they were hit with bullets that spun the still-helmeted players around or felled them where they stood. Now the stands had erupted in full-fledged panic, Cort Wesley struggling to hold his ground, not even remembering slapping a fresh magazine into the Glock.
No way he could reach the field to stop the madness before it converged on Dylan, he thought as Guillermo Paz burst up through the pickup truck’s sunroof, opening fire on the gunmen disguised as veterans with twin submachine guns as its double rear tires thumped across the field.
* * *
Caitlin lost track of Luke in the crowd surge that seemed to be moving in all directions at once. It was like getting sucked into the funnel of a tornado, but the knife-wielding man had got sucked into it too.
She shoved a woman aside and then yanked on someone’s ponytail to reach the attacker again after he’d briefly broken free. His knife must have been knocked from his grasp on impact and he was just retrieving it from the floor of the steel bleacher when Caitlin pounced on him. She got his knife wrist pinned with her left hand and began whaling at him with her right. Hand laced into a tight fist with fingers pressed high into the pads. She led with her knuckles, pounding him again and again and again, long strands of his blood coughed into the air until his nose mashed under her fist and the strands gave way to a geyser. She was vaguely aware her hand looked painted red and could feel the stray flecks spraying up into her face.
“Caitlin!”
Luke’s voice. Luke hugging her, trying to pull her off, the man’s features unrecognizable below, his face a mass of pits, hollowed and broken flesh. Caitlin felt the boy tugging at her, her gaze shifting in search of Dylan to the field now awash in panic, muzzle flashes, and the echoing din of gunshots.
76
SAN ANTONIO
Cort Wesley hurdled the interior fence enclosing the field and outdoor track. He had no recollection of pushing his way through the panicked crowd to get this far, only dimly aware of the chorus of screams and staccato bursts of fire from Guillermo Paz’s twin submachine guns. Paz’s huge, dark shape looked to be part of the big, black pickup from which he had burst. There were bodies everywhere, many still writhing, and the endless swell of panicked kids and adults stole any chance of him finding Dylan in his sights.
Cort Wesley entered that swell, the feeling like being swept under by an ocean wave. The panicked crowd even seemed to suck the oxygen out of the air, making it hard to breathe, the world turned oven-hot, those he pushed his way past literally steaming to the touch.
“Dylan!” he yelled out. “Dylan!”
He could barely hear himself, but he screamed the boy’s name again, his left arm carving the way forward while his right hand clung to the pistol. The body of a boy in a burgundy uniform nearly tripped him up, and Cort Wesley dropped to a crouch with his heart lurching against his chest wall, breath held until he saw it wasn’t Dylan; then both sadness and rage consumed him when he saw there was nothing left to be done for the boy.
Beneath the heavy spill of the stadium vapor lights, he could now see more bodies dotting the field. He’d just steered toward another shape wearing a burgundy uniform top crumpled on the field turf when a teammate pushed fleeing bystanders aside so he could drop down to help. The boy shed his stick, knelt by his fallen teammate’s side, and tore off his helmet to let a nest of long black hair swim freely.
Dylan! It was Dylan!
Cort Wesley surged forward, noticing crazed shadows of the panicked projected against nearby buildings by the sodium lights, cast as massive sentinels looming over the chaos. He was halfway across the field when the crowd buckled and pushed back against him, the massive pickup from which Paz was firing scattering them as a pair of the killers dressed as disabled veterans closed on Dylan.
* * *
Locaro pushed his way through the crowd that had engulfed him on the field, flinging anyone aside when they loomed too close. His eyes swept the blood-strewn scene he’d created, his ears awash in the sounds of screams and the gunshots of his remaining men.
He’d focused his attention initially on the uniformed police assigned to the event, four of them woefully inadequate to respond with mere pistols. Locaro killed them with his machete, moving from one to another to clear the way for his men to storm the field.
But events continued to conspire against him. First his snipers had been taken out, then two of his men were dropped where they stood by someone firing from the crowd.
The woman Texas Ranger maybe, or the outlaw father of his target. Uniform number forty-one currently lost from sight.
But the Venezuelan, the muck-dwelling Mayan, Guillermo Paz made for his biggest problem. The Ranger’s and these boys’ protector roaring across the field in a truck from hell, holding the remainder of his men at bay, shooting two more down. That left only two still with him on the field to join the search for the older target, while all the panic the attack had created stole sight of him from the younger one in the stands.
Locaro couldn’t help but smile, loving the world being made before him. He didn’t want to let go of the sights, sounds, and smells, wanted them to go on forever.
But Locaro saw that wasn’t going to happen, as his final two men closed on a boy wearing a burgundy uniform numbered forty-one.
* * *
Caitlin felt Luke clinging fast to her as they pushed down the bleacher steps for the field, gunshots continuing to echo through the night.
Not once had she experienced anything like this, guessed even the prison and labor riots her father and grandfather had been called in to stop couldn’t compare. She remembered going to football games herself, a cannon ignited whenever the home team scored, leaving the smell of sulfur and cordite to waft across the stands. The smell was similar tonight, the gunshots coming in pops not unlike Fourth of July firecrackers.
She finally reached the waist-high chain-link fencing but held her ground, suspended between staying here to protect Luke and joining Cort Wesley on the field in search of Dylan.
What if Dylan ca
me this way instead? What if Cort Wesley somehow missed him?
That made her decision easier, dragging Luke in tighter against her with the SIG palmed in her free hand. Caitlin was running her gaze over the panic still dominating the field when a sliver in the crowd opened up, allowing her to catch enough of a glimpse of a St. Anthony’s player kneeling by a fallen teammate to know it was Dylan. Knew it before she even saw his number or hair swimming past his shoulders.
Knew it even as a pair of gunmen finally cleared the crowd enough to find him in their sights.
* * *
Cort Wesley saw them too, desperately trying to find enough of a window through the crowd to fire and too far away to bother mounting an effective charge.
If he opened fire now, he was certain to hit bystanders, accomplishing nothing. If he didn’t, the killers had a clear path to Dylan, accomplishing less. The situation was further muddled by so many parents and team supporters wearing replica burgundy team jerseys, adding another element to the madness. They seemed everywhere now, mirror reflections of Dylan and his teammates, like the downed one over whom the boy was now kneeling.
But the crowd blocked Cort Wesley’s sight and path again, leaving the two gunmen a much clearer path to Dylan, as Guillermo Paz’s pickup surged the rest of the way through the crowd. Its huge tires ground wildly, kicking up the black pellets that helped provide traction on the turf. Scattering bystanders from its path and grazing those who didn’t lurch aside fast enough.
77