by G. P. Grewal
"Holy shit, look at this gun! Beretta 9 fucking millimeter. Man, I haven't seen one of these in ages!"
Roy kept still. The man, suddenly remembering him, kicked him in the head, knocking Roy onto his back.
"No!" Gitty cried.
He just laughed, one of them wonky eyes fixing on her . Then his eyes—I mean his eye—went to his buddy on the ground, his other looking off in another direction.
"Terry!" he called. "Hey, Terry!"
Terry didn't answer. He couldn't, as dead as he were, Roy having plugged him good.
"Oh, shit, shit, shit! Terry, you stupid fuck! Oh, you assholes are gonna pay! You, pick him the fuck up. Move!"
I reached down and hauled Roy up, finally managing to get him over my shoulder. Then he ordered me to start walking, all twitchy and fired up like he might start shooting at any second. Down the street we went, his gun on us the whole time as he followed behind, telling us more how sorry we was going to be for shooting his friend. I knew I had to do something, knowing we was as good as dead and that he were just trying to think up some twisted way of drawing it out. My first thought was wondering how many shots he could get off if I dropped Roy and charged him, though after weighing it in my mind I knew I'd never make it two steps before being gunned down.
I was trying to think up another plan when I lost my grip on Roy. The two of us went down, hitting the pavement hard.
"You asshole! Get that sack of shit back over your shoulder or you're next!"
I tried to do as he said, though after finally getting Roy up and carrying him a few steps we fell again, what little strength I had left after hauling him so far finally giving out. The man cussed, coming over and kicking me as I was getting up.
"Let him alone!" Gitty begged.
He ignored her, ordering me up again. I knew if I didn't make it to my feet I'd be dead. I got up, grabbing hold of Roy just as he was coming to, until at last he was able to get to his feet and both of us were shuffling forward, Roy's weight on my shoulder as I kept him from falling down.
We didn't go much farther before I saw them, those three men standing near the edge of the woods, two white and one with a ragged ball cap who I wasn't sure about, all dirty, the white men with long, scraggly beards, the other one just scruffy. They got up from where they was sitting on the ground when they saw us, grabbing their guns.
"What the hell!" one shouted.
They gathered around, all twitchy and fired up as they looked us over.
"We found them wandering up the street near those dead gangers. This asshole shot Terry."
"Shot him? Dead?"
"Dead enough."
"Fuck!"
He came up to Roy, staring him hard in the face, then hit him in the belly with the butt of his rifle, Roy crumpling up as he went down.
"Shot him? Shot him? Oh, you're gonna be sorry now!"
"And what's this?" he said, moving to take a closer look at Gitty. "Well, momma, momma, momma!"
He circled around her, grinning as he looked her up and down, Gitty trembling. I tensed, balling up my fists, them dirty eyes of his soaking her in.
"You get away from her!"
There was white hot pain as someone hit me hard in back of the knee. My leg buckled and I went down, my face hitting the dirt, the lot of them laughing, one of the men grabbing Gitty as she tried to run to me. I tried to push myself back up but a boot came down on my knuckles, grinding back and forth as I screamed. Then there was a heavy weight pressing down on my back as someone sat on me and forced me down, his rifle pinning my shoulders.
There was laughing and something ripped and I looked up and they had torn Gitty's shirt wide open, a man still holding her from behind.
"My God!" one of them said. "Look at them big tits!"
I was fighting to get up, the man on top of me pushing my face back down into the dirt, Gitty's terrible cries and the wicked laughter of the men filling my ears. "I'll kill you!" I said, my shout muffled in the dust, my rage useless as I was held down. Then there was a scream, not Gitty's but the man on top of me, blood-choked and terrible, and suddenly the weight lifted off. I rolled onto my side in time to see Roy stick another, that little whittling knife he had pulled from his boot stabbing the man who couldn't get his gun up in time right in the throat.
Everything happened so fast. One man was still holding Gitty, and yet another was suddenly tangling with Roy, the two of them going down, Roy trying to stick him though the man had a good grip on his arm. I rushed to help Gitty, though the man holding her was finally able to get his pistol out and pushed it against her head.
"Stop right there!" he said. Roy was getting up, the man under him twitching a little before he was dead. Now it was only the one holding Gitty who was left, the same crazy-eyed man who had brought us there. He backed up, keeping one arm tight around her, his pistol tucked under her chin.
"Stay back!" he warned, his hand shaking. I was afraid he might slip, like that trigger might suddenly pull. "One step and I'm gonna blow this bitch's brains out!"
Weren't no bluff. He knew he was dead anyway. I could see it in his eyes, and like him, I was shaking too, afraid that he was going to decide to take Gitty with him.
"Easy," I said, nice and slow. "Just you let her go and ain't no one more going to die here."
For a second he wanted to believe me. Then he laughed a little, his scared lips quivering, his crazy, crooked eyes darting back and forth between me and Roy.
"You gotta be shitting me," he said. "No way you're going let me walk away. Take one step and she's getting it, you understand?"
My eyes shot to the right then back again, though the man was so worked up he didn't notice. My heart was pumping hard for there he was, that fiendish Mexican creeping up on him from behind, skull face and all. I licked my lips, my breath caught in my chest, sweating as the seconds passed.
"Now hold on," I managed to say. "We can make any deal you want."
That skull face was even closer now, that sinister grim reaper straight out of hell who had been haunting us for days. Them dead eyes of his were locked on his prey as the distance between him and the man closed, close now, now closer, Gitty so terrified, not daring to move as the muzzle of the man's pistol pushed under her chin, his attention too fixed on me and Roy and his nerves too shaken to realize what was coming.
His feet tread softly, like a cougar stalking a deer, one hand empty with fingers spread, the other holding what looked like a big hook like those I'd seen them use in them slaughterhouses back in Texas dragging around dead steer. Then he sprang, the man holding onto Gitty suddenly realizing someone was at his back, but it were too late. He tried to bring his gun around but the Mexican caught his wrist, Gitty running as his hold on her let loose. And then that hook sunk deep into his belly, dragging all the way up as it filleted him, blood and guts gushing out.
There was a horrible, blood-curdling scream, but it only lasted a second before it stopped, the gutted man laying facedown with that skull-faced killer standing over him, that meat hook dripping blood. I held Gitty tight as she clutched onto me, pressing her face against my neck, her whole body shaking uncontrollably.
Me and Roy was speechless, just staring, that skeleton man who had just saved Gitty from death staring back, his bloody hook resting at his side. No one moved, Roy finally saying a few careful words to him in Mexican, the air tense.
"Ramiro," the skeleton man replied, his voice deep and gravelly.
Then they started talking, them Mexican words slowly passing back and forth, the two of them calm and unafraid, ready for whatever was going to happen next.
They stopped talking a moment.
"Roy?"
He looked at me.
"Roy, what are you talking about?"
He thought about it a second, like he still couldn't quite figure it himself.
"His name is Ramiro. He says he left the Hijos de Muerte. He says they're all cowards and deserved to die."
"Deserved it? He said
that?"
"He said he wants to come with us."
I shook my head, the cold, deathly eyes of the Mexican falling upon me.
"Is—Is this some kind of joke? "
Gitty, still breathless, anxiously turned to face the skeleton man, her arms covering up her chest.
"Gracias!" she gasped.
He just looked at her, that skull-face cold and unreadable, then back to Roy.
"Listen, Roy," I said, "I ain't understand this whole thing, but he done saved Gitty's life for sure. I mean, I don't know."
Roy looked at the bodies then back up the street, all of us waiting on him. "Let's get out of here in case these shitbags had any friends. This lunatic can follow us if he wants. If he tries anything, he'll be the first to go."
We took what was worth taking from them dead men and moved on, the skeleton man coming along.
Chapter 15
Thankfully, Roy weren't shot too bad. The bullet had hit him high in the shoulder and had just passed through, and after cleaning out the wound with some water Gitty boiled to make sure it weren't too dirty we bandaged him up. Our new friend, if you could call him that, told Roy he was going to go fetch some more water from the concrete river that was still trickling, me and Roy wondering what he might have really been planning though we let him go.
He startled us something good when he came back, the three of us at first thinking he were someone else. Apart from his big tattoo, it didn't even look like him anymore. The paint was gone from his face so that he were no longer a skellie but a normal man—a rough, mean-looking man for sure, his tanned face all weathered and scarred, but nothing as scary as he was before.
We stared at him as he came to set down an old plastic milk jug full of water near the fire, all of us still in shock.
"Agua," he declared.
"Thank you," Gitty said, trying not to look at him, taking the water and pouring it in the pan to boil. She was feeling much better now and was wearing a green hunting vest I'd taken off one of the dead men which I wished had covered her a bit more modestly, though after getting her shirt ripped off it were the only thing decent she had to wear.
We sat around going through our new things, them men having been well supplied compared to us: a good amount of ammo, a couple of flares, eating utensils, a fancy tin cup that had its own lid, some crackers, dried fish, a can of baked beans of questionable edibility, a couple packs of matches, and lots of other little things that would come in handy later on.
Roy and our fresh yet not so fresh faced Son of Death started talking, Roy nodding his head like he understood what the fella was saying.
"He ain't quite the same now, is he?" I said to Roy as we sat there, knowing I couldn't be understood. "Who would have thought that under all that scary paint that it were just some normal-looking Mexican."
"He says it's not his place to wear the death face anymore now that he's turned his back on his gang."
"What else he say?"
"That he's hungry."
We spread what we had around, saving enough for supper in case there weren't enough critters later on like the squirrels we had shot the day before. Afterwards we packed up, dividing the load. I watched as Roy gave our new friend his own gun and a handful of ammo—one of the several extra pistols we now had thanks to those men we'd killed—though I didn't want to tell him it were a bad idea.
We was well-armed now, better than before, and there was even one more of us, though I'd rather that Mexican fella—"Ramiro," Roy started calling him—had not been with us at all. After some time of walking though, ain't nothing bad occur, and I figured if he hadn't pulled that gun on us after Roy gave it to him then there weren't much chance of it happening from then on. Roy himself didn't seem to give it no mind, like he trusted him or simply weren't afraid. I weren't Roy though. I weren't some tough pistolero like the Mexican told him he were, and without a doubt he weren't nothing less. It was hard for me though, in a way, no matter how much I respected him, because I weren't half the man Roy was and it probably weren't something that were missed by Gitty. Weren't no doubt neither that if it weren't for him we'd be dead by now, which made it even worse. I'd have dragged Gitty to Lost Angeles only to die, and it was bitter knowing that, bitter knowing that no matter what I'd told her about staying by the creek that eventually the itch would have gotten too much and I would have brought her there and we'd be dead.
Maybe it wouldn't have been that way though. Maybe there really was a God watching down, and, knowing what I was fixing to do, he'd sent Roy along to keep us safe. Maybe that was it then, because I started thinking about it a long time and it seemed to me that Roy might have been one of them lost angels the city was named for: lonesome, drifting, never having no home.
The thought picked me up even as it pulled me down. Lost Angeles was a sad place to roam. Hell, anyplace I'd been was kind of like that, but something about Lost Angeles was even worse: all them dead buildings, all them lonely streets, all them poor people who once lived there in those lonely old houses we passed dead and gone.
"What are you thinking about?" Gitty asked me.
"Ain't nothing," I said.
"What ain't nothing? You still thinking about what happened back there?"
"Naw. Ain't no use in thinking about it no more."
She smiled and got closer to me, putting her hand in mine as we walked. Ahead, Roy and Ramiro, that tough-looking Mexican who had stopped being a Son of Death, chatted about things I couldn't understand, the both of them seeming to have a lot to talk about. I didn't like it too much, wondering why Roy had never talked so much when it was just me and him, though I tried not to pay it much mind.
We was moving south through them deserted streets, eventually coming to one that ran east and west as far as we could see. West we went for a whole day, the only other human beings we saw being some dried up corpses baking in the sun, passing for a few blocks signs of the fighting that had happened long ago: blown up buildings, huge craters in the road, and flipped over on its side across from a post office was a truck full of bullet holes, though whether them bullet holes was from back then or a lot more recent we didn't know.
To our left were the woods, all thick and green, both the city and nature blending together for a space until nature finally hit a place where the city weren't going to budge. There were lots of deer we spotted, and it was a nice surprise when we first seen them, and though Gitty thought they was pretty we ended up shooting one.
"Why do they have to look so sweet and gentle," she said. "I don't feel right eating this poor thing."
"Well, if they was ugly then they'd probably be mean and try to eat us instead. Think about that. Look at snakes for example. Hell, you ever walked by a rattlesnake minding your own business, like being nice and peaceable and all?"
"Them snakes don't eat people," she told me.
"All right, well maybe we're too big for them to try to swallow but how come then they still try to bite? You see, it's the same thing, and if them deer was ugly I'm sure they'd be trying to bite us too."
It made her feel a little better about it. "I suppose you have a point there," she said, thinking about it as she nibbled a little meat from the bone. Women was funny like that, or at least ladylike ones like Gitty, what with their tender hearts that got to feeling bad about doing what you had to in order to survive, whether it was shooting deer or little rabbits or scaring away hungry dogs that was begging for food because you hardly had enough to eat yourself.
We went west a little more, searching for a clear road south, which were impossible because everything south of that long road called Ventura we was walking, or so read the street signs, was so overgrown or otherwise cluttered up with smashed up automobiles and broken buildings that there weren't no way through. So we kept walking, our Mexican friend useless with anything he might have known because, according to Roy, he'd never been so far from where he lived among them big skyscrapers. I still didn't trust him—that "Ramiro" or whatever his name rea
lly was—wondering if he was planning something sinister, the fact that Roy was the only one who could talk to him not making it any easier to find out what he was really all about.
Finally our way was made clear, coming to an intersection of roads and a wide street that, besides the wrecks that cluttered it, seemed open for a long ways to the south. And so south we went, seeing nothing but crumbling houses and the remains of a laundry mat and a grocery store and a gas station that had burned down and was nothing more than a big sign advertising gasoline prices and a pile of ash.
Then all that fell behind and there weren't nothing but dry hills and some trees and a busted chain link fence behind which was a rickety looking trailer that we stopped at to have a look. Weren't nothing in there though, just an old skellie and a bunch of empty tin cans, though I did find a few playing cards with naked ladies on them that Gitty didn't like me looking at—big titties, spread open legs, and all that—and so I gave them to Roy and Roy gave them to Ramiro who smiled as he took a seat and chuckled as he went through them all, saying dirty things in Mexican as he held them up to show Roy.
Them cards had stirred me up a bit, and as Roy and then Ramiro got farther ahead after leaving that trailer I started laying eyes on Gitty. Not that I hadn't been, but now I did so without hiding it, a big grin on my face as I stood in front of her and brought her into the bushes where ain't no one could see and did my business as fast as I could. Gitty was smiling after that and I was real happy too, though I couldn't shake the thoughts that kept coming to me. I didn't say anything though, and I must have been putting on good enough of a face because she never asked what was wrong for the rest of the afternoon.