Phil tried to slide back into the car, but Halley seized his collar and pulled. Phil fought back, swatting at the mercenary, but Halley wouldn’t let go and the smell of cordite from the gun drained any resistance from Phil. He was dragged out of the car, thumping painfully into the dirt, and then along the ground until he lay in front of the old man.
Phil retched as the sharp smell of piss and the copper tang of blood reached him. Fat, black flies had already found the old man, landing on his chest, and a maddening buzz rose from the forest as if an army of flies would arrive, so many that the sky would darken and any remaining light would be obliterated, and Phil would be cast into an eternal night.
Halley leaned in, his breath hot against Phil’s cheek. “Take the photo.”
Phil lifted the camera. His hands trembled so much that he could not hold it still. He centered the dead farmer in the frame and took several shots. Halley laughed and walked into the shot, standing alongside the corpse, and pointed his gun directly at Phil. “Here we are shooting at each other.”
Phil snapped a few more shots but it seemed the strength left his arms, and he let the camera hang from the strap at his side. He turned and staggered back to the car, fumbling with the door before managing to pull it open and collapsing into the back seat.
“We need to get out of here,” he said to Xavier, but before they could speak, Halley climbed back into the SUV. He dropped the car into gear, gunned the gas, and the car burst through the bamboo blockade and hurtled the three of them into the deepening darkness ahead.
“Let me out,” said Phil. “I can’t do this. I don’t want to be a part of this anymore.”
When Halley glanced in the rearview mirror, Phil saw the dark road reflecting in his glasses. “The train has passed the station. No one gets off until we’ve shot El Diablo.”
“No. I’m serious. I’ll leave a camera with you. You can take the photo. Any photo. It won’t matter. I’ll walk back.”
“You’ve seen men get shot before. He was blocking the fucking road. Always a consequence.”
Phil’s stomach tightened and he clenched his jaw at the thought of that farmer dead on the side of the road, bullet holes in his chest, blood soaking his shirt. He was only trying to warn them off.
Phil closed his eyes. He never should have chased Xavier down for this hellish assignment. The doctor back at the refugee camp was right. Even after capturing the photo of El Diablo, the success of it would fade. Another iconic photo would occupy its space. No one would remember that it was Phil who took the photo.
And it would do nothing to erase the mistake with Samantha. The whole premise of what this photo meant was a lie Phil had been telling himself.
“Stop the car,” he said. “Let me out.”
“I’m not stopping the car. You can’t walk back.”
“It’s not that far. I’ll be fine.”
Halley swerved the car to avoid a protruding rock, then he gunned the engine and they barreled forward, tree branches scratching against the windows and body.
“Let him out,” said Xavier. “I can point the camera and take a shot. We’ll pick him up on the way back.”
“No,” said Halley, looking away from the road ahead and glancing at each of them. “I need both of you to complete this mission. He is expecting a photographer and a journalist, and a driver. I need you there to distract him.”
“What are you talking about?” said Xavier.
Halley laughed. “Who do you think I am? El Diablo is a loose end for the Agency, another paid gun with god dreams. We don’t need another socialist down here digging his claws into the throne of this banana republic. We gave him money and guns and training and he was supposed to do his part. But he veered off script. Like every other greedy, power-hungry bastard. But he’s taken our bait, inviting the gringo journalist, because he craves the spotlight. He thinks he is some fucking messiah, a barefoot savior. You two were sent here to give him that attention. To satisfy his ego. But the tale is about to come to a close.” He lifted his index finger and cocked his thumb. “Bang, bang, buddy. Smile for the pistol.”
“Stop the car!” screamed Xavier. “I’ve got a family and kids, I can’t be part of this!”
“You already are.”
Phil knew what would happen. Halley would try to kill El Diablo, but the attempt would fail, and they would be captured and executed and dumped in the jungle consumed by the insects. He had to stop this.
Phil saw that he had a chance to change the trajectory of his life.
He lunged out of his seat and grabbed the steering wheel. “Stop the car!”
Halley swung his elbow against Phil’s lips, and then again, but Phil refused to let go. Xavier leaned across to block Halley’s elbow. Halley cursed at them and then reached for his gun. Phil’s breath caught and his eyes widened. He twisted hard at the steering wheel tearing it free of Halley’s grip.
The SUV turned sharply, and hit a furrow in the road; suddenly Phil lifted from his seat, head smashing against the ceiling. He bit his tongue and hot, coppery blood filled his mouth.
The truck careened sideways down the road, wheels spinning in the slick mud. Then it hit something, and flipped.
The world outside spun and tumbled, sky, forest, mud, sky, forest, mud. Xavier screamed. The gun went off, the report deafening; the world fell silent for a moment, all sound stifled - and then glass exploded and plastic shattered and metal screamed and crumpled as Phil was tossed helplessly around.
He struck the ceiling, the floor, the seats; then the SUV hit something with a sickening crunch and Phil hurtled forward. The world shattered into a burst of light, and then darkness consumed everything.
13
Phil woke with a gasp, felt a sharp, burning pain all along the left side of his neck. The SUV’s interior filled with a buzzing crescendo as if all the insects of the jungle for miles around had gathered at a single spot. Everything was dark and hazy, as if a veil had been dropped over the world.
He saw stars through a break in the trees, through the spider-webbed windshield. He winced at the sharp smell of petrol. The metal had collapsed around him, making him think of a coffin. A hacking, sputtering cough broke through the insectile buzz. It hurt to turn his head, even to move his eyes. How was he not dead?
He tracked the sound of the coughing. Outside the SUV, someone was crawling away through the mud. Halley or Xavier.
Phil wanted to crawl after that figure. Escape the crashed SUV. Survive. He tried to turn over onto his belly but his legs did not seem to be working. He called out but only heard a wet bubbling sound. He sucked in a huge breath, nearly choking on the blood that pooled in his mouth. And when he spit the liquid, he watched teeth fly from between his lips.
Then he saw dark shapes emerging from the trees. Men and women. Or at least something grossly shaped like them. He squinted. They were dark, as if they could melt into the shadows. They loitered at the edges of the road, turning towards each other, and a strange insectile clicking rose from them.
Phil struggled to inhale a full breath. He glanced at his chest; metal pinned him. Air. He needed air. The figures came for him. He had nowhere to retreat. Then hands reached through the window, pried at the metal, and he was being pulled over broken glass and sharp metal, through cold mud.
More clicks and hisses. He saw a face painted black with a red band across the eyes. He saw himself reflected in those eyes; his face was bloodied, torn. He didn’t recognize himself.
He was lifted from the mud and carried along, floating above the earth and below the stars - and for a moment he thought that the world had righted itself. But then the pain rose up within him again and he retreated into blackness, into unconsciousness.
14
Phil woke. To darkness. To cold metal pressing in from all sides. His breathing echoed. The scent of petrol made his eyes tear.
He was squatting, knees and ankles burning with pain, back muscles spasming. He was imprisoned.
Phil tr
ied to stand but his head clanged against metal, and he cried out. He sucked in several quick breaths as the sharp pain faded. The air was warm, heavy with his own sour smell and the sharp scent of spilled petrol. He pressed his palms to the metal around him, feeling the shape of his prison. A barrel. He was inside a metal barrel.
He punched at the metal wall in frustration and a dull echo bounced back at him.
He knew that he was alive, but he could not help but feel that he had been carried, by those shadows, from the jungles of La Plata and into hell.
Why had he ever agreed to this trip? He had been so wrapped up in the promise of the elusive photo, one that would bring him out of the despair of his existence and back to some imagined status that he falsely believed that once achieved would erase all his problems. Why had he not fled to the airport after the initial meeting with El Diablo fell through? Any rational person would have done that. The country was imploding. He had seen the exact same thing in other countries, knew the signs. And yet he had still pursued the photo.
The doctor in the refugee camp seemed to have been pointing him toward a pathway out; one that had always been there, and he had turned from. Scurrying away from hope. His actions defined him. He was nothing more than a parasite.
There had been many chances laid out before him to live a different life. But at every fork, he took the wrong turn. He was complicit in his fall. Hiding behind his lens, documenting, watching, but never acting, never doing anything but witnessing some of the most horrible things that humans did to each other. And with each photo he took, he had had turned away from the chance to correct the course of his world.
He had always hidden behind the camera. Thousands of photos began passing through his mind, a blur of scrolling images; a few of them stood out suddenly, as if they were important markers:
A man on his knees in Kabul, begging, hands raised wide, pleading in the moment before being shot by a faceless man. Phil could have said something. His camera could have been a weapon of truth, exposing the atrocity, documenting the hidden identity of the killer.
Outside of Managua, safe in the truck as it slowly crept through the burnt-out village, he had seen a woman, leg blown off, dragging herself along the dirt, crying for her lost children. But her children were dead. No one else had survived. He could have given her human contact and compassion before she died, but he only leaned out of the truck to get the photo - the image that would pay his bills.
In the Sudan, a dust storm veiled the refugee camp, and for one moment it cleared enough to reveal a boy, bones wrapped tightly in skin, lifting his empty hands, cracked lips opening and closing, lost in a memory of eating… And Phil took the photo, only to later discard it because it was an image he had seen dozens of times before. It wouldn’t sell. It wouldn’t win him a prize.
He could have stopped a murder. He could have lifted a dying mother into his arms. He could have spooned food into the mouth of a starving child.
He had hidden behind the camera, in the world it had formed around him.
He could have been with Samantha as she spent her last days on the earth, but he had run away. He did not hold her hand as she took her last breaths, as she faced that moment of coming dark. He had run, had refused to come back, as if somehow avoiding the inevitable was a way to live. He had done the unforgivable; abandoned the person he loved, the person that had loved him.
That final act had disconnected him from the world.
And if he was not in hell right now, he certainly belonged there. For all that he had done. For all that he had not done. He deserved eternal, burning damnation.
He pounded his fists against the walls of the barrel, and the pounding echoed, vibrating into him, threatening to shatter his bones to dust. He screamed and his voice screamed back. He banged on the cover until splinters of pain spread through his hands.
“Let me out!” he yelled. “Help!”
He pounded, elbowed the walls, and howled.
The curved walls of the barrel felt like they were constricting, shrinking with every exhalation, cinching in the oppressive darkness. A shiver raced up his spine. He screamed again.
Eventually he fell quiet, replaying in his mind the poor decisions of his life. He drifted off to sleep, woke with a start, raged against his metal prison. All he knew was pain, anger, and despair. The cycle repeated over and over.
As he drifted in and out of consciousness and memory, his sense of time, and even place, deteriorated, as if the path of linear living broke apart and came back together in an unconnected way. All the horrors of his wrongly-lived life collapsed on him.
He gave up. He was going to die in the barrel. Or maybe this was a living hell. He laughed maniacally, screamed to gods he knew did not exist; or maybe they just didn’t care. He screamed even though he knew nothing would change. It was too late for that now.
15
Phil woke to a scratching noise on the lid of his barrel prison. Rats, he thought. Trying to gnaw through and eat me. A shiver ran up his spine. He shrunk away from the scraping, imagining the rats chewing a hole through the metal and then dropping in, one after the other, claws clasping his flesh, running over his body; he wouldn’t be able to fight them off, would only be able to scream.
But then the lid shrieked and was suddenly lifted off. Bright light blinded Phil, and he squeezed his eyes shut for a moment before reopening them. The forest against the sky wavered between light and dark, shapes blurred, as if a palette knife had been dragged across the surface of a wet painting causing all the colors to blend. The stench of his own piss dissipated enough that he smelled the salt of the sea. He heard the crash of waves against sand in the distance. He slowly lifted his hands to clasp the edge of the barrel but sharp needles of pain stabbed from fingertips to shoulders. He wanted to fully stand and pull himself out of his prison, but his leg muscles were frozen. He could only stretch enough to lift his head over the lip of the barrel.
He shut his eyes hard and when he reopened them, he saw the silhouetted shapes of two people standing over him.
“Help. God, help me.”
With each moment, they became more distinguishable; a man and a woman, faces painted black - a horizontal red stripe on the man’s face, red demon eyes and fangs on the woman. They wore green military fatigues and the woman said words that Phil couldn’t understand. When he did not respond, she shouted at him.
Then came the blows, hard slaps across his face. He wanted to raise his hands and protect himself but he could not release his grip from the edge of the barrel.
The blows and screaming continued; he tasted blood on his lips. He was struck so hard across his temple that a blizzard of black spots swam across his vision for a moment.
The man said something and the woman stopped slapping him, but still spoke angrily at him. The man grabbed Phil by his elbows and pulled. The woman, eyes wide, teeth bared, kicked the barrel over. As he landed on his hip and shoulder, intense pain lit his side, and he hissed through his clenched jaw.
The man grabbed his elbows again, the woman twisted a fist into his hair, and they dragged him completely out of the barrel and onto muddy earth.
Phil sobbed at his sudden freedom. The woman silenced him with a hard slap against the swollen, bruised flesh of his cheek.
The man looped his arms under Phil’s and dragged him. His flesh was dark with bruises and scabby lacerations. His skin wore a coat of dried, cracked blood.
Everything hurt. But he was still alive. Somehow.
He glanced back at the barrel, a used oil container, rust eating away at the surface. He saw more barrels, at least a dozen or so, and he heard muffled cries and even laughter from some of them. One’s lid was pried open and a black cloud of flies billowed over it.
The barrels stood in a muddy patch of earth surrounded with wooden shacks and open-air structures. The tropical jungle formed a barrier of sorts on one side, and two muddy ruts led further into foliage.
His captors dragged him towards the sou
nd of the crashing waves, and he wondered where Halley and Xavier were; had they died in the crash or had they also been stuffed into barrels?
A few moments later he saw Halley. The mercenary, naked, had been bound to a tree with barbed wire; the sharp metal bit into his flesh, and he had bled so profusely that it seemed he had been painted red. Ragged stumps marked where his thumbs and index fingers had been, and Phil thought the flesh had been crudely seared.
He wasn’t dead. Halley lifted his head weakly as Phil was dragged by. No mirrored glasses masked his eyes now, and somehow without them, Halley no longer looked intimidating. He looked young, as if he did not know how to navigate the world.
Halley locked eyes with him and mouthed, “Kill him.”
Phil burst out into insane laughter. How the hell could he kill anyone? He could barely control his limbs. He felt like retching even though his empty stomach turned in pain. And at this point, the only thing that mattered was survival. Not some threatening directive from Halley.
Phil was dragged further along and Halley and the settlement gradually slid behind a wall of trees. Bright, drooping hibiscus flowers began to appear on both sides of the narrowing trail and he felt the thundering of the waves in his bones.
Did they mean to drag him out to the shore and drown him?
They eventually dropped him on hard packed sand and walked away. Phil looked around. They had deposited him outside a concrete bunker, perhaps a remnant of the U.S. military occupation. The building had once been painted in bright blues and yellows and reds, but now the paint was peeling and black mold clouded the surface. Even so he could make out the words “cold beer” and “fish tacos” painted on the concrete wall.
His mouth watered and his stomach gurgled. He wondered how much the food cost and realized he did not have any money. He could not restrain the sudden laughter at this crazed thought.
A gravelly voice cut against the waves. “You find all of this entertaining, my friend?”
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