The Last Dawn

by Joe Gannon

  “What the fuck!” Monkey Man shouted from above. “Put the generator back on, you stupid fucks!”

  She saw Ajax stop. Gladys knelt to take aim and felt her knee slide in the gore pooling on the floor. She pushed her disgust away and took aim. If Monkey Man came to the top of the stairs he’d catch Ajax, but she’d nail him. She tried to signal Ajax but … but what? Later she wouldn’t be sure what happened, but as she heard Monkey Man’s steps coming to the top of the stairs she saw … she saw …

  Ajax disappeared.

  He just disappeared. One moment he was right there, or a sliver of his face was and the next he was just … gone. Disappeared into the darkness.

  Then Monkey Man appeared at the top of the stairs.

  “Oyen! Idiotas!”

  She took aim. It seemed impossible he hadn’t seen her. He came down the stairs, disappeared for a moment, then stepped into the pool of moonlight where Ajax had been. But he was alone. He grabbed the banister and seemed about to shout again. Monkey Man opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Instead a black stream poured out and ran down his chin like all his sins streaming out of his black soul.

  It was blood.

  Monkey Man hung there a moment, blood running out. Then his head gave an odd jerk backward and he fell over the banister with a wet thud.

  Ajax stood on the stairs, rematerialized like some ghost. A shape shifter resuming human form. Gladys gasped in fear and tried to stand, but she slipped in the blood under her feet and half fell. Her hand went down to steady herself and came back covered in black gore in the darkness.

  Ajax looked right at her. Or behind her. But he was seeing something else.

  “Get away from her,” he shouted. “Get away!”

  He rushed down the stairs at her. “Get away from her!”

  Gladys spun about, expecting an assassin, but there was no one, nothing but dead bodies and moonlight.

  “Get away from her!”

  She turned about, slipped again in the blood pool, went down on one knee. Ajax, the Needle in hand, charged her.

  “Stop! Ajax, stop!”

  He disappeared into a pool of dark.

  Gladys stood, wiped her bloody hand across her shirt, moved back toward the door, and raised her pistol. She suddenly had to get Claribel and the others out of the house, away from … away from …

  Ajax emerged into another pool of light.

  She pointed her pistol at him. “Stop.”

  “Gladys?”

  “Stop.” She cocked the pistol. “Stop!”

  “I told you to wait outside. This had to be done. You know that.”

  “Who’re you talking to?”

  “Put the gun down, Gladys.”

  He kept coming at her, slower, but he wouldn’t just stop.

  “You said ‘get away from her.’ Who’re you talking to?”

  “Gladys.” He put his hands up. To her horror they were clean. Clean! He’d slaughtered five men and his hands were as clean as if he was sitting down to table. He was no longer a man, no longer her friend, but a butcher in an abattoir and he was coming for her.

  “Stop!” She took a step back.

  As if in an ambush every light in the house snapped back on with the small grumble of the generator. The suddenness of it was like a slap, she slipped on the blood and in reaction she pulled the trigger.

  Bang!

  The report struck her like a sonic boom. The muzzle flash merged with the lights coming on and she was blinded for a moment. When her vision cleared Ajax was gone, again. Gone to the floor on his back.

  “NOOOOO!”

  She dropped the pistol and ran to him, knowing what she would see. In her panic, in her new horror she missed the silhouette sliding down the hallway from the garage and the generator that had so fatefully come back on.

  “No. No. No. No. No.”

  She’d hit him a few inches below the nipple on his right side. The stain! THE STAIN! Oh God how it spread across his chest. She reached for him but the sight of her already blood-covered hands froze her a moment. In that second Ajax opened his eyes, but he seemed not to see Gladys.

  “Get away from her.”

  She ripped his shirt open. Had only enough time to see the blood pooling on the floor from an exit wound when a pistol barrel nuzzled her ear, then the click of the hammer.

  “You’ve killed him, angelita.”

  35

  It is time to die.

  Gladys had no time to think, or at least no time to reckon. I am caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea. The Devil and a bloodred sea. A rock and a hard place. A cock and a hard-on. Goddamn all men! None of this did she have time to actually think. Ajax was bleeding to death and Krill had a metal phallus stuck in her ear.

  “You two are like a telenovela, I swear, angelita!” Krill looked around the room at the slaughtered men. “And they say I am a butcher.”

  Gladys had her hand pressed over the hole she’d shot into Ajax. Her fear of Krill was nothing compared to her dread that Ajax would die, right here and now. His eyes fluttered open. He looked at her, looked up at Krill.

  “You.”

  Krill smiled. “Me. I told you I would see you again. And here we are. You should have left her with me.”

  Gladys leaned over him. “Ajax, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Forgive me. I…”

  Ajax lifted his hand, Gladys was afraid he would strike her. But he took her chin more gently than she believed he could, and he gave her a little tug. It was so gentle, so weak, that tears sprang to her eyes.

  “It’s alright, don’t worry. You can fix it. Stitch me up, like knitting a sock. All you need is thread and a needle.”

  And then she got it, he was not reassuring her, he was pointing her face at the Needle, still in his hand, half hidden under his thigh. Could she? Her eyes went to his. “Wash your hands.”

  That did it. Gladys snatched up the blade and whirled like an angry dervish, burying it into Krill’s thigh.

  “AHHHHHHHHHHH!” Krill recoiled but still managed to knock her on the head with the pistol grip before stumbling backward.

  But through the pain, through the tears, through the blurred vision from the blow Gladys was on him, like a python on a staked pig. All her fear was now anger, all her shame was a burning rage. Her hand clamped on the Needle like coils on a delicate neck. She rolled into him, twisting and turning both her body and the Needle. She got her other arm around his legs and took him down. Krill hit hard, his head bouncing off the tiled floor. She ripped the Needle out, feeling it slice muscle and blood vessel before tearing through his skin. But Krill was from generations of campesino stock breaking their backs on the land and his head was as tough as a dirt clod. He got one hand on the wrist wielding the Needle, the other on her throat.

  “No, angelita, not like this, not like this.”

  Krill’s face seemed a mask of confusion. She could see the killer in him, the set of his mouth, the teeth grinding each other, governing the vise he’d clamped on her throat. But the eyes, the eyes implored something else.

  “Not like this.”

  No, not like this.

  She gave in. Gave in to those eyes. And it wasn’t, she knew, the blood and air he was cutting off to her brain. She wanted it, this, to give in to him as she had never done in the dark dungeon in which he’d kept her. No. This was the surrender she needed, and he wanted.

  She opened her mouth, not to speak, but to offer it to him. He had taken it before, her mouth, but there would be no end if she did not, this time, offer it to him. Her head shook with the violence of his grip, but she parted her lips and forced herself down on him, even though it meant colluding in her own strangulation.

  Look at me. See me!

  She could not speak but she could tell him nonetheless. Like this. Yes, like this.

  And he saw, God bless him. He knew. His heart willed his killer’s mind to let her come, come closer as he had wanted her always to come. His hand was still on her throat bu
t he let her come. And she longed for that too. Let me do it, please!

  Her lips reached for him. He reached back. His grip still locked on her throat but he let her come down, come down to him until their mouths were inches apart. And then, and then, at long, long last they touched. The kiss. That longed-for kiss.

  Then Gladys locked her teeth on Krill’s lower lip and ripped, tore, rent that quivering piece of flesh from his face.

  “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!”

  It seemed shock as much as pain as Krill instinctively let go of her throat as Gladys rose up from his chest, a piece of him in her mouth, finally the piece of him she wanted in her mouth and she spat back into the motherfucker’s face.

  In the same gesture she stabbed the Needle into his neck to the hilt and held it there, like a thermometer up his ass.

  Krill’s face was now all about the dying. All about the knowing that every moment of their joint existence had led to this moment. All he’d ever had or could have expected was this moment. But he could not speak, the blade had gone through his jugular right through his larynx. All he could do was gasp like a fish and cough blood.

  Gladys leaned in close until their noses almost touched. “Like this, angelito. Always like this.”

  And then she sawed the Needle up and out of him, his blood spraying her and the world like the first rain of a long-delayed deluge.

  36

  It is like a call, like Gabriel’s trumpet. I don’t know why, but I can’t resist it. It beckons and I answer. But this time it is not Señor Ajax who summons me, but the woman Gladys. She holds the trumpet, she has been anointed and I see her now. I can see them all, the flesh ones, but as if through a veil. But Gladys is now as clear as Señor Ajax used to be. Now he is veiled, too, not like the others, but I cannot see him as he once was. He is more like me, like Celina and doña Elba. The padres.

  They’re all gone now. Most of us just go like that. Like cows following each other to the barn, most of us just go, not knowing where, we just follow. Some know where they’re going. The padres did. Celina stayed awhile. She wasn’t lost, just reluctant. The men Señor Ajax sent, they are gone now too. Soon he will follow. I think he knew that, when he saw me standing behind Gladys. It’s why he told me to get away.

  Gladys now calls me so I come. There are others, the girls like the ones from my town who used to tease me. They are all saying many words, the words I used to know. There is fear, I can hear that. The other girls are afraid of Gladys, as she was once afraid of Señor Ajax. The lamentations I can also feel. Señor Ajax will come with me now. We will go with Señora Gladys.

  37

  “Get me some plastic! Get me some fucking plastic!”

  Claribel and the girls looked at her in horror. She thought they were horrified by Ajax lying near dead. She slapped Claribel. “Get me some fucking plastic, anything, a shower curtain!”

  Claribel recoiled at the slap but she went into action. Gladys kneeled over Ajax. She pressed her hand over the wound on his chest, slid her hand under him to seal off the exit wound. She knew from the pink foam blowing on his chest the bullet had pierced his lung—a sucking chest wound. If she couldn’t seal the hole he’d be dead in minutes, and she would not let that happen.

  “Ajax! Ajax look at me! Open your eyes and look!”

  But nothing. Claribel was back in a moment and Gladys used the Needle to slice two patches off the shower curtain and pressed them over the wounds.

  “Come on, come on, come on. COME ON!”

  It was the longest half minute of her life, but the plastic recreated the vacuum in his lungs and his chest rose ever so slightly and fell. After an agonizing moment it rose and fell again. He coughed up a mouthful of blood and she turned his head away to let it seep out.

  “Claribel! Check Krill’s pocket for car keys. You!” she shouted at one of the girls. “Get me some pillows, raise his feet up. And you, bring sheets from the bed!” Gladys saw that Ajax had not lost a lot of blood—if her calculation of where Krill’s blood stopped and Ajax’s began was correct. Shock was her main enemy now.

  Claribel held up some keys.

  “Go outside, find the car they belong to, Krill must’ve parked nearby. Pull the car inside the gate, we’re going to a hospital.”

  “We can’t, Gladys. The curfew, the army, they’ll shoot us.”

  “Do what I say!”

  But Claribel’s sense of self-preservation was stronger than her loyalty to these two cubano-gringos—stangers passing through the hell-hole of her country. The other girl was back with the sheets. Gladys got another of the girls to keep pressure on the wounds while she slit the sheets to make bandages. If she could tie down the plastic she could rig it to hold long enough to get him to a hospital, but all the while she wrapped and tied she knew Claribel was right—driving to a hospital would likely get them killed, staying would likely see him dead. She wouldn’t allow that.

  She took the keys from Claribel and made her way to the street to find Krill’s car. She’d made her choice: better to die with him than let him die alone.

  The street was empty and dark. About half a block away was a Ford LTD, about ten years old and as big as a boat. She’d seen it somewhere before. That had to be it. She rolled the iron gate back and dashed to the car. Red tracers suddenly arced into the sky, but they were a long way off, ricochets from a firefight she’d not heard. She crouched and made the final dash to the car. She was about to open the door when muffled voices made her freeze. Damn it! She’d not brought her gun, had only the Needle. The voices must be near but in the blackout streets she could see nothing. She heard them again, muffled but very near. The trunk? She crouched next to it. She heard them clearly. She tapped twice on the trunk. The voices stopped. She tapped twice again and someone tapped back. Gladys fumbled for the key and unlocked the trunk, knife at the ready, little good that it would do her.

  What she found was as surprising as it was miraculous: Jasmine and doña Estela were trussed up like chickens. She slit their bonds and yanked off their gags.

  “Gladys!” Jasmine reached for her.

  “Shut up! Estela, thank God. You’ve got to help me. Ajax. He’s dying!”

  “Then get me out of this trunk!”

  “Stay there.” Gladys shut the trunk, gunned the old boat to life, and plowed into the driveway, where Claribel shut the iron gate. Gladys helped Estela out of the trunk, and then sprinted back into the house, her mind clocking the next steps: a stretcher, the car, a hospital. She ripped curtains off the windows—a stretcher. She knelt by Ajax, put a hand on his chest, and waited the longest moment of her life until his chest rose ever so slightly and fell again.

  “Jasmine! Help me roll him onto this, we’ve got to get him in the car. Where’s the nearest hospital?”

  She slid some of the curtain under him, the roll onto it would be a delicate thing but … but … She realized no one had spoken nor moved.

  “Jasmine, help me!”

  “Gladys, we’re not going out there now. No one can move on the streets, you’ll hit someone’s lines and they’ll kill you all.”

  Gladys leaped at her, all the anger, the guilt, the shame at what she had done surged like amphetamines through her blood. She had the Needle against Jasmine’s throat, her hand, her entire body shaking in rage, in helplessness.

  “He needs a doctor. I’ll take him. I’m taking him!”

  To Gladys’s surprise doña Estela’s hand came into view, set itself on her own hand. The old woman’s skin was cool, soft, papery-thin. With the slightest, lightest of touches Estela pushed Gladys’s hand down, and slipped the Needle from her desperate grasp.

  “We are not going anywhere, young lady. Neither are you, neither is he.”

  “He needs a doctor,” Gladys begged.

  “I am a doctor.”

  “What?”

  “She was a doctor, Gladys.” Jasmine touched her shoulder. “I told you about it.”

  “Am a doctor,” Estela said. “You think b
ecause I haven’t practiced in twenty years I’ve forgotten? My husband was a soldier. I served in the Soccer War.”

  “Gladys? Gladys?” Claribel’s hand trembled as she clasped Gladys’s arm.

  “What!”

  “Upstairs.”

  “What about it?”

  “They,” she gestured to the slaughtered men, “they keep kits upstairs, in case they are wounded. Trauma kits. I’ve seen them. They snorted the pain pills in them.”

  “Do they?” Estela seemed delighted. She took Claribel’s arm. “Now, honey, you and the others go upstairs and find all that you can, bring it down here. Okay?”

  “Sí, señora.”

  “Doctora.”

  Estela looked around the sala. “We can’t keep him in this butcher’s palace. My God, what happened?” She saw Krill’s body. “And this one!” She spit on his corpse. “Talk, talk, talk! Hijo de puta! Got yours, didn’t you?” She turned to Gladys. “Is there a table? Tables are better than beds for the wounded.”

  Gladys wasn’t sure what was happening. She wanted action, she wanted to race through the streets, she wanted to be as dead as she was certain Ajax was. She hadn’t really expected him to live.

  She and Jasmine rolled Ajax onto the curtain and gently dragged him into the next room where a dining table sat, covered with the detritus from Monkey Man’s last supper. They swept it clean and levered Ajax onto it. Estela set about checking Ajax’s vitals. Claribel came in toting a box with a red cross. The other girls brought in two more.

  “Wonderful!” Estela seemed delighted. “What’s your name, amorcita?”