Blood Makes Noise

by Gregory Widen

  “It’s okay,” Michael said.

  There was only one way out of these mountains: down. They jerked along the path, horseshoe after horseshoe. Everyone knew without speaking that the others had a vehicle, were probably just behind them, and that this was now a race to…where? The Guardia Civil weren’t a problem; one call from Hector to Franco would bring help from the next station. But if the Guardia station was too small, Lofton and Lopez Rega might be tempted to just shoot their way through to Michael. They needed a bigger town with a bigger Guardia squad. They needed luck. They needed to keep going…

  But there were no towns in this part of the world—not real ones—only the road, and dawn was working it in soft purples as they tumbled from the Pyrénées into the dry plains of the Aragon Reconquista.

  The land flattened, stars retreated, and the engine sprayed mists of oil through the smashed windshield.

  “This thing’s finished,” Michael said.

  “What do we do?” Gina asked.

  The mountains had quit, but the wind had only gained enthusiasm for the treeless, dusty plain. It rocked the truck broadside so hard Michael thought it would topple. “Keep going…”

  The horizon was now a pale line, and they could see clouds of orange brown clawing into the air everywhere. A dust storm. Gusts of it struck their clothes and muddied itself with engine oil.

  Michael scanned the horizon and it gave up dark, silhouetted towers. “There’s a town. It looks big…”

  “Yes, Michael,” Hector said from the rear. “I see it.”

  Gina took a smaller dirt road toward the spires. Drifting mountains of dust played peek-a-boo with the image, and she traveled the road on faith.

  They kept their scratched eyes on the three or four yards of dirt in front of them until they were stopped before an earthen wall. Gina drove along it till she found a break. They passed through it onto what could have been cobblestones…and the truck shut down. She turned the key a few times, but Wintergreen’s four-wheel was finished.

  Michael, Gina, and Hector climbed from the truck and were stung by dusty gulps of air. The wind lived here, was born here, and spun with the arrogance of someone who knew it.

  “We’ve got to find a Guardia Civil station,” Hector shouted. Michael nodded. The sun was up, up for real, and lighted only swirling sand. The wind found strange eddies within the city’s walls, and the dust bunched into four-story traveling storms. One drew other strays to it and shot along the inside wall, giving Michael a brief glimpse of the town. It was old, its cathedrals and apartment blocks the color of the earth, rising from it, like a mirage, hastily thrown together and left a thousand years.

  “Where is everyone?” Gina shouted.

  It was dawn but the streets weren’t dawn quiet. They weren’t even dust-storm quiet.

  The clouds of earth pulsated once more, an apartment block came into view, and it was a normal apartment block but for one wall completely sheared away. Orderly rooms and toilets stared at Michael like the removable wall of a dollhouse. He looked to the cathedral’s spire. It had seemed indistinct, fuzzy, and he had blamed the dust, but now, with the weak strikes of morning, he saw its fuzziness came from having been so smacked by artillery that it had lost the edges of its shape, like sandblasted glass.

  “What is this place?” Gina asked.

  Hector smiled his secret smile, the one irony owned, and turned to her. “Los Martirizados, Gina.”

  “What do you mean?” Michael asked.

  “The martyred ones. Civil War relics. Cities destroyed and abandoned forever. Aragon is littered with them.”

  “So no one’s here?”

  “Not for forty years.”

  Michael hobbled back to the gap in the city’s walls. About a mile off a car was approaching. It could be any car, but Michael knew it could only be one.

  “They’re coming,” he said.

  Alejandro had his machine pistol, which he kept with its one remaining magazine. He wouldn’t leave the Senora, so they helped him behind a rubble pile nearby. Hector had a small derringer four-shot, nickel-plated and scrolled from another century; Michael and Gina had nothing. Michael turned to her. “Alejandro’s finished. I’m crippled. Hector’s a thousand years old.”

  “And?”

  “You could run.”

  She stared at him a long time. “Where?”

  And Michael knew there wasn’t anywhere. Not for any of them. Blowing sand crept up his back and he thought, Don’t bury me yet.

  Lofton and Lopez Rega upfront, two of Lopez’s thugs in back. They came through the gap in the wall, navigated the clouds of lashing earth, saw Wintergreen’s four-wheel at a corner as Lofton parked the Opel. They all got out, armed, and stood in the blowing dirt.

  “They could be anywhere,” Lopez Rega said, an edge in his voice.

  “Tell your men to fan out. Slow,” Lofton answered.

  Lopez snapped at his two thugs, and the four of them began moving with caution through the orange wind.

  Michael and Gina saw the car, saw briefly through the flying dust the four climb out. Michael took Gina’s hand and limped to a half-destroyed apartment block nearby. The lower apartments had been stripped, and Michael searched them in frustration. “What are you looking for?” Gina asked.

  “Anything.”

  It was useless. A staircase led up. It was strewn with tumbled masonry, and the whole wall breathed with wind. “Maybe the apartments upstairs.”

  Outside, twenty yards from the truck, one of Lopez Rega’s men moved along a wall. Abruptly he shredded like a red doll from machine-pistol fire.

  The others dropped for cover. “Well, I recognize the gun,” Lofton said, lying on the ground beside Lopez Rega. “Is that you, Al?” he called out. There wasn’t any answer.

  Lopez Rega couldn’t take his eyes off the blood-drenched wall that a moment ago framed one of his boys. “You said they were finished. That this was the end.”

  “It is the end, Lopez. Right here.”

  “They could kill us!”

  Lofton stared at him. “No matter what happens, Lopez old boy, it’s a pleasure to know that the future of Argentine government is in such brave hands.” Lofton unscrewed his flask, shuddered a bolt, and motioned to Lopez’s remaining thug to flank Alejandro on the left. Lofton slipped the flask back into the breast pocket of his seersucker jacket, checked his gun, and rose creakily to his knees. “That boy out there, the one with no face, he’s your country’s best, Lopez. He could have saved your nation.” Lofton began moving right, flanking the opposite side. “Now let’s kill him so we can get out of here.”

  Gina went first, hands and knees up the collapsed stairs, panting, reaching now past the debris and helping Michael over. His foot caught a brick and he twitched a full minute in agony as Gina held him. His senses coming back, shaking, he stood and together they eased up the remaining steps, grasping a wall that shifted each time they touched it.

  On the next floor half the roof was missing, but the rooms were less looted: rotten mattresses, ceiling fans, a crumbling chair. Michael went into what was left of the kitchen, ripped open drawer after drawer, and came up with one rusty butter knife.

  “Michael…”

  He turned. Gina was standing in a fragment of living room and staring down at something hidden by tumbled ceiling. He limped over.

  Partly buried by debris, blown in half by whatever brought the ceiling down, were the mostly skeletal remains of a Spanish Nationalist soldier. He was clad in a ’30s dark khaki uniform, and his face showed no peace in death. He had died up here, and his fellows had clearly written MIA on his form, and Missing in Action he remained, staring at a crumbling chair—ugly even when new—bird shit running down his cheek into a clenched mouth. He held in one hand a rusted German-made Karabiner grenade launcher.

  There was a clatter of fire outside from Alejandro’s machine pistol. The second battle for this town had begun.

  Lofton was gone into the maze of collapsed sto
ne immediately, leaving Lopez Rega alone, clutching his gun, looking feverishly around him. He heard two pistol reports and the return burst of machine-gun fire. He heard Lofton’s voice calling out “Al?” Blowing sand cut him like glass, and he cursed it, cursed Lofton and this godforsaken place.

  Lopez Rega moved in the direction of where he thought the Opel would be. He got lost immediately, his only orientation in the orange sameness Lofton’s voice pitching around him: “Al, I don’t know what Wintergreen told you, but we’re with you, man. We’re with Her and Argentina…”

  The buildings all looked the same, their destruction relentlessly anonymous, and Lopez Rega began to run, away from this town, away from Lofton’s voice…

  And into another one.

  “Lopez…”

  Lopez Rega spun and shot from his pistol and saw only a frail shape fall behind a tumbled Moorish statue.

  Michael and Gina pried the grenade launcher from the dead man’s hands and dragged it to the blown-out apartment wall. “Will it work?” Gina asked.

  “Of course not.”

  He blew clean as best he could the trigger mechanism, pulled what he thought was the safety, and stuck the bulbous head through a sheared part of the wall. “Keep the rusty knife,” he said.

  Lopez Rega’s thug kept tossing off shots in Alejandro’s direction, and Lofton muttered at the stupid bastard. He was just shooting dust. They had to get closer. Lofton’s voice flew in every direction in this wind, but the shots didn’t. Each one announced his position, and if Alejandro had many bullets left, he wasn’t wasting them on that fool. Alejandro was the key. Mike, the girl, Hector: they were a carnival show. He had to get the kid. Could have used him in this. Where the fuck was Wintergreen?

  There was just enough room around the edges of the grenade launcher for Michael to look over it and see…dust. A world of swirling orange. He knew the truck was down there somewhere, Alejandro, Lofton…His foot throbbed hard enough he felt it in his spine. He couldn’t just fire. Not without a shot. The whole building wheezed, and when he rested one hand on the wall, four bricks fell away to the street. He never heard them hit.

  Lopez Rega, his gun shaking in front of him, walked slowly toward the fallen Moorish statue. It was of some feudal lord, hands on his shield, one eye squinting down at Isabel’s confidant. Lopez kept bobbing up and down, trying to see over it, but the statue was a big one to a big lord and he couldn’t glimpse the other side.

  Pressed against it, Lopez Rega drew his face up its pitted, marble flanks and there were…drops of blood. Emboldened, he jerked his arm and head over the top, and all he saw was the face of a dog, silver, racing at him, puncturing his eye, and he fell back—gun jerking pointless, spasmodic shots into the sky—screaming in agony as Hector appeared over the top of the Moor’s mustache, his dog-headed cane bloody, his derringer aimed flat at Lopez Rega’s face. “Hector!” Lopez squeaked.

  “Stick with horoscopes, Lopez.”

  “Don’t shoot me!”

  Hector came around the Moor’s head, a bloody bullet graze on one cheek, and stood above him. Lopez Rega babbled, one hand over his ruined eye, gun somewhere in the dirt. “You can’t kill me! I’m part of the government! You work for me! You can’t kill me!”

  “You’re right, Lopez. I can’t kill you…”

  Lopez Rega calmed some, put his other hand over the first on his eye, and moaned, “My eye…Look what you did to my eye…”

  “I can’t kill you…but I can still shoot you.”

  Lopez Rega stuck his hands out to protect his face, but it was his knee Hector blew into a ragged pulp. Most of Lopez Rega’s screams went into the dirt, and it hardly mattered if he heard Hector walk away. “Casting spells for Isabel, Lopez, you don’t need to walk.”

  Lofton listened to the pair of shots—two guns—and the direction was impossible in this caterwauling. They must have confused Alejandro as well, for the young Argentine responded this time when Lopez Rega’s thug teased a shot over his head. A dull burp of half a dozen shells, and it wasn’t the reflection of bullets on masonry that caught Lofton’s ear but what was almost imperceptible just beneath it.

  The click of an empty ammo magazine.

  Michael waited on the ancient Karabiner grenade launcher. He had no shot but could hear the patter of gunfire below. He couldn’t decide which was worse: never getting a shot, or actually having to use it.

  Then the dust lifted.

  Bunched up into a whirlwind, it dragged away like a curtain the barrier between Michael and the street below. There was the truck, high and right. He couldn’t see Lofton or Lopez Rega, but there was the other thug, coming up slowly on a dead-looking Alejandro, curled behind some debris. Alejandro had let his machine pistol tumble away from his grip and it lay two or three feet from his unmoving body.

  The thug was in no hurry, measuring his steps, and Michael knew he had one shot, if that, and where was Lofton? Then he saw him. Arcing from the opposite side of Alejandro, coming now nearer the thug, now himself right below Michael’s building. And the dust cloud had grown weary of its journey and was returning now, bearing down on them, and Michael knew it was now or never. Even if he hit Alejandro. Or the truck. Or nothing. The dust cloud smacked against the building, sand clogged his eyes, and Michael squeezed them shut and pulled the trigger.

  Silence.

  Then a hiss. A trail of smoke at the grenade’s base and Michael waited a million years till he couldn’t take it anymore and pulled the launcher back from the wall opening, tried to get a sense of where the hissing smoke was coming from…

  When the grenade launched.

  Straight up into the roof, and a thousand roosting birds died instantly in a concussive blast that flattened Gina and threw Michael into the wall.

  Which gave.

  A brick cascade that annihilated the remaining thug in a rolling catastrophe that might or might not have swept Lofton and Alejandro into it.

  Michael went out with the first brick but caught a handhold, which went too, and he was scrambling the wrong way up an escalator of collapsing building till there wasn’t any more escalator and down he went. And if he could have felt it, eighteen feet down into a brick pile would have hurt. But he was numb and the world turned slowly in a dusty, dreamy way, and maybe that was Gina’s voice, screaming his name from somewhere over him. Heaven maybe. She’d be in heaven. He? He’d be, well, lower, just like this, listening to her voice above, waiting on the devil, and here he was in chalky orange seersucker.

  The devil carries an FBI .38 and drinks too much.

  “I can’t figure out if that was on purpose or not, you crazy fuck…”

  There’s too much wind in hell. It’s hard to hear anyone.

  Lofton had his .38 pointed at Michael’s face now, the barrel taking up way too much of his vision. “Long road, Mike, huh? Should have just stayed out of it…” Michael nodded. There was wisdom in that. Lofton straightened his gun at Michael, and that meant bullet time. “Sorry about your wife…” Michael nodded again. He’d forgiven Lofton. Forgiven everyone. He just wanted to float away.

  Lofton squeezed the trigger. The gun jammed and Lofton smiled. “Son of a bitch. Just a second, Mike…” Sure. Take your time. Lofton flipped open the chamber and tried to clear the sand clogging it. “You and Wintergreen. The two of you were always my favorites at the station. The other stiffs. Never got on with them, really. Too bad you turned out to be such a company cocksucker.”

  Was I ever a company man? Michael thought. Oh yes. A long time ago. Something to do with Argentina. My mother and sister were there. And Evita. They’re all dead now. Everybody’s dead. Now I am too. Please don’t be mad at me. I tried and please don’t be mad at me.

  “Still with us, Mike?” Michael blinked. “Just checking.” Lofton finished cleaning the gun, flipped it closed, and there was a noise in the rubble behind him. Over the wind and settling concrete, Lofton turned and was hit broadside by a rushing, screaming Alejandro. The impact drove them
both off the top of the rubble into a wind-piled dust dune.

  Michael watched Lofton struggle to get out of the dune, which was sucking him down like quicksand. He could see Alejandro, tangled around his legs, holding on, sinking with him. Lofton fought feverishly against Alejandro’s hold, striking the Argentine’s hands, dragging himself forward, working his gun around, firing over and over—pop, pop—point blank—pop, pop, click—and still Alejandro’s grip held, the boy almost completely below the sand now, Lofton clawing desperately up its sides but only clawing a grave that was closing around him.

  At a certain point Lofton stopped struggling, turned back from the dune’s lip, and stared into the boy’s face. He was dead. Cold flat dead, but his arms held on like steel. And Lofton smiled improbably, patted the dead boy’s head, and together they sunk beneath the surface of the dune.

  You see the strangest things in hell.

  35.

  Michael.”

  That face. Lingering again between this world and another. She really has to stop doing that. Purgatory’s maître d’ is beside her, pleasant concern etched on a face recently also etched by a bullet.

  “Are you all right?” Gina asked.

  “What a strange question.”

  “It’s a doctor’s question, Michael,” Hector answered.

  The doctor had her own etchings, tiny cuts over her face. He had liked that face. He liked it now. “Maybe. I can’t hear very well.”

  “None of us do after that grenade,” Hector might have said.

  “Can you feel your toes?” Gina asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Your nose is cold.”

  “I’m not a golden retriever.”

  Gina smiled and turned to Hector. “He’ll live.”