by Unknown
By the time he reached the bottom of the steps he could hear his own voice chastising him, You fucking coward … you left him there, you fucking coward.
The boat was still at the quay, though the oars were gone. Phil threw himself into it, not caring if it capsized.
The boat rocked, then settled, and edged out into the river and began to float away. Upstream, this time.
Astral had been right. It was his choice, and the only logical one. He was right about being likely to enjoy himself there too, at least for a while. Wherever, and whatever, there was. Not a night out, or a game, or an illusion, but somewhere, something, old and generally hidden for good reason. Phil shivered.
The boat slowed. Looking up Phil saw he’d reached another quay. This one was metal, and the river appeared to stop and pool here. The quay was empty save for a metal door in the stone wall. He got out and went up to the door. It swung open easily when he pushed it. Phil screwed up his eyes at the sudden light. Once his vision had adjusted he wasn’t surprised to see the familiar lit and tiled corridor of an underground station. When he went through the door and looked back he was equally unsurprised to see a storage cupboard full of cleaning equipment. He closed the door. It was a lot like the one Astral had picked the lock of earlier. With that thought some of the numbness left him. If the wall hadn’t been concave he would have leant against it. As it was he took a deep breath and made a sound that was half sob and half sigh. Astral was an innocent at heart, open to being exploited or tricked.
Phil got his phone out. According to the time it was just past midnight. No surprise there. He checked the date too, but it was the next day, as it should be.
With that mundane act the evening’s experiences took another step away from him, heading into the realms of dream.
He’d been carrying a camera and analogue voice recorder in his small backpack but never got them out. He’d just taken the one picture, on his phone. He brought it up now, half expecting a dark screen. No, there was the boat, against the black water. But that could be any boat, in any covered or night-time setting. It proved nothing – and it reminded him what an idiot he’d been, too blinded by wonder to spot the danger. He deleted the photo with a fierce stab of his thumb.
When he put the phone away he found something else in his pocket. An envelope. He remembered stuffing it in there now, when they’d fled the police. It contained the map, the map that had started them off on this crazy, stupid mission. He pulled it out, and ripped the map from the envelope. He should tear the damn thing up, to stop anyone else making the same mistakes he’d made. But he didn’t have that right. Instead he raised his hand and half threw-half released it into the air. A gust of wind took the map, blowing the paper away down the corridor.
He turned on his heel and began walking, initially without direction. When he saw a sign for the Central Line he followed it. This looked like Bank station. When was the last train? He shook his head as he came onto the platform. Amazing how easily reality reasserted itself. Except for his missing friend.
He registered the woman dozing on a seat under a map of the underground, but didn’t really see her.
‘We need the world to speak to us.’
Phil started and looked around. The sleeper had stirred, raising a heavy head, showing fluffy blond hair, smeared make-up and tired eyes.
‘You hafta understand that, lovey.’ The voice was slurred, the accent pure East End.
‘You were there. You took my friend! You can’t just do that.’
‘Think you’ll find they can, lovey. We can.’
‘You’re one of … them.’ Whatever or whoever they were.
‘Yes and no. Checks and balances. Temptation and redemption. Y’know how it is.’ She waved a hand dismissively, ‘B’sides, no one took ’im. He was a grown lad an’ he made his own choice. Had some great stories though, he did.’
‘What do you mean, “had some great stories”?’
‘Didn’t you do well though, lovey!’
‘Me?’
‘Rational lad like you, an’ you accepted what you saw, didn’t get tied up with logic or evidence or any of that bollocks. Even deleted the piccy.’ She dropped her voice conspiratorially. ‘And you let the map move on. Ready for the next ones. We need that. You need that, all of you mayflies up here. We decided we owed you, for letting go of the picture and the map. Right, lovey, must be off.’
Mechanical thunder exploded behind him. Phil looked round, heart frozen in his chest, ready for fight or flight. Just a train. An ordinary, mundane train, pulling into the station. When he turned back, the woman was gone.
‘Right,’ he said to himself, ‘guess that’s that.’ He walked over, waited for the doors to open, then got on the near-empty train.
‘Shit, mate, didn’t expect to see you tonight!’
A familiar figure slouched in the seat opposite. ‘I could say the same about you,’ he said with considerable conviction. ‘So, where’ve you been?’
‘Weasel was meant to get us tickets for this new club in Camden but he never showed and I didn’t get in. Had a pint then gave it up as a bad job, only to find the bloody Circle line’s buggered up again so – oh,’ Bleary eyes snagged on the platform sign as the train pulled away. ‘Bank? I was going to suggest an outing to this neck of the woods. I got my hands on this map. Not sure where I put it…’
Phil spoke past a lump in his throat. ‘Let me know if it shows up. Though these days I don’t get out much. Parental responsibilities and all that.’
‘That why you’re grinning like a loon? Never thought sleep deprivation and nappy fumes made for such a good natural high.’
‘You’d be surprised. Astral, I don’t know about you but I could murder a cup of tea.’
‘Sound plan. Back to yours and don’t wake the baby it is.’
Under Cover of Night
Christopher Golden
Long past midnight, Carl Weston sat in a ditch in the Sonoran Desert with his finger on the trigger of his M-16, waiting for something to happen. Growing up, he’d always played army, dreamed about travelling around the world and taking on the bad guys – the black hats who ran dictatorships, invaded neighbouring countries, or tried exterminating whole subsets of the human race. That was what soldiering was all about. Taking care of business. Carrying the big stick and dishing out justice.
The National Guard might not be the army, but he had a feeling the end result wasn’t much different. Turned out the world wasn’t made up of black hats and white hats, and the only way to tell who was on your side was looking at which way their guns were facing. Weston spent thirteen months in the desert in Iraq, and for the last three he’d been part of a unit deployed to the Mexican border to back up the Border Patrol.
One fucking desert to another. Some of the guys he knew had been stationed in places like El Paso and San Diego. Weston would’ve killed for a little civilization. Instead, he got dirt and scrub, scorpions and snakes, land so ugly even the Texas Rangers had never spent that much time worrying about it.
Army or Guard, didn’t matter that much in the scheme of things. None of it was anything like he’d imagined as a kid. All just waiting around. If he’d earned a trip to Hell, he was living it. Never mind the heat, or the grit and desert dust in his hair and every fucking orifice … the boredom was Hell enough. It was all just so much waiting around.
Once upon a time, he’d have been excited about a detail like tonight. Border Patrol and DEA were working together to take out a cocaine caravan, bouncing up from South America on the Mexican Trampoline. The traffickers were doing double duty – taking money from illegals to smuggle them across the border, and using them as mules, loading them up with coke to carry with them. Where the DEA got their Intel was none of Weston’s business. He was just a grunt with a gun. But from the way the hours were ticking by, it didn’t look good. They hadn’t seen shit all night, and it had to be after two a.m.
South of the ditch, Weston couldn’t see anything but d
esert. Out there in the dark, less than half a mile off, locals had strung a barbed wire fence that ran for miles in either direction. The idea that this might deter illegals from crossing the border made him want to laugh and puke all at the same time. Yeah, Border Patrol units traversed this part of the invisible line between Mexico and the U.S. on a regular basis, but if you were committed enough to try crossing the border through the desert, you had a decent shot at making it. Border Patrol captured or turned back hordes of illegals every day, but plenty still slipped through.
And that was just the poor bastards who didn’t have transport, a bottle of water, or a spare sandwich. You had a little money and wanted to get some drugs across, all you needed was a ride to the border and a pair of wire-cutters. Came to it, you didn’t need the cutters, either. If you drove a little way, you’d find an opening.
The whole thing was a game. That was what bothered Weston the most. Over in Iraq, the other guys were full of hate and trying to take as many Americans out of action as possible. That was war. This whole business, sitting around in the ditch, was hide-and-fucking-seek.
‘Weston.’
He blinked, turned and glanced at Brooksy. The guy hadn’t been in Iraq with Weston’s unit. He was brand new to the squad; eighteen years old and thinking this shit was war. Grim motherfucker, skinny as a crack whore, hair shaved down to bristle, and twitchy as hell. The squad leader – Ortiz – had made Weston the kid’s babysitter, which meant they were sharing the ditch tonight. Six other guys in the squad, but Brooksy had to be Weston’s responsibility. He wasn’t sure if Ortiz was punishing him or complimenting him, making him look after the kid.
‘Shut up,’ Weston said, voice low.
He held his M-16 at the ready and glanced around to see if anyone was picking up on their chatter. No sign of movement from the rest of the squad, never mind the Border Patrol grunts or the DEA crusaders.
‘I gotta piss, man,’ Brooksy said.
Weston’s nostrils flared. ‘Not in this ditch.’
‘What do I do?’
‘Hold it, dumbass.’
‘And when I can’t?’
‘You piss in this ditch, I swear to God I’ll shoot you.’
Brooksy’s eyes narrowed. He gripped his M-16 and scanned the desert in the direction of the border.
Weston rolled his eyes. He turned and looked north. In the moonlight, the black silhouettes of a dozen or so small buildings were visible. They were all single-story, slant-roof shacks, most of which had once been houses. One had been offices, one a gas station, and one a saloon. The tiny desert town had never had a name – though one clever prick had painted a sign and planted it at the south end of the cluster of shacks. It read WELCOME TO PARADISE.
From what Ortiz had told the squad, passed down from the DEA briefing, the place had been hopping back in the days when heroin production had been huge in Mexico – before they’d realised that their greatest asset wasn’t crops, but the border itself, and started putting all of their efforts into trafficking instead. There’d been a big operation going in this little shithole, but the DEA had compromised it then and it had been abandoned ever since. The few people who’d actually tried to live there had long since wandered off.
Paradise Lost.
‘Seriously, man,’ Brooksy began.
Weston laughed softly, reached out with his foot, and kicked the kid’s pack. ‘Drain your canteen and piss in it.’
‘I’ll never get it clean, man. I’ll never be able to use it.’
That might be true. Weston gave him a hard look. ‘Go in the corner over there. Dig yourself a little hole, piss in it, then cover it up again. And you better hope the wind doesn’t shift.’
Brooksy nodded, propped his weapon against the side of the ditch, and went over to the corner. He used the heel of his boot to dig into the ground, then got down and deepened the hole with his hands. When he stood and unzipped, Weston laughed.
‘Keep your head down, Brooks.’
The kid bent his head and his knees, half-crouched, and it was just about the most foolish-looking thing Weston had ever seen. For a few seconds, it seemed inevitable that Brooksy would stumble into his hand-dug latrine.
From out across the desert came the distant growl of an engine. Weston swung round, propped the barrel of his M-16 on the top of the ditch, and sighted into the darkness. The sound of the engine cut off abruptly. Maybe there had been more than one. Regardless, it had come from the other side of the border, and no way anyone was joyriding the Sonoran in the wee hours of the morning.
‘It’s on,’ he whispered.
Brooksy might have been a kid, but instead of losing his cool and flopping all over the place, he turned pro. Quietly, he sat backward on the floor of the ditch, used his boots to cover the hole he’d made with dirt, then lay back and zipped up. He was back at his post with his weapon up in a handful of seconds, eyes gleaming in the dark. All the nervous energy that made him so twitchy had gone away. Weston nodded to him, then settled in to wait. Maybe the kid wouldn’t be a liability after all.
He imagined he could hear the twang of the barbed wire being cut, but at this distance, that might have been in his head. For long minutes they sat in the ditch, barely breathing. The other six members of the squad were broken into three two-man teams in different locations, but all on the obvious approach to the empty husks of Paradise.
At first, the rhythmic sound was so muffled that it could’ve been his own pulse in his ears. But when it grew louder, Weston knew the mules were on the move. Ortiz had told them the DEA expected a couple of dozen, but as the noise of running feet multiplied, it sounded like a hundred or more. The illegals would all have backpacks full of coke. They’d been warned some of them would be guards sent along to protect the coke – coyotes herding the mules – and those guys would be armed. Weston tried to do the math. If he figured twenty-five pounds of coke per mule – over ten kilos – at a hundred mules, they were talking about over a thousand kilos of cocaine.
How the DEA knew about the whole setup, he had no idea. That was their job. But obviously the traffickers had to be pretty confident to risk that kind of product on a bunch of desperate Mexicans looking for a better life in the goddamn desert.
Shadows out on the desert began to resolve into running figures. They were coming, but after crossing through the hole they’d cut in the fence, they’d spread out. DEA and Border Patrol were set up in the ramshackle buildings of Paradise, hiding behind and inside them, just waiting. There were big black Humvees and somewhere – not far off – a DEA chopper was waiting to be deployed.
Weston sighted down the barrel of his M-16. He almost felt bad for the mules. They didn’t stand a chance. They expected to show up in Paradise, get a meal and a blanket, and transport deeper into the U.S. But their ride wasn’t ever going to show up. DEA had already taken care of that.
A night wind blew over the desert and Weston shivered. During the day, the Sonoran was a frying pan. But at night, it could get cold as Hell.
He watched the tiny figures running closer, moving in and out of patches of moonlight. The night played tricks on the eyes. It was hard to track them closely from this distance. But the sounds of their running grew louder and pretty soon he motioned to Brooksy to duck down inside the ditch.
They slid down, their backs to the dirt wall. The mules started running by, some of them so close he could hear their laboured breathing and their grunts of exertion. A voice snarled, let off a stream of abuse at one of the mules. Had to be one of the shipment’s guards. Weston forced himself to take his finger off the trigger to fight the urge to rise up from the ditch and blow a hole in the bastard’s skull.
He kept his own breathing steady. Their assignment was simple. Let the mules and the coyotes pass on by, then close ranks behind them so that when the shit hit the fan in Paradise, none of the coke fled back across the border.
Simple.
Until the screaming started.
In the dark, he saw Brooksy
glance at him, wondering who the fuck was screaming. There’d been no gunshots yet. Nobody was supposed to make a move until they got the go signal from DEA, and that wasn’t intended to happen until all of the coke-carrying illegals and their guards had marched into Paradise, putting them between the DEA and Border Patrol on one side, and the National Guard on the other to keep them from retreating. But to the south, toward the border, a grown man had started shrieking like someone had just cut his dick off. It sent a chill up Weston’s spine, and he wondered how the other guys would be taking it.
The sound of running footsteps slowed, became hesitant.
Voices barked, urging the illegals on. The guards couldn’t let the mules change their minds now. Whoever was hurt or dying out there, it didn’t concern the drug runners.
Then the screaming died abruptly, a second of silence followed, and several other voices started a chorus of screams. At least one of them had to be that of a child, badly injured or at least in terror.
‘Damn,’ Weston whispered.
Brooksy flinched and stared at him, almost like the kid was judging him for breaking silence. Punk could fuck off as far as Weston was concerned. You got to the point where the terrified, maybe dying screams of a child didn’t rip your heart out, you might as well eat a bullet right there.
The comm. unit in his ear crackled. ‘Go. Word is go.’
Engines roared – the Humvees coming to life. Shouts began to arise, in English. ‘Go, go, go, go!’ over and over. Weston took one glance at Brooksy and saw that, indeed, the twitchy motherfucker had vanished, leaving one stone cold bastard behind. No more babysitting for Weston.
‘Go, go!’ Brooksy chimed in.
They ran up out of the ditch, weapons up and ready. Instantly, Weston saw what had happened. The screams back there in the darkness of the border had made the flood of illegals hesitate. They’d slowed down. Some had maybe even started to turn back, going to check on friends or family members who were stragglers, worried that they were the source of the screams. Whatever it was, the DEA cowboys had gotten worried that they might lose part of their score – or they’d just gotten impatient, which was typical. Grunts like Weston were used to waiting around for the world to explode. From what Ortiz had said, DEA cowboys spent too much time in offices, doing paperwork, and got stir crazy enough that once they hit the field, they couldn’t wait for shit to go down.