Mules:: A Novel

by Jarred Martin

  And then she heard a voice speak out of the darkness. She wasn’t alone. The voice was female, speaking Spanish.

  “Who is that? I don’t understand you,” Els crossed her arms over her chest, covering her naked breasts.

  The voice spoke English this time. “I said come forward three or four more feet and there will be a bed directly in front of you.”

  Els came forward slowly, reaching out with one hand. She felt the edge of the bed as her leg brushed against it. She touched the bed with her hands and then sat down on it.

  “Who are you?” Els asked again.

  “My name is Eliana. I’m like you.”

  “You’re like me? They’re keeping you here?”

  “Yes,” said Eliana.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “A few days, I think. It’s hard to tell. But I think we’ll be leaving soon.”

  “To go to Texas?”

  “I think so. Somewhere in America,” said Eliana.

  “I went to Texas before. I didn’t like it.”

  “I go to school there. Did they give you any pills? Like pain pills?”

  Els shook her head. “No.”

  “Oh.” Eliana sounded disappointed. “So they didn’t put anything inside of you, then?”

  “No,” said Els.

  “You’re lucky. It hurts.”

  Outside there was a startling and ferocious blast as the lion roared.

  “What was that?” Asked Els.

  Eliana was silent for a moment, the two of them sat draped in darkness. “Just another animal in a cage. Just like us. They like to keep things in cages.”

  THIRTY ONE

  Gusano parked the Volvo in front of a row of small houses. They were dusty-looking and the upkeep was poor, paint peeling, rubbed raw by the heat and the grainy wind. The land they were on was bare and hard-packed except for the occasional sprout of scrub brush rising from the dirt.

  Gusano turned to look at Neesha from the driver seat. “Welcome home. You can get out. If you try to run, I’ll put a bullet in your leg. I’m no doctor, so you’d just have to live with it. I’m not that great a shot either, really, so I’m not sure where the bullet may hit you. Probably best not to take the chance.”

  Neesha could barely follow what he was telling her. The fear was in her, boiling like tar, bubbling withing her and suffocating. She didn’t know how much more she could stand, the capacity for living in constant terror could not be infinite, and she feared once she reached the limit she would go insane.

  “Just stop,” she pleaded. “I’m here. You have me. I’ll do what you want, but please, just stop scaring me. I’m so scared, please. My parents have money. A lot of money. If you just tell them where I am. If you let them come and get me, you can have however much you want.”

  “That’s tempting,” said Gusano. “I always wanted to be rich. But ransom is a difficult game. Too many variables. You gotta be one of those bold types to pull that shit off. Or just stupid. I ain’t so bold, really. I ain’t so stupid either. Just do what I say and you’ll be hurt very little, okay? I said get out of the car earlier. So what do you think you should do right now?”

  Neesha pulled the door handle and got out of the car. Her legs were shaking and she had to steady herself by holding on to the roof.

  “That’s real good, rich girl. Now we’re going in the house.”

  He got behind her and she walked to the door they had parked closest to. She waited while Gusano found a key and turned it in the lock. The door swung open on a small room, mattress on the floor with wrinkled sheets, dirty clothes flung about haphazardly. The place wasn’t neat or clean, but it wasn’t filthy, more untidy than anything. There was a stand with a small TV on it, a card table with a couple of chairs pulled up, dirty shirt draped over the back of one.

  “This is it,” said Gusano. “Try not to get too overwhelmed.”

  Neesha reflected on the course her life had taken in the last few days: From a dormitory in Florida, to a mansion in Mexico, to a two-bedroom house where she may very likely be raped to death by a man who didn’t keep up with his laundry.

  She stood in the center of the room and watched Gusano in the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and took out one of the few thing inside, a bucket of fried chicken and a bottle of beer. He took the chicken and the beer to the card table and sat down, reached into the bucked and selected a chicken wing with a layer of congealed grease clinging to it thick and come-colored. He ate it in small bites, nibbling like a rat. When he was done he threw the greasy bones back in the bucket and pried the cap off the bottle. He took a long drink and watched her standing there.

  One question in Neesha’s mind. She dared not ask it. She feared the answer and she feared not knowing. What happens next?

  “You look lost,” said Gusano.

  I am lost. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

  Still seated, he kicked the empty chair out from under the table. “I want you to sit down in this chair.”

  Neesha went across the room and sat down.

  Gusano was silent for a while, entranced in reverie, deep in thought. He seemed to be making a difficult decision. He finished his beer and set the empty bottle down in front of him, tapped on the glass with his fingernail. And then he spoke. “Get me another.”

  Neesha got up and went to the refrigerator, selected a bottle and took it to Gusano. She set it down on the table and went back to her seat.

  Before she could sit down he spoke again. “Open it.”

  She turned around and picked up the bottle opener and snapped the cap off.

  She sat down.

  Gusano took a drink, his eyes were on her, looking past the upturned bottle. “You didn’t get one for yourself.”

  “You didn’t tell me to.”

  “Do I have to tell you to do everything?”

  “I didn’t want to. . . to make you mad.”

  “No you don’t. So go get yourself a beer and drink it.”

  Neesha got another beer and took it back to the table and sat down. She took a sip and put the bottle down in front of her.

  “Good?” Gusano asked.

  She hated the taste of beer. “Yes. Thank you.”

  That question came to Neesha again, the one that is better unasked and unanswered.

  Gusano asked it.

  “So, what happens now?”

  Neesha watched that reflective look come over his face again.

  “I think I may have an idea,” said Gusano. “I’ve got something in my closet I’ve been dying to try out. Nobody ever volunteers. I think I have one now, though, huh?”

  Neesha remained silent.

  “Yes, I think you’ll do nicely.” Gusano got up and went to a closet, opened the door and began digging through it. He found what he was looking for and turned to Neesha, smiling. “How would you like to play a little game?”

  THITY TWO

  Cages. They like to keep us in cages.

  She could see the bars form in her mind, black and cold and she was behind them, a frightened and defeated animal, flinching, burrowing itself in a corner at the approaching footsteps of her captors. She thought of Seve, dead. Neesha waiting to die in her own cage. She herself would be dead soon, too.

  Els drifted off in the shadow of those bars. The veil of sleep was tenuous and she dreamed of herself sleeping in a dark and unfamiliar room.

  She woke when the door opened.

  A man in a white doctor’s coat over green hospital scrubs was standing in the doorway. He wore a surgical mask and on either side of him were the two young thugs from the night before, also dressed for surgery, one with a bandage over his broken nose.

  They came for her and took her away. From behind the bars, Els watched her body being led down the hall to a different room. This one was covered in sheets of plastic. There was a kitchen table in the center of the room. They laid her down on it.

  As she lay there on the table with the surgeon- his name was Wad
e, she heard him say- telling her specifically how he was going to cut her open and what he would do to her insides.

  She went away.

  She was in the cage. The black place in her mind. Though the bars held her captive, her cage was infinite.

  On the floor of her cell a single pink aster pushed up through the darkness and bloomed. The petals unfurled like fingers, beckoning her. She was on her hands and knees before the flower, focusing on a single petal with microscopic intensity. It grew around her as she stared and it enveloped her vision. She saw nothing but pink and she went deeper into the flower. Deeper. A lone petal had become the sea and she let the pink waters wash over her, carrying her deeper and deeper still. She was on another plane now, she could see every atom that made up the petal, pink and shimmering, and the space between the atoms grew until she was standing alone in a mist, a cloud of dull red and white, pulsing and sparkling. She made the mist heavy and it settled over the ground and became solid. She walked on it and she made the fog into blades of grass that stretched pink and endless. And she made the sun and the blue cloudless sky above her. And in the distance she called mountains to rise, huge and snowcapped, and a stream cut the land in two, its waters peaceful and clear. The grass grew around her, up to her waist and she walked and ran her hand along the top of the blades. She made trees, glorious pines that rose hundreds of feet high. No, I don’t want pines, she thought. It’s too much like Montana. The pines became ash and they fell and drifted down to the pink earth. In their place oaks and birch trees shot up, cottonwood trees and palms all towering into the sky. Above the stream a flock of eagles with fifty-foot wingspans circled the churning waters. They swooped and plunged into the stream, bigger than pterodactyls, and when they emerged they held fluorescent dolphins in their talons, and they carried them off toward the mountains. Suddenly the grass parted and Karlstad emerged from the tall stalks, unscarred and dazzling white, he ran to her with his tongue lolling from the side of his mouth. She went to her knees with her arms spread and embraced him when he met her. She ran her fingers against his fur, soft like down, and he licked her face. As a warm snow began to fall over the land, she and Karlstad walked through the tall grass and came to the edge of the stream. They leaned over and peered into the crystal waters with their reflections smiling back up at them. Dolphins, glowing in neon hues, jumped into the air and twisted and flipped before diving back down again.

  She watched as two fish swam to the bank. They crawled out of the water on crude, stumpy little legs. As they walked on the land they began to change. Their legs grew longer and their fins and gills disappeared. Their caudal fins lengthened into tails and the fish became reptiles, lumbering dinosaurs the size of Karlstad with narrow dorsal plates rising from their backs. They sprouted hair and became mammalian, rats that grew into wolves that grew into apes. The apes became Australopithecus and their legs grew longer. They walked upright as their spines straightened. Homo Erectus became Neanderthal and their brains swelled inside their growing skulls and they finally took the form of modern man. Neesha and Seve stood before her, still damp from the water. Their skin was gray and mottled with lividity. Els could see Seve was missing the back of his skull and Neesha’s eyes had been carved out. Her smile was warm beneath the empty sockets and Els wrapped her arms around the both of them.

  “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” she said, holding them tight.

  “Time is a wasteland rendered on a grain of sand. Lets burn it together,” said Seve.

  “Yes, let’s light the blaze,” Neesha agreed. “We’ll all choke on the black smoke of ruin.”

  “It’s so good to have you back!” said Els. “What should we do first?”

  “We will dismantle the fabric of reality, brick by brick until the tenuous threads dangle like the viscera of the disemboweled,” said Neesha.

  “Or we can have a tea party,” Seve suggested.

  “Oh, yes,” Els clapped her hands. “Let’s do that. We’ll have a tea party. Follow me, everyone.”

  Els took them by the wrists and led them up a strawberry-colored hill, thick with pink grass swaying in a gentle breeze.

  At the top of the hill sat a long table covered in a white cloth. The table held all manner of cakes and sweets and four places were set at one end. They approached the table, and a praying mantis, six feet tall and wearing a tuxedo jacket over his thorax pulled their chairs out.

  The mantis butler poured tea for them and they sat and sipped it. Els watched a spider crawl out of Neesha’s eye socket.

  “I think this is just wonderful,” said Els. “Is everyone having a good time? More tea?”

  “Make the sun black,” said Seve, cutting delicately into a pastry with a knife and fork.

  Karlstad, who had been walking around on the table, sniffing at trays of cakes, came to Seve and started to lick the exposed brain hanging from the back of his skull.

  “We’ll have none of that, Karlstad,” said Els and she snapped her fingers and signaled for the mantis to cover Seve’s head with a top hat.

  “Call forth a plague of locusts to devour me,” said Neesha.

  “Yes, me too,” said Seve.

  “I don’t think I shall,” said Els. She turned to the butler. “Mantis, bring us something special, if you would.”

  “Right away, Mum.” The mantis hurried to the middle of the impossibly long table and selected a silver serving tray and brought it back to them. “I hope this is to your liking, Mum,” said the mantis, lifting the lid off the tray.

  Beneath it, on a platter, sitting on a bed of Romain lettuce, was Els’ father’s severed head.

  Seve and Neesha applauded as steam rolled off the top of his skull.

  “Oh my, isn’t that lovely?” said Seve, adjusting his hat.

  “I must have the recipe,” said Neesha.

  “Well I don’t like it at all,” said Els.

  “It is rather horrid, isn’t it?” Seve agreed, part of his brain leaked down the back of his neck.

  “Quite,” said Neesha.

  And just then, the head started to roll. It tumbled, face over cranium, until it reached Els’ plate and stopped, staring up at her.

  “Elizabeth,” said her father’s severed head, “now is not the time to be fucking off in fantasy land. The situation is dire, and unless you go back, your companyman is going to die, and so are you.”

  “Daddy, my friend is already dead. I’ll be dead soon, too, if I’m not already. I think I may have died on the operating table.”

  “Cancel that fucking talk, private,” her father’s head shouted. “We’re all going to be FUBAR unless you learn to un-fuck your attitude, believe you me.”

  “I make-believe, what I choose to make-believe. I’m sorry daddy.”

  The mantis came and picked up her father’s head, buried his mandibles around the hot, cooked flesh. His skull crunched sickeningly as the mantis devoured him.

  “Elizabeth,” screamed the head as it was eaten, “you have to wake up. You have to go back.”

  “I’m sorry, daddy. I shan’t be going back anytime soon. They like to keep us in cages up there.”

  THIRTY THREE

  Myles Wade’s hands were uncharacteristically steady as he removed the cloth mask which administered the anesthetic. He worked two fingers into the girl’s mouth and pulled her jaw down to insert the breathing tube. His two assistants- he hoped to God nothing would happen that would require their unskilled hands to interfere- watched intently. They always did. There was a fascination with the viscera of the human body. At least they weren’t squeamish, but why would they be? They had done far worse things to people, far less delicately.

  He marked off the area of incision on her breasts, noting the apparently self-administered stitches on the side of one. It looked like it was done with sewing thread- pretty good job, though.

  His assistants noticed her breasts too, letting their intellectual curiosity about what is inside the body be overcome, however briefly, by what
was pink and visible.

  “Those are some big fucking titties,” one of them remarked. Wade didn’t know his name, didn’t know most of their names. They were interchangeable, and he just thought of them as Gallo’s men. Now they were Calisto’s men, and soon, he thought, they would probably be someone else’s.

  He disinfected the area and injected a series of painkillers into her breasts.

  He took a deep breath and selected a scalpel from a tray of instruments.

  The fact that he was one of the interchangeable set he thought of as Calisto’s men was not lost on him. He was content with digging bullets out of gangsters and sewing up knife wounds, prescribing antibiotics and performing the occasional abortion on their captive whores, content but not exactly satisfied. But this was an entirely different plane of involvement. Before, he had no illusions that by providing medical attention to these people he was enabling dangerous psychopaths who would go on to commit unspeakable acts, but that was justifiable. Everyone deserved medical attention. If someone wanders into an ER, the doctor doesn’t decide where he fits into their personal hierarchy of morality, the doctor just sews them up. But this, he thought, holding the scalpel over her soft breasts, this was a crimson stain on his hands that would be impossible to rinse.

  Just underneath her breasts he made the incision more than twice as wide as he normally would. This was because the implants were hard-packed heroin and not pliable gel implants or saline, which were filled up after insertion.

  He inserted two fingers into the incision, separating muscle tissue from her rib cage and connective tissue. Next he slid a retractor into the incision to widen it while he used an electrocauter to sever the tissue further back and burn close the damaged blood vessels.

  His two assistants stared impressed into the gaping, bloodless hole he had made in her. He shuddered to think of the ideas he was giving them.

  Now he took one of the blocks of heroin, they each weighed around-one-and-a-quarter kilos and were molded into circular shapes a little bigger than his fists, and pushed it through the incision, stuck his fingers in after to set it in a natural-looking position.