by Anthology
“We were just—”
“You’re lucky someone found you before you did too much damage. I’ll give you credit—no one expected a store out here—but when Hector hears you broke a bottle of olive oil? Really? When was the last time we had olive oil?”
Ren tossed another rock, knowing he should shut up, but not wanting to. “Get more water, Ren. Dig a new ditch, Ren. The old walls don’t mean shit anymore and I’m sick of doing stuff for other people. Look what we found—”
“Shit? What if you got hurt? Did you think of that?”
“Maybe the store will lift spirits for New Year’s?” Óscar added, softly.
Jeanie sighed as she turned. “Maybe, Óscar. Maybe. After Christmas, Ronda certainly deserves good news.”
“We could look for medicine on the shelves,” Ren muttered.
“There could be aspirin, yes. But no antibiotics. Not in a corner store.”
“And Selene?”
“Her fever is getting worse.”
Ren pulled his legs up and hugged them. He liked Selene. The only Greeks in town, she and her husband were always nice to him and Jeanie, unlike most locals. Dmitri had taught Ren to whittle and make small traps, and occasionally they played fútbol in the town square.
“You can’t keep pushing, kiddo. Bored or not. Not with rationing coming up again. You know Hector—”
Óscar groaned as his father rounded the corner, running without running, anger in each step. Stout and ruddy-faced, his button up shirt tucked into his slacks.
“Hector,” Jeanie interrupted, palms up. “See? Both boys are fine.”
His thick mustache curled beneath his nose as he towered above Óscar, forehead dappled with sweat. His finger went from Óscar, to Ren, back to Óscar.
“Papá, I—”
Hector cuffed Óscar across the face so hard his glasses fell off.
“Pick them up,” he commanded.
Ren stiffened and moved to speak. His mother shook her head once, sharply.
Not our place.
“Americana, this is a second time in a month your son has ignored el perímetro. We no longer guard the barricades, but Ronda still has rules.” He whirled to Ren. “Because you are the youngest, you think you can get away with everything. But you’re not special, you’re—”
“They’re just being boys, Hector. Look, they found a store.”
“A store? What if they died? Or woke something up?” He bristled over them, face purple with anger. Then he paused. “The Greek?”
“Rests inside Santa María with her husband,” Jeanie replied. “Luc stays with them, day and night. Without medicine, we run out of options. The pueblos are picked bare, Hector. Luc is right. We must send someone to Sevilla. Look for medicine, food, before—”
“No,” Hector said, ending the discussion with a swipe of his hand. “I will not risk the cities. We widen our search in el campo. Go further north this time.”
Hector pulled Óscar to his feet and shoved his son toward town. When he motioned for Ren to follow, Jeanie nodded.
Go.
“Los malcriados can spend the rest of the day gathering wood for a bonfire,” Hector added. “Pray the Greek does not die at night. If she turns, we should all be ready. Ronda has not seen such evil in some time.”
***
“I’m sick of this mierda.”
Ren tossed his wheelbarrow end over end as they reached the mid-span of the bridge, sending scrap wood tumbling onto Puerto Nuevo’s cobbled way. They crossed the gorge from La Ciudad—Old Wown—where foreigners lived in the Moorish buildings damaged during the fallout—toward El Centro, where the Spaniards resided in the finer apartments near the bullfighting ring.
“Por favor, Ren. No more trouble. Mi padre—”
“How long are they going to treat us this way? We’re not kids. But after we finish the pyre you know they’ll send us for more agua.”
The water containers grew heavy, filled at the cisterns near the Arab Baths. After fighting them up the streets, Ren would become so hungry his stomach would cramp. Sometimes the pangs were so awful he spent all night clutching his belly. Lately even his fingernails hurt. He hadn’t known nails could hurt.
He kicked a piece of wood and glared at Hector’s home. Nestled above El Tajo canyon, its faded HOTEL DON MIGUEL sign above the door. Across the Plaza de España, the grander Parador Hotel perched high above plains dotted with the skeletal remains of cork trees.
During the days after the electromagnetic pulse, half of Ronda’s residents had holed up inside the Parador, hiding in its lower floors. Now the luxury hotel stood as an empty testament, as his mother called it, to Ronda’s survival.
Raising his hand to shield his eyes from the sun, he stared into the ravine. A hundred meters below, Río Guadalevín trickled through the canyon. Dead plants were mixed in with a few living ones, mostly brown, struggling grasses. Sometimes, if he waited long enough, he would spot a bird in the underbrush. They reminded him of the swallows of the Alhambra. He often wondered if they still survived.
“What about the Bruja?” he asked, and flicked a thumb toward the Serranía de Ronda mountains. “Everyone says the old woman has medicine. She took army stuff from the garrison, right? Who knows what else she has stashed in her cave. Maybe food.”
“La Bruja?” Óscar fidgeted. “No one has seen her in months. Mi padre thinks she and her son died over the summer, or they would have come to trade.”
Ren spit off the bridge, and both boys watched it disappear into the gorge. “We should go,” Ren said, his wavy hair billowing in the breeze. “See if she has medicine for Selene. The adults—they’re too scared.”
“The cave is an hour away. We’re supposed to finish the pyre. We’d never make it back before nightfall. Ren, mi padre—”
“Rides you all day long, amigo. I think—”
“—says we grow lazy, that we neglect the barricades. That moving to the villas is dangerous. That we forget what it was like.”
“I’m tired of rules. Living like I’m already dead, afraid of every rusty nail I see. Let the old folks live that way. We get medicine, we won’t need a bonfire. Your padre can’t be angry if we bring back antibiotics. He’d be proud. On New Year’s Eve?”
“But what if one of them is out there? They’re—”
“—all in the cities and you know it. Likely shriveled up and dead, too. No, we ride to the cave and back before anyone notices we’re gone. The highway runs straight there.”
“You should have told the adults about that dead hombre.”
Ren’s eyes shined as he pulled out the clerk’s revolver. “Oh, I’d love to see their faces when they find that old bag of bones. Come on, compinche. Target practice on the way?”
“Compinche? Cómplice en crimen, you mean.”
Ren slid the heavy handgun into his belt, glancing over the countryside as the cork trees blew in a burst, settling as the wind died. “The whole town will thank us. All of them, afraid of their own shadows.”
“Yo no sé…”
He socked Óscar’s shoulder. “Hey, your stomach still growling?”
“¿Qué? It was my idea to try that neighborhood! You owe me for those cookies in your pocket. Don’t think I didn’t see you take them.”
Ren smirked as he flipped up his hood. “Come on, it’ll be a blast. You and me, the heroes of Ronda. Think of it as my birthday present. What’s the worst that can happen?”
CHAPTER THREE
Sweaty from their ride, the boys lay on the hillside, bicycles resting beside them as they stared into the valley. The baking sun had risen past midday, stretching the shadows of a nearby cork tree.
Beneath his hood, Ren squinted down the barrel of the gun, feeling uncaged and—for the first time in forever—full. Unable to eat another bite, he set the cookie down. They should hurry, he knew, find the medicine and return. Instead he imagined his mother and Hector in the aisles of the store, tallying foodstuffs. All the adults thought of—food
and not dying. Never really about leaving, except to raid the pueblos. Gone for days, only to return empty-handed.
“Never been this far out of Ronda, have you?”
Óscar rolled onto his back and shook his head. With a smirk, Ren wiped the hair from his eyes and glanced down the gun sight to the opposite side of the vale, where the entrance to the cave cut the parallel slope like a gash in a sea of brown. A farmhouse squatted in the midst of the valley, flanked by a cropping of dead trees lacking the sense to fall over. Unlike most of the ruins in Ronda, the building appeared untouched after a decade of neglect.
Untouched by the last century, he thought. With sparse cloud cover, the temperature left him parched.
“Why don’t you admit it, Ren?” Óscar asked, as he stared at the sky. “You’re americano. Tu mamá is americana, that means you’re americano.”
Ren aimed, smiled wider at Óscar’s ignorance, and fired. The crack echoed through the valley, dinging the farmhouse a foot from a window. “Ridiculous. Do I suck or what?”
“Why not admit it?”
“Because I’m not.” Ren spun the chamber and—against better judgment—reached for another cookie. “My mom came from the States but I was born in Paris. I grew up on the highways between France and Spain. You, on the other hand”—he spoke between bites—“have been pueblerino since you were born.”
Óscar snorted and sat up. “Pueblerino,” he repeated, and grabbed the binoculars. Turning his cap backward, he stared past the farmhouse at the gravel trail climbing the hillside to an empty parking lot. Hewn steps led to the cave above. “Tu mamá comes from America, you’re americano. Don’t have the balls to be español.”
Ren’s grin faded as he stared at the cave. He did not keep many secrets from Óscar—they were the only two people in town younger than twenty-seven—yet no one in Ronda knew Jeanie was not his birth mother. Ren’s parents had died in Paris. Jeanie came from Seattle. The idea of revealing the true nature of their relationship left Ren feeling alone. Alone terrified him more than anything—the fear of waking up to discover his mother missing. Nightmares from youth, which sent him to sleep on her bedroom floor until she woke. She always held him until he settled. Even now. Another thing he wouldn’t tell Óscar.
Ren glanced at Óscar and forced a smile. He had lived in Ronda for almost a year before Hector allowed the boys to meet. Kept in La Ciudad under the watch of his mother. Their first meeting happened only after her nonstop cajoling bore fruit. Holding his hand as they stood outside the hotel, watching Óscar in his second-story window. Unable to keep still as they waited for Hector to bring him out. To this day, Ren remembered Hector’s rules.
Los chicos can fetch agua. After, they may play in my garden for one hour. No longer.
Ren slid the pistol into his belt. “You get raised by an American in France and move to Spain—see how you do,” he countered. “Besides, most people spoke English on the roads, like we’re speaking now.”
Óscar let out a raspberry. “Come on, Ren. Let’s see if the old Bruja is in that cave. If not, it’s us gathering wood until the sun sets.”
“Like I said, tu padre will be—hey! Wait!”
***
Ren scrambled, grabbed his backpack and followed Óscar down the hillside. In the valley the wind sent a plume of fine black silt into the air—leftovers from the ejecta—and settled as storm clouds rolled in from the southwest.
He reached the shingled farmhouse first, grinning as he waited. Adrenaline surged through his system. Past a dilapidated fence and dank stream, the trail snaked up the hillside to the cave entrance. “Man, you’re slow. Like tortuga slow.”
“Tortuga?” Óscar wheezed as he leaned against the farmhouse. “Who just ate ten galletas?”
“Yeah? And how many Fantas did you drink?” Ren laughed as he pointed to the cave. “Cueva de la Pileta? What does that mean, anyway?”
Óscar shook his head. “Cave of the pool. The family who owned the caves used to do tours. Mi padre says there are real caveman drawings inside—fish, animals, made by el Cromañón.”
“Cro-Magnon?” Ren stepped forward. “No shit?”
“Neanderthals, too. But you’ll have to go slow for a change, if you can. Mi padre says sometimes the caves are so deep, you can fall and fall and…”
Óscar’s voice died as both boys turned to the farmhouse’s storm cellar doors.
Ren took an involuntary step back. A chill emanated from the shuttered basement, sending goose bumps along the back of his arms. As he stared hunger, rage, famine, flooded over him, thoughts scratching at the base of his skull like a mouse trying to escape a trap and—connection—delving further, an emptiness within the cellar, deep-walled and inescapable, a terrible yearning, hungry and weak, gnawing, always gnawing, awakened by their presence, the smell of sweet boy sweat and the thumpa, thumpa of two pumping hearts.
Ren gripped Óscar’s arm and they scrambled up the hillside to the cave, faces drained white, like the thing in the cellar had leached their lifeblood from afar.
***
The rusty gate stood wide open, beckoning the boys down a natural hallway so low they had to duck to enter. Inside the cavern’s first grotto, their heavy breathing echoed into the darkness. Óscar shivered in the chill. “Dios santo, Ren. Was that…?”
“You know it was.”
“A loner? But you said they were all dead. You said—”
“Probably can’t even walk anymore,” Ren replied. “Come on.”
One of them, Ren knew, shuddering as he squinted into the cave—the few who remember their past. Not like the moribund in the cities. Back in Paris, when his mom had brief radio communication with the Americas, she learned about monsters in the fog more horrible than the undying in Europe, spreading from a dead zone in Rio. A zone of silence, she called it, where evil issues from whatever fell from the stars, or woke up beneath the earth’s crust. Thankfully, the thing in the cellar felt decrepit—kept alive on dirt and worms.
“We should go back to town,” Óscar muttered. “Tell someone. Mi padre—”
“It’s still daylight,” Ren said, “we have plenty of time. Besides, what we need is to find that medicine. We tell them when we get back. They can burn the house, all I care.”
Óscar trembled. “But maybe they’re right. The last time I felt one, was the night they attacked Ronda. Before the barricades. The night mi mamá, she…”
Ren paused. He had been so focused on the antibiotics, he had failed to think about Óscar’s fears. “No one talks about that night. Do you think about your mom a lot?”
“Mi padre says they came like a wave at the beginning. Los moribundos killed nearly everyone in Ronda. Comida. That’s what mi padre says we were to them—food. The photos of mi mamá are digital, I don’t even have that. But I remember her warmth, if that makes sense. She smelled like soap.” Óscar glanced over. “Do you remember the cities? Skyscrapers? Luc showed me a photo of New York. So tall.”
Ren stared at a rusty metal sign bolted to the cave wall, covered with illegible tour instructions. Beneath it sat a row of ancient-looking lanterns. Most broken. Gripping the nearest, he unscrewed the container and took a whiff, cringing at the bite of old fuel. He recalled little before Spain. Since Ronda, Jeanie rarely spoke of their journey. She mostly taught him history, like how the Moors called the land Al-Ándalus before giving it to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Ren enjoyed Óscar’s tales of the time before the pulse best. The final bullfight of the season happened in town, he knew, when all of Spain descended on Ronda for the Corrida Goyesca—royals, movie stars, Ferraris in the streets.
“I kind of remember Granada,” he admitted. “And a castle outside Bordeaux. Walking the highways and the fires. I hated the smell. The cities, all burnt and melted. Full of moribund and crows. My mom won’t even talk about Paris. Not anymore.”
Óscar sighed. “You, her, the highway. All I had was our crap village. Can you imagine working cars? Refrigerators? Ice?”
Moving on. Might as well be my motto.
“What’s the Bruja’s story, anyway? All the adults talk about her like she’s cursed.”
“Mi padre says she came to Ronda from a big city right before everything with her palsied son. They lived in a village near the garrison when the pulso hit.”
Ren squinted into the grotto. Far away, water dripped. “Shit, maybe your padre is right. Maybe the Bruja died. Maybe she and her son—”
Ren swallowed as a shotgun sliced the gloom, both barrels pointing at his pale face.
CHAPTER FOUR
At gunpoint, the withered woman directed Ren and Óscar deeper into the caverns, up and down limestone steps, her thin frame draped in threadbare gear. After forcing Óscar to light a lantern, she led led them along staircases slick with water. Stalagmites teased from the periphery. Ren tried Spanish and ended up with both barrels pressed firmly in his back. And more swearing.
“She speaks Catalán,” Óscar said. “Catalonian. La Bruja is from the north.”
At the word Bruja the hooded thing laughed, spat an obscenity and shoved the shotgun so hard between Ren’s shoulders he yelped. Her language sounded like Spanish, French, and Italian all mixed together.
Twice he slipped on the old metal railing, nearly plunging into the unseen expanse below, yet on they went, until the steps ended in the largest cavern yet.
Torches sputtered about a camp where makeshift rooms, storage areas, and sleeping quarters had been constructed from wooden slats. A dozens crates sat close by, adorned with the letters FFAA—Fuerzas Armadas Española. A smoldering pit fire cast light across a large painting on the wall, of a fish or a seal. Far above the flames, thousands of ancient hash marks filled the walls. Cro-Magnon marks, he realized, so far up that whoever made them had to have used ladders, or the ground had simply been that much higher, centuries ago.