by Phil Tucker
“That’s not saying much,” said Ramonito, his grin a mile wide.
Cloud lunged at him, but Ramonito darted back, laughing, and Cloud shook his head again, his own grin wry. It was rare that he smiled. Selah laughed, and then hoisted her own pack.
“All right, boys. Let’s get moving. Ramonito, how much farther once we cross the freeway?”
Ramonito blew out his cheeks as he considered. “Depends how much luck we have? We should get to the Hills by—maybe in another three hours? Then it gets hard. The Culebras have most of those roads on lockdown. The Hills divide Culebra and Loco territory. We’ll have to be extra sneaky. I would say wait for night, but then you get all the pinche Dusters running around and there is nothing worse.”
Cloud pulled his pack up. “All right. Let’s avoid that then.”
“Wise decision! Maybe you’re not as slow as I thought,” said Ramonito, and then ran ahead a dozen steps laughing again as Cloud simply lifted an eyebrow.
Selah smiled. She lifted her face to the hazy sun, which had just cleared the rooftops, and enjoyed the warmth on her face. Maybe this would work out. There was a chance. Maybe they’d get to Chico without too much difficulty after all.
They crossed the freeway without incident, running across the empty lanes at Ramonito’s signal and plunging into the morass of homes beyond. Official Culebra territory, but it looked the same to her. The more they walked, the more Selah picked up on details around her. It was if she was learning to see the slum, notice elements that had at first evaded her. Most of the shacks and brick huts had blue water drums placed on the edge of their roofs, their sides stamped with a yellow logo and the words One World NGO. The vast cobwebbed tangles of power lines that emanated from rough poles of wood, each patched and stealing electricity from the other, till the top of each pole disappeared into a cloud of snarled black wire. The small faces that watched them pass, eyes large, hidden in the shadows of windows, doorways. Homes under construction, piles of bricks stacked neatly beside them. The napping dogs of indeterminate color, the rats creeping through the trash underfoot, the occasional rooster perched regally on a high retaining wall, the early morning sunlight setting its feathers aflame in a riot of glorious hues.
They were off the avenues now. Ramonito was leading them through a rat’s nest of alleys. Cutting back and forth, working off instinct and the position of the sun. There was no way he could have this entire city memorized, thought Selah. Yet he moved on with confidence. She put her trust in him and just followed, focusing on where she placed her feet and ignoring covert stares from passers-by.
Ramonito turned a corner up ahead, and then immediately jumped back as if scalded. He whipped his head about, looking for another way to go, and his sudden screaming tension caused Selah to grab Cloud’s arm.
“Go, go!” hissed Ramonito, and scrabbled past them, running back the way they’d come. Selah fought curiosity and ran right after him, pack dancing around on her hips so that she had to grab the straps to hold it in place. Cloud was right behind her, fleet of foot, and Ramonito was running back up the block, glancing over his shoulder as he went. They weren’t going to make the next street in time. Desperate, Ramonito ran to a random front door and tried the handle. It was locked. Cloud shoved him aside, shot a look back the way they’d been coming in time to see a gang of armed men round the corner, and then smashed in the door and stumbled inside. Ramonito spilled in right after him, almost tripping on his heels, and Selah slipped in last and pulled the door closed.
A bad smell. They had entered a dark room whose large size was intimated by a few lit candles. Selah pressed the back of her hand to her nose and narrowed her eyes. People were stirring, rising from sleeping pallets on the ground. Had they broken into a hospital? That smell. Dried blood? Standing behind Cloud, one hand on his back, Selah tried to make out details around them. The darkness was oppressive, smothering.
“Cloud?” Selah dug her flashlight out. People murmured to each other, sighing as they climbed to their feet. The skin on her scalp crawled at the sound. They weren’t saying words, just moaning.
“Oh no,” said Ramonito.
“Cloud?” They both lit their flashlights at the same time and swung the beams around. They were in a large room, brick walled, crudely built but with every chink and crack in the walls plugged with knots of cloth and dried mud. The floor was covered with sleeping pallets, nests of old blankets and sweat-stained sheets, from which men and women of all ages emerged, as gaunt and emaciated as plague victims. Dressed in rags or completely naked, they slit their hazy gray eyes and stared at them with inhuman desire.
“Ramonito?” Cloud turned and pressed his back to Selah’s.
Selah leveled her light at one man who had stood perhaps three yards from her. The ridges of his skull were prominent under his drawn skin, and his eyes were sunken and murky as if tainted by smoke. He raised a vial to his nose. Snorted deeply, and then closed his eyes. She watched, horrified, unable to move. He shuddered. Shivered as if in ecstasy, and he smiled, showing teeth filed down to points. His eyes snapped open, and they were pure vampire black.
Chapter Three
“Run!” yelled Ramonito, breaking the spell, and darted forward into the crowd, making for the back. Cloud grabbed Selah’s hand and yanked her after him. She looked back at the Duster, who let out a ululating cry and pointed after her. The others around them took up his howl and suddenly everybody was tearing at them with clawed hands.
Selah ducked her head and clung to Cloud. He was shoving people aside, roaring out in anger. Somebody grabbed her pack and nearly hauled her off her feet. Wriggling like a fish, Selah slipped out from the straps and abandoned it. She flailed out with her flashlight and cracked it in a woman’s face, snapping her head back and forcing her to release her grip on Selah’s arm.
A door opened somewhere ahead of them, and sunlight spilled in. Cries of anger and dismay filled the air. All around them people were sniffing at vials and shaking off their somnolence. Hands sought her face, plucked at her clothing. She yelled, sheer terror giving her strength, and burst out the back door into the alley right after Cloud, slamming into a cinderblock wall and nearly falling to the ground.
Selah hauled herself up. Sunlight. Cloud shoved himself off the ground, pack nearly catching her in the face. A number of Dusters were crowding the doorway, close enough to touch, glancing up at the sky outside, grimacing and slitting their eyes. Selah froze as she watched them recoil. They didn’t seem human. She stared, transfixed. They hissed and swayed in the shadows, cracked lips pulling back from their long, yellowed teeth. A voice was yelling for her to run, but she couldn’t come to terms with the feral hunger in their eyes. One gathered himself, a scrawny kid, and lurched out into the sun, coming right at her. Cloud stepped in and caught him with a hook right across the jaw, hitting him with all the power in his hips, and the kid dropped to the ground like a pile of books.
“Run!” yelled Cloud, pushing her as he backed away, more Dusters daring the sun and entering the alley. “Go! Go!”
Selah gathered her wits and ran. The alley was so narrow that she could push off each side as she navigated over fallen trash and churned up patches of sucking mud. Ramonito was just ahead of her. He’d stopped running. He’d hit a dead end. Selah looked over her shoulder. Cloud was coming right behind her, blocking the view of the Dusters beyond.
“Up!” yelled Ramonito, gesturing frantically to her. “Help me up!”
The buildings were two storied and made of old-fashioned brick and cinderblock, the construction sufficiently rough that there were handholds and ledges to climb. Above them, a crack perhaps a foot wide ran vertically along the imperfect seam where second story of the building to their left met the one that sealed off the alley. Selah laced her fingers to form a stirrup, caught Ramonito’s mud-caked shoe and hoisted him up with all her strength. He grabbed a protruding pole, and quick as a monkey he shimmied up, gained the crack, and then turned to reach down and help her
up.
Cloud drew his revolver and turned to level it at the oncoming Dusters racing toward them, flooding the alley, doubled over in the sunlight and reaching for them as they came. Inhuman, she thought again, and then Cloud aimed the gun right over their heads and fired a shot. The sound was deafening in the alley’s close confines, and the Dusters dropped, falling into crouches, some slipping in the muck and falling altogether.
Selah placed the toe of her hiking boot in a gap between two bricks, stuck her fingers into a cavity in the side of a cinderblock, and then surged up and grabbed the pipe. It groaned ominously but held. Another toe hold, a second heave, and she grasped Ramonito’s hand and nearly yanked him down into the alley. A kick, a wriggle, and she was up, Ramonito falling back through the crack so that she could squirm up onto the ledge, first on her stomach and then up onto her feet.
Cloud tossed her the gun and then came up right behind her, needing no help, his teeth gritted as he scrambled up the walls. Selah squeezed through the gap and out onto the flat roof beyond, the corrugated tin surface groaning and shifting horribly beneath her feet. Cloud tried to fit through with his pack, then let out a cry of frustration and shucked it. Turning sideways he squeezed through after her and took back the gun.
“We gotta run,” said Ramonito, speaking over his shoulder as he hurried across the roof. “They’re disoriented now, but the Dust, it kicks in fast! Soon they will be like vampiros. Come on!” He ran lightly over the roof and then leaped over to the next building, crossing the yard-wide gap with ease. Selah and Cloud came right after. The next roof was slightly canted, clay tiles sliding and giving way treacherously beneath their feet. They ran awkwardly, arms extended for balance, following Ramonito up to the peak and then down the other side and onto the next building.
A forest of wire antennas confronted them, forcing Selah to duck and dodge through them. Ramonito paused at the building’s edge, looked down, and then ran off to the right. She cut across the roof after him, over a retaining wall and onto the next building. A couple of men stared at them in surprise where they stood by a pigeon coop smoking cigars, but Selah ran right past them. A gunshot. She cast a look over her shoulder. Cloud was running slowly as he looked back, revolver gleaming in the sunlight. A body lay sprawled on the tiled peak of the roof behind them. Three more Dusters raced into view. They were getting faster, starting to pick up that vampiric speed she knew so well.
Panic beat its frantic tattoo in her mind. Think! They wouldn’t be able to outrun them for long, but if they dropped down into the streets they would be out of the sunlight. Another shot, followed by a close second. Four shots all told. Two left before Cloud had to reload. But his ammo was back in his pack. Selah bottled down a cry of anger. Think!
The roof they were running across was edged on two sides by second stories, making it feel like an open courtyard. Desperate, Ramonito sized up a water tank, glanced up at the roof above them, then darted to the side to glance down at the street below. Selah ran up behind him. Faces down in the street stared back up, suspicious, scared, curious. The street was too wide to jump. The roof suddenly shifted under their weight and nearly spilled them down. Darting back, grabbing onto each other, Selah saw a group of men standing a block down, rifles resting on their shoulders, staring in their direction.
“Culebras?” asked Selah, pointing at them.
Ramonito shook his head. “No! No no no! We need to go away from them too!”
Selah ignored his cries. A desperate plan formulated itself in her mind. Cloud came pounding up, causing the roof to shake and shiver. She ran to one of the second-story walls and tore aside a rude curtain that blocked one of the windows. “Through here!” She climbed inside, scraping her knee on the sharp brick edge, and tumbled onto a bed in the room beyond. It was empty, posters of naked women tacked to the walls. Rolling off the bed she turned to help Ramonito through, pointed at another window on the far side of the room, and then grabbed Cloud’s hand to help him tumble in as well.
“We need a plan,” he rasped, wiping his face with his sleeve.
“I got one,” Selah said, and climbed out the second window into the sun. She turned back to him. “Hurry!” She helped Cloud squeeze out, and then together they ran, feet thundering on the clear plastic roofing as it cracked like dry lasagna pasta under their weight. It spanned several homes beneath them, and so they ran, cursing and looking back. The Dusters were clambering out of the window like spiders emerging from a hole, impossibly fast. Cloud turned to shoot again, but Selah grabbed his wrist and shook her head, “No time! Come on!”
The roof ended right ahead. There was a gap of three yards, and then a final solitary building. Selah prayed that they had gone in the right direction. She examined the far roof with terrified hope, searching for a way down. There was none. No time to think. She summoned her reserves and burst into a sprint. Ten yards. Five. Jump! She launched herself over the space, arms wind milling, and crashed down onto the far roof. The white plastered surface cracked alarmingly under her, sagging and sinking under her weight as if it were made of dry-wall.
Cloud and Ramonito came sailing right after, both falling next to her. The roof cracked again and lurched down a foot, finger-thick cracks running between them. Selah scooted back on her butt, kicking her heels. The Dusters came surging right after. She had to get to the far edge. Yell down her plea. But there was no time. The first of the Dusters leaped the gap with ease, flying impossibly high to land around them–one, two—four of them.
“Cloud!” yelled Selah, reaching out for him, but the entire roof gave way beneath their combined weight. They fell with a rushing roar into the belly of the building amidst a cloud of billowing dust.
Selah coughed. Rolled onto her side, disoriented. Her head pounded. She wasn’t hurt. At least, she didn’t think she was. She tried to rise but fell over. A thick plane of roofing lay beneath her at an angle. She rolled off it. “Cloud?” Outside, people were yelling. Shapes rose around her. Dusters. They were shrugging off the shock and hurt as easily as if they really were vampires.
Where was Cloud? Selah started to crawl through the rubble. Sunlight filtered into the room in vast shafts, catching people and turning them into silhouettes where they stood swaying or into faint outlines if they stood in dark. A door opened. A man barked out a question. Selah’s head was ringing; she couldn’t make out his words, but she cried out Cloud’s name again and then her fingers closed over the handle of the gun.
Hands grabbed her by the shoulder and flung her onto her back. She raised the gun but the Duster smacked it out of her hand. Even in the dark and dust she recognized him. It was the first Duster that had grinned at her in their nest, his thin hair ragged and unkempt, his eyes burning, his body little more than a collection of bones dipped in wax. Selah kicked at him, but he ignored the blows. Baring his teeth, he fell upon her, thrusting his face into her neck. He was strong, impossibly strong, and even in the dust-clogged air, Selah could smell his rank sour sweat and something worse, something spoiled and foul. She tried to thrust him away, shoved with her elbows and knees, but she couldn’t dislodge him.
His lips found her neck. He bit her, teeth grazing her skin, then lunged in closer to tear at her flesh. A gunshot, a second and third, and the man spasmed and let out a terrible cry before going limp. Selah screamed out in revulsion and shoved him away, sitting up and kicking her way out from under his body. The air exploded into gunshots and cries, screams of rage and hatred. Selah wrapped her arms around her head and fell over, closing her eyes as madness engulfed the room.
Ten seconds, maybe, and then everything went still. Selah cracked open her eyes and peered toward the front of the room. A group of men stood before an open door, six of them standing shoulder to shoulder, guns leveled. The Culebras. Around her lay the bodies of the Dusters, intertwined with the rubble and ruined furniture. Where was Cloud? Ramonito? Breathing in sharp gasps, Selah sat up, unsure if movement would draw fire.
“Que chingada,”
said one of the men. He lowered his rifle and spat. “What the hell happened here, hey?” He looked up at the collapsed ceiling, and then shook his head. “OK, chicos. Go through the room. A bullet in every brain.”
“Wait, please!” Selah raised her arms as the group of men swiveled to face her. “We’re not all Dusters.”
“Oh, yeah?” The man examined her and then grinned. He was short, compact, with a pot belly and a round face with suspicious eyes. “You talk real nice, but lady, you got Duster eyes.”
Her eyes? Selah bit back a curse. Of course. Desperate, she pressed on. “I promise. They were chasing us. Across the rooftops. I led them here, to you. Except the roof collapsed. I was going to yell for help, get down into the street.”
Coughing came from Selah’s left. Cloud. He half rose from under a sheet of roofing material and then slumped again. A spike of hope pierced her chest. He was alive.
“Uh huh. Whatever.” He raised his gun and pointed it at her face.
“No! Stop!” Blank denial rose up within her. It couldn’t end here. Not like this, not with so much at stake. “Please—you can’t do this.”
The other men grinned, except for one kid who studied her face intently. The potbellied man gave her a wintry smile. “I can do whatever the hell I want. Adios, senorita.”
“Guillermo, wait,” said the kid. He pushed his way forward and stared closely at Selah. Tall, gangly, probably not even fifteen, he frowned down at her. Selah glanced a look at their leader, who was glaring at the kid.
“What? What already?”
“I think I know her.” The kid shifted his weight on the loose bricks, and holstered his gun. “What’s your name?”
Selah tried to place him. She was sure she’d never seen him before in her life. “Selah?”
“No fucking way!” He smacked one hand into the palm of the other and turned to Guillermo with a grin. “Esse, it’s Selah Brown.”