“Shut the fuck up and get in the back!” Gerardo growls.
Anita turns, spotting a small hatch leading into the trailer. She pulls it open and crawls through the small opening muttering curses. Gerardo slams the hatch shut behind her.
Edu leans out of his window. He raises his shotgun at a charging Red Eye.
Gerardo’s neck shoots from side to side. He peers through the windshield. In the dim light of early dawn, a murder of Red Eyes runs toward the front of the truck.
“The lights! Hit the lights!” Edu shouts.
Gerardo whacks the understeer switch and Gloria’s headlights pop on at full blast. They burn white, twin suns gleaming behind a metal grill.
The Red Eyes wail, bloody hands shoot to cover their eyes. They part, some falling to one side, others crawling away from the headlights as if burned by them.
Gloria moves forward, her massive body gaining momentum slowly but surely. Through the well-palmed, dusty windshield, a gut-punch revelation like the worst kind of news only a doctor can deliver: the street ahead ends in a wall of rusted street signs and wood planks…a gnarly road block.
Gerardo grips the steering wheel like he’s strangling it into submission.
Edu looks at him. “Bust through it?” he asks.
“What do you think?”
Gloria’s tires shriek, billowing smoke. The wire mesh covering them crackles over the asphalt. Then she shoots forward like a cannonball, impossibly fast despite her gargantuan size.
Crash.
The truck’s metal grill smashes the wood barriers to splinters, the street signs crunch, bending backward. Gloria’s tires skid as they push, making slow progress forward.
“Come on, Gloria, baby!” Gerardo shouts.
The metal of one of the signs creaks as it dents outwards. Gloria’s grill busts a hole, finally popping through. Her back wheels screech as they peel out past the wrecked wall. The semi rattles as she zooms through. The truck has made it. Behind it, the wall is a crumpled mess.
Gabo bangs the inside of Gloria’s trailer, “yeah! YOU GO GLORIA!”
Gerardo sighs. Edu cracks a smile. Gerardo floors it.
The truck blasts past the traffic light, gunning down through the intersection. Her brake lights flash like embers in the distance. Twin, glowing, red eyes.
◆◆◆
Chief looms over a downed hunter. It’s one of the Red Eyes that ran from the headlights, still convulsing as if he were covered in invisible burns. He blinks endlessly, grunting as he rubs his blind eyes.
“I’m so tired…” the hunter mumbles, “I just want to sleep again. I just wanna sleep.”
“You wanna sleep? Close your eyes. Here, close ‘em,” Chief says softly like he’s speaking to a freshly-tucked-in toddler. The hunter closes his eyes and rests his head on the hot, welcoming asphalt. In the throes of the merciless, smothering insomnia, anything is as soft as a pillow, as warm and seductive as your bed after an endless, grueling day of work. Chief grabs the hunter’s spear. He angles it up and drives it down. Plop.
“Shh. Sleep now,” Chief says. The spearhead punches through the hunter’s throat. It slides through the skin like butter, denting the neck between the Adam’s Apple and the chin. The hunter gurgles as he dies, shooting bubbling blood out through the hole in his throat every time he breathes.
Chief drops the spear and turns to the dazed hunter next to him, “Heading to Santa Tecla,” he says. “Rally our hunting party. Signal the Eyes. Gotta get that Sleeper.”
◆◆◆
Gloria shoots down a wrecked, trash-littered street. On the asphalt, the bodies of several Lazies are split open like roadkill.
Gerardo sits in the driver’s seat. He rubs heavy, aching, stinging eyes and mumbles to himself, “Toluca Street, Pan-American Highway, El Salvador Highway, Mixco Overpass…the Pill Haven.” The cabin’s beginning to wobble again, the world lurching back into its familiar, blurry, quivering self.
Gerardo’s shaky hands shoot subconsciously to where the backpack was…but it’s gone. He breathes deeply, steadying his nerves, feeling the smoldering embers of adrenaline fading out of his system. The fatigue makes his posture droop. When he goes for the steering wheel again his arms move slower. It’s as if the exhaustion is slowly crippling him…
◆◆◆
The semi called Gloria moves down the road, cracks and pops sounding off underneath her. She stops in front of a small building in the center of a large parking lot. Rows of shopping carts have been set up around it, makeshift barricades against the ghosts of invaders who have surely been here. Still, they’re intact. They wouldn’t do much against an attacking force on foot who might be able to climb over the walls with ease, but they make driving up to the pharmacy impossible within a thirty feet radius.
Gloria rumbles, her reinforced wheels sparking against the asphalt. Gerardo revs the engine then lets go of the brakes. The semi’s massive grill crashes through the reinforced shopping cart wall. The carts fly upward, squealing as they’re dented beyond recognition beneath the ramming power of a semi truck at full blast. Then Gerardo cuts the engine, Gloria rumbling and growling as she stands still, like a dragon at his beck and call that’s just torn through an invading army. Ever-ready, ever-reliable. That’s Gloria. The wall of shopping carts is no more. Beyond the twisted metal and warped plastic, the stairs leading to the pharmacy are now visible. A sign above the store’s double doors reads, ‘TOWER PHARMACY.’
With the immediate problem dealt with, there’s only really one thing standing in Gerardo’s way. One thing sticking out of the aching, too-bright, too-long world like a splinter in his screaming mind. He rushes out through the driver’s side door. He’s seeing red, his face a deformed grimace. His gnarled fists bang against the trailer door.
“Diana!” he shouts, “open up! Get that fucking kid out here!”
“Gerardo,” Diana’s voice echoes from inside the safety of the metal trailer, "she’s a goddam child!”
“Just open the door!” Gerardo says.
The trailer door creaks open. Inside, Anita hides behind Diana, Gabo cowers in the corner, it’s like a house in a battlefield, its occupants hunkering down and hoping the enemy will pass them by. But he’s already here. Gerardo pushes Diana out of the way and grabs Anita’s arm, yanking her out of the trailer and dropping her on the street.
“Gerardo! No!” Diana shouts, but Gabo holds her back.
“What the fuck are you doing here? Do you think this is a game? Huh? You cost us our stash! You almost got us killed!” Gerardo shouts.
Anita rises to stand. She pats dirt off her jeans. There’s a hole on one of the jean’s legs revealing a colorful Band-Aid over a skinned knee, a striking hint of childhood normalcy sticking out like a glinting diamond in a storm of violence and chaos. “I’m sorry,” she says, softly, but not whimpering, not weakly. “I needed a ride. I did what I had to do to stay alive. Just like you.”
“Did Diana sneak you on? Did you ask her to?”
“It wasn’t her. It was me,” Anita says, eyes unflinching, voice not wavering. There’s no hint of any tears on the horizon.
“Yeah, it was you. It was you who fucked this up for us. We needed to sell that stash to get tickets to the Pill Haven. Without them, we’re as good as dead. You fucking killed us.” Gerardo gets closer and closer to her with each word, the rage building and shaking loose the cobwebs that have wrapped around his brain as if it’s a juicy, dying but still wriggling insect. Dinner. Prey. Something that’ll stop fighting in the end and allow the black, hairy spider that is the Insomnia to dig its fangs into it.
Diana rushes out of the trailer and hugs Anita, hiding her from Gerardo’s view with her own sweaty, ragged form. It’s an image as old as time, one human being shielding another from some ruthless attacker. They might as well be a mother and her daughter in a battlefield, the last image of human decency amidst a sea of carnage and death. Gerardo sighs, seemingly breathing for the first time since he set eyes o
n Anita. “You get in the driver’s seat with her, Diana,” he finally says. “I don’t want to see her outside. Edu, Gabo, with me. We’re gonna see if this guy’s still around. We don’t have anything to sell anymore, but maybe we can steal something off him.”
“You sure? What if he’s packing?” Gabo asks, fidgeting and shooting his eyes around as if there’s a sniper trained on him, on all of them. There very well might be.
“Take a look around. He’s probably dead. Let’s just hope we can find something someone overlooked,” Gerardo says and starts walking up the stairs. He’s holding his handgun out in front of him, the barrel shaking up and down with each tremor of a body that aches for rest, for any kind of respite from an eternal, merciless day. Edu and Gabo march behind him, Edu swinging the blood-soaked sledgehammer, Gabo holding his rifle.
Diana sits behind Gloria’s wheel, eyes closed, fighting back the mother of all headaches. She learned, in the beginning, that the only way to get through a particularly brutal bout of exhaustion is to lie to your own body. So she does that now, promises her squirming brain and her sluggish muscles and her hammering heart that she’ll be asleep soon. It works, she feels the invisible weight that’s weighing her down subside slightly. But it won’t work for long, won’t work again for a long while. That was all life was now, coming up with a million temporary solutions that did nothing to solve the same undying problem.
Next to Diana, Anita stares into the distance, looking past the front door of the pharmacy to a place only she can see. Maybe she’s seeing the Sleeping Place, maybe she’s just imagining what Gerardo and the others will find inside the husk of a building that looms over her.
Gerardo stops in front of the pharmacy’s door, then runs his hand over its edge. It’s dented. Busted through. He starts to pull it open, but it collapses backward, falling into the dark interior of the pharmacy. They’re not the first ones here.
SIX
Inside the dark pharmacy, Gerardo, Edu, and Gabo are black, man-shaped silhouettes against the blazing white rectangle of the open door. They all start coughing as soon as they walk inside, a stench assaulting their senses like a booby trap, like a wall of fire or a rolling cloud of poison gas set up to ward off intruders. But it’s just a smell, just a horrifying, gut-twisting, eye-watering smell.
“Oh God,” Gabo whispers, “it stinks like a public bathroom in here.”
“You mean like piss and shit,” Edu says, not bothering to lower the volume of his voice in the slightest. He’s seen enough to know that a place that looks like this, smells like this, sounds like this…is a graveyard.
Beyond them, in the dark, there’s a sound like sandpaper on sandpaper. Gerardo recognizes it. Breathing. Or, not quite. More like a death rattle. A moan sounds off right in front of them.
Gerardo pats the wall next to him, ignoring the wet patches that shoot cold into his already clammy hand, then he finds it. He flips the light switch. Suddenly, the room around them comes into existence one fluorescent blink at a time. Until, with a buzz and a crackle, the lights become steady enough to see clearly. And they all immediately wish they hadn’t.
It’s a normal pharmacy, like every other that Gerardo has ever stepped foot in. White walls, some light-up displays showing ads for pills no one needs, a couple of fridges for cold drinks, a freezer for ice cream. But it isn’t a normal pharmacy. Not anymore. Now, it’s hell itself. Empty shelves are knocked over. Scarlet smears track the entire length of the blue linoleum floor, turning it the worst kind of purple. Brown splatters cover the walls, some are handprints, others are bare footprints.
In the center of the room are three men. They’re naked and lying in a foot-deep puddle of everything a body might produce. One of them shrieks. He flops his head toward Gerardo and the others. His eyes are blood red, drowning in a pink waterfall that’s never-ending, always-flowing out from behind exposed eyeballs that are as raw as uncooked meat.
There’s a gaping, jagged circle of exposed flesh that runs from the bottom of his eyebrows to the top of his cheekbones…his eyelids have been sliced off. Carved into the middle of his forehead is a circle with another circle inside it. An ancient symbol that’s easy to recognize, even if the lines are blurred with dragging, dripping scarlet tears. It’s an eye. An eye colored in red by the raw flesh underneath.
Gabo and Edu rush out through the front door, their gag reflexes in full effect and moving their bodies in a mechanical, fully automatic series of movements that are impossible to fight or stop. Gerardo doesn’t budge. He steps past the men, ripping their grasping, pleading hands off his pants with his purpose-filled, determined strides forward. He plots focused, frantic steps toward the counter in the back. Then he hops over it.
“Please. One bottle. It’s all we need. One pill even,” he mutters to himself, or to God. But the men behind him are muttering to Him too. Hell, the whole country, the whole world is screaming out for Him to fix this, to reverse this, to return their sleep. But the line’s either busy or has been disconnected entirely.
Behind the counter are rows of shelves that used to hold the pharmacy’s stock of prescription-only meds, a library of bright boxes that came in soothing pastels and vibrant reds, greens, and yellows, and that shouted out ridiculous names in authoritative, confident fonts…only there isn’t a single box, bottle, or pill in sight. In one corner, melted plastic and a rainbow of ash are fused into a charred, useless heap.
Gerardo only nods, like he was expecting it. But his eyes are wild, teary, but somehow resolved, like he’s looking at the very thing that will kill him.
◆◆◆
Gabo collapses on the sidewalk. He scrunches over, spewing vomit. Edu pulls out a flask and downs it mercilessly, welcoming the stinging, burning, mind-killing liquid inside.
Gerardo stumbles out of the pharmacy and toward the semi without even looking at the others. He’s in a daze, a man on death row with his stay of execution denied yet again. Hopeless, stuck, not going anywhere but down the drain he’s been circling for sixteen hours.
“What happened?” Diana asks.
“No pills. Not even fucking Melatonin. It was the Red Eyes. They got to them. ‘Opened their eyes,’” Gerardo says, still not looking at Diana, only opening the driver’s side door for her. She hops out, grabbing Anita’s hand and helping her off the semi’s high seat.
“Where are we goin’?” Diana asks, turning to Gerardo cautiously as if addressing an active volcano that’s finally dormant…but not for long.
“Insomnia Café,” he grunts.
“With Anita?”
“What do you want me to do? You don’t like it, drop her off someplace better on the way. Come on,” Gerardo grabs Anita by the arm, leading her toward the trailer, but she pulls her arm loose.
“Take me to the Faithful. They can help. Looks like you need it,” Anita says like she’s the one talking to a child.
“No. You just want us to take you there so they can take our truck and drive you to Neverland,” he motions to the trailer. ‘In,’ that motion says. ‘Out of my hair.’
She still doesn’t budge. “They have supplies. Water? Food? Are you smart enough to pack any of that? Just take us there and you’ll live longer. We all will.”
“Now, listen here, brat. This is our truck. You have any idea what we did to get it? What we’ve done to keep it? I’m not taking it to made-up places that a stowaway suggests. We lose it, we might as well lie down and wait to die with the Lazies. When I drive it, everyone’s life is in my hands. Including yours. So get in the fucking trailer and shut the fuck up before someone spots you and puts you to sleep for real.”
Anita nods and hops into the trailer, her eyes teary for the first time.
◆◆◆
Gloria barrels toward a small shopping center. A series of storefronts surround a parking lot. Dozens of mismatched pieces of fabric have been knit together into a giant quilt as big as a circus tent. It drapes from each of the storefronts’ roofs, blanketing the entire parking
lot. There are men standing guard here and there, some sitting on the wheels of overturned cars, others peeking out of smashed-out windows.
Gerardo parks Gloria on the side of the road and slides off the driver’s seat. Edu plops into it right behind him. He leans the shotgun out of the window, on watch. It’s a well-oiled, well-practiced maneuver, not a word spoken, not a look flashed between them. They’ve stayed alive this long because of a hundred stunts like it. Some are like this one, so tiny and quiet you might miss them, and you’d definitely miss how seamless they are, others are shocking in their violence and brutality.
A pair of glass lenses glint in the sunlight like the eyes of a mechanical insect. An emaciated Red Eye scout sits on a rooftop’s edge. He plops the binoculars away from eyes so dry they’re practically red raisins. Two large tracks of blood drip from jagged, swollen flesh around the sockets. His eyelids have been cut off so irregularly he doesn’t even have bags under his eyes anymore, it’s all just exposed, raw muscle all the way down to his cheeks.
The scout takes a filthy water bottle from the ledge next to him and pours it generously over each dried eye. It’s a wonder he can see anything at all…but he can. And he did. His hands move to the remains of the SWAT vest he’s wearing. On its chest is a grimy police radio. He fingers a button and it crackles to life.
“Saw ‘em,” the scout says, with a voice that’s barely a whisper.
◆◆◆
Gerardo parts the tarp’s flaps. The cloth tent above casts a shadow so dark it might be night inside. The asphalt beneath it is cluttered with cars of every make and model. With their headlights on, the atmosphere’s almost like that of a small town in the evening. It’s a little city crammed under a tent. Cozy. Welcoming. Beautiful in its ingenuity and seductive in the shelter it provides. ‘Rest here,’ it says, ‘you’ve got time. You won’t sleep, but you’re tired, and not moving can almost feel like sleeping, can’t it?’ And that’s how you become a Lazy. That’s how you lay down and wait for your heart to give out or your body to wither away under the sweltering sun of malnutrition.
Awake Page 5