◆◆◆
Gerardo sprints toward Gloria, the morphine case in his shirt pocket. Behind him, his crew spills out of the front door. Gabo’s hair is a mess, he’s cradling his CD player and his CD case in his hands as he runs. Diana’s got a look of pure determination, not a hair out of place, not looking at all like she was resting. Edu’s already drunk, carrying a bottle of rum in each hand and has a good deal of it flowing off his chin.
Gerardo hops into the driver’s seat, hands and feet finding the right places with almost animalistic instinct. Edu lumbers in through the passenger’s side, letting one of the bottles slip out of his clammy hands and shatter on the driveway. Gabo helps Diana limp into the trailer.
“We head for the back gate!” Gerardo shouts, slamming the driver's door shut, pulling his seatbelt on, and looking ahead.
The Red Eyes have made it through. Feral, bloody men and women run toward the mansions around them. They bash against the windows, kick lawn ornaments and discarded toys, a few even whip their dicks out and piss on front doors. Two Reds pull a screaming young woman out through the window of her room.
Gerardo stares at her. He shares a look with Edu. They’re both thinking of Anita. The moment passes. Gerardo turns the ignition, a sad look on his face. Stopping now could mean allowing the Reds to swarm the semi, and if that happens, what’s stopping them from doing the same to Diana?
Gloria’s trailer door bursts open, the sound distant and fading into the racket all around them. But Gerardo recognizes it. And it’s the last thing he wants to hear right now. In Gerardo’s side mirror, Diana runs out of the open trailer.
“Was that Diana?” Edu asks.
“Yes,” Gerardo says, revving the engine as if he already knows where she’s going. Because he does.
◆◆◆
The double doors of Anita’s house rattle against their hinges. Slaps, whoops, and a trickle of urine sound off from the other side. The maid covers her mouth, suddenly superhumanly aware of every sound she’s making, of her breath smacking her palm, of her heart drumming inside her chest. She backs away from the doors. The maid. That’s all she is right now. With the uniform, that’s all the men outside will see her as.
Her name’s Isabela. She’s from Barberena, near the Guatemala/El Salvador border. Isabela worked in many houses before Mrs. Andrea’s, but the others paled in comparison to Andrea’s kindness. Andrea would have lunch with Isabela in her lavish dining room as if she were a friend or a guest instead of her employee. Isabela’s room, near the kitchen, was as big as her own family’s living room, and the bed and TV inside just sweetened the deal.
Then the Insomnia began, something so strange, so alien, that it managed to find its way inside the walls of Andrea’s home and hit both of them equally. She’d have stayed with Andrea even if she didn’t offer her pills. But she had. She’d given Isabela the same amount as she was taking. Of course, she’d declined at first, pleading with Andrea to give little Anita the pills instead. But it wasn’t long before they realized that Anita didn’t need to take any pills to sleep. She just did it naturally, the way everyone else used to. She was a miracle, and it was Andrea and Isabela’s job to keep her safe.
Now it was over. The Red Eyes had found a way inside the guarded gates, and now all those sleepless nights, the days they’d endured their tired bodies that were more like prisons than flesh…were all for nothing. Isabela never thought she’d make it. She was practically invisible, important only to a family in Guatemala and to Mrs. Andrea and Anita. She only left Andrea’s home to go with her to the supermarket, and around Christmas time to be with her family. ‘What a life,’ she thinks, ‘what a waste.’
As a kid, she’d loved painting, taking after her father, who painted landscapes and set the canvases out by the road in the hope that the passing tourists on their way to El Salvador or back would stop and buy one. They rarely did. There were a few canvases of her own in her room right now, paintings mostly abandoned halfway through. She hadn’t stopped because she got tired of it, but rather because every time she picked up her brush and got to work, she’d see her father’s paintings in her mind, measured against her crude ones. She was scared. Scared that, when she finally finished one it’d be much worse than her father’s. She’d never shown one to him either, afraid that he’d toss her a snide remark or an ‘it took me years, keep going.’ She wanted to be as good as he was now, thought she was owed it because she was his daughter.
That was the one feeling that best summed up her life. Fear. Being afraid that she would never be as good an artist as her father, being scared she wouldn’t be able to send enough money home for his medicine, being terrified she’d never amount to anything except being Mrs. Andrea’s maid. She was terrified of wearing that uniform her entire life, never marrying, never having a child. Well, she was only 24. She still had time. Right? Even now. Even with the Insomnia bearing down on her like a terrible storm, she deserved to have time.
Through the glass door behind her, two bloody men hop over a wall and into the mansion's garden.
◆◆◆
Rough hands drag Isabela’s body across the stairs. They’re monster’s hands, thick with calluses formed only through the worst activities. The two Red Eye men, naked, blood dripping from their gnarled crotches, rush her toward the master bedroom.
The door to Andrea’s bedroom splinters apart. A bloody face smashes through to the other side. It’s cut up by the shards of wood, swollen almost beyond recognition…it’s Isabela.
Andrea screams. She backs away from the door, toward the walk-in closet. Anita cowers behind her.
“Anita!” Andrea shouts, but the girl’s frozen in place. That face, the one that’s now shredded and covered with slivers of wood like quills, it used to greet her in the morning. It used to be there when she and her grandmother were having breakfast. Now it’s as horrible as a dead body or a Red Eye, something that causes her stomach to flip over and her brain to beg her to look away. But she can’t.
“Girl, are you listening to me?” Andrea growls, “get inside the closet and hide behind my dinner dresses! Now!” Anita’s body finally thaws, and she runs for the closet.
Andrea follows her after a few seconds, having to look, to witness the two men rip Isabela’s head from the hole in the wood. One of them sticks his hand through and finds the doorknob. Andrea pulls out a small handgun from her bedside table. Then runs into the closet and goes to close the door, but a claw-like hand slaps between the frame and the door, making it bounce back open.
Andrea gasps, she falls back onto the hanging dresses. They clatter off their rack and smack onto the wooden tiles on the floor. An empty sound, there's no indication of the hangers hitting flesh. Andrea’s eyes widen. She pushes the dresses off her. There’s nothing behind them.
One of the men bursts through the door. Andrea raises the handgun and shoots him in the face. He falls backward, onto another raving Red Eye man and a group of feral boys nipping at his heels. The man pushes his companion off him without so much as a second glance. Andrea raises her gun again.
The man and the boys behind him all smile like they’re watching a clown with a prop gun. Then they start walking toward her, entering the sanctity of her closet, their bare feet staining the wood with blood and shit and mud. Andrea screams as they charge her. She shoots one of the boys. The man rushes her and gets a shot in the stomach. He tackles Andrea anyway.
Two of the remaining boys clamber over Andrea and try to wrestle the gun out of her hands. One of them bites at her fingers, the other claws at Andrea’s eyes, her face, pulls out tufts of her hair as he laughs. Desperately, Andrea looks around the closet: no sign of Anita. There's an open window on the far wall. A set of tiny shoe-prints leads up to it. Andrea smiles as one of the boys aims the gun at her head.
◆◆◆
A Red Eye straggler howls. He turns bleeding, inhuman eyes toward Anita’s house, spotting its busted-in doors. He runs toward them, blood-smeared genitals bouncing
in the moonlight.
Bang!
A chunk of the straggler’s head is gone. He topples onto the front steps, somehow still laughing, his broken brain unaware that it’s already dead. Diana steps out of the garage door, holding her rifle out in front of her.
Tiny hands suddenly grab her shirt from behind. Diana turns around, swinging the barrel of the rifle. It’s Anita. She puts her hands up.
Diana turns and aims her gun at another feral straggler across the street. He’s chasing a woman in tattered pajamas. Boom! The straggler falls back, shrieking and clutching his stomach.
“Come on,” Diana says, grabbing Anita’s hand.
Anita and Diana run across a nightmarish slice of suburbia. Some of the houses are on fire now. Groups of Red Eye children are painting other mansions in red, their faces scrunched up with effort and concentration. Two Red hunters are pushing a naked man they’ve tied to a swing, taking turns working on his exposed buttocks with a knife.
Diana pushes Anita in front of her and sprints toward the back gate. It’s open, and Gloria’s brake lights are on just beyond it.
“Sleeper!” Chief’s voice. It echoes horribly through the night air, registering clearly despite the screams and the flapping madness of the blazing houses. Chief gallops toward them, still smiling, still mostly naked. Under one of the antique streetlights that line the cul-de-sac he’s riding out of, Diana can see that he’s wearing a gold watch. A retirement gift, maybe. Maybe even his own. Or maybe it's just from one of the houses around him.
Diana grabs Anita’s hand and runs in the other direction. Immediately, the clatter of Chief’s horse’s hooves on the asphalt sounds off behind them. The horse is a machine, closing in on them in seconds, but they’re already out of the gate.
Diana’s running as if her leg’s completely intact, but there are streams of fresh blood trickling out past the bandages. She knows that, if she makes it, she’ll pay for this little mad dash later. She’s probably turned what would otherwise be two weeks of limping into months, maybe even caused irreparable damage. But she doesn’t care. All that matters now is getting Anita into Gloria’s open trailer door.
The world’s a tunnel, and at the end of it is Gabo and the semi’s brake lights. Everything else, even the galloping sound behind them, is irrelevant. She can feel the hot breath, the rush of air as motion closes in on her, even imagines feeling the strangling vice of Chief’s grasping hand on her neck. But she doesn’t. Diana sweeps Anita up and tosses her into Gabo’s arms.
“Go!” Diana shouts. A screaming face bashes against the trailer next to her. Not Chief’s face, just a random hunter that somehow managed to outrun the horse. Diana shoots him, rewarding his effort with permanent sleep. “Drive!” Diana shouts, hopping through the trailer door, already feeling her leg acting up as if it’s aware that her mad sprint is over. Now it’ll probably repay her irresponsible behavior by locking up for days.
“What the fuck were you thinking?” Gerardo’s voice blasts from the open hatch, “you consult us before pulling shit like that!”
“Did you consult us about Diego? Did you even think about what you were doing before you fuckin' shot him?” Diana shouts back.
“Stop! You fucking stop talking!” Gerardo growls. Then he floors it. Diana closes the trailer door, then collapses against its smooth metallic interior.
Gloria shrieks away, leaving the back gate, and Los Pilares, in the dust of its titanic tires.
Chief gallops out, slowing down. He can’t catch up. But he might not need to.
ELEVEN
Gloria rolls down a road clogged with the dissected corpses of dozens of cars. Some, the oldest, were stopped by the exhaustion of their drivers, and by the simple fact that the Insomnia has no borders. The most recent ones were stopped by something else entirely.
A wire glistens a few feet away from Gloria’s rumbling tires. Her front grill, so reinforced it looks like it belongs on a tank, pushes against the wire and snaps it instantly. Rusty, improvised pulleys whirl. It’s a primitive, shoddy, thrown-together contraption. It shouldn’t work, should have never worked. But it does. It’s ravaged by time and the elements, but there are still enough essential bits doing enough of a good job to achieve the desired effect. Just like the Red Eyes.
A large blade swoops down, really just a sharpened sheet taken off the side of a bus or a billboard. But it’s sharp and thick and moving fast. Gerardo has time to move away, but he’s too slow, too lost in the labyrinth of haze and aches that his mind has become. He’s struggling to even keep Gloria straight on the road.
The blade slices into Gloria’s driver’s side, shearing the mirror off cleanly and digging into the door underneath. The truck lurches forward, the blade screeches as it rips into Gloria, pinning her by the driver’s door. As Gloria chugs forward, the blade’s unforgiving grasp breaks the door clean off.
“Shit,” Gerardo whispers.
The Red Eyes run closer, bikes revving, bare feet drumming. Chief rides ahead of them, the horse’s hooves clacking madly along with the bikes and the feet, as if it’s all part of some insane symphony that needed the Insomnia to start…and it won’t ever stop.
In the trailer, Anita peeks out through one of the rifle slits, an arrow whizzes by, taking a few of the hairs off her head. Diana pulls her down just as another arrow flies in through the slit.
Gabo fiddles with his walkman’s headset, as if one good song will make it all better. The trailer bucks as Gloria rounds a corner. The walkman slips from Gabo’s sweaty hands. The headphone cable slips out of the jack, Fall Out Boy giving way to the sound of screeching tires and the howls of the Red Eyes.
Chief smacks the horse’s side, the beast riding through the pain and the exhaustion. Chief’s kept it awake for weeks, but it’s surprisingly, tortuously loyal. It moves up toward the space that was once the driver’s side door. Chief steadies the horse’s side between his hands, planting his bare feet onto the matted fur with the grace of a well-trained dancer…and jumps.
He flies through the air, somehow, in the way that the world sometimes aligns to shit right in your face, he aligns perfectly with the hole where the driver’s-side door was…and lands on top of Gerardo.
Chief grabs Gerardo’s collar. His hands are twisted, like barbed branches, with thorns made from chipped fingernails.“Sleeper?” he growls.
Gerardo reaches for the handgun on his lap. It’s rolling around as Gloria’s monstrous wheels churn over the asphalt. All he has to do is grab it. Grab it and point it at Chief and it’ll all be over. But things are moving slowly, syrupy, even now, even as Gloria barrels down the street pushing 80 miles an hour. Gerardo wills his hand to move, each tendon and each bone responding like rusty chains beneath muddy water. One fingernail scratches the worn leather handle of his handgun—
And Chief pins his wrist to the steering wheel, his knobby fingers crushing Gerardo’s into the hot metal and rubber of the wheel. Gerardo exhales a hiss of pain, a wheezing, pathetic discharge of air, like the sigh of a leather couch as a fat man sinks into it on a hot afternoon.
Edu lifts his shotgun, heavy, but lighter with his adrenaline, and points it squarely at Chief…and also at Gerardo’s head. “You’re in the way!” Edu shouts.
“You. Can’t. Fire—” Gerardo begins, grunting each word as he tries to pull his hand off the wheel.
“A shotgun in the cabin. Fuck!” Edu finishes. Another rule Gerardo had tried to drill into them. When he’d first said it, Edu thought it was fucking obvious. No shit. You fire a shotgun in a space as small as the cabin, you’re likely to be skewered by your shot, but with the Insomnia, even things that once seemed obvious are hard to remember. You might even forget the sun is supposed to come up in the morning.
One of Chief’s hands drops onto Gerardo’s lap. Gerardo flinches, put off by the movement, and its general direction. Chief grins, licking his lips seductively…and wraps his greasy fingers around Gerardo’s gun. He picks it up, caressing it like it’s his fa
vorite part of a long lost lover, and aims it down at Gerardo’s crotch.
Gerardo moves back as if he’s recoiling, like he’s about to faint and collapse onto the passenger seat. Then he swings his head back so quickly it’s as if it was resting on a taut rubber band. A rubber band that just snapped. Gerardo’s forehead crashes into Chief’s nose, shattering it and sending a stream of blood and meaty chunks flying. Chief staggers back, still grinning stupidly, one hand still holding onto the driver’s seat, the other holding Gerardo’s handgun as if it’s made out of a twisted balloon instead of polished metal.
Gerardo’s hand is free, but still resting against the steering wheel as if held there by a phantom hand. He lifts it, wraps the numb fingers around the wheel, and pulls.
Gloria’s wheels twist, her massive body rolls in a mad, churning arch. Everything and everyone in the cabin shoots forward. Chief smacks against the dashboard, his popped nose leaving a trail of gore on the rubber. With the impact, the radio on Chief’s vest pops out of its pouch, landing on the rubber mat on the floor.
Air blasts through the hole that once held the driver’s side door. Gerardo's handgun drops out of Chief’s twisted fingers as he grips both sides of the door frame, landing on Gerardo’s seat. Gerardo raises his foot and drives it into Chief’s chest. Chief staggers back, still flashing a blood-red grin, and flies out of the door hole.
Gerardo collapses onto the steering wheel and grips it with both hands, wrestling it back into place.
Gloria lurches, swinging madly back onto the road. The cabin bucks, spilling Red Eye climbers as it goes.
◆◆◆
Gloria’s parked in the middle of a deserted street. She’s a hulking beast of metal, rubber, and glass, now sporting her fair share of war scars. There are still arrows sticking out of the trailer, quills on the world’s largest metal porcupine. Spears wobble slightly, embedded in the tarp and metal wound around Gloria’s beach ball-sized tires. Most of the windows are either cracked or blown out entirely. The driver’s side door’s gone, ripped out messily like a tooth or an eye, leaving a gaping wound that begs to be filled.
Awake Page 10