◆◆◆
Gloria’s half-hidden under a foliage blanket. Gabo and Edu sit on the grass in front of her. Gabo’s listening to his music, his face a mask of numb exhaustion. Edu nurses what little remains of his bottle, studying the red buildings below him with a look of genuine curiosity as if he could spot the answer to a question from this far away.
Pilar and Marco lie awake in front of them. Marco’s practically a Lazy, his head rests on his backpack, eyes glazed over and flicking over the space like he’s reading a page in the air in front of him.
Next to him, Pilar’s holding a beat-up cellphone. The burns on her arm and back have healed slightly, but they're still gnarly and raw. Maybe the fatigue is dulling her pain. Chirps and blips sound off from the phone's tiny speaker as she plays a puzzle game. Every so often, she’ll tilt the screen over to Marco and nudge him so that he can see, but Marco’s eyes always drift off before too long.
Gerardo walks out of the bushes carrying several water bottles filled with mostly-clear water. He tosses one to Edu and walks over, plopping one down in front of Gabo. He doesn’t even react. “Where’s Anita?” he asks.
“Hilltop,” Edu says, without looking up from the cityscape below him.
Gerardo nods and starts to lumber up the hill. Below him, a thousand tiny flashes that might be explosions or gunshots flicker through the Red Eye Zone. Ahead of him, Anita and Lorena sit under a massive, half-dead tree. Gerardo approaches them cautiously, like one of them is holding a bomb.
“Think I could talk to the kid?” Gerardo asks.
Anita’s stare could kill. Lorena nods then gives Anita a quick, reassuring hug. “I’ll be right back,” she says, then walks away, leaving the two of them alone.
Gerardo takes a deep breath, waiting until Lorena’s footsteps fade in the distance before speaking. “I’m sorry...about Diana,” he says.
“Me too,” Anita says, not looking up from the stick she’s trying to break in half in her hands. All around her are piles of snapped sticks and tiny branches. Her hands are red and rough and definitely full of splinters, but she doesn’t care. She has to do something, wants to break something, and doesn’t feel like she’ll stop any time soon.
“You were right,” Gerardo says like those words are made of glass and cutting his throat on the way out. He’s a proud man, like his father before him, and he has learned that the two hardest things for a proud man to say are ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘you were right.’ Those two phrases mean the same thing: ‘I was wrong,’ or ‘I’m not always right.’ That idea, that fact, is a proud man’s kryptonite.
“I should’ve listened to Diana, and if I would have, she’d still be alive. But out here, everyone lies and cheats to get by. You can’t believe anyone. I’ve made that mistake before.”
“You’re all the same,” Anita says, suddenly snapping the stick in her hands with one clean, brutal motion. She grabs both pieces, lays them together and snaps them in half once more. “You kill each other for anything you think might help you sleep. And the answer’s right in front of you!” Anita wipes her eyes with her dirty arm. Her tears dissolve the dirt that’s gathered there from the Tuk-Tuk or Gloria’s trailer or this hilltop. She tracks a thick line of it across her eyes like war paint. “Diana was the best of you. She was kind, she had faith...and now, because you wanted to go to your Pill Haven, she’s dead.”
“She’s dead because of the Red Eyes,” Gerardo says but it’s almost a whisper, one Anita doesn’t hear as her voice gets louder and hoarser.
“She deserved to sleep. And now she’ll never get to...now she’ll never be free of the Insomnia.”
“She’s sleeping now.”
“No. She’s dead,” Anita says, tossing what remains the sticks aside. “That’s different.”
Gerardo sighs, nodding in agreement, but having to move past this painfully awkward moment. “What’s your plan now?” he asks.
“We’re walking,” Anita spits, turning her eyes on him for the first time. There’s hurt in them, but pride too. ‘We don’t need your fucking help,’ those eyes say. ‘What kind of girl was she, before all this?’ Gerardo thinks. If the Insomnia had never happened, she’d never face this kind of pain, this kind of burden, until she was an adult. Now she was one, but forcefully, prematurely, dragged from innocence and glee into fatal responsibility.
“That’s suicide,” Gerardo says, turning his eyes away from hers.
“You don’t even care.”
“I do. I lost two good friends today. I don’t want you to die too…” Anita’s eyes soften at this. “I’m helping you. I’m taking you up.”
“You serious?” Anita asks.
“It’s what Diana would have wanted.”
Anita considers this for a moment. Her face is a tough mask, shielding her from the cruel world she’s had to endure. Then it cracks. A smile breaks through. Gerardo smiles at her too. “Thank you, Gerardo,” she says. Anita goes to hug Gerardo. He steps back, patting her shoulder instead
◆◆◆
Gabo lies inside Gloria’s trailer, next to Pilar and Marco. Lorena sits with Anita lying on her lap. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think everyone was sleeping, but the odd grunt and sniff here and there betrays the fact that only one person is actually asleep. Anita snores. Everyone else’s body is wracked by fatigue. Postures droop, faces scrunch up under the strain of pained limbs, and breaths are uneasy and uneven.
This is a small and vital moment of rest before the trip ahead, but it’s unsatisfying. Without the final release of sleep, a nap is just lying down to ease limbs that feel like they’re solidifying.
There are rituals that each body goes through before sleep, gates it passes through on its way to that final, dream-filled destination. A leg might shake as it works out some pent up energy, one person might need to lie on his back for around ten minutes before turning over and sleeping face down into his pillow. Gabo has to listen to music up until the last ten or so minutes of being awake, before practically throwing off his headphones and slumping back down on the pillow for the rest of the night. Now all of those moments go uninterrupted, infinite foreplay to a climax that will never come.
Pilar and Marco share a sleeping bag. She’s letting him have most of it and most of their blankets, focused instead on whispering into his ear. Her voice is barely audible, but a few words echo in the metal interior of the trailer. Words like ‘Christmas,’ and ‘cake,’ and ‘papa’s garden,' intimate memories, wrapped with her sweet words like ribbons and ornate paper.
There won’t be any sleep tonight but, to Pilar, that doesn’t mean there can’t be any dreams. Most of her dreams, the ones that she can remember anyway, were sort of psychedelic remixes of her memories. So that’s what she’s doing for Marco, whispering shared memories and knowing that, somewhere inside his exhausted brain, they’re exploding into vivid images, sounds, and even tastes and smells. Combined with the dark interior and the blankets and sleeping bags, she hopes they’ll go a long way toward tricking Marco’s brain into thinking it’s getting some rest. Hopefully.
She’s seen worse attempts at this. Some people peddle ‘sleeping songs,’ ‘sleeping powder,’ ‘sleeping bullets.’ There were millions of snake oil solutions to the Insomnia, and millions of snake oil salesmen and saleswomen ready to make a quick buck or score something (blow, booze, pills) that’d add a little more time to their dwindling lives. There were hordes of men and women of all ages and sizes sauntering around the tent slums peddling their magic ‘sleep pussy’ or ‘sleep dick’ to those about a day away from becoming full-blown Lazies. So what were a few whispers compared to all that? They were white lies in a void of dark ones.
Outside the dim trailer, the midmorning sun blazes mercilessly. That was something else the Insomnia caused: time distortion. You felt like it was midnight when it was only midday. The sun spits at you, shines in your eyes as you try to lie down to rest, sticks to its clockwork ritual while you're still up after a sleepless night. I
t was no wonder why most people wore shades and why they had become more sought after than cellphones. Who the fuck were you gonna call nowadays anyway? Who had time to sit around and charge one of the damn things when your own battery was dying slowly?
Gerardo and Edu sit in the driver’s cabin. Both of them are still wearing their shades and have pulled the sun visors down behind a windshield that’s lit up like a headlight. Edu’s holding a warm beer can. He’d stowed this particular one in the glove box. There were more, Gerardo knew, hidden around the car like people used to hide money back in the day. This was his money now, his backup plan. If he was going to spend the rest of his life awake, he was going to go out a little buzzed. His face droops, both with fatigue and drunkenness. “I don’t get it. Why the fuck would you do that?” Edu asks.
“Because Diana would've wanted me to," Gerardo says.
“Where is it?”
“On a volcano at the edge of the city." Gerardo points to it, even if he knows Edu won’t look.
“Are you fucking kidding me? You wanna drive Gloria up a fucking volcano!”
“It’s an hour drive at most. And it’s a dormant volcano. We owe it to Diana, Edu."
“You owe it to us! You let us all down when you lost our pills and killed Diego, so now make it right!” Edu slurs, wiping his bottom lip and then immediately taking a messy sip of his can.
“You think I don’t know that? That’s with me every day,” Gerardo says, thankful he’s wearing sunglasses. He doesn’t need Edu to see him tearing up. Most people might be more convinced of what he was saying if they saw him cry, but Edu sees emotion like a mad dog sees your exposed neck. “But Diana’s dead. Don’t you feel anything?”
“I do! Fuck! Fine! But like you care what I say. You’re gonna do whatever you want, right? You’d give the fucking truck away to these people if you could.”
Edu tosses the can against the dash, spraying everything and everyone in range with the sweet-sour stench of beer. Gerardo sighs and slips out of Gloria’s cabin, patting at the wet patches on his shirt and pants.
Edu watches him go, hurt rage burning in his eyes. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the grimy walkie-talkie. Two shaking fingers coil around the tuning knob. He turns it on. It crackles and pops to life.
SIXTEEN
Edu stands on the edge of the hill, surveying the sun-blasted horizon. The sun seems to have gotten brighter, seems to be drenching everything in light the way atomic bombs do in the movies. But that’s not true. The sun is still the same, it’s their brains that have changed, that have contracted something as deadly and inevitable as rabies.
“Let’s move,” Edu says, turning away from the sun above and the Red Eye Zone just below him. Gerardo and the others load into Gloria. Edu climbs into the passenger's seat. He slams the door shut.
Gerardo settles into his seat with a sigh. He takes several deep breaths, as if he’s psyching himself up to drive again. Next to him, Edu massages his closed eyes, working the pain out from behind them. “Thanks for going along with this,” Gerardo says, his words slightly slurred, “we’ll just make sure they get up there safe, and then we don’t owe them, or Diana anything. Then we’ll go to the Haven.”
“Whatever,” Edu says, slurring a little himself, though whether it’s because he’s been drinking or because he’s tired is anyone’s guess.
Gerardo starts the ignition.
◆◆◆
Gloria rumbles down a city block clogged with tents. A hospital looms in the distance, the tents sprouting from it like runny tumors, spewing soiled clothes and bloated dead bodies.
Anita and Lorena stand in the trailer, scanning the tents as they roll past the rifle slits. “Where are we?” Anita asks, her voice chipper, far more alive and clear than those of the people around her, but it’s also nervous, fraying at the edges and nearing hysteria. “Are we at the hospital?”
“It’s not the same one, Anita,” Lorena says, combing Anita’s hair as one of the tents moves into view. It’s not even a proper tent, just a pair of blankets held up by metal pipes. There are tiny bodies wrapped in bundles all around it. “Just close your eyes for a second.”
The closer Gloria moves to the hospital, the less space she has to move around the tents. There are cars among them, long abandoned, as if most of these people thought they’d be gone in a few hours, but eventually set up a tiny community here. Before long, Gloria's tires are flattening the tents, crunching over the fleshy sacs inside. They pop and crunch like dried insects, sending digits and desiccated guts flying like black confetti.
“Why are we driving by the hospital?” Edu asks, “bound to be some scavengers left.”
“It was either this or a street where all the buildings were painted red,” Gerardo says. He leans closer to the windshield, having to crane his neck to get a clear view of the hospital. It’s not just one building, but a group of three, each at least four stories tall, with rusted metal chutes running from one building to another. It would have been state of the art in the 70s, but one civil war and one bout of incurable Insomnia later means its now a skeleton made of concrete and glass.
There are clusters of huge, runny red letters smeared on the inside of the few windows that remain intact.
“What’s that say?” Gerardo asks, removing his sunglasses to get a better look at the letters in the distance.
Edu removes his own and leans out of his window, gripping the shotgun like it’s a stress ball.
“It’s all smeared. I can’t make it out. ‘Sleep Death’ something, Figures. Everyone fucking writes ‘sleep,’ like it’s on a fucking letter to Santa Claus.”
“Fuck,” Gerardo says, leaning out of the hole in the door to look behind him and jiggling the gear stick into reverse. Some adrenaline is now coursing through his veins again, bringing back some of what has faded.
“What are you doing?” Edu asks.
“We gotta turn around.”
“I told you!”
Bang!
A bullet smacks against Gloria’s hood, bouncing off and cracking a part of the windshield as it spins away. Gerardo revs the engine in reverse, he tries to spin the steering wheel around but the road is too narrow, too cluttered with tents and cars for Gerardo to fully turn both Gloria and the trailer around.
“Fucking drive!” Edu shouts, swapping his shotgun for a rifle crammed between his seat and the center console.
A tiny flash lights up one of the hospital’s dark, broken windows. Then another. Bullets punch the asphalt next to Gloria’s tires, hit the concrete walls on either side of her, a couple even pop the swollen bodies inside the tents, sending out tiny explosions of gas-propelled shit and innards.
“There!” Gerardo shouts, pointing at one of the metal tunnels between two of the hospital’s buildings. There’s a woman in what was once a doctor’s coat and scrubs, only the coat is now yellow-brown and the scrubs a puke-green, smeared with blood and shit and her own sweat. She’s holding a handgun and popping it off wildly, like a kid with a Nerf gun.
Edu leans out of the passenger’s side window, resting his rifle on his door’s mirror. He doesn’t lean in to put his eye on the scope. He doesn’t have to. He closes one eye and moves the rifle toward the woman. He’s eyeballing it, estimating distances and running through a backlog of memories of firing the rifle. He knows it, knows where it steers toward.
Bang!
Edu’s bullet dings the side of the metal tunnel just below the woman in scrubs.
“Fuck!” Edu shouts, closing his eye again and scrunching up his face.
Then something big lands on Gloria’s roof with a loud thud, bouncing off clattering toward the trailer.
“What the fuck was that?” Edu asks.
Gerardo opens the hatch in between them and shouts into the trailer, “something’s moving your way! It’s on your roof!”
In the semi-darkness of the trailer, Lorena, Gabo, Pilar, and Anita look up toward the smooth, reflective roof above them. Bang, bang, b
ang. A set of thuds and movements sound off from the roof, rattling it and echoing through as if the trailer itself were a massive drum and whatever’s up there is the stick.
BANG!
A shotgun blast punches through the roof of the trailer, denting it downward and sending a deafening explosion and a barrage of pellets into the metal space. The pellets bounce once, then either dig themselves into one of the metal walls or into one of the boxes that have been strapped to the several handholds on the floor. Nobody is hurt. Yet.
The curved metal interior amplifies the sound of the gunshot so much that everyone inside it is left with ringing ears and a heavy dose of disorientation. Pilar scrambles, tripping as the movement of the semi makes the floor rock. Lorena throws herself on top of Anita, shielding her with her body, but also sending both of them rolling and bumping around the smooth floor.
Only Gabo stays still. He’s holding onto one of the handholds on the wall with one hand and pointing his rifle up with the other. He grits his teeth, and not just at the fact that he’s about to shoot the person up there. He knows this is going to hurt him too. He shoots and the rifle kicks back mercilessly, slamming into his elbow and rocketing his arm back several inches. Red hot bullets of pain drive into his muscles and joints. He grimaces, already feeling a bruise forming where his forearm meets his elbow. Then he grimaces again as a hot dribble of blood splatters him on the face from above.
Gerardo’s still steering in reverse, doing his best to avoid the cars that pop out of the tent clusters. But he’s getting sloppy. He slams into one then, while trying to back up, hits another. He slams into the first a third time when he accelerates again, having forgotten to put the truck in reverse.
“Jesus!” Edu says, “why don’t you let me drive?”
“I got it!” Gerardo says. Then he lifts one of his hands and slaps himself on the cheek. It’s a small slap and not a particularly dramatic one, but it gets the job done. Some of the fog clears. He puts the truck into reverse. But he’s too late.
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