Awake

by Fernando Iglesias Meléndez

  Something flies through Gloria’s driver’s side hole, landing on the floor rug just below Gerardo. It explodes instantly, filling the cabin with a rolling cloud of sour smoke.

  “What the fuck was that?” Edu asks, coughing.

  “Cover your mouth!” Gerardo shouts, kicking a smoking bundle of cloth out of the door hole. Whatever was in it is still floating around in the cabin, dispersing slowly through the open hole and window but still stinging Gerardo’s eyes and sending a shower of tingling spikes across his face. In seconds, the half of his face that was closest to the improvised smoke bomb is numb.

  Gerardo slams his foot on the accelerator just as another bomb hits Gloria’s hood, exploding into another white pocket of mist and blocking out the windshield.

  Gloria slams into another car hidden among the tents. Its rusted bumper scrapes the passenger’s side door, then nicks Gloria’s grill, knocking the semi-truck to one side.

  TACK! TACK! TACK! A shower of bullets smack against Gloria’s grill, ding her hood, and pelt her windshield. It’s as if the smoke bomb’s a red flare, an easy target for every deranged resident of the hellish hospital.

  “Get us out of here!” Edu says, his voice hoarse and caught between coughs and gasps for clean air.

  Gerardo twists the steering wheel from one side to the other, rocking Gloria wildly, twisting her in wide, messy loops as she rockets backward down the cramped street.

  More projectiles bombard Gloria’s hood, this time not only slamming and dinging but also digging and sticking. As the semi makes deformed 8-shapes with her backward turns and dips into bright, beautiful sunlight, some of these bolts and flying skewers twinkle in the midmorning rays. They’re scalpels, and next to them, rolling off Gloria’s hood without sticking, are dozens of syringes.

  As Gloria rattles underneath a two-story building, a torrent of red plastic bags, inflated like balloons, splash against her roof. When they hit, they explode into a chunky, black and brown spray. A burst of the liquid squirts in through Edu’s open window, hitting him squarely in the chest and coating his rifle.

  “Fuck!” he shouts, punched immediately by a stench as powerful as a shotgun blast. It’s the musky smell of shit punctuated by the rusty edge of blood. One of the bags flops onto the windshield, leaking its muddy innards over the already disfigured glass. Gerardo catches sight of the label on it before it flutters away as Gloria soars backward, ‘BIOHAZARD.’

  Gloria reaches the end of the road, where it opens up and splits off in two directions. It’s finally wide enough for Gerardo to turn Gloria’s unwieldy frame around fully. Just as he does, a group of men and women in scrubs walk out of the underbrush of tents. Most of them wear surgical masks and latex gloves, but a few have naked faces with weeping, resentful expressions as if seeing Gerardo and the others drive away is a tragedy they don’t know how to cope with. A man walks up with his arms outstretched and a pleading expression on his face.

  As Gloria turns and begins to disappear around the corner, Edu raises his shit-varnished rifle and fires, plugging the man’s frowning mouth with a bullet.

  SEVENTEEN

  The buildings on either side of the semi called Gloria are deep scarlet. Gerardo’s moving her slowly, driving at a snail’s pace. The motor chugs, the tires rumble, but the noise is nothing that would carry to another street. They just have to worry about what, or who is on this one.

  Gerardo thinks that most of the Reds would have flocked to Chief, but he’s not sure. Nobody really knows how the Red Eyes operate. Maybe Chief isn’t their leader, maybe there’s someone else above him, or maybe there are several bands, each with their own Chiefs or kings or whatever the bastards decided to call themselves.

  The Red Eyes are the boogeymen, the living, breathing nightmare of the waking masses. If you saw a building that was painted red or a corpse with gaping, lidless eyes, you went the other way. If you were smart. Most people were. But, as a result, very few people had ventured into the Red Zone and come out on the other side speaking of what they saw.

  All you hear are stories, rumors, legends fed by the desperate who thought telling stories at the bar might get them a free shot of something with diphenhydramine or doxylamine. ‘The Red Eyes are still alive because they drink blood,’ ‘the Reds wear eyeball necklaces,’ ‘they eat babies because they think they’ll be able to absorb nine months of sleep...’ all definitely bullshit. As far as Gerardo is concerned, the Red Eyes do two things: cut off the eyelids of anyone looking for sleeping pills (which is pretty much everyone) and hunt Sleepers. Everything else was bullshit. They aren’t zombies, they aren’t vampires, and they sure as fuck don’t eat or drink anything that lets them survive this long.

  So how are they still alive? Gerardo has a theory, but it’s the same one he holds for most things, including the Sleepers: they’re lying. The Red Eyes probably have a nice little stash of sleeping pills, spoils from hundreds of successful raids. That’s why they’re so militant, why they’re so obsessed with expanding their turf. Hell, they probably paint patches of the city in red so they know where they’ve already looked for pills. It makes sense. But that’s the problem. The Red Eyes don’t make sense. If they’re sleeping, why are they so crazy? Why even pretend to have that philosophy?

  Maybe they’re telling the truth. Maybe they’re so broken, so fucked up on drugs and booze and just plain insanity that they’ve cheated the system. Their brains don’t need to sleep anymore. They’ve adapted, evolved, like some of them are fond of saying.

  After Anita, Gerardo doesn’t feel sure about anything. He doesn’t even know if he believes her, or if, like the Red Eyes, he can fall back on skepticism. It’s easier and more comforting to doubt, to poke holes in things and find a million perfectly ordinary, perfectly unchallenging theories to explain it all away. Maybe Anita has a hidden stash of pills. Her grandmother was rich and she apparently had enough of them to give them away to the maid. She’d give her granddaughter as many as she needed to ensure her survival.

  Then why is he taking her then? Is it really because it’s what Diana wanted? Or is it because he’s starting to believe in her himself? Is he just scared and desperate, following a group of people because it’s easier than going out to face the unknown by himself? He doesn’t know, and that’s what scares him the most. He’s losing his grip, losing himself, doing and betting on things he never would have before, when his survival was all but guaranteed. Gerardo is becoming what he hates most: an unprepared, reckless, and gullible dead man, and all it took were a few sleepless hours.

  The red buildings on either side of the street make everything around Gloria into a dizzying red tunnel, like a gaping mouth. Even the asphalt’s painted red. This is bad. They shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be driving down a red street. It's another rule. How many more rules is Gerardo going to break before the day’s through?

  There are groups of Reds in clusters in between each building like wasps crawling over themselves. Most blend in with the walls around them, naked and slathered in the same red paint. In the center of each group is a Red Eye with stumps for arms or legs or holes for eyes. The others are beating, cutting, stomping, or bent over them. In their boredom and their frenzy, they’re turning on each other. Or maybe not. Maybe there’s no deeper meaning, no excuse, no reason beyond morbid curiosity and a warped sense of fun.

  There are piles of little broken bodies on the street. Gerardo has to drive over them, has to look away. His eyes keep drifting to windows painted over in red, sunken-in rectangles surrounded by brick and concrete like shut eyes. There are headless bodies leaned over trashcans with their pants around their ankles. There are mosaics made from things that should be on the inside and things on the outside that should stay in. There are…stop. Keep looking forward. Keep driving.

  Gerardo lowers his foot onto the pedal slowly, steadily. Gloria responds immediately, her engine purring then growling then roaring. She starts moving down the street faster with each passing second, crunching and rat
tling and thundering as she moves. Red heads are peeking out of the alleys now, red hands closing around clubs and spears, red eyes peering out of clear spots in red windows. Soon, dozens of Red Eyes are moving after Gloria, first lumbering like zombies, then breaking into an excited jog, then sprinting after the glittering chrome trailer.

  “They’re coming!” Edu says, looking into the passenger’s side mirror and seeing only scarlet.

  Gerardo floors it, hitting the gear stick into each speed as Gloria begins to rocket. He weaves, zigging and zagging around scorched car wrecks and mass graves as, all around them, more and more naked Red Eyes pour out of shattered windows and open doors.

  Rocks, wads of feces, and empty bottles strike Gloria and her trailer. Inside, Lorena and Gabo stand ready at the slits. They don’t have to wait long before there are Reds in front of them. Gabo fires and misses. Lorena fires and misses. The exhaustion’s getting to them, zapping their ability to line two things up in their field of vision.

  “Fuck!” Lorena shouts, rubbing her eyes.

  “Picture a tunnel!” Gabo shouts, closing one of his eyes and tilting his head over so the other’s closer to the gunsight.

  “What?” Lorena asks, turning away from the slit to look at Gabo.

  “Your eyes are tired so everything’s blurry, but if you narrow them and picture a tunnel in the middle of your vision,” Gabo says, lining up the shot again. He fires, hitting a Red Eye bent over a fallen body in the crotch. The Red Eye wails as blood spurts. “Then you should be able to line things up easier!”

  Lorena sighs, shaking her head. She lifts her hands to her hair and ties it into a messy ponytail. Then she leans into the slit and lifts her rifle. A Red Eye's running up next to the trailer with a kitchen knife in his hand. It looks like he’s been holding it the wrong way, as there are bone-deep gorges in his palms and flaps of skin and flesh flopping off his hands as he runs. Lorena narrows her eyes and pictures a black tunnel in the center of her vision, right around the Red Eye’s head. She takes a deep breath and fires. The Red Eye’s forehead sinks as the bullet digs into his brain. He falls backward, tripping the Red directly behind him.

  Lorena smiles, “thanks!” she says, “that’s really good!”

  “Diana taught me that,” Gabo says, smiling sadly. Then he leans into his rifle again and fires once more.

  Gerardo clips Gloria’s grill on a dumpster on the side of the road, sending it tumbling and making Gloria slide wildly.

  “Fuck!” Edu says, “easy!”

  Gerardo shakes his head to clear some cobwebs, then keeps driving. There are Red Eyes above them now, on the rooftops. The few wearing pants lower them and join the others in pelting Gloria in all manner of bodily fluids. Every so often, a still somewhat lucid one among them holds up a flaming alcohol bottle.

  A Molotov cocktail shatters on the asphalt next to Gloria, exploding into a ball of flame and blasting hot air in through the driver’s side hole. Gerardo flinches, turning the wheel in response and slamming Gloria into a set of metal trashcans, sending them flying and chipping away another piece of the truck’s front grill.

  BANG! A bullet hits the passenger’s side door, punching through and flying into the cabin. It dings the dashboard and buries itself inside Gloria’s center console.

  Edu looks out his window. A Red Eye holding a rifle struts out of one of the alleys. He’s wearing bloodstained rags that still have police department logos, like those in Chief’s crew. He smiles, pulling on a chain wrapped around his waist. Two naked men wearing gas masks scurry out of the darkness of the alley behind him. Their skin is draped over the steep and uneven mountain ranges of their bones. One of them kneels in front of the Red wearing police colors, tilting both hands up, presenting him a hand grenade like it’s a holy relic.

  “Oh shit!” Edu says, raising his shotgun as Gloria zooms by. But he’s much too slow, the alley’s gone in a second. All he can do is turn his head back and see the Red Eye and his pets walk into the street. The Red cocks his arm back and tosses the grenade. It flies in an arch, spinning through the air like a game-winning American football pass, then hits the roof of Gloria’s trailer. It’s a good throw, impossibly good given the circumstances. Like all things related to the Insomnia, the Red Eyes must have some sort of sick god on their side.

  The grenade bounces off, whirling wildly as Gloria shoots away. It hits the asphalt, rolling as the trailer zooms past. One second passes. Then two. Then the grenade disappears into a storm of white and orange and yellow that floods the asphalt like sunshine water. A shockwave flies out from it, shredding the Reds that were unlucky enough to be jogging next to it, shattering every painted-over window around it, and punching the double doors of Gloria’s trailer, denting them inward.

  The closed metal cart bucks with the force, throwing everyone inside forwards. Gabo lands face-first on one of the handholds, popping his nose to one side. Blood explodes out of it like red fire. Anita slams the side of her head on one of the walls. Pilar collapses onto Marco, digging a knee and an elbow into his chest and his throat. Lorena slides across the floor, landing in a pile of strapped-down cardboard boxes. Something inside them breaks, leaking chunky soup beneath her.

  In the driver’s cabin, Gerardo and Edu feel the trailer buck forward and hit the truck bed behind them. Gerardo veers left, turning Gloria in a wide arch and shooting her into another street like a gargantuan bowling ball on wheels.

  The street is, like the one before it, a red tunnel. There are small shops on both sides, coffee shops, pet shops, a dentist’s office, all coated in paint until they’re reduced to scarlet geometric shapes. The semi rolls past them on its way to the end of the street. It isn’t open, like the last one was. Instead, like most roads out of the Red Zone, it ends in a wall. Only, it isn’t a normal wall.

  The air in front, above, and all around the wall is slightly darker, as if a thin smoke were rising from the wall itself. But this smoke buzzes and flies in frenzied circles. There are dozens of flies filling the air as hundreds of freshly-hatched maggots squirm on the piles that make up the wall. There’s a tangle of fingers here, a hairy knot of hair there. Dozens of glistening eyes dot the wall like nails might if you shone a light on them. The wall’s a patchwork of dozens of different skin colors, most muted and discolored by decomposition. Things flop out in places and bloat out in others, teeth dot the wall here and there, broken bones stick out like splintered planks.

  Looking at it from a distance, Gerardo thinks that the wall is dead, but as Gloria blasts closer and closer, he sees that it’s anything but. Stray cats run across it, flies and gnats and maggots thrive, rats scurry, and a few buzzards peck out their lunch.

  Gerardo closes his eyes and steps on the gas. This is gonna be messy. For some reason, a merengue song about a bus going in reverse snakes its way into Gerardo’s head, maybe because that’s what he’d love to be doing right now. Gloria’s grill smashes into the wall, sending up a black and red and pink mush, limbs loosened by decomposition pop off as if they belong on dolls, heads split like rotten pumpkins. Gloria’s through in less then a second, the wall collapsing around her and bouncing off her roof, but it’s anything but a clean getaway.

  EIGHTEEN

  The semi’s parked halfway into an old garage in a knot of homes converted into small businesses. There’s a billboard to one side with what looks like a group of bloated scarecrows nailed to it. Their skin is a rainbow of shades of white, black, and brown, some of it adorned with patterns of black and colored ink, others wearing studs and jewelry.

  Gabo holds a tangled hose in front of a shivering Edu, who’s currently being blasted by a sharp stream of cold water, taking the opportunity to wash off the contents of a biohazard bag. Gerardo holds another hose and is giving Gloria the same treatment, spraying the chunks of flesh and entrails off her roof, windshield, and tires. There’s an odd finger here and an eyeball there, remnants of the Red Eye’s grotesque wall.

  “Should’ve. Fucking. K-known,” E
du sputters between shivers. “You drive through Red Eye country, you get what you deserve.”

  Anita’s ducking under an outdoor sink, surrounded by buckets and brushes, running her hair under the tap. Next to her, Lorena splashes water on her face, wringing some of the exhaustion out of it.

  “We got through, didn’t we? We were gonna have to move through their turf eventually.” Gerardo says, angling the hose so he can spray his own hands. “It’s been three months. Most of them are either too weak to fight or long dead.”

  Anita stands up, her short hair dripping. She spots a filthy rag by the sink and, for a moment, debate flickers through her eyes. Then she just shakes her head, flopping her hair around until it’s a little drier.

  “You know we’re gonna have to go back the same way, right?” Edu says, ripping the hose from Gabo’s hands and finishing the job himself. “If we get back, that is.”

  Gerardo sighs. “Let’s move,” he says, “the sooner we do, the sooner we get back.”

  ◆◆◆

  It’s an open space much wider than any Gloria’s barreled through before. The road’s now a highway, wide enough for the car wrecks to be several feet apart. The semi rolls around a roundabout and shoots off in front of a modern metal fence. Beyond it is a gated slice of Eden, rolling green hills segmented by clean concrete walkways and street lights. In the center of it all is a sleek structure, impossibly clean and impossibly untouched by the grip of the Insomnia. The building’s all sharp edges and steep arches. A space rocket of a spire shoots out of it, topped by a golden angel blowing on a trumpet...a Mormon temple in San Salvador.

  Gerardo always thought it was a strange addition to the city’s evolving landscape, like a UFO manufactured in the United States that had chosen to land here and spew its smiling, uniformed crew.