The Mormons had been among the first to go, of course. They were above even drinking caffeine, so when the shit hit the fan they didn’t even try to look for sleeping pills. They opted instead for what Gerardo assumes was a bizarre demonstration of their faith. Gerardo looks over Edu’s shoulder to see if they’re all still there. They are, of course. There, on one of the green hills in the shadow of their space-age temple, is an ocean of shriveled bodies. They’re all lying on their backs, holding hands and looking up at the sky and wearing what was once their Sunday best.
Gerardo doesn’t know what they expected to achieve, lying down together until they all succumbed to their fatigue, all he knows is that it was worthless. Nobody gave a shit. A few people hopped the fence and looted their pockets, but God certainly didn’t take the Insomnia back, and there were no journalists left to write about them. Well, at least the buzzards loved their contribution to this new, waking world. There are still seemingly hundreds of them waddling on top of the remains mummified by the sun, picking off strips of flesh and digging around the open mouths like nostalgic tourists visiting the site of their best meal ever.
Gloria peels off into the distance, leaving the city for the tree-smothered mountains in the horizon.
◆◆◆
Gloria lumbers up a winding dirt road. Tangles of bushes and banana trees flank her on both sides, casting uneven shadows that blanket the metal and rubber of the truck and the dirt that churns underneath it.
From Gloria’s trailer, Gabo and Lorena scan the greenery with their rifles. In their fatigue, they’re seeing faces in the leaves, arms and legs in the bark, weapons in the branches. The world seems to be much less concrete now, as fluid and unpredictable as any feverish backdrop in their long-forgotten dreams.
Edu slumps over his open window. His eyes are shut, his breathing unsteady. Every second is measured in a million bodily pains, in breaths and the throbbing of the veins that press into his forehead, in the pounding muscles in his legs and his arms, in the migraine that’s as ever-present as it is exponential. He doesn’t know how long he can make it, how long he even wants to. But he does. He has to survive. The alternative would be his worst nightmare, not because he’s afraid of dying, but because he’s afraid of what will meet him on the other side.
The road winds upwards. Gloria tilts to accommodate, Gerardo struggles to keep the semi’s wide frame within the confines of the narrow, crumbling dirt. Next to him, sitting on the divider between both seats, is Anita. She’s looking out of the windshield, dead ahead, seeing past the trees in the distance. She’s honed in like a missile, reveling in the speed and the distance, knowing that, with each second, she’s getting closer to the truth. What if her dreams are meaningless? What if they get up there and nobody else can sleep at all? No. That wouldn’t make sense. She can’t think that way now, not after everything everyone has done for her.
But the doubts are still there, somehow snaking through her resolve and her faith and hitting her where it hurts the most. She pictures Diana dead on the side of the road, split open like a Lazy…all because of her. No. Stop. This isn’t accomplishing anything, it will, in fact, set her back.
Last year, when Anita and her parents had flown to the States on vacation, she’d stupidly dropped her passport in the plane. They’d noticed by the time they got to immigration. Now, sitting in Gloria’s cabin, Anita feels the same way she did when she and her parents were running back to the gate. It was pure limbo, pure free-fall as every step closer to the gate meant an answer to a painful, monumental question.
Back then it had been whether or not they’d even find the plane there, or whether the passport would be on it at all. Maybe she’d left it at the gate in El Salvador, maybe she'd dropped it in that little tunnel that connected the plane to the gate. Then they’d gotten to the desk at the gate and her parents had explained the situation to a flight attendant while Anita bawled her eyes out. Of course, the kind lady had come back out with Anita’s passport in her hand and an understanding smile on her face.
Now it’s much worse. People’s lives are at stake. What will they think if they get there and it’s just a regular, useless, empty mountaintop? What will they do to her? Surprisingly, she finds that she’s less afraid of what Gerardo and his crew would do in that situation than of what Lorena and the other Faithful would. But is that surprising?
Anita has, over these three months, seen the Faithful evolve from a group of scared but hopeful Christians into a full-blown religious militia. Where once the men and women with guns would look at her with hope and understanding, now they looked at her with wild, desperate, hungry eyes…eyes that reminded her of her parents' at the hospital.
‘That’s doubt, again,’ Anita thinks. It made sense that the Faithful had armed themselves. They weren’t just protecting her from what the Red Eyes and others like them would do to her, they were trying to survive just like anyone else. If Gerardo and his crew are any indication, if you wanted to survive, you had to become something like the guerrilla members hiding in the mountains during the Salvadoran Civil War. She wonders if that has crossed anyone else’s mind, if Lorena or Gerardo or the others who had been alive then have noticed how similar the Faithful are to the communist militia Anita’s parents had spoken about in hushed, disapproving whispers when they thought she wasn’t listening.
Did Gerardo think about that? Was it ironic to him that the city, which had seemed to be growing and developing in the last couple of years, had regressed once again to gunshots and explosions echoing through the streets and dead bodies on the asphalt? Anita doesn’t know much about those days, only knows snippets of the brutality and the senseless killing, but what little she does know seems to match what the city’s like these days perfectly. The only difference, she guesses, is that the Civil War ended...and there would be no end to the Insomnia. There would be no sleek, modern world beyond the gunshots and the madness. Not unless she could take a large group of people to the Sleeping Place…and not unless the Sleeping Place was real to begin with. She’d soon find out.
Mango and avocado trees line the path that Gloria’s blowing past. Here and there, grotesque, man-shaped fruit is nailed onto their barks.
“Close your eyes a moment, Anita,” Gerardo says. Anita starts to shake her head, then catches sight of the scarecrows. She’s finding that, like everything else, the sight of a dead body loses its novelty after a while. You get used to it, desensitized to the bloated, gray skin and the glassed-over eyes. Still, that doesn’t mean that she wants to look at it. So she closes her eyes and Gerardo steps on the gas, shooting Gloria past the dead bodies that are a warning or just a boast to those passing by.
NINETEEN
The semi called Gloria blasts past a group of grazing cows. A few of them have drifted from their more social sisters, choosing instead to find the shade of a couple of avocado trees and lie down in the cool grass. Some of their eyes are closed, their breathing steady…asleep.
Gloria’s tires kick up dirt and they’re hidden from the jealous eyes of her sleepless crew.
◆◆◆
Gloria eases up a twisting path carved into the mountainside. Like most roads running up a mountain in Latin America, there are sections of flat, sheer rock face on either side. They're remnants of when someone said ‘fuck it’ and dynamited away whatever section of Mother Nature was in their way. The rocks that are left are gargantuan dinosaurs camouflaged by layers of years of faded election campaign murals with names no one remembers.
The brakes whine and Gloria screeches to a stop. On the road, hundreds of bodies lie where they collapsed. They’re frozen with bent knees, outstretched arms, and reaching fingers. Some lie with their faces to the sky, some holding each other’s hands, others carry statues of the Virgin Mary. They’re arranged like a procession, one felled under a world indifferent to their cause.
“Exhaustion,” Gerardo says as if he’s saying the name of a deadly poison he’s consumed himself.
“Where were
they going?” Anita asks.
Gerardo looks at her, red, exhausted eyes flickering to life for a moment with interest. “Think anyone else saw the Sleeping Place?” he asks.
Anita thinks about this for a moment. “The place calls out to us who sleep. Like a signal. If you can still sleep then you can see it.”
Gerardo looks out toward the dead procession. “Poor bastards didn’t make it. Walking was stupid.”
“But where’s the Sleeper?” Anita asks.
“Doesn’t matter. Cover your ears. This isn’t going to sound good.”
“I can handle it,” Anita says.
Gerardo floors the gas pedal. Immediately, a symphony of snaps and crunches sounds off from under Gloria.
The trailer lurches up and down, popping and squishing as Gloria works her way forward. Pilar holds a water bottle over a pale, collapsed Marco. Lorena looks out of her rifle slit. Gabo fiddles with his CD player. He slides the battery compartment open and ejects two dead batteries, pulling two fresh ones out of a ziplock bag in his hand. “You guys seem close,” Lorena asks, “what’d you do before?”
“Oh, um, construction. Gerardo was the foreman,” Gabo says, not looking up from the player as he slots the new batteries in like bullets into a rifle.
“Most construction crews don’t stick together through something like this.”
“Gerardo always said he had two families left. He had his brother and he had us. We stuck by each other cus we had no one else.”
“And Gloria?”
Gabo smiles at this like it’s a fond memory. “Gerardo thought that, someday, we could start our own company. But he said we needed something to move bigger machines. Then we found Gloria. We fixed her up. Damn near built her.”
“Came in handy.”
“You bet. Gerardo got it all together. When we were all praying, half-convinced our sleep would come back during that First Day, he was getting guns, sleeping pills. He saved our asses.”
“Is that why you stayed with him?”
“Yeah. Even when my dad took everyone away.”
“Where?”
“To church. Think they’re gone now.”
Lorena squeezes Gabo’s hand. “Most people are,” she says, “but we’re still here.”
Gabo smiles weakly.
Gloria squeals to a halt. Two bodies lie crumpled in front of her. One, a woman, half-holds a gun in her hand. The other, a man, lies a few feet in front of her. There’s a chunk of his head missing. They’re the last bodies on the road. The procession stops here.
Gerardo looks at both bodies with contempt, Anita with horror and disgust. “Think we found the Sleeper,” he mutters.
“She shot him…” Anita says, “why would she kill him? He was helping her!”
“Procession was dying off. Probably realized she’d die too.”
“So she did...that. I still don’t get it,” there’s more anger in her eyes than hurt or tears, but they’re coming fast.
“Killed him so he wouldn’t make it. Like she wouldn’t.”
“How do you know?” Anita asks, an outraged edge slipping into her voice as if what they’re talking about is the epitome of sacrilege.
“If it were me, I’d have probably done the same thing,” Gerardo says.
Anita shudders as she settles into her seat. She can’t look at Gerardo anymore, not in the same way she had before at least.
Gerardo moves Gloria off the road to avoid the last two bodies, whether out of respect or because he wants to spare the tires this last bit of carnage is anyone’s guess. Then he accelerates and leaves them in the dust.
◆◆◆
Gloria’s parked on the side of the road, overlooking a set of mountain ranges growing out of the stretch of wilderness the crew had been driving on. Gerardo, Anita, and Lorena stand by her front bumper. Ahead of them, an almost impossibly tall volcano rises into the distance, its peak dipping into heavy clouds.
“Sure that’s the one?” Gerardo asks, uneasiness dripping into his voice.
“That’s the one,” Anita says, sounding like a mother trying to convince her kid of the altruistic qualities of the razor-edged vaccine in a doctor’s indifferent hand.
“All the way at the top?”
“Uh-huh.”
Gerardo sighs. “Shit.”
“Come on, man. Gloria can make it…right?” Anita says, borrowing some of Gerardo’s uneasiness. They’ll be taking mountain roads, after all, ones that are not known for being the most spacious or the most accommodating, especially not to a souped-up semi-truck carrying a modified trailer.
“It’ll be a bitch for sure, but she’ll make it.” Gerardo stares at the volcano like it’s about to come alive and eat him. Maybe it will. He doesn’t like the way things are moving in his periphery now, shifting and changing and becoming as elusive as dreams. He feels drunk, and not the good kind. “Let’s go,” he mutters, trying to keep the gravel and the edge out of his voice and failing miserably.
◆◆◆
Gloria trudges up the mountain, the monstrous semi slipping in and out of the narrow road, but always rolling back from the ditches and the grassy slopes to the cracked asphalt.
Edu's head leans out of his window, swaying as the truck turns, as loose as a drunk sailor surrendering to the whims of the waves.
Anita and Gerardo stare out the windshield at the winding, steadily-inclining road. Gloria’s tires kick up clouds of dirt so thick they become a golden mist. The afternoon’s swelling like a blister and the sky’s a nauseating grayish-yellow, except it’s all brown under Gerardo’s finger-smudged sunglasses. He maneuvers through the dust, finding the road and then losing it again.
Gerardo’s head is a minefield, every blink, every movement, every thought sends pricks of pain across his scalp, threatening to trigger the clusters of pain embedded deep in his brain. He’s already feeling his grip on the steering wheel loosening, his hands not just numb but distant, like they’re attached to someone else who is also underwater and very far away. His eyelids feel not just impossibly heavy but alive somehow, as if they have a mind of their own, and they’re skittering closer every second. Soon, they’ll force themselves shut and he doesn’t think that anything, not a slap on the face, not a splash of cold water, not even the tip of a knife will be able to pry them apart.
What will he do then? Will he keel over and stick his head out of the fucking window like Edu’s doing? Will he floor it past a curve and send Gloria, and everyone inside, tumbling to their deaths? The smart thing to do would be to pull over and let someone else take the wheel. Edu hasn’t driven since they’ve set out, but even if he weren’t drunk he’s too far gone by now. Gabo might be able to take the wheel, but Gerardo knows that when the time comes to run someone down or drive over piles of roadkill the kid won’t have it in him. He could ask Pilar or Lorena, should ask them, but won’t. 'Never give the reins to an outsider, no matter how trustworthy they may seem…' another rule from a time when the lines seemed so clear and crossing them so unthinkable.
How many Lazies has he seen skewered through the front seats of cars so flattened they look like accordions? ‘Why were they still behind the wheel?’ he’d asked, thinking through a million steps he’d taken to ensure his own survival should their roles be reversed. But he knows better now. When the time came for those men and women to drive their loved ones to the hospitals or the airports or the borders as their world fell to pieces, they’d refused to give the driver’s seat over to anyone else. ‘No,’ they’d thought, ‘I can handle it. These are their lives and mine and I don’t trust anyone else to get us there safely.’
How pathetic they seemed to him, their bloated bodies buzzing and squirming with the only life they’ll contain for the rest of eternity…and now he was in the same position. Now it was his turn to feel the tug of war between warm, gushy pride and cold, detached knowledge. Was he really that surprised that he was doing the same thing they had? He’d always been a stubborn bastard and he found that
doing things he promised he’d never do was like excavating the soil of his own heart and finding black oil inside.
He’d promised himself he’d never do drugs, and when he had, he’d discovered a dark version of himself that wasn’t above smoking pipe tar or scavenging for flecks of white or green among the dust under his couch. He’d promised he’d never kill a man, and when he had, he’d found himself reflected in a gas station bathroom washing blood off himself with dirty toilet water because the sink didn’t have a knob anymore. And now he’s finding that that darkness spread further and wider than he’d ever imagined as a kid or a pimply teenager. He isn’t above letting others die because he wants to be the big boy in the big truck’s driver’s seat.
A silhouette appears like a backlit shadow in the billowing, sun-blasted dirt. Gerardo doesn’t stop. He’s half expecting the Pale Man’s face to appear on the dark body at any moment.
“Look out!” Anita shouts.
Gerardo slams on the brakes. Anita smacks the dashboard between Gerardo and Edu. She rubs her forehead. The pain still hasn’t hit her yet, but she knows it has to be coming. Half of her face is numb, but millions of prickling needles are starting to break through the haze and the shock of the sudden impact.
Now that Gloria’s tires are still, the dust in front of the windshield begins to clear. A man is standing in the middle of the road. He’s naked. His eyes are shut, but there’s something else about them, the way the lids are swollen but drooping inward at the same time.
“What the fuck? Guy’s completely out of it,” Edu says, rubbing his eyes and rising from his slumped position. He sticks his head out of his open window as Gerardo leans out of the driver’s side hole. They each hold their guns out.
“Hey!” Gerardo yells. The naked man turns his head. “Get the fuck off the road!” The man mumbles to himself. He walks forward and around Gloria’s front bumper. He taps his hand on it as he goes, reaching around in the dark for anything familiar. He seems to find it as his fingers reach one of the semi’s headlights. Something like a little smile flashes across his face for a microsecond. It’s a nostalgic smile, signifying not just recognition, but the warmth of fond memories.
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