Awake

by Fernando Iglesias Meléndez

  “I think he’s…blind,” Anita says.

  The man passes by Gerardo’s door-hole, shambling forward like a drunk caught in a city-wide blackout. The man’s tanned skin is crisscrossed by wet tracks of scarlet blood that twinkle as they catch the sunlight. All those rivulets and streams and offshoots are coming from the same source: the burst dam that is his closed eyes.

  Gerardo hesitates as the man walks by. Once he’s past the door, Gerardo moves to step on the gas. “Wait, there’s more of ‘em. Goddamnit!” Edu says.

  A crowd of men and women in rags emerges from the bushes. They’re underfed, their bodies are a patchwork of cuts, scabs, bruises and scars, their flesh like paper that the world has written all over. All of their eyes are closed, but their lids droop over hollow eye sockets. They have no eyes.

  “They’re gonna surround us!” Edu shouts, raising his shotgun at the nearest shambling body. The fact that it’s a woman who weighs at most eighty pounds doesn’t seem to bother him in the slightest.

  “Just what we fucking needed,” Gerardo says, “Anita, get back in the trailer!” Anita ducks through the hatch and crawls toward the trailer.

  “Don’t see any weapons. You?” Gerardo asks.

  “They’ll still do damage if they gang up on us,” Edu says.

  The blind men and women lumber forward. They’re spilling out of the underbrush in a hundred different directions. Only a few are walking toward Gloria. Most are bumbling toward trees, the open road, or bundles of boulders growing out of the dirt. A man trips over the rocks, his toe twists, and a bone cracks. He yelps, but it’s a subdued, pathetic sound as if he’s used to suffering the offenses of the dark, indifferent world he can no longer see. Another man shuffles off the road and keeps walking into thin air over a sheer drop of maybe twenty feet. When he finally hits the rocks below his limbs break as branches would. There’s a muffled whine, then another crack...then only silence.

  One of the blind men slams into Gloria’s front bumper, one of the sharp edges on the cage around it slicing into his stomach. He hisses, patting at the red stain that’s quickly expanding on his filthy shirt. The others behind him zero in on the noise like dogs hunting in the dark. One after the other, they first slap and then grab onto different parts of Gloria: her tires, her trailer, her grill. They’re a school of blind fish that’s just found their supper.

  Gabo looks out of the rifle slit in front of him in horror. One of the men outside runs his hands over the smooth metal, finding the slit and then the tire underneath it. Recognition explodes across his face like a carpet bombing. He opens his mouth, grimacing and scrunching his eyes and eyebrows the way you would before shouting a war cry, only he doesn’t. His voice is a raspy half-whisper, a shadow of a sound. Gabo can barely even hear it…but the blind hear it for the battle cry it is.

  The mob rams the trailer from all sides, running into it at full speed, arms, heads, legs, shoulders, all slamming into the trailer walls. The force isn’t enough to dent the metal yet, but it's enough to rock the trailer furiously from side to side.

  “Gerry!” Gabo shouts, lunging for a handhold before he’s knocked off his feet. “Do something!”

  Lorena grabs the handhold next to her and raises her rifle, aiming at each head that appears in her field of view...too many. She curses under her breath and puts the rifle down. “Can’t shoot them all,” she says, “waste of ammo!”

  “Wait. I’m gonna try something!” Gerardo shouts back from his seat.

  The blind mob swarms Gloria. Their hands roam over the truck, searching for windows, banging on them when they find them. Feet climb over the hood and the truck bed. Several blind men find the hole where the driver’s side door used to be. Gerardo kicks a few of them out of the way, the sole of his boot crashing into a chin here and a rib cage there. When more of them start clambering over to the open door, Gerardo leans forward over the steering wheel.

  An explosion of sound blasts from under Gloria’s hood. It’s low, throaty, like something a bull or an elephant would make. Gerardo blares Gloria’s horn continually, his hand practically glued to the middle of the steering wheel as he pushes it down. Edu covers his ears. “Stop it! Gonna give me an aneurysm!” he shouts over the deafening noise.

  The blind climbing atop Gloria shout and tumble off. They roll into each other in an avalanche of limbs and dazed heads. The ones on the ground cover their ears in absolute agony.

  Gerardo backs Gloria into the road, running over several arms, legs, and even heads in his way, not that he can hear the crunch they make anyway. He turns and shoots the truck further up the mountain, still laying on the horn as he peels around the corner.

  Up ahead, a misshapen bamboo statue towers over the road. It’s a humanoid figure. On its head, where its eyes should be, are two massive holes. They’ve been partially filled in with yellowing globs. Other globs lie in piles around its feet. They’re eyes. Around the statue’s chest, like a toga, is a banner with the words, ‘PLUCK THEM OUT AND SLEEP AWAKE.’

  TWENTY

  Gerardo guns it past the statue, driving further up the volcano, and closer to the supposed Sleeping Place. If the dead bodies and the crazies without eyes are any indications, then there might not be anything up here but death. He should’ve convinced Diana and the others to join them in the Pill Haven. It was a pharmaceutical compound, after all. Maybe they would've taken an interest in Anita, maybe they could've used her somehow to develop a new kind of sleeping pill. But Diana wanted to take Anita up, and the only way she’s getting there now is if Gerardo drives her and her Faithful baggage.

  The cabin’s hot but he can’t turn the air conditioning on. Gerardo’s father used to say that, if you were running out of gas, leaving the air conditioning on would use it up faster. He doesn’t know whether this is true or just an urban legend passed on by fathers to their sons. Driving was like that, everyone seemed to have a personal philosophy about it, some personal motto or rule they were keen on passing on to others, especially those they taught to drive. Gerardo’s mother would always roll the window down when trying to move onto another lane. She said that, as a rule of thumb, she wouldn’t allow someone to pass onto hers unless they did the same. He’d scoffed at her, but once he started doing it, he found people were letting him pass more often.

  So Gerardo took both his parent’s nuggets of driving wisdom and turned the AC off a while ago. He doesn’t mind Edu’s occasional grunt of discomfort, adding his own every so often. He wonders what else he’ll have to ignore by the time they get up to the volcano’s peak.

  It’s a dormant volcano, something so much a part of the Latin American landscape that it’s almost taken for granted. He knows from experience that tourists from other parts of the world are fascinated by volcanoes and by how people can live so close to them without worrying about being caught in some hellish eruption. But the truth is that a volcano is really just a mountain with a temper. You get used to it and to the occasional earthquake just like you get used to the heat and the traffic.

  But a dormant volcano…that has to be either some hilarious cosmic coincidence or the reason why the Sleeping Place is here in the first place. If it’s real at all.

  Gerardo’s mind is drifting, wandering from one idea to the next. How many hours has it been since he last slept? He looks down at his arm, where all those hours ago he wrote the hours he’d spent awake. Another one of his rules. Only he'd let it slip. There’s nothing on his arm now except a smudged number that might be a '25' or a '28.' He thinks that number's really closer to a thirty-five by now, but he’s not sure.

  Once, he was convinced that keeping track of every waking hour would make things easier. As a kid, he insisted on watching the vaccine needle hit his arm, would stand in front of the mirror and twist his own baby teeth off. But he was wrong, watching the thing that hurt you, being intimately aware of it as it killed you slowly, didn’t make things easier. These last hours he hadn’t marked down went by the quickest.

  T
here’s a straight stretch of road coming up now. Easy driving. Easy on the mind. Gloria’s engine drones, her cabin vibrates as her tires touch the asphalt, cool air rolls in through the hole in the driver’s side…it’s all perfect, as comforting and reliable as a hammock swinging lazily. Gerardo closes his eyes.

  Gloria’s a little over halfway up the enormous mountain by now. Her tires move unsteadily, weaving from side to side around the winding asphalt road as if they’re being led by it.

  Gerardo rests his forehead against the steering wheel. His mouth’s open and his jaw slack, his breathing becoming steadier. He can’t sleep, but this is as close as he’ll get. He’s quieting the noise inside his mind, letting his muscles loosen, if only for a few moments.

  Then Gloria starts to vibrate angrily as if in protest, one of her tires drifting toward the rougher asphalt and dirt of the ditch on the side of the road.

  “Fuck! Open your motherfucking eyes!” Edu shouts and punches Gerardo in the arm. Gerardo’s eyes shoot open.

  One of Gloria’s tires spills off the edge of the ditch, moving the truck onto the grass on the other side. Up ahead the grass curves drastically, rolling down into a ravine. The truck’s weight shifts, dangerously close to careening off the edge. Gerardo corrects the steering wheel just in time.

  “You fucking idiot!” Edu shouts. “Next time you wanna kill us, why not let me know first so I can get my fucking shit out of the truck? As a matter of fact, move over!”

  “No…no,” Gerardo starts to argue but a yawn rips its way out of his open mouth. He rests his chin on the wheel and looks forward at the same time, still driving, still possessed by that stubborn need to carry on, to be the one to carry on, to be the one in charge even if it costs them their lives.

  “I told you we should’ve just left. How the fuck are we gonna get back now?” Edu asks. Gerardo starts to mumble a response, but a crack sounds off beneath Gloria. One of the tires sputters, hissing strangely. “What did I just fucking say?”

  Gerardo’s fully lucid now, the adrenaline shooting through him like fire snaking through the underbrush. He slams his own head against the wheel again and again in frustration, each strike clearing the fog that has set in around his head, clogging the cogs in his mind.

  ◆◆◆

  Gerardo and Edu stand next to one of Gloria’s wheels. Gerardo sticks his hand in the space between the wheel and the axle. He pulls out a gnarled sliver of a tree branch. Behind it are at least three more, each having followed the semi’s tire as it rolled up and gotten stuck in its inner workings. Gerardo looks out to the road ahead. All along it are pieces of tree trunks, branches, rocks. A natural roadblock. Easy to avoid, if you were paying attention.

  “Why the fuck didn’t you watch the road?” Edu asks.

  Gerardo looks composed for a second. Then he throws the branch off the cliff the road wraps around. “Fuck!” he shouts.

  Lorena walks over and puts a hand on Gerardo’s shoulder. “Can you fix it?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” Gerardo admits.

  ◆◆◆

  Gabo drops a toolbox down with a bang. Edu and Gerardo open it and begin pulling tools out instantly. Marco lumbers over to them. “I can help,” he says.

  “Fuck off!” Edu shouts, “as useless as a Lazy.” Marco cowers away.

  Gerardo surveys the stretch of road they’ve broken down on…he’s broken down on. There’s a mountain wall on one side and a steep ditch on the other, nothing useful, nowhere that might hide tools or shelter. The afternoon’s boiling down to its last few hours, things might get ugly if they’re still stuck here by nightfall. There are all manner of animals that come out at night, not to mention the fact that the temperature drops down to Guatemala levels at this altitude.

  There was a part of Gerardo that believed they could drive up the volcano and then back down again before it was dark. Then they’d drive to Guatemala. Eight hours, maybe ten more of being awake, and they would still have a bit of morphine to get some shut-eye. But now that's looking more and more like the wishful thinking of a reckless, unprepared, dying man.

  The more time passes, the more he finds the tough parts of his mind shutting down, the more Gerardo's having split-second fantasies of the Sleeping Place being real. ‘Maybe we don’t even have to drive back down’ he thinks, ‘maybe we can sleep at the peak and live through this.’ But he couldn’t count on that, shouldn’t ever stoop to betting his life and Edu’s and Gabo’s on what is, for all intents and purposes, a religious cult’s death march.

  Only…Anita could sleep, couldn’t she? Shouldn’t she be on the verge of death by exhaustion by now? Gerardo had seen his fair share of Lazy kids in the early days, the older ones shambling behind their parents like the walking dead and the younger ones in caskets or wrapped in blankets. Anita’s different. Right now she’s stooping to get a better look at Gloria’s tire. She’s a little beat up because it’s been a rough few days, but she’s still full of life. ‘Isn’t that proof enough?’ Gerardo thinks, almost hearing Diana’s voice in his mind.

  “Try to hurry,” Gerardo says. Not liking the reckless notions burning through his mind like a virus.

  “Try not to be an asshole, how ‘bout that?” Edu asks.

  Gerardo and Gabo walk out in front of Gloria. Anita runs up to join them. “Feeling helpful too?” Gerardo asks.

  “Yep. But what’s all this crud doing in the road?” Anita asks.

  “Landslide maybe,” Gerardo begins, “except—”

  Bang.

  A series of events explode into existence as if on fast-forward: Gloria’s passenger’s side window shatters as it’s punched out by a bullet, a spear flies through the air in an arch and stabs into Gloria’s hood, a hail of arrows stabs into one of the trailer’s walls.

  A gang of Red Eyes charges out of the bushes. They carry spears, machetes, and revolvers, their faces and bodies covered entirely in red paint. They sprint toward Gloria, eyes wild and wide, teeth bared like hungry dogs.

  Edu retreats, walking back toward the hole in the driver’s side. There’s shock on his face, chased down with something else.

  Gabo and Lorena ready their rifles. Gerardo pulls out his handgun. Anita pushes a frozen Pilar into action. They’re all moving in slow motion, the world suddenly becoming flooded with something like syrup and their muscles turning to taffy.

  There’s a feeling Gerardo knows well. It starts like a kick in the balls, a kind of numb electricity that moves hard and fast up to the stomach and turns quickly into something paralyzing and hollow and stinging all at once. Then he feels it in his head, right behind his eyes, a sort of cold vice tightening as his thoughts circle madly around one unchangeable, unavoidable fact: he’s fucked up.

  He feels this as a musclebound giant bathed in red paint charges toward him. The man is blonde and pale and is at least six feet tall, but looks more like seven. He’s got ‘European tourist’ written all over him. Probably a Swedish or Danish or German guy in his late twenties whose hobbies included bodybuilding and surfing, and he was once here to check out the waves at El Sunzal.

  Gerardo knows the type, has seen dozens of them around the holidays walking in and out of bars and having to stoop their heads as they go through doorways. Only this guy looks nothing like them anymore. Here he is, as naked as the day he was born, slathered in not just red but neon blue and carrying a red fireman’s ax.

  The Giant raises the ax, swings it down in a clean, slow, telegraphed half-circle. Gerardo steps to one side at the last moment, letting the blade swoosh down in front of him and land harmlessly in the asphalt. Then Gerardo lifts his handgun and fires once, hitting the Giant in the face. A part of him relaxes, eyes unclenching, tension easing behind them in his feverish brain. Then he notices that, despite the fact that there’s a chunk of the Giant’s cheek missing, he’s smiling through it as he scoops the ax up once more.

  Lorena and Pilar fire their rifles at the charging Red Eyes. A spear whooshes by Lorena’s head, taki
ng a clump of hair with it as it goes. Lorena doesn’t budge, she holds her breath, moves her rifle toward the thing flapping freely between the Red’s legs, and pulls the trigger. The Red crumples like an action figure dropped off a store shelf by a petulant boy. He wails like a boy too.

  Edu scrambles for his shotgun, finding it under the floor mat. He grabs it and winds up pulling the mat up with it, the rubber underneath it dragging across the barrel and adding what feels like five extra pounds. It’s one of those moments that could only happen when you’re in a hurry and the shit’s hitting the fan. If there was a coffee cup in the holder, he would have definitely hit it on his way up too. He shakes the shotgun, sending the mat flopping out of his way and sitting up in the driver’s chair…but there’s a Red Eye right in his face when he does.

  “Wait! I was the one who fucking called you!” Edu shouts, “we had a deal!” He starts turning the shotgun around when the hunter wraps his hands around Edu's head and slams it against his own, head-butting him so hard that Edu hears the echo in his brain.

  As the Giant brings the ax down over his head, Gerardo lifts his free hand and grabs one of the burly man’s sweaty forearms, stopping him from dropping the ax any lower. Then Gerardo sticks the handgun in the Giant’s stomach and pulls the trigger once. Then twice.

  A Red Eye rushes toward Gabo. In his hands are several leashes and attached to these are groups of Red Eye boys. Gabo hesitates, the barrel of his rifle trembling between the Red and the boys. Bang. Bang. Bang. The boys fall to the ground, dead and bleeding. Gabo turns around to see Lorena raising her smoking rifle and plugging the pack leader in the head.