“Don’t stop to think!” Lorena says, chambering a round into her rifle. “They’ve got them so fucked up you’re doing them a favor.”
A Red Eye decked out in leaves and mud leads another pack of boys. His eyes are bleeding. It’s Chief.
“Gabo! Get Anita and run to Gloria!” Gerardo shouts.
Gerardo kicks the giant away from him. The Giant rushes forward, unfazed at the fact that his guts are practically spilling out of the two tiny holes in his stomach. Gerardo aims his gun again. The Giant swings the ax, its sharp head hitting the barrel of Gerardo’s gun and sending it spinning out of his hand.
Gabo runs toward the trailer and grabs Anita’s arm. He pulls her toward Gloria.
Lorena moves toward the trailer, firing as she moves backward. Marco cowers by one of Gloria’s tires, his face twitching as if it’s malfunctioning, caught between a terrified grimace and an exhausted slack-jawed numbness.
Gerardo stares after his handgun. It’s landed somewhere in the grass, but he can’t even see the gleam of the metal in the sun. Gerardo looks up only to see the Giant’s whirling ax. He begins to step backward, but he’s too slow, the blade’s coming too fast. As a last-ditch effort, Gerardo raises both arms to protect his face. The ax lands with a wet smack. Gerardo howls in pain, both of his forearms now sporting deep canyons the ax’s head has carved on its way down. The canyons run wet with twin red rivers. He looks up at the Giant who is now a taller version of the Pale Man.
Gabo leads Anita to Gloria’s trailer door. He lifts her up. He’s about to plop her in the open door, but then he shrieks. A spear bursts out of his chest. Behind him, Chief pulls him back and impales him further. Anita’s face is a mask of horror. “No!” she cries.
Gerardo screams in shock as Gabo collapses and Chief grabs Anita. His gored arms are forgotten. He walks toward the trailer in a daze. “No, no, no…” he mutters.
Snikt! The Giant slashes Gerardo across his back with the ax, ripping open the back of his denim shirt and turning it wine red. Gerardo looks behind him to see the Giant Pale Man laugh. There’s an unpinned grenade in his hand. “Pulled. Didn’t forget,” he says in accented English.
Gerardo turns. He sprints toward Anita. The grenade blooms into fire, shredding the Giant Pale Man into a flesh flower that blooms bony petals from the top of his head to the bottom of his navel. The blast lifts Gerardo off his feet, the force smacking him like an invisible stampede and propelling him forward. He flies through the air, catching the world moving in half-a-second snapshots between blinks. Then he hits, crumpling and rolling and landing in a ditch on the side of the road.
“Gerardo!” Anita shouts, her voice so distant it sounds to Gerardo like he’s hearing an echo of an echo of her voice...he might as well be on the bottom of the mountain.
TWENTY-ONE
Gerardo’s eyes are half-open. He’s covered in dirt, face down, bleeding from a hundred cuts and spewing smoke from one or two gnarly burns. His sunglasses lie shattered in front of him. Now his eyes are exposed to the full fury of the late afternoon sun.
The whine from Gerardo’s ears drowns most sounds out. Through his blurred eyes, he catches a glimpse of Chief pushing Lorena, Pilar, Edu, and Marco toward the trailer. He throws Anita in the front.
“We had a fucking deal! You’d just take the girl and let us pass in peace!” Edu’s distorted voice says.
Lorena spits in Edu’s face. “You fucking traitor!” she shouts then charges at him. Two Red Eye hunters hold her and pull her back.
Anita raises her chin, holding her head high even as Chief grabs her and tosses her into the trailer.
Gerardo looks up hazily. His eyes narrow with pure rage. The ringing from his damaged ears drones mercilessly. Chief stops for a moment. He regards Gerardo with contempt, then turns and grabs Edu by the throat. “No deals,” he mumbles, “too bad your friend won’t see. Special up top. You’ll see. I’ll make you. None of you’ll close your eyes again.”
Chief climbs into Gloria’s driver’s seat. ‘Please don’t let him remember how to drive,’ Gerardo thinks. ‘His mind’s gotta be broken by now. Don’t start it.’ Chief turns the key in the ignition and Gloria grumbles to life. Chief works the gear stick and Gloria complies, flashing her brake lights for a second before zooming forward. That’s Gerardo’s truck, that’s his last hope for survival, the only thing that made him special in this fucked up, used up, shell of a world. Gloria drives away past Gerardo’s outstretched hand, leaving him for dead in the dust just like Gerardo had left hundreds of Lazies behind him.
◆◆◆
Gerardo twitches. He’s half-passed out, slipping as far into unconsciousness as the Insomnia allows. Then it pulls him back, just like it had everyone who’d decided to try the hundreds of urban legends that involved anything except medication. He’d seen kids try to strangle each other to the point of unconsciousness and get kicked back into the waking world by the invisible, hateful, omnipresent hand that enveloped the entire world.
Now it does the same to him. He gasps as he’s thrown back into consciousness, shot out of the haze and the dark and back into the impossibly bright present. He rubs his eyes, yawns to clear his ears, and lurches into standing.
Gerardo’s body is a topographical map of hurt. Bruises swell like mountain ranges, hematomas and open cuts fill his skin like purple and scarlet lakes. He wheezes when he breathes, limps when he finally takes a step forward. He imagines he looks like the most fucked up Lazy on the side of the road. But he’s up and he’s walking. He doesn’t have a choice. He knows that if he lies down again, he’s done for.
“Gerry,” a weak voice whispers. Gerardo turns in its direction and something like a phlegmy, rattly gasp stabs its way out of his throat. Gabo’s lying in the street on his side. The spear that impaled him sticks through his back and out of his stomach, half in, half out. There’s a scarlet puddle underneath him so thick it’s almost like mud.
Gerardo limps toward Gabo, dropping to his knees when he’s close enough to touch him.
“Gabo,” Gerardo says, “I’m so—I’m so sorry.”
Gabo’s hand finds Gerardo’s. It’s cold, clammy, and unwieldy, Gabo can’t even seem to close it fully. Gerardo lifts Gabo’s head into his lap. At that moment, it’s as if the whole world has fallen away, leaving only the two of them. There’s no reason for Gerardo to put up a macho front, to hide his weakness and his heartbreak behind the persona of the toughest guy on the construction yard.
This is Gabo, the kid he’d hired personally. The kid he’d doubted at first, seeing him walk onto the yard with a smile and a flimsy soccer jersey at four in the morning. Then slowly, like drawing water from a well, Gabo had started to grow on him, started to make him smile then chuckle then laugh. Hell, he’d even grown on Edu. This is the kid Gerardo, Edu and Diana had stood up for. This is the kid that had made Diana, badass, indifferent, lone wolf Diana, into a sort of surrogate mother figure. They’d eat lunch together and everyone else would laugh, calling her a cradle snatcher and pretending they were the world’s most mismatched couple. Then they realized Diana was giving him money and a place to stay when things got rough. This was their kid, the kid in the crew everyone claimed as partly their own to protect, but nobody would ever say it outright. And now here is that same kid, lying in the road, dying in the road, like a stray dog spat out by the world.
“So close,” Gabo says, his voice like a shadow of a shadow of its former self. “We almost made it. Haha.”
“Yeah,” Gerardo says, biting his lip and turning his eyes away to hide the tears swelling in them. “We’re a good team.”
“Thank you, Gerardo. You saved me,” Gabo says, smiling sadly. “I would’ve died a lot sooner if it weren’t for you.”
“No. Don’t say that Gabo, please!” Gerardo says, gripping Gabo’s hand with both of his. It’s funny, his hands seem to be shaking more than Gabo’s. “I can still save you. We can do this, okay? You and me.”
“No. No,” Gabo sa
ys, shaking his head slowly, almost lazily. “You go up. Help Anita. The others.”
“Gabo, you’re going up there with me right now, alright?” Gerardo says, rambling, speaking faster and louder with each word as if he’s convinced he can talk Gabo back into being all right. “You’re a good kid, you hear me? You’re the best of us, and you’ve never done anything to hurt anybody unless you fucking had to and don’t close your eyes, Gabo, damnit! You need to get up there, man! You deserve to sleep. You deserve it way more than I do.”
Gabo closes his eyes and smiles. “You deserve it. Too late for me.”
Gerardo pats his shirt pocket and finds the morphine box. He opens it. The vial’s cracked. Liquid pours out. It’s probably been dripping since the explosion, but he hadn't noticed. “No, don’t do this! You can’t fucking do this! Come on…please.” He pokes around the small box desperately, blinking more times than necessary, as if he were looking into an impossibly large box instead of a tiny one. One of the syringes is still full. The one he’d filled out for himself. Gerardo tosses the shattered vial and the other syringes and holds the last one in his hands.
“Don’t waste it on me,” Gabo says, shaking his head as Gerardo brings the needle closer to him. “Save it. For the ride back. Just in case.”
“Shh, we’ll figure something out. You need this right now.” Gerardo lowers the needle onto Gabo’s arm. He stabs it in and pushes the plunger. Gabo shudders as the morphine’s warmth runs through him. Gerardo strokes Gabo’s hair tenderly, gently, as you would do to a sleeping, sick child. “Sleep, Gabo. You’ve earned it.” Gabo nods and closes his eyes. “I’m going up there, and, when everyone’s safe, I’m coming back for you. I’m taking you up to the Sleeping Place. You’ll make it up there. You hear me? We’d never leave you behind.”
“Yeah, I’d like that. Find a nice place for me,” Gabo whispers, each word more quiet than the last.
“Of course, a nice place. If we can’t sleep up there, at least you will. I won’t leave you out here for long. I promise.” Gabo’s grip on Gerardo’s hand loosens. His body relaxes. He shuts his eyes. It’s like he’s asleep.
Gerardo pulls the spear out of Gabo in one swift, quiet motion, then tosses it into the ditch at the side of the road. He carries Gabo over to the brush and covers him with leaves thoroughly, until no part of him remains exposed. Then Gerardo limps up the incline, grabbing Gabo’s rifle off the street as he goes.
A little further ahead, Gerardo catches the twinkle of metal in the grass. His handgun. He stoops to pick it up, then keeps walking.
◆◆◆
Gerardo struggles up the road. His eyes are half-open. His gait wavers. Ahead of him, dozens of bodies are strung up from light posts. Crucified. Gerardo stops, scans the faces. Nobody he knows. “Toluca Street, Pan-American Highway,” Gerardo begins whispering, then stops. “No. The mountain road. The mountaintop. The Sleeping Place,” he mutters as he limps.
In this new, waking world, if you don’t have a carr, you’re basically dead. When you’re unable to sleep, every waking hour, every motion and action is a drain on an invisible, but very limited tank of energy. If you can’t sleep, you can’t ever replenish that tank. Walking at all is stupid, walking a long distance is suicide.
But here he is, walking to the peak of a volcano. Not hiking, walking. Limping, actually. He doesn’t have a backpack with water and food, he doesn’t have a tent in case he gets too tired to keep going and needs somewhere comfortable to rest for a while.
It all serves to remind him how pathetically underprepared he is now. How’d it get to this? He once had a safe full of dozens of boxes of a dozen different kinds of sleeping medication, enough to ensure his own survival and that of four others for at least ten months. He also once had Gloria, a powerhouse, a game-changer, a fortress on wheels that he could use to ram through fortified defenses or withstand heavy fire.
Now he’s alone. Just one man limping forward with one rifle and one handgun, no extra ammunition kept in the glove compartment or in the canvas bags under the seats, no walls to protect him from sniper fire. Just him, and not a hell of a lot of him at that. Can he even run anymore? Can he shoot straight? Can he go toe to toe with even one Red Eye? He doesn't know. He doesn’t have a plan. He’s just a man limping up a mountain despite the fact that each step is bringing him closer to death.
◆◆◆
Gerardo hobbles forward, using Gabo’s rifle as an improvised walking stick. His eyes are mostly closed. He wobbles more and more with each step. Next to him, the road keeps going up. Ahead of him, the side of the road drops off to a steep incline. Gerardo’s eyes are closed now and he keeps walking ahead. He’s still awake, of course, but his mind’s somewhere else. In it, he sees something like a dim room with a TV in it…somewhere cozy and nothing like this stretch of road in the cold sunset. Then his feet leave the ground.
Gerardo falls off the incline, his feet still trying to walk even as he plunges through the air. He skids off a bank of dirt, flips off and bounces against the rocks embedded into the mountainside. He grunts as he rolls and falls even further. Another flip, this one slower than the last, longer, more time in the air to process what’s happening.
Splash.
Gerardo lands in a brown stream choked by piles of trash, his head slingshotting forward as his neck whips with the momentum and dipping underwater. He welcomes the cold, quiet, wet new world for a while. It’s peaceful and he loves the way the cool water wraps around his bruises like a space-age icepack. He can’t even hear the ringing in his ears anymore. Then a pressure begins building in his chest and starts turning into hot vomit, clawing its way up his throat. It takes Gerardo a few moments to realize that he’s suffocating.
Gerardo lifts his head out of the water and swallows a gaping mouthful of air down his throat. Above him, the steep incline he just fell off rises like a small mountain itself. Gerardo chuckles to himself, but it turns into a sob halfway through.
“Never make it...failed them,” a ghostly, warped voice says.” The Pale Man sits on a nearby rock. His limbs are cocked at strange angles as if he’s the world’s most disturbing marionette. He licks the trickle of blood that drips into his mouth from the gunshot wound in his forehead. Gerardo ignores him and scoops water from the stream. He splashes it on his face, ignoring the fact that, instead of washing his cuts and burns he’s actually plugging them with hordes of bacteria.
Gerardo sloshes over to Gabo’s rifle and wraps its strap around his shoulder. Then he starts climbing. His bruised, cut, warped fingers grasp at the rocks on the hillside as he pulls himself up. His body feels so much heavier now, as if the world itself were trying to swallow him into the dirt, and every movement, every breath is an act of exhausting rebellion.
He keeps going, keeps ignoring the pain and forcing images of Gabo and of Chief throwing Anita into the trailer into his mind like conductors forcing logs into the furnace of a steam engine. He’s moving faster and faster, climbing out of the muck and the shit in a way he’s never seen a Lazy do…because he isn’t one. He’s a fucking survivor. He’s the fucking Butcher of Santa Tecla. He’s not going to die in a ditch or in a dirty stream next to used diapers and fifty cent bags of chips. He’s not just going to live through this, he’s going to go up there and make those bastards pay for what they did.
One of Gerardo’s hands flops over the ditch on the side of the road. Then the other. Then Gerardo himself is crawling out of the underbrush and rolling over onto the street. He holds the side of his chest as he pants and stands up. ‘Did it,’ he thinks. ‘Still alive.’
Gerardo limps onward, lowering Gabo’s rifle back into its familiar place at his side and leaning as much of his weight as it’ll take onto it. Then he stumbles ahead and keeps going.
◆◆◆
It’s pitch black by the time Gerardo smells the smoke. Up until then, he’d been using sound to guide himself in the dark, knowing the road only by the flat pitter-patter of his boots on the asphalt and the d
itch on either side by the crunch of the dirt. There are no streetlights, no moon hanging up above the tangle of trees on either side of the road.
But now, he doesn't need to listen to his steps anymore. Now he can not only smell his way forward but see the path ahead too. Above him, toward the left as the road he’s on circles up toward the volcano’s peak, is a wall of fire. The blaze churns, the fire rolling like an infinite tidal wave, spewing pillars of smoke so large they become a second mountain in the sky growing out of the top of this one. The circumference of the mountaintop is engulfed in at least a dozen bonfires arranged into a semi-circle.
“Burning the Sleeping Place down…” Gerardo mutters. But they haven’t, not yet, not if that black cone behind the wall of smoke is any indication. The bastards must be keeping the bonfires under control for the moment.
Gerardo begins walking, almost running, ignoring the pain in both of his legs. Then he freezes in his tracks. In front of him is the Pale Man. A wretched grin twists his features. Gerardo rubs his eyes, but when he opens them, the Pale Man is still there.
“No!” Gerardo cries, “go away!” He aims Gabo’s rifle at the man, who chuckles in response. It’s a wet, gurgling sound, the kind you might make if you blew into a straw to make your glass of milk bubble and force a chuckle out of your baby brother. When he speaks, the Pale Man’s voice echoes and distorts, as if it’s coming from underwater. “Shoot me again?” he says.
“No choice, after what you did,” Gerardo says, almost in a whisper. ‘The fire,’ he thinks, even now. He doesn’t have much time before the stupid bastards lose control of the bonfires and start the mother of all wildfires.
“Had…choice,” the Pale Man whispers back.
“You betrayed us. Betrayed me!”
“Shot me. Brother,” the Pale Man says. This time, his mouth isn’t even moving, it’s just stuck in a sick grin while the voice behind it snakes out into the smoky night air.
Awake Page 20