A wooden cart exploded against the vehicle’s front end. Emaciated ears of corn flew from the wreckage and rained down over the hood. Horses screamed and bolted for cover. Simon didn’t know horses could scream. It was a remarkably human sound, and it echoed in his mind as a fresh wave of rioters battered the window next to Otis’s head.
Otis gunned the engine and swerved around a stone fountain at the center of a plaza. Simon felt the truck lean to the left, its right wheels losing their grip on the cobbles. For an instant, he felt certain the vehicle would roll, but Otis cut the turn short, and the wheels plopped down with an anguished squeal of overtaxed suspension. Simon closed his eyes. How much longer before they hit something that wouldn’t break or dive out of the way? Something was sure to stop them eventually, and the vehicle’s momentum was its only weapon. The mortar remained mounted to the back, but it was out of ammo.
The truck rounded a corner and nearly ran over the two-wheeled vehicle sprawled across the dirt road. A man with a harelip was fiddling with the handlebars, trying to get the engine started. Thin arms blotched with scabs burst through the tatters of a greyish shirt. A tattoo depicting a silver eye glared at Simon from one cheek. The face’s other eyes noticed him a second later.
Otis braked hard enough to hurl Simon against the dashboard. He caught himself just in time, avoiding a broken nose and possibly a cracked skull, earning instead an ugly jolt up his forearms.
As he righted himself and worked his hands over opposite wrists in search of damage, he saw Emily pulled off to the side, pinned to the ground by another man, this one marked with a crescent moon. Blood trickled from her nostrils. Her left eye had swollen to a squint, the angry flesh already fading to the blotchy purple-black of a thundercloud.
Otis slammed the gearshift into park and leaped from the truck.
“Wait,” Simon cried. “Don’t open the door!”
But Otis was already gone, the door was open, and eager rioters poured into the cab. They skittered over every surface—pawing dials, jabbing buttons, and snatching anything loose enough to yank free.
Simon scooted back until his shoulders touched the passenger door. A rough mass pressed against his tailbone. He reached for it and found the unloaded gun Selena had given him several eons before. He pointed it at the would-be carjackers. “All of you get out of here! I’ll shoot!”
One of them, his torn but well-tailored clothes pegging him as a merchant type, took the hint and scarpered. The others carried on as if Simon had done nothing. One man, his face disfigured by open sores, grabbed the steering wheel and tried to press it into the dashboard as if it were a single enormous button.
Simon paused, unsure how to proceed. Did the guy know the gun was unloaded? Or did he simply think Simon lacked the guts to fire it? Maybe he doesn’t even know what a gun is. A warning shot would make the point pretty clearly, but of course for that Simon needed bullets. With a cry of frustration, he hurled the gun at the man’s head.
It was a good throw. The gun spun once in the air before its barrel struck the man square on the temple. He slumped sideways, dazed, and tumbled out of the cab, landing on an incoming rioter and sending him sprawling to the ground. The other rioters, now aware of Simon as something more than a cowering child to be ignored, grabbed him by the shirt and tried to haul him out of the cab.
“Hey, let go!” Simon’s hands scrabbled about the cab for purchase. They found a metal protrusion beneath the passenger seat—a lever for height adjustment, noted the tiny pedantic engineer that four years at St. Barnabas’ Engineering Academy had implanted in his brain—and locked onto it. His joints screamed in their sockets as the mob tried to dislocate them. He kicked wildly. His foot connected with something hard and brittle—a nose, maybe—and made it crunch. Twin bolts of pain pierced his right ankle. Someone was biting him. He kicked harder, pulling his leg free, and retched at the damp patch of mingling spit and blood that trickled down his heel.
The tension in his shoulders was growing unbearable. He felt like a wishbone being torn in two. His fingers slackened their grip, unable to ignore the rising shriek of his joints begging them to relent. He curled his legs toward his belly and pistoned like a swimmer pushing off from the side of a pool. His heels struck a man in the forehead and knocked him back, but another soon took his place. Simon wondered what they’d do to him when they got him out of the truck—whether they’d be content to toss him aside, or if they had something darker in mind. He begged his failing fingers to hold on a little longer.
Otis rose up like a wave and crashed over the rioters. He held Emily under one arm and wielded a short length of steel pipe with the other. He worked the pipe like some strange cross between a knife and a hammer, jabbing and swinging and gauging in a mad flurry of his free limb. Emily bawled in his grip, her good eye squinting as tight as its injured partner.
He let Emily go once he’d gained a foothold on the truck. She curled up on the floor of the cab, hands knitted protectively around the back of her head. With both hands free, Otis’s ferocity seemed to double. He fought less like a man than a lion, a predator blooded and cornered and pitiless with mammalian rage. A patch of dark red bloomed on the front of his shirt. It grew as he fought his way into the truck, its bottom border distending into crimson rivulets that beaded through the soaked cotton.
The rioters fought back, but soon fathomed the depth of Otis’s anger and fled before it, reasoning that a wheeled contraption wasn’t worth their lives—especially when they didn’t know how to drive it anyway. Simon slammed the door behind them and engaged the lock.
Otis collapsed over the bench seat. He tucked his legs beneath his belly and began hoisting himself upright. He made it to hands and knees before the effort wrung a deep, hacking cough from him. Flecks of blood sprayed the upholstery. His limbs trembled and gave out, spilling him into his own sick.
“Dad!” Emily cried. She scrambled onto the seat and cradled Otis’s head. Otis raised one unsteady hand and touched her cheek. A greyish haze rolled across his eyes, but his smile was oddly content.
“Got you,” he said and coughed a gasp of blood into his closed fist.
Together, Simon and Emily managed to move Otis to the passenger seat. He groaned as he slumped against the backrest. The red patch on his chest spread laterally, widening with a fresh spurt of blood. Simon didn’t know how much blood there was in a person, but Otis had clearly lost a lot already; it was unlikely that he had much more to spare.
A fresh crowd gathered around the truck and tried to get inside. They rattled the door handles and banged the windows. Simon heard the kettle drum clatter of feet on the roof, kicking and stomping. The mortar swiveled on its axis as the rioters batted it back and forth. The vehicle was built for combat and not easy to damage without heavy equipment, but it was far from invulnerable. Simon didn’t want to stick around to observe what innovations in carnage the blood-simple crowd might concoct. He turned to Emily, who was stroking her father’s forehead with one hand. Her fingers shone with sweat—whether hers or her father’s Simon couldn’t tell.
“Can you drive this thing?” he asked.
Emily ignored him. Her fingers continued their slow loop: tracing his hairline, sliding down the ridge of bone beside his temple, skirting each eyebrow, and returning to where they started.
“Look, I don’t want to be a jerk, but we really need to get out of here. The doors and windows on this thing are pretty strong, but they’re not gonna hold off the crowd forever.”
Gently, Otis plucked Emily’s hand from its track and folded it in his own. “He’s right, Em. We gotta go.”
Emily sniffed, wiped her nose, nodded. She shimmied into the driver’s seat and grabbed the steering wheel. Her legs strained to reach the pedals, while her forehead barely peeked over the dashboard.
“I can’t reach,” she said. “I need someone to work the lever-things.”
Simon looked at her. “You mean me?”
“
Unless you’d rather steer.”
Swallowing, Simon climbed into the recess beneath the dashboard. Two pedals rose from the rubberized floor, their tops flattened to better match the driver’s feet. He reached for one of them, paused, bit his lip. He’d fixed this stupid thing, he should know which pedal did what, but the knowledge was gone, pilfered like a wallet by some talented pickpocket.
“Which one makes it go?” Simon cried.
“The one on the right. Hurry!”
Bodies pressed against the windows, battering the glass and eclipsing the afternoon light. It was like being buried in a slow landslide of human flesh. Simon shoved the pedal down with both hands. He was unsure how much counter-pressure the bar would exert, and was surprised at how easily it moved.
The truck bounded forward, transmission squealing as it flitted through gears with the rat-a-tat speed of a cardsharp riffling a deck. Simon’s stomach lurched with each swerve of the wheel. He craned his neck over the seat, trying to catch a glimpse through the passenger window and seeing nothing but Otis’s pale forehead and beyond it a wedge of grayish sky. He closed his eyes, pressed harder on the pedal, and braced for inevitable impact—hoping that whatever they hit would be lighter and smaller than the truck.
Over time—how much Simon had no idea; seconds stood for ages before toppling—the quality of the road changed, from the drumroll thunder of cobbles to the axle-busting jostle of a poorly-tended dirt road, which gave way to the long, loping undulations of the plains. Emily reached down and tapped Simon on the shoulder.
“You can slow down,” she said.
Nodding, Simon obliged. The two developed a crude and wordless symbiosis, through which Emily’s toe applied varying pressure to Simon shoulder, and Simon mirrored the force against the pedal. She gave him a final tap signaling him to brake and put the truck into park. It had barely stopped moving before she was back at Otis’s side.
They laid him out on the bench seat. The position made tending to him awkward, but the two of them together still lacked the strength to move him. Emily shimmied between the seat and the dash and unbuttoned his shirt. The fabric made a wet tearing sound is it pulled free of skin, revealing a wound far deeper than Simon had thought.
A blackish hole puckered two inches above Otis’s navel, curling up to the left in a sardonic half-smile. Blood burbled through the gash, a fresh spout of it with every exhaled breath. There were other wounds too, sneering from his chest and shoulders. But the one in his belly was the worst. Simon groaned at the sight of it, swallowing the sound as best he could to limit Emily’s dismay—a futile effort since she couldn’t be much more dismayed than she was already.
“Oh, Dad,” she moaned, hands pressed to her mouth. She fished a snatch of cloth from her pocket, its brown fibers stained with dirt and oil, and pressed it to the wound. She compressed it with both hands
“Oh, Dad,” she repeated. She seemed unable to say anything else. And what else could you say when your father lay gut-stabbed and dying in the cab of a truck after he’d charged straight into a riot to rescue you?
And why was she in that riot, chimed a voice in Simon’s head. It was for you, right buddy? Another brave fool dead simply because he was dumb enough to try and clean up your mess.
He’s not dead yet, Simon countered, but even in his head, the voice lacked conviction. He’d never seen anyone die up close before, but Otis looked pretty much how he imagined it. His eyes had taken on a glassy marble cast, pupils pinned to an arbitrary spot on the ceiling, and his face had paled and softened into a waxwork of itself. Each breath came with the damp, ugly sound of a wet rag torn in two.
Otis reached out to Emily with one trembling hand. She took it, and he led her close. His eyes rolled toward her—Simon could almost hear the sticky sound they made in their sockets—and fixed her with a steady gaze. He smiled. The gesture pumped life back into his waxen features.
“I guess you see why I never wanted you goin’ to Juarez,” he breathed.
Emily’s breath hitched. “I’m sorry, Dad! I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean—”
Otis pressed a finger to her lips. His smile warmed further. “You did right. It doesn’t matter if it went wrong. You won’t be blamin’ yourself for this, Em, you hear me? If you love me, you won’t do that.”
Wiping her eyes, Emily nodded. “Okay,” she said. She did her best to mean it, but Simon could hear the doubt behind the words. Otis must have heard it too, for he folded his hands over hers and shook his head.
“I’ve been away from that place a long time. Seein’ it burn might’ve cost my body plenty, but it did my soul a world of good. Something good can come out of this yet. You tell this Selena when you see her. Only so much you can do to change a building when it’s standing. You knock it down, you can build it back up however you like. Juarez was a prison. Whatever stands up in the rubble don’t have to be.”
Otis brought his daughter’s fingers to his lips and kissed them. His head dropped back a moment later, the last of his energy spent.
Simon expected the breath that followed to be his last, but he held on for another twenty minutes, oscillating between frantic, shallow-chested gasps and the long slow breaths of a man in deep meditation. Death is tidier in stories, Simon thought, recalling the heroic acts described in The Last Testament, where sainted knights, victorious but dying atop the corpse of some fell beast, delivered orations on the evils of secular worship, elegantly expiring as the last word of their perorations escaped their lips.
When it came, Simon and Emily nearly missed it, their attention flagging from their prolonged stillness and worry over things to come. A high, wheezing sound whistled from deep in his throat, shrill and quiet as a kettle in another room. His hands shook, fingers clutching at phantom objects, balled into fists, and slackened. Emily touched his cheeks with her fingertips and looked into his eyes. They found her gaze for an instant and widened, as if something huge and fundamental were trying to escape through their narrow apertures. The last gust of air left his lungs, and his eyes rolled back, the whites like gibbous moons in a twilight sky.
43: Death In Combat
Sound is a funny thing, thought Marcus. The tumult outside was far from inaudible. It bled through the walls of the abattoir like grease through fine paper. Shouts, crashes, cries of pain and rage, the shrill ululation of anarchic joy; whinnying horses, splintering wood, shattering glass, the piff of distant gunshots, and the crackle of flames—Marcus could hear all of these things, if he chose to listen for them. Yet his impression of that moment was one of absolute stillness, the sort of silence skies proffer in the minutes before a storm. He looked at the Jefe, awash in silence, and the Jefe looked back at him.
Thorin remained seated. He hadn’t stood once since the fighting began. It was the shock of it that pinned him in place, Marcus figured. That and the sheer speed at which events unfolded. It was hard to say how long the whole thing had taken. Ten seconds? Maybe fifteen? His mind had gone to its familiar place where time lost its momentum, where instants crystalized into discrete objects to be measured and weighed at length.
“How quickly things change,” Marcus mused. He studied the knife in his hand as if for the first time, delighting in the simple geometry of its blade, thumbing the sultry roughness of its grip.
Thorin’s fingers twiddled against the armrests of his throne. He slathered a smile across his face and slouched back in a gesture of exaggerated calm. It was an impressive performance, under the circumstances; Marcus had forgotten the depth of Thorin’s wiles.
“I suppose you expect quivering? There is no need. You’ve been mistreated. A just ruler is a hard ruler, and sometimes that weight comes down unfairly on one man’s shoulders. You’ve overstepped, as have I, so let’s discuss what we can do to make things right. We will start in the most obvious place: your debt. Consider it paid. As for further recompense, you’ll find me a very generous man.”
“I can absolve my debt on my own,” rep
lied Marcus, wiggling his knife. “As for payment, there’s only one currency I want from you, and it’s in your veins.”
“Then you are a fool.” The oily bonhomie was gone, cast aside like a tool found ill-suited to the task at hand. “You think such slaughter will go unpunished? I’m the Jefe of Juarez, last survivor of the Triumvirate. Touch me and you’re doomed the moment you walk out that door.”
“That may very well be. Assuming that, when I step out that door, you are still the Jefe of Juarez. And that, I’m afraid, seems very much in doubt.” He motioned to the chaos, now plainly audible beyond the building’s walls. “Do you hear that? It’s the sound of your dynasty collapsing. Your reign is over. It was short, but eventful.”
“You dog. You think some fires and a riot can break my rule?”
“In truth? No, I don’t. Not on their own. I think it will be an upset, but your loyalists will not be wiped out altogether, and when the streets fall quiet you can reclaim what’s yours. That it, if you live. But it’s the ‘if’ that always gets us in the end, isn’t it, Jefe?” Marcus chewed the last word like a piece of taffy, savoring its syllables. It had tasted so bitter before, but time and circumstance had sweetened it considerably.
The first glint of true fear shone in Thorin’s eyes. The negotiator had fallen to the tyrant, and now the tyrant vanished just as quickly. Behind his was the true man, not Jefe but simply Thorin, a shivering weakling in an outsized crown. His red eyes welled with tears.
“So it’s come to this, has it? You’re to murder me in cold blood? Will that fill the hole inside you, Marcus? Will that lessen the ache?”
Iron Circle Page 25