Face Blind

by Lance Hawvermale

  They gathered around him. Gabe the loner, Gabe the isolationist, suddenly surrounded by a tribe of his own creation. He knew them only by their shapes, their clothing, and their voices. He didn’t have to see their faces to sense their faith in him, as misplaced as it might be. What he’d done to deserve it, he couldn’t say.

  Mira held the gun at her side.

  “Let’s go,” Gabe said, and led them over the hill.

  * * *

  The youngest of the Cable boys, known to his older brother as Benjo, realized after a mile of walking through the desert that he was a damned fool.

  The reasons were many. For one thing, he didn’t own a decent pair of hiking boots. His scuffed oxfords were fine for the Santiago pool halls and for composing the second novel of his lapsed career, but they had no business matching wits with the Atacama. Every man needed at least one pair of postapocalyptic footwear. Secondly and rather bluntly, he’d wasted too many years of his life.

  “Thirdly,” he whispered, “I am now in the lead.” At some point during their seesaw trek through the badlands, Ben’s long strides had moved him naturally to the front of their little band, this fateful fraternity of do-gooders.

  “Did you say something?” Gabe asked from ten feet behind him.

  “Nothing worth repeating.” He mounted the ridge and headed down the far side, feet turning up fairy clouds of dust. “Soil’s getting redder,” he observed, loudly enough that his voice carried down the slope.

  “Not just redder,” Luke said. “Marsier!”

  “Marsier.” Ben chewed on that. “I like it. Have to write that in somewhere.”

  And finally reason number four: He had revealed his oldest secret. By telling Mira he was immune to gunfire, and by honestly believing it, he had potentially put the jinx in play. In sports, you didn’t talk about a winning streak while the streak was running.

  “Hold up,” Gabe said, stopping beside him. “I don’t want us to get too close.” He handed Ben the GPS while he peered through the binoculars.

  Ben wiped a thin line of sweat from his forehead and gazed up at the sun. The day wasn’t particularly hot, but there was something about the lack of moisture in the air that made everything feel dead. In the humidity you knew you were alive. Out here you might have been nothing but a column of salt.

  “A little closer,” Gabe said.

  Ben was happy to relinquish the lead. “You okay, Hemingway?” he asked Luke.

  “I’m thinking about the Martian.”

  “We all are.”

  “He cut those people, cut ’em apart.”

  “I suppose he did. But that usually means that karma’s about to pull a U-turn and do a little cutting of its own.”

  Mira frowned at this.

  “Sorry,” Ben said. “But reciprocity, if you’ll pardon the pig Latin, is an itchbay.”

  They kept walking, angling through a cleft between a pair of saw-toothed mounds that had been scrubbed clean by an eternity of dry wind.

  “This is close enough,” Gabe finally said. He squatted and brought the binoculars to his face.

  Ben looked askance at Mira. She’d said nothing for the last several minutes. The brim of her baseball cap was pulled low over her eyes, but he could tell she was watching Gabe. Every few moments, probably without even realizing it, she’d check to make sure Luke hadn’t drifted off. Ben wondered if she’d admitted to herself that one day she would have to let him find true north on his own.

  “Take a look.”

  Ben accepted the binoculars—he preferred the term field glasses—and zeroed in on a faint blur that might have been at least a thousand yards away, if not more.

  Luke edged closer. “What do you see?”

  The world seemed to rush in from a great distance, startling him with its sudden proximity. “Well, I’ll be damned and denied parole.”

  The wooden fence might have been a century old. It stood about waist high and appeared nearly the same color as the dirt around it. Within its perimeter were three or four dozen upright slabs of rock, a microcosmic Stonehenge.

  “Ben, what is it?”

  “Graveyard.”

  “No foolin’?”

  “Not a single ounce.”

  The plinths thrust up from the earth in remembrance of those who slumbered beneath it, their names likely recalled by no one. In the middle of the stones rose a wind-scarred crypt with an arch over the door and a flat roof. Affixed to one side of this ten-foot cubical bunker was a lean-to made from a gray tarpaulin and stacks of wooden crates.

  A shadow shifted beneath the tarp.

  Ben immediately lowered the field glasses and sank to his knees so as not to be seen. “Someone’s over there, someone moved…”

  “It’s okay,” Gabe assured him. “We’re too far away. Unless he’s using his rifle scope and intentionally looking this way, he doesn’t have a chance of spotting us. We’re a kilometer out.”

  “Is that like a mile?” Luke asked.

  “About sixty percent of a mile. Either way, we’re safe.”

  Ben wasn’t convinced. “You sure about that?”

  “No.”

  “What the hell kind of answer is that?”

  “You want me to lie to you?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, that would make me feel a lot better.”

  Gabe gestured to the bottom of what Ben was beginning to think of as an arroyo. “Take a seat down there, keep out of sight, and he’ll never know we’re in the area. I’ll stay up here and see if I can get a better look at what he’s doing. I want to make sure he’s not hurting Sergio.”

  “And if you can’t confirm anything one way or another?”

  “Then I’ll have to get closer. And before you ask me if that’s safe, let me say no, it’s not safe. But I’m not letting him do that to anyone else, not what he did to the others.”

  Ben acquiesced with a frustrated wave. He wasn’t going to raise his voice and risk being overheard. Like Gabe, he wanted to do what he could to protect the boy, but he suspected that Gabe’s desire had crossed over into the obsession category, the way a hurricane builds power as it nears landfall and moves up in the storm ratings. “Fine. Be the lone wolf and leave the rest of us to chew on our nails.”

  “I’m just keeping an eye on him,” Gabe said. “At least until the cops get here.”

  “Then shut up and get on with it.” Ben joined Mira and Luke in the hollow where the two hills met. He needed to distract himself from what was going on, find a getaway into the sanctum sanctorum of fiction. “Thank Apollo I brought my notebook.”

  “Who’s Apollo?” Luke asked.

  “God of poetry.”

  “Are we writing poetry?”

  Ben wanted to laugh at that, but his heart wasn’t in it. “It may not be Shakespeare, but I guess it has its moments, just the same.” He sat on a rock that he suspected hadn’t felt rain since the days of the Bard himself. “Now keep your voice down and tell me what happens next.”

  Luke gladly settled in to relate the next chapter of their tale.

  Though Ben tried to pay attention, his eyes strayed to the crest of the hill, where Gabe was sprawled on his stomach, staring through his stolen field glasses, and waiting.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Mira watched the shadows for half an hour, while part of her tumbled deeper into the drama evolving next to her. Her brother had again picked up Ben’s divining rod, and together they unearthed more buried fragments of their story—her story.

  “‘Tilanna advanced down the hallway like a spring uncoiling in zero gravity,’” Luke read, “‘silently and full of energy not yet fully realized. The butt of the gun was a bit big for her hand. She imagined she could feel Dycar’s touch on its wood, as she’d once felt it on her skin.’”

  Mira eased up from where she leaned against the hill. She was tired. Tired of waiting here. Tired of being nervous. Tired of wondering if she was living the life of a fictional heroine who would probably end up dead by th
e story’s conclusion. At least she could climb up there and give Gabe some company during his vigil. And maybe get some company in return.

  She bent down and used her hands to brace herself on the stone as she ascended toward his position.

  “‘Tilanna had left Vanchette behind to deal with their escape route. These last few steps to the core of the Kanyri stronghold would be ones she took alone, not counting the secret passenger inside her. What amazed her most of all was her willingness to risk that fragile seed. She would put both parts of her in the fire zone in her last mad effort to erase these men from her adopted home of Mars.’”

  Mira reached the short summit and flattened herself on her stomach next to Gabe.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “I got bored.”

  “Not much better up here.”

  “It’s not very comfortable, that’s for sure.”

  The cemetery was so far away that she could see only a haze.

  “‘If they killed her now,’” Luke said, his voice clear and calm, “‘then they would in effect be killing her twice. But if she somehow slipped through them still alive, she would be living for two.’”

  “Mira?” Gabe said.

  “Yes?”

  “Maybe we can go to dinner.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Dinner. Maybe we can get some.”

  “Are you … asking me out?”

  “Assuming all of this turns out okay, I mean.”

  “You didn’t answer the question.”

  “Neither did you.”

  Mira was glad he was staring through the binoculars so he couldn’t see her smile. “The answer is yes.” Amazing. She had no other word for it.

  “How can your brother read like that?”

  Mira was still processing the dinner invite and consequently experienced some lag time before responding. “Uh, I don’t know. Ben says we’ll never figure it out. I’ve stopped worrying about it. Have you ever seen those people who struggle with some kind of debilitating mental handicap but they can play Mozart after hearing it only once?”

  “Savants, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Like in Rain Man.”

  “Same thing. Medically they have no explanation for it.”

  Gabe lowered the binoculars and looked at her. “Now that is something I can understand.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Long story. And not a subject for a first date.” He resumed his watch.

  Mira wanted to pinch him. This was no time to be cryptic, not when the next few minutes could … No, she wouldn’t let herself go there. Like Tilanna, she had to believe it would all unfold according to some predestined plan. “Anyway, I think I’ve convinced myself that it doesn’t matter how it happens between Luke and Ben. The doctors are never going to be able to explain it. I’ve realized that the important thing is this story they’re writing. That changes everything somehow. Or at least it feels that way. Still, it’s a little weird.”

  “Well, weird is something that happens to be near and dear to my—”

  A scream carried across the desert, then faded.

  Mira tensed and held her breath. Down below, Luke and Ben stopped composing.

  Gabe paused only for a moment, then dropped the binoculars and got himself moving down the hill as if it were a playground slide.

  “Gabe, wait.”

  “It’s Sergio.”

  Luke and Ben turned to watch him as he picked up speed.

  “Get your ass moving, Tilanna,” Mira said to herself. She slid down the smooth stone.

  “Gretel?”

  “I’m going with him. You two stay here.”

  Ben snapped the notebook shut, his pen flying into the dirt. “No way, sister.”

  “I have to.”

  “The hell you do!”

  She held up the gun in its brittle, decades-old holster. “He might need this.” She looked at Luke and fell in love with him again, just as she always did, this other half of her, this babe who’d shared Cathy Westbrook’s womb with her. “I’m off to fight the Martian, Hansel.”

  “Follow the breadcrumbs to find your way back.”

  “Will do.” Tears stung her eyes, but she refused them purchase on her cheeks. Her only choice was outrunning those tears, and so she set off after Gabe at a sprint.

  The angular hills that rose and fell on her left blocked her vision of the cemetery, but they wonderfully worked both ways. She and Gabe would be able to advance without being seen—or so she hoped. Sunlight blinked through the ridges and valleys as she ran, a strobe light that had the effect of turning her shadow off and on.

  Hearing her footsteps, Gabe looked back.

  Mira didn’t call out to him, but she was glad when he slowed down. If she was racing to her death, she didn’t want to do it alone.

  She caught up with him and breathed as quietly as she could.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” he whispered.

  “No choice.” She held out the gun.

  Gabe considered the weapon for a moment, then took it, pulled it from the leather, and dropped the holster in the dust.

  Mira realized, then, Gabe’s role in her story. Luke was Lieutenant Dycar, always present in her thoughts, and Gabe was Dycar’s gun.

  “I’m coming with you,” she told him. Though she was as scared as she’d ever been in her life, her voice was remarkably steady. “Let’s just get it over with.”

  Gabe surprised her by touching her face.

  Then he nodded and resumed his run.

  Mira ran beside him.

  * * *

  Ben watched them go, his hand forming an awning over his eyes.

  Luke picked up the fallen pen. “Are we really going to stay here?”

  “Not a chance in hell.”

  “Thought so.”

  Ben pocketed the notebook, and they set off across the slumbering Martian soil.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The screaming stopped.

  Gabe knelt and peered around a desert rock shaped like a shark’s fin.

  The rifleman’s camp was defined by the dead. Weathered grave markers stood like sundials, casting rows of oblong shadows that provided shade for canteens and rubber-sealed packages of military rations. Christ rose from one of the slabs, and from His crucified arms dangled a leather satchel and a pair of goggles reminiscent of the kind Rommel had favored in the African sand. In the middle of it all, the crypt door stood open, the darkness inside complete.

  Where are the damned helicopters?

  Mira pressed close behind him, straining to see.

  An array of shovels stood just inside the fence, their blades stabbed into the ground, their wooden shafts marking what appeared to be some kind of pit. Gabe didn’t have the proper angle to confirm what this depression might have held.

  The stench made him wince.

  Whatever was in there, it had been rotting for a long time. But decay in the Atacama happened differently. Without the trusty industry of maggots and the universal solvent of rain, things left for dead out here didn’t so much decompose as crumble. Had there been any moisture in the air, he supposed, the stink would’ve been worse.

  Mira tugged his shirt.

  Gabe turned so that his face was near hers—and then pulled back, startled.

  “What’s wrong?” she whispered.

  Mira wore a baseball cap, bright blue with KC stitched in white letters. The bill cast a full shadow on her face, giving her cheeks and mouth meaningful dimension, making shapes from the shapeless. Very rarely and very briefly, when the conditions were right, the prosopagnosia seemed to fall away, and it fell away now.

  “Gabe, say something.”

  He barely mouthed the words. “You’re beautiful.”

  Despite everything, she smiled. “No one but my brother has ever said that to me before.”

  Gabe, rapt, had no intention of looking away, but Mira said, “There’s something at the gate.”

  Though
he might not ever be able to re-create the moment, he sighed, turned around, and swept his eyes over the fence until he found the wooden arch that served as the cemetery’s point of entry. A four-wheeled ATV stood just beyond the gate, with canvas-wrapped bundles lashed to its cargo rack. From his current vantage point, Gabe couldn’t make out any details, but if the rifleman had left his weapon there …

  He again positioned himself close to Mira, speaking as softly as he could. “I’m going to circle around, see if I can find his gun.”

  She held up a hand in an obvious question: What should I do?

  He didn’t know what to say. She was too much for him. Who was he to give instructions to the wind? He settled for a bit of daring and kissed her forehead, bumping the brim of her cap along the way.

  Then he edged around the perimeter defined by the fence, staying low, revolver in hand. If he could ensure that the rifleman was without his gun, the very one that had killed Eduardo and shot up Vicente’s truck, then he’d rearrange the odds in his favor. Though he wanted to charge into the crypt and save Sergio before the boy sustained irreparable damage, he feared that rushing in blindly would only get him killed. If the rifle wasn’t among the items stowed on the four-wheeler, then at least Gabe knew what he faced when he called the cocksucker out.

  He rounded the pit.

  The crater was eight feet deep and full of bodies. Arms reached up at nothing. Legs were cut away. Skulls sprouted brambles of black hair.

  The rifleman had found Micha Lepin’s deposited dead, using the journal he’d obtained from Paulina Herboso. Within the hole lay people who’d been burned, gassed, and torn apart in the name of the state, an exposed choir of corpses that propelled the rifleman with their song. Gabe came within touching distance of a greater explanation for it all, a bridge between the rifleman’s hacksaws and the ghouls in the pit, but the answer eluded him.

  He lowered himself so that his stomach almost brushed the sand, then crawled lizardlike to the gate. He expected another sound from the crypt, but there was nothing. Whatever was happening to Sergio was happening in silence.