Face Blind

by Lance Hawvermale

  He reached the four-wheeler and searched it quickly. The saddlebags bulged. A sleeping bag was strapped down with nylon bands. A long shape wrapped in burlap turned out to be not a rifle but a set of flexible tent poles.

  So much for disarming the man. The last thing Gabe wanted was the OK Corral.

  He was about to backtrack when he noticed the keychain.

  The keys hung heavily from the ATV’s ignition, at least thirty of them of various sizes forming a loose mass of metal. Instead of a key fob, the cluster was held together by a wallet with an eye-ring attached to one corner.

  A moment passed. The sun glared down. A muffled sound escaped the crypt.

  Wallet.

  Gabe slid out of his stupor and made sense of what he was seeing. His hand, almost as if it were unattached from the rest of him, floated up and outward. Of their own accord, his fingers closed around the wallet and turned it over to reveal a plastic-covered window.

  Printed there quite plainly was the rifleman’s name: JULIAN HERBOSO.

  Ben had read in the file that Micha Lepin had sired an illegitimate son named Julian. And later they’d found that Lepin had raped one of his victims, Paulina Herboso.

  Julian Herboso, the rifleman, was Micha Lepin’s son.

  * * *

  Ben didn’t bother staying low. He walked upright, as evolution had intended. Beside him, Luke played things closer to his ape ancestry, bending at the waist and scampering between the rocks so as not to be seen.

  Ben knew who was the smarter of the two. Some fools, they said, never learned. Especially old fools. He touched Luke on the shoulder, a gentle reminder not to get too far ahead or reveal their advance by kicking an errant stone. They had the benefit of numbers and the chance to attack from a position of surprise, and Ben didn’t want to be responsible for giving away their advantage. Hopefully they’d catch the bastard out in the open, and Gabe could simply shoot him and be done with it.

  Ben asked himself if he was okay with that, just killing the man, assassinating him.

  The answer was You bet your black ass.

  The graveyard appeared between a break in the hills. Ben got his first unobstructed look at the place. Whatever community it had once served had long since faded into the annals of busted boomtown mythology. Only the jagged teeth of the tombstones remained, some leaning one way, some the other. The fence looked ready to collapse. The only sturdy part of the whole enterprise was the white stone cube that probably contained the remains of the town’s wealthiest nitrate baron.

  Luke saw it, too. They were drawn to it and whatever it might hold.

  Reading the expression on the young man’s face, Ben nodded, and they made their way to the back side of the fence. He saw nothing of Gabe and Mira. They were either hunched behind the hills or on the far side of the white vault.

  Not a vault, he decided. A sepulcher.

  Yes, that was a much more writerly word. A sepulcher. It sounded like some damn place that old Edgar Poe would’ve appreciated. No doubt the killer had made it his HQ.

  They reached the fence. The wood had once been painted white and still was, mostly. Without any rain to dilute the color, the paint hadn’t been washed away but rather scoured by the granules of dust in the desert’s erratic wind.

  Ben swung his leg over it. Luke followed him.

  Sounds issued from inside the sepulcher, but the thick walls rendered them unintelligible. Ben approached the structure from the back, watching his feet to make sure he didn’t come down on anything that would snap and give him away. As he moved to the right, he knew how incongruous he looked, a part-time billiards hustler and mostly failed novelist playing stealth commando on a German pillbox with a maniac inside. This was what he got for answering the door when the Westbrook twins came a-knockin’.

  A few steps behind him, walking on his toes as best he could, Luke went left.

  Only briefly did Ben consider reining him in. He suspected that Luke already had too many folks in his life treating him like a child, despite his sangfroid in the face of danger. Ben opted to trust him, just as he opted to have faith that the kind policeman had been correct in ’79 when he said that Ben’s bones were built from Kevlar.

  He rounded the corner and found a hanging mobile made of body parts.

  His knees failed him. He staggered, caught himself on the wall, and slid into a breathless crouch.

  A frame of scavenged fence posts supported human limbs that dried like chiles in the Atacama air. Feet that had been severed at the ankle hung from silver wires. One had toenails that were painted a dull red. Yet another had no nails at all; they appeared to have been ripped out.

  Ben jammed a hand over his mouth and tried to swallow.

  Three arms dangled from clothes hangers. On a hook nearby, thigh muscles had contracted like jerky to reveal the ivory gleam of bone.

  Ben pinched his nose shut before the smell could force itself down his throat.

  Here hung the body parts of Micha Lepin’s family, carved up and left to cure. Ben managed to get himself turned around. His eyes watered. He stumbled around the corner and leaned his back against the wall, breathing through his mouth as quietly as he could. These were all that was left of the victims Gabe had described, the boy in the backpack and the woman from Mentiras, otherwise known as Nicky and Carella. And soon a piece of Sergio would join them.

  Luke appeared from around the sepulcher’s opposite side. Incredibly, he was grinning.

  Ben couldn’t find his voice. He wanted to say be quiet because he could tell that Luke was excited about something, but his throat had contracted to a pinhole.

  Luke gave him two thumbs-ups. “I found the Martian’s gun.”

  Inside the little building, Sergio screamed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The man in the too-big coat stepped from the crypt.

  The scream followed him and faded as he emerged in the sunlight. Mira watched him from her position behind the rock, hating him for forcing such sounds from an innocent boy. She saw his face, with its drooping eyes and blade-sharp cheekbones …

  Her nails bit into her palms. She tried to force her fingers to relax, but anger fused them shut.

  The man wore an overcoat of transparent plastic. It was the kind of thing a butcher might have worn when standing amid the upside-down slabs of skinned cattle, or the man in the funeral home who drains the blood from bodies. Mira understood, then, what Gabe had already realized. Had they waited for the police, Sergio would’ve been dismembered and driven mad … if he wasn’t already.

  Before she could stop herself, she relinquished her concealment, moving clear of the rock and daring him to see her.

  He did.

  For a moment they stood considering each other from a distance of sixty feet, the grave markers and wooden fence between them. He held something in his right hand, a surgical blade that reflected tiny butterflies of sunlight. Insanity rutted with intelligence in his eyes. Startled to find himself confronted at his special place, his face went through a series of slow transformations. He looked exactly like what he was: ambushed.

  On the opposite side of the cemetery, near the gate, Gabe appeared. Mira saw him, but she was careful not to give him away with her eyes. He had a clear shot. Mira’s lungs yearned for deeper breaths, but she couldn’t find the power. It took all her strength just to stand there and face the man like this, as Tilanna might have done when she was feeling ballsy and looking for war.

  Gabe lifted the pistol in both hands.

  Mira watched him without looking directly at him.

  The man from the crypt bent his head to one side like an animal, trying either to get her scent or to convince himself she was real and no desert mirage.

  “Good-bye,” Mira whispered to him.

  Gabe fired.

  The sound was so sudden and so loud that Mira jumped, even though she’d been anticipating it. The bullet cracked into the side of the crypt, dislodging dust as it ricocheted with a high keening
sound. The man darted to the side of the building, his plastic coat fluttering around him. He made a noise of fear and rage as he disappeared from Mira’s field of vision.

  Ben’s voice rang out. “Luke, get back!”

  Luke.

  Mira’s lungs found their air, that sweet, thin air of Mars, and she hurdled the fence and ran for the crypt.

  * * *

  Gabe’s hand buzzed from the recoil. He cursed himself for missing even as he sprinted through the gate and careened between the tombstones.

  Too late.

  He’d been too late, too slow, too damned shaky with the gun. The revolver had bucked in his hand, the big cylinder rolled, and the thirty-year-old bullet had bull-rushed down the barrel and gone terribly wide, slicing splinters from the tomb.

  And now he ran.

  He’d get close, close enough not to miss, and maybe there was a time in his life when killing would’ve chilled him, but that was before he found Nicky Lepin in a backpack. He leaped a fallen grave marker, tripped, caught himself with his free hand in time to get a glimpse of a plastic jacket whipping around the corner.

  He heard Luke’s voice and kept running. Moments later, he jumped around the little building and brought the gun up wildly, his arm shaking with adrenaline.

  Luke was sitting on the ground, a tiny lizard of blood creeping down his chin. Gabe recognized him by his tennis shoes. Ben hovered over him, trying to inspect the injury while simultaneously checking over his shoulder.

  Mira appeared from the other side, throwing herself at Luke. “Baby, are you okay?”

  “He hit me, Gretel, hit me and took the rifle!”

  Ben looked at Gabe. “He ran there, behind those hills.”

  Gabe almost bolted after him. He caught himself, biting his lip. He threw a glance at the pistol. The embossed lettering read RUGER .357. It trembled in his hand. He aimed at the nearest hill and shouted, “Julian Herboso!”

  The moment he’d seen the name on the ATV’s keychain, everything finally made sense. Micha Lepin had tortured and raped a woman named Paulina Herboso. She’d given birth to a son. That son had used the detailed notes in a stolen journal to learn of his mother’s past and to taste the blood of it on his teeth. He suckled on it like curdled milk, and in his evolving madness he’d sought recompense for his mother’s aguish. Micha Lepin was his father as well as his obsession. Julian had set out to mutilate and murder everything his father loved.

  “Julian Herboso!”

  By naming this man, Gabe gained a power over him that he was unable to obtain by seeing his face. No longer was Herboso the rifleman, or Gigante, or a cipher seen only in shadows. He was built of bones and brain matter, and he could be killed.

  Emboldened, Gabe doubled back, hoping to flank him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Ben knew a dead man when he saw one. Gabe had that captain-goes-down-with-his-ship look when he galloped toward the cemetery gate, revolver held near his head. Bent on avenging those he never knew, he would get himself shot by a man much more skilled with a gun.

  Ben had one hand on Luke’s shoulder. He touched Mira with the other. “I’m going.”

  “But—”

  “I can help.”

  “He’ll kill you both.”

  Ben thought about that only for a moment. “Ma’am, I was there when they buried Mr. John Wayne, the finest cowboy who ever lived. I know how a hero goes down.”

  He also knew a good parting line. He turned and headed for the hills where the Martian had disappeared, wondering if Luke would ever read again without him.

  * * *

  From inside the crypt: a soft, fluttering moan.

  Mira almost chased after Ben. She wanted to drag him back, keep him safe, and trust that Dycar’s gun would finish the man Gabe had called Julian Herboso. But she couldn’t send herself in two directions at once, no matter how strongly she wished for it, so she took her brother by the hand and tugged him behind her as she ran to the entrance of the crypt.

  A yellow light burned from within. Mira had no time to give herself a pep talk or worry about what might be lurking in there. She had to ensure that Sergio would live. Only then could she join the battle with her friends.

  She stepped through the low stone arch.

  The room reeked of piss.

  Fear had caused that smell. Terror had freed it to run down the boy’s pantleg and drip to the floor. He lay on a stone catafalque where the body of the crypt’s original resident had once rested. Thick bands of duct tape held him in place, rendering his limbs immobile. An aluminum rack supported an IV bag, the tube of which snaked around Sergio’s arm. The needle at the end of the tube, however, had not yet been inserted into the boy’s skin; it dangled from the table’s edge, evidence that the surgeon had been interrupted before his work began. The boy looked physically unharmed.

  Mira wanted to fall to her knees in relief, but she couldn’t afford the rest. There would be time for nervous breakdowns later. To everything there was a season, and right now the season entailed getting this kid the hell out of here.

  “He’s okay?” Luke asked from behind her.

  “I think so. There’s no blood.”

  He put his hand on the center of her back. “We need to help.”

  “Working on it.” She took two steps into the small chamber and realized there was someone else here.

  It was a man, naked and thin, strapped to an army cot. His skin was the color of cheesecloth. A stained bandage covered most of his head.

  “Who’s that?” Luke wondered.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “He don’t look so good.”

  “Doesn’t.” She aimed her attention at the boy.

  Mercifully he’d slipped into an unconscious state. The bier on which he lay was sprinkled with black hair. His head had been shaved, but Mira saw no other damage.

  “What do we do?” Luke asked.

  Sergio’s body radiated heat. Mira resisted the urge to coddle him and say soft things. The best remedy for him was a dreamless sleep.

  The man on the cot whispered, “¿Quien es?”

  Luke, surprised, made a little barking sound and spun on the man. “Mira, he’s—”

  “Yeah, I see, he’s awake.” She crossed the room and bent over the man, realizing that he was one more injured soul assigned to her, one more charge to keep. As if she didn’t have enough already. “Who are you?”

  Only his eyes moved, blinking slowly as he stared up at her through bloodshot corneas.

  “I said, who are you?”

  He tried to wet his lips with his tongue. “Me llamo Alban Olivares.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Gun in hand, Gabe crawled through the rocks. He scanned the ground, the hollows, the crooks between the boulders. Julian Herboso waited somewhere in this cragged maze of stone. Gabe had little hope of tracking him; his training for such a hunt came only from video games, first-person shooters that glorified your ability to frag your friends online but came up terribly incomplete when simulating the real thing.

  He pulled back between the columns and pressed his spine against one of them, gripping the revolver in both hands. If he kept up like this, he’d start to swoon from too much oxygen, but what choice did he have? Herboso captained this world, thrived in it, butchered people in it. Gabe had no advantage here.

  Or did he?

  What he realized as he huddled there was that every sound, no matter how small, came to him perfectly through the Atacama vacuum. After so many years of depending on nonvisual clues, he’d refined his sense of hearing to the point that, if he held his breath, everyone around him revealed themselves by the noises they made. People breathed differently, yawned differently, walked differently.

  Ben’s footsteps separated themselves from the other sounds. His strides were long, and he had a tendency to slide his feet when he moved. Gabe had spent the last several hours marching beside him and discerned the difference, even if no one else could. Farther away w
ere dull echoes that others would have dismissed but Gabe realized were voices in the tomb.

  And something else. It was faint as hell, fainter even than the occasional puff of breeze, so Gabe did what he knew he shouldn’t do if he wanted to avoid being taken by surprise.

  He closed his eyes.

  Here was his environment; here were all the faces he’d ever tried to see. And into this place came the sound of someone moving but trying so very hard not to be heard: the lightest step, the faintest passing of boot over sand.

  Gabe opened his eyes and moved toward where Herboso thought he was hiding.

  The sharp angles of rocks and wind-carved totem poles offered him no clues, their shadows too skinny to conceal anyone. Gabe trusted only what he heard, just as he did when meeting a new friend or navigating the faces on a busy street. The gun now surer in his hand, he kept low and moved with a swiftness that felt like it belonged to someone else.

  From somewhere behind him, Ben kept coming, slower, more cautiously, but still moving.

  Gabe stepped carefully over loose pebbles, veering slightly left, following the sounds that few others could have heard. He understood the irony: His disability had given him an advantage. The last time it had worked that way, he’d been a kid winning every game of hide-and-seek.

  When he knew he was close, he stopped and lowered himself behind a column of basalt that might have been a million years old. Two, perhaps three meters away, the rifleman shifted slightly behind his own piece of cover, unaware that he’d given himself away.

  At least Mira had said yes when Gabe asked her out to dinner.

  That was his final thought before leaning out from behind the slab, the gun leading the way.

  A face stared back at him.

  Startled to find himself staring into someone’s eyes, Gabe lost a few moments, the revolver pointed nowhere in particular. Just as the deaf probably wondered what a laugh was like, so too did Gabe sometimes imagine the vibrancy of recognizing someone’s smile. One of his doctors had gone so far as to call him blessed, remarking that Gabe never judged people by their appearance or the pigmentation in their skin. Whatever. Gabe just wanted one time to know what was so damn fine about Marilyn Monroe.