The stranger, little more than an arm’s length away, peered around a shelf of stone, and the one thing preventing Gabe from shooting a hole in the center of that moon-face was the tiny chance that maybe he was wrong. Had his ears sent him false signals? Was this actually Mira, chasing after him like Jill after Jack? Or Luke, the most honest of them all, trying to do his part?
Julian Herboso lifted his rifle.
Too late Gabe realized the truth. He threw out his hand and deflected the long barrel, but by then Herboso was already well into his second move, lunging out with a scalpel he must have been holding when he’d first stepped from the tomb. Gabe wasn’t fast enough to defend both attacks.
The blade disappeared entirely into the meat of his left arm, all the way to the scalpel’s handle. His biceps became a hive. Within this bloody hollow dwelled things with wings and teeth, biting deeply and spinning him around in a half pirouette.
Gabe fell.
Though he tried to catch himself, his arm would not respond, a flailing thing connected to the rest of his body. His tailbone absorbed the shock, nearly rattling the gun from his hand. From a sitting position he sighted down the barrel—
The scalpel drew a silent red line across his knuckles.
He tried to jerk the trigger, but his finger didn’t respond. The instrument was so sharp that the pain held back, delaying, and then it came on all at once, an aftershock that forced his hand open. The gun dropped to the sand.
Gabe started to cry out but realized in the far edge of his mind that sometimes you can’t scream because you’re too busy dying.
The blade glimmered again in the sun.
Gabe pulled back just enough that the scalpel unzipped the skin horizontally across his forehead but missed the bone beneath. This time the pain was automatic, and so was the blood, rushing warmly into his eyes. He lost sight of the gun that could save him.
He wanted to tell someone he was sorry, but he didn’t know where to begin. There were too many people in need of an apology.
Turn your tears into water, and your rage into rain.
Maybe there was truth in that, even here where all the strings were unraveling. Gabe had one more chance to lunge and tackle this man, and that would be everything.
He threw himself up from the ground, yelling without meaning, arms reaching for whatever was in front of him.
Herboso kicked him in the face.
Just like that, Gabe was through. He landed on his back, bleeding everywhere, the stuff flowing down his face and into his mouth. Herboso struck again at the nearest target, which turned out to be Gabe’s knee, slicing open his pantleg and the flesh beneath it. Despite the blood in his throat, Gabe managed to scream. Hopefully Mira would hear that and have the sense to run. Take the damn four-wheeler, baby. Just run and be like me: don’t ever look back.
Herboso stood over him, his plastic overcoat smeared with the dried fluids of his victims. Apparently satisfied that Gabe had no more resistance left, he let his surgeon’s blade fall to the ground, bent over, and picked up the same gun he’d used to kill Eduardo, the one with the soiled shoulder strap and telescopic sight. The rifle’s bore was huge, the kind of thing used on safari. Gabe, blinking back the blood, understood the symmetry in going out the same way as the Midnight Messenger. He was trying to make himself think about something worthy here at the end, something profound, when he heard Ben say, incredibly, “I strongly suggest you drop that rifle, pilgrim.”
* * *
Ben Cable came upon the bogeyman. He reckoned the distance at thirty paces.
Hell. This was it. He had no weapon, not even so much as a good-sized rock to throw. All he had was a myth. Having delivered his best line, the only thing he could do was wait and see how it played out.
Slowly, as if his bones were powered by gears rather than sinew, the man looked away from where Gabe lay cut up on the ground at his feet. He turned his head, and Ben finally got a look into the abyss of his eyes. After all this, Ben wanted to see something there, an animal cunning, a gamey glimmer that at the very least revealed an undercurrent of sentience, but instead he saw only a descent and a sudden, dark ending. Like a desert hermit on a self-imposed fast, the man’s face had tightened around his cheeks and chin, his jawline too prominent to be healthy. It looked as if the desert had dried the moisture from his skin. Behind his thin lips, his teeth were even but discolored. Black hair hung without form on either side of his head. He wore some kind of see-through raincoat over a bedraggled military jacket. Breathing in and out of his mouth, he hooked his finger around the trigger.
Ben, in contrast, breathed easily. Sure, he would die here today, but when that son of a bitch took aim and laid him low, Gabe would have the chance to get up and attack. And so Ben found himself charmed, even in death, because he’d come to a place on Earth where nothing lived and still found a way to preserve life. In fact, now that he thought about it—
The man lifted his rifle and fired.
The echo of the shot carried across the desert floor, and Ben thought no more. Time did not slow down, as he might have written in his stories of Mars, but instead the impact against his forehead happened almost instantly, staggering him. He took a step backward and squeezed his eyes shut, aware of the pressure just above his eyebrow, waiting for it to become an explosion of pain.
It never did. Everything simply ended.
Ben fell.
* * *
The moment Gabe heard Ben’s voice, he knew the cagey old novelist was trying to give him an opening and would probably die because of it. Which meant Gabe owed him the courtesy of getting off the ground and doing something, even though he wanted nothing more than to remain here and let it be over. But there was the boy with the goddamn pinwheel, telling him he had to go.
Wiping an arm across his eyes to clear the blood, he rolled onto his stomach just as the rifle thundered.
Ben’s eyes closed. He stumbled backward and dropped. In that single instant, the grief arrived fully formed, forcing a ragged cry from Gabe’s throat. He was sorry for everything at once, for leading them all to this place, for not fighting hard enough. With tears clouding his vision, he pawed for the revolver with his right hand, his fingers slippery with blood. The thing weighed sixty pounds. He didn’t think he could lift it.
Herboso ejected the spent shell from his rifle. The brass casing flicked in the sunlight like a dragonfly.
Coughing on the blood that had drained into his mouth from the horizon line on his forehead, Gabe got to his knees. He supported one hand with the other, hoisted the gun point-blank at the man, and pulled the trigger.
The revolver’s cylinder spun. The hammer fell.
When the bullet discharged, the gun snapped upward in his hands and sent shock waves into his elbows and injured arm. The shot went between Herboso’s legs and lost itself as a reverberation in the distance.
Herboso, hissing through his teeth, rammed another round into the chamber.
Gabe fired again.
His quivering muscles, the blood on his palms and face, the fire burning from the scalpel’s work, the tears—these things defeated him, despite his proximity to his target. The bullet clipped Herboso in the arm, knocking his hand from the rifle.
Gabe’s body thrummed with recoil. Frantically he clenched the trigger a third time. The sound deafened him. The gun almost flew from his hand.
The bullet entered Herboso’s face just left of his nose, forming a black hole that quickly turned red. Undaunted by bone, the lead slug bored a tunnel and exited in a spray through his ear.
Unable to stop himself, Gabe let loose another round. It missed by half a meter.
And another.
The fifth shot took Herboso in the ribs. He said something Gabe couldn’t hear, saliva bubbling on his lips, then dropped the rifle and fluttered backward. One leg collapsed, then the other. He crumpled like something struck from above.
Gabe drew the trigger back again. Though the hammer lifted from its seat, he di
dn’t have the strength to complete the move. His hand felt broken. Maybe it was. The pistol again slipped from his grasp.
He wanted to fall right along with the gun, but he saw Ben’s body through the moisture in his eyes and forced himself forward on his hands and knees, spotting the earth with his blood as he moved. When he reached his friend, he toppled and hit the ground with his face, one arm across Ben’s chest. Behind him, Herboso bled out. The desert drank deeply until the man’s body offered nothing more.
Gabe lifted his head, sand clinging to his lips. Through the blood he stared at Ben’s face. The man looked no different dead than he had when he was alive.
I did this to you, Gabe thought. He’d led them all out here, and one of them had given his life for a cause that Gabe had never fully explained. Could he live with that forever? Or even for a single day?
He folded in on himself and gave the desert one more drink, this time with his tears.
And then Ben Cable sat up.
* * *
Ben came awake, forced to his senses by the throbbing in his head. It was the most devastating headache he’d ever experienced. When his eyes flashed open, a part of him expected to see the indescribable vista of the Other Side, the answer to the great riddle. Instead he saw Gabe staring at him with a look that Ben thought no less awestruck than Hamlet’s when he recognized the ghost of his dead father.
Ben touched his own forehead, felt a considerable knot, found no blood.
“Ben?”
He spent a moment processing what had happened. Why was he still alive? He’d been shot in the head and there was no blood. He’d been shot in the head and the bullet had bounced off.
He looked at the sky and laughed the laugh of the immortals.
Let the bullets come like the rain that would never fall on the Atacama. Let armies rush in waves bearing muskets and machine guns. They held no power over him.
He raised his arms. “Shit is holy!”
CHAPTER FORTY
“Tilanna emerged from the rubble of the Kanyri fortress,” Mira said as she passed between the tall rocks on the far side of the cemetery fence. “She counted herself blessed to be alive.”
“Not blessed,” Luke said. “Ben says on Mars you’re either lucky or your dead.”
“We need to hurry.” She took her brother’s hand and jogged through the obstructions, looking for her friends, hoping that they’d gotten lucky, too.
Luke pointed. “There!”
Mira darted between the boulders and saw Gabe on his back, Ben hovering over him.
She might have shouted Gabe’s name. She never knew for sure. But moments later she was on her knees beside him, and there was so much blood that he couldn’t be alive. A few feet away, the man in the too-big coat lay facedown, a red crater in the back of his head.
“Easy, sugar,” Ben said to her, wrapping strips of a torn shirt around Gabe’s hand. A similar bandage was already tied around his head. “He’s a little woozy, and he has a right to be, all things considered. But I reckon he’s going to live.”
This time Mira was sure of the sound she made, a startled gasp of relief. She bent down closer to Gabe’s face, forcing him to focus on her. “Gabriel? Sergio’s alive. He’s unconscious, but he seems to be breathing okay.”
Gabe nodded. “You all right?”
“Did we win?” Luke asked.
“I’m fine,” she told him. “We’re all fine.”
Gabe looked at Ben. “You want to tell me how you survived that?”
“Survived what?” Mira asked.
Gabe pointed to the swollen ridge above Ben’s eye. “He was shot.”
Ben smiled without saying a word.
Frowning at him, Gabe looked back at Mira. “Sergio?”
“We got here in time. He’s not hurt, at least not badly.”
Gabe pushed himself onto his elbows. “I want to see him.”
Ben lashed a knot behind Gabe’s knee. “Let me get these cuts covered first.”
“No. I’m all right. Just help me up.”
They got him to his feet. His skin was pale and his face smeared with his own blood, but Mira had never seen anyone more determined to move. She delayed him with a hand on his chest. “There’s something else.”
“What? What’s wrong?”
“There’s a man in there. Someone I think you’ll want to meet.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Come on. I’ll introduce you.”
Luke stayed with Ben as Mira retraced her steps. She heard him ask again if they’d won or if the dead man would rise up like a zombie, and in a dreamy sort of voice Ben replied that he wouldn’t be surprised if that happened, not surprised at all.
“So it’s over?” she asked, echoing her brother’s concern.
“Maybe.” Gabe coughed without covering his mouth. He limped heavily. “There’s a lot of bodies to be ID’d. And probably TV reporters. And cops.”
“Doesn’t seem so difficult, considering.” A true sense that it was finished still inched its way into her, slowly untightening the wires and giving her a bit more room to breathe. “You’re really okay? Your arm isn’t—”
“It’s fine.”
“Nothing I can do?”
“Well … right now a cup of coffee would be nice.”
“Personally I’m thinking more along the lines of tequila.”
His grin was faint, but Mira appreciated the effort.
“How about a cigarette?” she asked.
“Never again.”
“Okay, I’ve got another question.”
He tried to wipe the dirt from his mouth but ended up just streaking it across his chin. “Yeah?”
“Would you mind terribly if Tilanna, Amazon queen of Mars, held hands with you?”
Apparently he didn’t mind at all.
Mira laced her fingers in his and led him into the crypt to meet the man he’d saved.
* * *
Ben thrust his hands on his hips and looked at Luke. “Why are you grinning like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like the cat that ate the chocolate-covered canary.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means your sister and Sir Galahad just walked off into the sunset, the dead antichrist is lying in the dirt ten feet away, and you’re smiling like a Cheshire Cat who’s just smoked a doobie. What gives?”
“You’re alive.”
“I damn sure am, my young friend.”
“I did it.”
Ben’s eyebrows converged at the center of his forehead. “Say what?”
“You’re alive and I did it.”
“Did what?”
Luke spoke very slowly, as if addressing a simpleton, which Ben figured wasn’t far from the truth. “I told you. I saw his gun. Right there.” He pointed to the sepulcher, where, upon their arrival, he’d reported to Ben that he’d encountered the rifle.
“Yeah, I dig. Then old Lucifer there came to fetch his fire-stick, coldcocked you, and took off running with it.”
“But not before.” He smiled with all his teeth.
“Not before what, goddammit?”
“I put the pen in it.”
“Huh?”
“You dropped your pen back at the rocks. I picked it up. Then I put it in the gun.”
“Down the barrel?”
He nodded hugely.
“My pen? You shoved my pen into the rifle barrel?”
“It didn’t blow up like I thought it would. Like the Road Runner’s coyote. Boom. It didn’t do that. But it still worked.”
Ben, blinking, touched the tender spot on his head where the bullet had struck. He searched the ground, his eyes flying across the featureless soil …
An aluminum fragment the size of a matchstick lay a few feet away. And there, not far from that, was a more substantial shard, perhaps the very one that had struck him in the forehead.
“You gotta be shitting me.”
“I wouldn’t sh
it on you.”
Ben forgot about the corpse and the gunplay and everything else, seeking and finding a third piece, this one still bearing a bit of gold inlay. The heavy Montblanc had deflected the bullet. Son of a bitch.
He sank down on one knee.
“Ben? What’s the matter?”
Ben shook his head. After all this time, all these years …
“We’re still going to finish the story, right?” Luke asked.
The story. The story. Here he was, all juiced up about the thought of completing his bit of science fiction, when his life was turning out to be far more fantastical.
I put the pen in it. Incredible.
“I want to see what happens next,” Luke said.
Ben laughed. “Me, too, my friend.” He laughed again. When you thought about it, Mars was a damn funny place.
Cold, but damn funny.
EPILOGUE
Gabe stared at the man in the glass.
The face that looked back at him was that of John Kennedy, handsome, self-assured, haunted by the coarseness of the world. On second thought, the face belonged to James Brown, full of hard living, hard loving, and undeniable soul.
“Yo, dummy,” Gabe said to himself. “No more hiding in airport bathrooms.”
Luckily he was alone. He saw no puddles of pants beneath the stall doors. This gave him time for one more weird indulgence: he dug into his carry-on and brought out the mask.
Made of plastic and papier-mâché, the mask depicted a laughing Incan god, rainbows peeling back from his eyes and feathers sprouting from his chin. In an earlier age, shamans had worn accoutrements like this to honor their deities. Currently they were peddled for five U.S. dollars apiece by Santiago street merchants preying on sucker tourists.
Gabe held it before his face and gazed through the eyeholes at the mirror.
There.
The rare clarity of it nearly stole his breath. Every color sang. The curve of the cheeks, the radiance of the artificial smile—was this what it was like to see a face?
He lowered the mask, causing his reflection to retreat to anonymity.
“Good luck with the curse,” he said, repeating the next-to-last thing Fontecilla had said to him before finally signing the paper that permitted him to leave the country. Three weeks of debriefings and interviews had worn everyone like sandpaper on skin. With the exception of the tabloids, all parties involved just wanted it to end.
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