He answered with his hands, his mouth, and his body. They came together, hands fumbling for clothing, shortly naked. Ratatouille was an hour and fifty minutes, he knew from long, long experience. He wanted every minute of that time.
Epilogue:
The gringo looked soft and middle-aged. And dressed like a tourist, in jeans and a t-shirt. He labored his way up the road to the job site with a cloud of dust hanging about his head. José María Rivera mopped his face with his handkerchief and shouted at a couple of men with wheelbarrows to get back to work. He could see fifteen, twenty others who’d set down their shovels, picks, or wheelbarrows to watch the gringo.
“Busco trabajo,” the man said. I’m looking for work.
Rivera was six weeks behind schedule. His engineer had gone to Lima three weeks ago to get married, then never returned, and one of his surveyors had cut himself, developed tetanus, and was in the hospital. His work crews kept threatening to strike. Rivera didn’t need some pendejo—what, maybe a reporter?—slumming for a story about the terrible labor conditions in Peru.
“You’re kidding me. Look at you, gasping for air. What good can you possibly do me?”
“That’s just the altitude, I’ll adjust, and I’ll get in better physical shape.” His Spanish was very good. “I know how to build roads.”
“Yeah? You build a lot of roads in the United States?”
“I built roads that would make this one look like a child’s footpath.”
“That’s no good here,” Rivera said. “We work by muscle and sweat, not machinery. And up here, in the Andes, I lose men every month. These are men who know the mountains. They’ve been swinging a machete or a pickaxe since they were two years old. If it’s that dangerous for them, what’s it going to be like for a fat Norteamericano?”
“That doesn’t matter. A road is a road. I’m a civil engineer by training and I know everything there is to know about roads. Everything.”
“Yeah? Can you survey?”
“Of course.”
“Determine the property of a vertical curve?”
“Anything short of calculus I can do in my head,” the gringo said, and it did not come across as a boast.
“How about manage a work crew?”
“Any crew under me will get its work done in half the time.”
“We’ll see. What’s your name, gringo?”
“Call me Guillermo.”
“Funny name for a gringo.”
“I’m a funny sort of gringo.”
And Rivera would be buggered, but the gringo could work. Guillermo rose before the laborers and he did his calculations, graphs, and maps by kerosene lantern after the others had gone to their tents for the night. His work crews didn’t double their productivity, they tripled it. He took ten dollars a day in pay, but demanded a fifty percent pay raise for his laborers. Rivera gave it to them. Within two months, the road had stretched five miles toward the remote village of Santa Elena de las Montañas. Another three miles and the driving time from Cuzco would be cut from four hours to ninety minutes.
Guillermo himself never talked about his past. He ate by himself and when the other men got drunk to celebrate their paychecks, and someone pulled out a pan flute and another a guitar, the gringo would sit to one side, his mood as dark and brooding as the mountains that surrounded the camp. Sometimes Rivera overheard him muttering to himself in English. But when he worked, he seemed to forget his past and what had brought him to Peru and Rivera didn’t press him.
And then one day Guillermo didn’t come up the mountain with the rest of the crew. Rivera drove his pickup into camp, worried that the man was sick or injured, or perhaps had just tired of the job and moved on. The camp was above the tree line, tucked between the mountain and an outcrop of rock to provide protection from the wind. Guillermo had placed his tent outside the outcrop, behind a boulder. It gave him some of the same benefits with more isolation.
As soon as Rivera stepped around that boulder, he knew something was wrong. Guillermo’s tent flapped in the wind, its poles down. Papers blew over the edge of the mountain and his clothes lay in the dirt. Rivera approached the tent cautiously. The flysheet flapped up to reveal two protruding legs, one bent at an odd angle. And lots of blood.
Rivera would never learn who had tracked the gringo into the mountains to hack him to death with a machete. Guillermo had a fat wad of hundred dollar bills hidden in the lining of his sleeping bag, but the money was untouched. So were his other possessions. Someone had stripped the gringo’s shirt and carved the word “veganza”—revenge—into the man’s flesh. Most curiously, the killer had stuffed the heel end of a swim flipper into Guillermo’s mouth and there was a flexible black hose wrapped around his neck.
Rivera didn’t like what he’d discovered, but it was a lie to say that he felt more sorry for the gringo than for himself. He could not easily replace Guillermo’s skills, yet somehow, Rivera had to keep the project moving forward. And so he ordered his men to bury the gringo’s body and divided up the found American dollars to buy their silence. The last thing he could afford was the authorities driving out from Cuzco to look into the death of a foreigner.
Because Rivera still had a road to build. He thought Guillermo would understand.
-end-
Please continue reading for the author bio, discussion questions, and an excerpt from the sequel, The Devil's Peak, by Michael Wallace.
About the Author:
Michael Wallace has trekked across the Sahara on a camel, ridden an elephant through a tiger preserve in Southeast Asia, eaten fried guinea pig, and been licked on the head by a skunk. In a previous stage of life he programmed nuclear war simulations, smuggled refugees out of a war zone, and milked cobras for their venom. He speaks Spanish and French and grew up in a religious community in the desert. His suspense/thrillers include The Devil's Deep, State of Siege, Implant, and The Righteous, and he is also the author of collections of travel stories and fantasy books for children. His work has appeared in print more than a hundred times, including publication in markets such as The Atlantic and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He welcomes email from readers at [email protected].
Discussion Questions:
1. There may be thousands, if not tens of thousands of people around the world suffering from locked-in syndrome. The technology exists to identify and establish communication with these individuals, but there is no system in place to do so. What should be done to change this situation?
2. Michael Wallace has indicated that a past job at a care center for the developmentally disabled led him to write The Devil’s Deep. He speaks about the despair and joy that could be found in the work, as well as the frustration to be found in a system that gave lip service to the worth of human beings while treating staff like assembly-line workers and residents as factory product. And yet the system is enormously improved over that suffered by past generations. What else can or should be done to improve a system meant to care for people who cannot care for themselves?
3. A recurring element of Michael Wallace’s novels is the intensity of family bonds. In The Red Rooster, a young woman sacrifices everything to find her father in Occupied France. In The Righteous series, the characters of the polygamist enclave are sometimes related to each other in multiple ways. In The Devil’s Deep, a successful family hides a terrible secret. What is it about the family bond that can lead to both intense love and intense hatred?
Excerpt from The Devil's Peak, by Michael Wallace, available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble.
The Devil's Peak - Chapter One:
Zach Herring could name the trails as if they were past lovers: Cutter, Majesty, Fishhook, Lucy’s Couloir, Razorback, Miracle, Sloopy, Bloody Hollow, and Goose Egg. He had once figured there were 288 different ways to take those nine trails—hundreds more when you included the woods—and he’d taken every conceivable path from top to bottom. One thousand eight hundred forty seven vertical feet.
But he’d never s
kied Devil’s Peak in the dark.
The temp was falling fast when Zach came out of the warming hut. The lifts had stopped spinning at 4:00, and thirty-five minutes later he’d heard the crunch of ski patrol making its last pass. He had waited a full half hour more before he dared come out. Heart pounding, he searched the trail, glanced into the woods. Nobody there. First week in January and darkness came quickly, with visibility further diminished by the wind that scoured snow from the peaks.
Zach removed a glove, tucked his hand into his ski jacket to make sure it was still there, zipped into an interior pocket. He felt the hard plastic under his fingers. Dillon, you son of a bitch, he thought. Now I’ve got you.
He couldn’t ski down the center. Too easy and obvious. Maybe skier’s right? Wide, fast trails, and he heard ski guns roaring to cover trails before the busy weekend. Between the snowmaking and the wind, it would be a frigid white hell. He liked his odds in that direction. But even better was the double black diamond of Lucy’s Couloir to his left, and when he came out he could duck into Lucy’s Woods, come over the rocky ledge that would take him almost to the lower mountain. The trails opened up below the woods and he’d pick up speed. Not one skier in a hundred could keep up with him that way, but the woods had turned icy and only an idiot would ski through them alone and with this light. Either an idiot or a man with bigger fears than dangerous ski conditions.
Zach was turning onto the spur that led to the couloir when something caught his eye. He continued around the bend until he got to the flats in front of the chute, then glanced over his shoulder. A pair of skiers came in fast behind him. They wore red jackets with the double crosshatched mountains of the Devil’s Peak logo, as if they were ski patrol. But it was too late and too dark for ski patrol and they were moving to flank him. Zach pushed off with his poles as they arrived. He shot past the warning signs and into the couloir. The other skiers didn’t follow.
Lucy’s Couloir was shaped like a luge run, a steep, icy run flanked by granite on both sides. In the spring it turned into a series of cascades from melt-off. It was almost black in the twilight and he couldn’t see the rocky ledge that thrust from his left side like a giant’s fist. But he knew it was there and swiveled to the right before he slammed into it. A split second later and he launched from the chute.
A third skier waited at the bottom, where the trail curved to join Razorback, and this other man stuck out his pole as Zach emerged. If Zach had been skiing onto the trail it would have tangled his legs and he’d have taken a nasty fall. And then the man would have been on him, joined by the first two skiers now coming around the couloir on the easier way down from the peak. But Zach had only been crossing the trail to lose himself in the wooded slope on the other side. The pole missed. He shot into the woods. The other skiers followed.
Three? Who the hell were the other two?
One of the three had to be Dillon. Zach had the guy’s fake ski patrol badge zipped into the inner lining of his jacket. Evidence. The badge read Mike Jeffers, but that was bullshit. He’d grown a scraggly beard and buzzed his hair down, but it was the same guy from Colorado.
You pushed her. You son of a bitch, I saw it.
Zach could still see the terror on Rylie’s face. Her arms windmilled, she grabbed for Dillon, but her boyfriend pulled back. It might have been reflexive, except Zach had seen the push, knew Dillon wanted Rylie to fall.
What had they been doing with the safety bar up? It had been a bluebird day in late spring, and they were all sunburned. They’d been heading up for one last run and the lift was at least eighty feet above the ground as it crossed between the two highest towers on its climb to the summit. Soon it would be the end of the season and Zach didn’t know if Rylie and Dillon would be staying together. Rylie was going to Chile to train, but Dillon didn’t have the money or—let’s be honest—the skills to keep up.
He didn’t know why Dillon had done it. Maybe no reason. Maybe Rylie lifted the bar to mess with her bindings and he felt a sudden and irresistible urge to give her a shove. Or maybe he was pissed about the night before when she’d taken off her top in the hot tub in front of those guys from Austria and spent the next hour flirting with them. Maybe Dillon was brooding about the inevitable breakup at the end of the season. The guy was a sociopath, who could tell what he was thinking in there? But there was no question it was a push. Zach had turned in his chair at just that moment, seen the intent on his face. The look of terror and understanding in Rylie’s eyes.
And now Zach didn’t know what Dillon was doing in Upstate New York and didn’t care. What he had zipped into his pocket would put the bastard in prison.
But if Zach thought he’d lose them in the woods, he was wrong.
The other skiers were good. He didn’t look back, concentrating on avoiding the dark shadows of trees, but he could hear them coming. One of them was gaining. Zach had taken the thickest part of the woods, thinking there was no way they could follow him through, and now the guy on the right took advantage of the thinner glades to catch up and cut across Zach’s path. Whoever it was knew the mountain, maybe almost as well as he did. The man wore one of those mini-backpacks they used on ski patrol, with first-aid gear to help injured skiers. He couldn’t be Dillon. Then who?
The trees thinned. Another few hundred feet and he’d come onto Sloopy. That was a blue cruiser, wide and groomed. The blast from snow guns was closer now and a fine, crystalline haze filtered through the trees as the wind lifted some of it into the woods. If Zach could reach Sloopy first, he’d get enough speed that they’d never catch him before he was past the snowmaking and onto the groomers on the lower mountain. He’d ski right down to Devil’s Pub at the hotel.
Another skier came in on his left and the guy behind—had to be Dillon—was almost keeping up, too. The other three skiers couldn’t quite catch him, but they kept him funneled in. He couldn’t get right, like he needed to, in order to get onto Sloopy.
Zach hit a thin spot and his skis scraped over a tree root. A grunt and a snap of tree branches behind him. He glanced back to see that the man behind had taken a fall and was struggling to his feet. There was a ledge in front of Zach maybe three feet off the ground. He hit it, twisted mid-air, and came down short of a spruce the size and shape of a Christmas tree. Above him, one of the other skiers scraped to a halt at the top of the ledge and cursed.
Only the guy on the left to worry about now, and Zach was free to cut right. He hit the last ledge and burst onto Sloopy. It opened with an even, steep pitch. He’d made it through the trees, left two of his pursuers behind. The final skier was twenty feet behind, just coming out of the woods. Too late. Zach put his skis together and tucked down to pick up speed.
It was almost dark, and the path ahead was a gauntlet of snow guns on either side of the trail, further obscuring visibility. He didn’t see the rope.
It was the kind of rope they drew across a trail to close it for a race, or due to thin coverage. Except someone had pulled off the red warning flags that made it visible to a skier. Zach didn’t see the rope stretching across the trail until a split second before he hit. He stood to do a quick hockey stop. Not in time.
The rope caught him at the waist. He flew over the top, losing his poles. His head slammed into the ground.
Zach came to in excruciating pain. His helmet was off, two people dragged him by the arms. He screamed. His right arm was broken from the fall and one of the men had him by the wrist. He’d popped out of his bindings on the left ski side, but he still wore the right ski and he could tell at once that he’d torn the ACL on that side where the ski had levered his knee.
There were three of them and they’d stepped out of their skis and trudged through the snow in their boots. It was like a frigid blast furnace this close to the snow guns and the snow gathered in huge, heavy drifts. The two men had to heave and pull to get him across the snow.
The broken bones ground together in his wrist. “Oh god, please. Let me—ah! No, please.”
Once they had him to the side of the trail, they pulled off his gloves and coat. A wild hope rose in his chest. There had been a mistake. They’d meant to scare him and now that he was down, they’d check him for injuries, then get him down the mountain. But once they had his jacket and ski pants off, they tossed them back to the center of the trail, threw his gloves and helmet into the woods on the other side. The cold lanced through the pain. Snow cascaded from the nozzle over his head.
The third guy came over from the trail and he now groped through the pockets of the ski pants and coat. He pulled out the ID that Zach had tried to hide.
“I was right. Zach, old buddy, what were you thinking?” The voice was familiar, and so was the hard tone, even through the blast of the snow guns.
Zach gritted his teeth against the pain and the searing cold. “Come on man, I was curious. I don’t care what you’re doing, why would I? I’ve moved on, come on, leave me alone. I’ll forget all about this.”
“Sure you will. That’s why you stole the ID from my jacket, curiosity. Nothing else.”
“What are you going to do?”
But Dillon didn’t answer. Instead, he turned to the other two men. “Make sure he doesn’t crawl out of here.”
One of the other guys slipped out of his ski patrol backpack and removed a hammer, the kind used for tamping crampons into bare rock. He pulled it back over his shoulder. Zach cried out and tried to scramble back. The man swung.
The hammer caught his kneecap, now exposed except for his thermal underwear. Pain exploded in his knee. He screamed. Another blow, this one against the shin on his other leg.
“Tragic injuries,” Dillon said. “A bad ski fall. That’s what you get for skiing after hours in these conditions. Come on, let’s go. These guns will go all night. He’ll be ten feet under by morning.”
“But what about the cats?” one of the others asked as they snapped their boots into their skis and picked up their poles. “Aren’t they grooming this trail tomorrow?”
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