by Rob Bliss
“Paco, dude, be cool about this. I just want to make up my loss. I’ll pay you triple for it. You can dance with the bridesmaids—fuck all three if you want.”
The elevator lowered, setting Gord on the floor of the tunnel, then rose up to ground level. I stepped on and called to Gord to bring me down. Was Paco buying this? In a matter of seconds, Gord and I would both be in the tunnel, where we wanted to be in the first place. Was Paco stupider than I thought? He kept his gun trained on my head the whole way. I couldn’t see a thing and didn’t know I was underground except for a shiver of cold and echoes off rock. The platform abruptly halted. With hands held out in front of me, I felt only stone wall. Then Gord spoke and I turned toward the sound of his voice. I stepped off the platform. Gord grabbed my hand and pulled me away from the elevator shaft.
Paco bought it. Then he smartened up quickly. He swore a blue streak, telling us to get back into view. A storm of bullets crashed down the elevator hole, then Paco told us what he was going to do to our bellies, nice and slow.
I was being pulled into the darkness, stumbling, heard Gord’s voice tell me to get up. I followed him, feeling the cold air around me with my free hand until I felt a tower of sandbags.
His voice was close beside my ear, muted by the rock wall behind me and the sandbags in front. “Stay here,” he whispered. “Paco’s going to head down. I can’t believe he sent you down—he gets stupid when he’s really paranoid. But now we need him to open doors, to the gun room at least. I’m going under the stairs, try to get a lucky shot. You try to distract him if you can.”
I hissed out a whisper, “How? He can see in the dark! He’s gonna fucking kill us down here, Gordy! It’s a turkey shoot for him!”
“I don’t know…throw some bags of coke at him. I know this room well enough in the dark. Wait—I’ve got an idea.”
He put the gun in my hand, tore open the plastic covering the sandbags, grabbed a few from the top. His steps shuffled away, then I heard something soft hit steel, then another soft thud clang on metal stairs. He returned to get more.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m making a trail of cheese for the rat,” Gord giggled as he took down more coke bags. “He’s going to be so pissed when he sees his shipment scattered all over the place.” I heard a tear in one of the bags, then Gord’s nose snorted. “Help yourself. Better to die high.”
His steps shuffled off again and I heard more thuds. Then the muted voice of the demon, Paco, sounded from behind the door at the top of the steps. Gord rushed back to me, took the gun out of my shaking hands, rushed away. I pressed my back against the stone wall and sweated.
Steps up the metal stairs rang, a shot from the rifle hit stone and ricocheted, steps clattered down the stairs again.
Then I heard beeps, a click, then the door opened.
“You’re both fucking dead! No lights, eh? No problem. I spend every day down here, Gordy, it’s the back of my hand! My coke! You pieces of shit!”
The rifle blasted a stream of bullets into the pallets, sending up clouds of cocaine. You couldn’t help getting stoned just by inhaling the air. I figured Paco really hated us if he was okay with destroying his shipment.
Thinking of Gord—hopefully under the stairs, pointing his gun up, taking aim at Paco, waiting for the asshole to get in line for a good shot—I knew I had to help. I dug out a sandbag and lobbed it high over the pallet. Paco sprayed bullets, and maybe the bag burst but I couldn’t see.
“Hiding behind the coke like a fucking pussy?” Paco said, then laughed. “You’re trapped, bitches! You’re blind. Throw me another one—I’ll blow it out of the sky!”
I did as ordered. Paco must have felt the coke in his system, too. A coked-up psychopath was not a good beast with whom to go to war. But I dug another bag out and lobbed it over the pallets, braced my ears for the blast. Bullets ricocheted off the rock walls. Paco’s boots started forward, clanging on the staircase. Exactly what I was hoping for. I kept up the distraction, throwing more and more bags for the fool to shoot until his steps clanged down every stair and he was fully underground with us. Cursing me and Gord for making him shoot his coke.
Gord screamed.
Three bullets blasted and echoed, a spurt of rifle fire shot up into the cavern ceiling, a body thudded to the ground like the heaviest sandbag of all. Silence. I held up my next bag like a kid with a stuffed bear. Hugged it to my chest as I listened.
“He’s dead,” said a voice.
Took me a while to click in that it was Gord’s voice, not Paco’s.
“Chris, you can come out.”
Still holding the coke bag, I felt my way around the pallet into the open. The air smelled like a shitload of cocaine. I was getting higher with every breath.
“He’s dead?” my whisper asked.
“Yeah. His rifle fell at my feet. So did he. Looking through the scope now. Fuck, I made a mess of his head.”
“Where are you? I can’t see shit.”
“I see you. Just walk forward, a little to your right, almost there. Hi.”
Felt Gord’s hand grab my shoulder. Then he put a long gun into my hands. “Have a look.”
I felt the contours of the rifle, found the scope, held it up to my eye. Greenish-white clouds of dust roiled in the air. The sandbags on the pallets were eviscerated, spilling powder in streams. I revolved the rifle in a circle, caught a glimpse of Gord, the barrel hitting him in the side of the head.
“Easy with that, buddy. Look down.”
Paco lay face-down on the cavern floor. Well, not really—he didn’t have a face. Barely even a head. Chunks of, I guessed, skull and flesh and hair lay in scattered clumps around the stump of his neck, a pool of dark green pouring out across dirt and powder.
The scope fell from my eye.
“That’s fucked up,” I whispered.
“You distracted him good—he never looked under the stairs,” Gord said, slapping me on the shoulder and taking the rifle from my hands. My arms relaxed and I tried to get the image of the headless man out of my head.
“Follow behind me, hold onto my jacket, I’ll take it slow,” Gord instructed.
I clutched a fist of Gord’s jacket as he held the scope up to his eye and led us both up the stairs and through the door. Eventually, we made it into the gun room. Gord found a light and we squinted at the glare until our eyes adjusted.
The arsenal was impressive. Like a kid in a gun store, I looked at everything, wanting to play with it all. Then I asked a niggling question.
“Are we gonna need any of this?”
“Never know,” Gord said, taking down a machine gun, a rifle called an M-16 with a carrying strap attached to it, plus a few clips, stuffing them into his pockets. I’d seen most of the guns in movies, so they weren’t completely foreign to me. Then Gord took what looked like grenades, jammed them in pockets where they could fit. I copied him. Had no idea how to fire the gun and felt a little uncomfortable having explosives in my pockets.
He handed me a machete about three feet long in its own sheath, which had a strap that tightened around my waist. Took one himself. “Just in case of close combat.”
“Close combat with who?”
“Whom.”
“I’m the English geek, remember?”
“Never know who might be in the tunnel.”
Ah yes, and I had thought it would be just a walk in the park…or, in the tunnel. Silly me.
Gord handed me a pair of ugly goggles that had two lenses which tapered outward as cones. “Paco should’ve used these instead of having his eye trained through a scope. He’s lived in the woods too long.”
He told me they were infrared goggles. I strapped them onto my head. He showed me how the lenses hinged upward, and how to change the sight from night vision to regular vision.
“Won’t get too far into the tunnel without them.”
We were heavily armed. I felt like a soldier—me, a professor of literature. Living a new life. No one
back at the college would ever believe this—if I even got back there. I’d go out with a bang, that was for sure.
With goggles on, we went back down the steel staircase and into the green darkness. Stood facing the tunnel, cold air wafting over us.
“How far is it to Canada?” I asked.
“Not sure. But we probably have a bit of a walk ahead of us. Remember, though, it’s a walk to freedom.”
I looked at the gun in my hands. “You’re going to have to show me how to use this thing.”
Gord chuckled. But before he said a word, we both froze, thinking we heard something in the distance. Not down the tunnel but coming from the elevator shaft. He put a glowing green finger to his lips, and I followed him to the shaft. We stood and listened. Voices. A vehicle door closing. More doors. Laughter.
“Shit,” Gord whispered. “The family caught up to us. I’ll go upstairs to make sure. You stay down here, locked and loaded. Just aim and squeeze the trigger, the gun’ll do the rest.”
I felt cold from head to foot as I watched Gord be as quiet as possible climbing the stairs and vanishing through the door. I looked up the elevator shaft, listened. Could make out four distinct voices, but there could’ve been more. Wondered if any of them knew Paco’s place as well as Gord did, and if so, were they about to peer down into the dark shaft? Could they see in the dark?
Stones and dirt clattered down into the shaft and hit me. I bit my tongue and stepped off the elevator platform.
“I think there’s someone down there,” a voice said, then called down an echo, “Hello?”
I edged my goggles back up the shaft to see two faces looking down at me. Tightening my finger on the trigger, I raised the rifle barrel upward.
“Can’t see nothin’,” another voice said. “How far down is it?”
“Hell I know, I never do a pick-up. Can’t be far, I reckon’.”
“How you figure that?”
“I dunno. It’s hidden by this here shitter. Someone knocked it over, so I figure someone’s down there. Hey, Paco—you there? Gord with ya?”
The voices paused, listening. My throat was as thick as a tree trunk. Dirt and a good-sized rock fell down the shaft, clattering on the elevator.
“See? It don’t sound far down,” one voice said. “Drop yourself down there.”
“You drop down there; I’ll break my legs.”
“That’s ’cuz you’re so fat.”
“Fuck you. I’ll go down the other way, through the front door.”
“You shittin’ me? They ain’t gettin’ in that way. Paco’s always got it locked up tighter than a nun’s ginnie, with a ton of booby traps. Why’d you think he’s got this secret entrance? This is the only way in—I’ll put a pound of weed on it.”
“B.C. Gold—not your homegrown shit.”
“Fuck you, my shit’s good. But you’re on. Get your ass down there.”
Legs dangled into the shaft and I watched as one of them twisted his body, trying to get a good hold of the earthen ledge, his boot toes kicking more dirt down. I had to do something, or I’d have company. Aiming the rifle at the man, feeling the rifle stock against my shoulder, I breathed slowly. And pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. Pulled again. Cursed Gord in my head for not giving me a quick lesson. I figured the safety was on, but where on the damn gun was the safety?
While quickly scanning the gun with my goggles, I saw the controls of the elevator in my lenses. A light bulb went on in my head, then exploded. The man was dangling full-bodied down the shaft, his friend holding his wrists. They cursed each other. The dangling man was grunting and swearing, afraid to drop, but he knew he had to. Not knowing how far you have to fall makes the drop infinite.
The man dropped and landed on his ass, his head whipping backwards, smacking the wooden platform. An “Oof!” burst out of him. Moaning and swearing, he held his head and tried to get to his knees but was too dizzy. The other man called down to see if his friend was hurt, but the fallen man couldn’t talk coherently at first.
I took my chance. Grabbed the elevator controls and pushed the button that started the platform rising. The man glanced around in the dark, holding on all fours as he felt the wood shift under him.
“Yeah that’s it, bring the elevator up to me,” the voice above called.
“I ain’t doin’ it. I told you—someone’s down here!”
Before the platform could rise high enough into the shaft, the man rolled off the platform—whether by intent or accident, I didn’t know. He hit the earth hard, wind knocked out of him once again, but still tried to get his hands and knees under himself. He reminded me of a wounded spider.
I kept my thumb on the elevator button as I stared at the man. I knew I had to kill him. I told myself to bury my civilized morality and just find the safety on the gun. It was hard with only one hand holding and trying to inspect the details of the rifle. I figured it had to be close to the trigger guard.
Eyes between the man and the elevator, I felt my heart hammer. Sweat and salt wormed around my eyes. The man got to his feet, coughed and farted a few times, feet shuffling backwards until his back leaned against the rock wall. Breath heaving in and out, he held a hand to his sternum. Maybe a heart attack would kill him for me.
If not, he made a perfect target.
The elevator reached the top and stopped, sealing the tunnel. I heard gunfire distantly above me, up the shaft, someone in the trees. Then I heard screams in the other direction, up the stairs and into the house. Guns blasted and more people screamed.
With two hands on the rifle, my fingers searching for the safety, I heard a click.
“What the fuck?” the hyperventilating man said, peering into the dark. At me, but he didn’t know it.
At once, I raised the barrel and squeezed the trigger. The gun kicked me backwards onto my ass as bullets swept upward in a ragged line from the man’s crotch to his forehead. He fell onto his face at my feet. My arms shook and the universe stopped to catch its breath.
I had killed a man. For sure this time—not just a drug-induced dream.
I was in horrified awe and numb at the same time. I stared at the corpse for a long time until the sound of a banging door brought me back to the real world.
Gord dropped down the steel stairs two or three at a time.
“I got a few of the fuckers, and booby traps got some more. Dumbasses. There’s at least three more outside, but I locked up what I could, it’ll buy us some time. Oh shit…you got one too.”
He looked down at the dead man. I looked at him too, rifle relaxed in my hands.
“He dropped down,” I said in a cracking voice. “There’s another one up there, but I lifted the elevator, sealed him out.”
Gord glanced up the shaft, then at the dead man again. He smiled in the green light of the night vision.
“Good thinking. That’s the first man you ever killed, isn’t it?” I nodded. He patted my shoulder. “Good work. Semper Fi. Now let’s get the fuck out of here.”
I followed him out at a jog as we headed down the tunnel, trying to keep from thinking about the man I had killed—what this made me now—a killer, a murderer. Or, a soldier in a strange war, maybe? I ran for what seemed like a long time, not feeling any pain in my legs, running on stilts, the goggles bouncing on my face, the machete slapping against my thigh and knee, cocaine in my veins to kill all pain.
I slowed to a walk as Gord did. We caught out breaths, looked behind us and in front, seeing nothing but a green-dark tunnel.
“Those motherfuckers,” he heaved out between breaths. “The family doesn’t give up when they’re on the hunt.” He glanced at me and chuckled. “I guess you figured out how the gun works.”
“Took a while, but yeah.”
He looped an arm around my shoulders. “Well, you might have to use it again. Cross your fingers that you don’t. We got a head start so hopefully we can get to the end of the tunnel before they catch up. They’ll radio for reinforcem
ents most likely, now that a few of theirs are dead.”
I felt all the air go out of my lungs. I bent over at the waist and vomited a puddle of glowing green. Things were starting to hit me, adrenaline wearing off. I coughed and spat and puked a little more.
“You gonna be okay?” he asked. I nodded, unable to talk. “Take your time, but not too much. Can you walk and puke?”
I admitted to him, “I snorted a lot of coke while you were out of the truck…plus the air at the pallets was full of it.”
“Good boy, that’ll keep your head on straight.”
“No, I mean, I think that’s why I feel like shit.”
“Nah, that’s just from making your first kill. You still got the Black Betty in you.”
“That horse pill?”
“Yeah, it lasts for about five years or so.”
“Five years! What the hell is it?”
“Not sure. Secret family ingredients, they never told me. But you can snort tons of coke and just feel good and alert, not overdose.”
“For five years?”
“Why’d you think it was so damn big?”
Shuffling forward a few steps, I spat out the bile taste in my mouth. Inhaled and stood back straight, sucked in cool breaths, cleared my head. Nodded once, and Gord and I maintained a walking pace for a while.
I asked him about the gun in my hands, so he gave me a quick tutorial. Showed me where the safety was, how to lock and load, how many rounds it fired per second. I commented on how he sure knew a lot about guns. He replied that he had learned a lot of things since moving out west, and since he’d met Venus. She was a world of knowledge—possibly now lost for good. We didn’t talk about her much. I asked if he had ever killed another human being. His cryptic response was “Who hasn’t?” with a smile and a chuckle from the depths of his throat. He wouldn’t say more, and I didn’t ask for more details.
With rifle in hand and grenades swaying in my pockets, I felt like a soldier again. And it felt good. (Maybe it was partially to do with the coke, I had to admit.) Pushed away the professor side of me so that I could function, do what I had to do to survive. Must’ve gotten a second wave of coke to the brain, feeling blood speeding through my limbs, so I started jogging. Gord kept up. We didn’t sprint, paced ourselves, shoes scraping soil and stone, getting further into the tunnel. I flipped up the goggles to rest on my forehead, two optical horns, preferring the joy of the cold darkness, no green vision bouncing my path ahead, making me a little dizzy. I followed Gord by the sound of his steps for a while before putting the goggles back down to give me clear vision.
