Border Crossings
Copyright 2010 © Michael Weems
Cover Photo Copyright 2010 © Michael Weems
Published by Michael Weems at Smashwords
All right reserved. No part of this may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Michael Weems.
The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference.
–Bess Myerson
Prologue
The afternoon lay quiet except for the crunch of dirt beneath tires on an old worn out trail. A white and green Ford Explorer bounced along the dirt road, kicking up the desert floor and scattering it to the wind. In the passenger seat a young man’s hazel eyes peered out from under the shadow of his green ball cap towards the searing sun. “Awful hot,” he said. It was more a premonition than a comment on the weather.
In the driver seat sat a squat man, brown-skinned with a wispy mustache that flickered with the air blowing in on high through the vents. He raced along the road with an eerie calm of someone right at home despite being so consistently close to a cataclysmic crash at any second, skipping and sliding the suv around each bend like a seasoned drift racer. He glanced down at the temperature gauge on the dashboard - Ninety-four degrees. It could be well over a hundred and fifty in a confined metal space, making it an oversized oven. “Yeah,” he agreed. “May already be dead.” He reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out a well-worn toothpick and placed it between his teeth as he continued slipping along.
In front of them, Guadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas at an elevation of 8,749 ft, rose up in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Before them lay the dirt road designated for four by four vehicles only, and somewhere out in the canyon region sat an abandoned metal trailer which had six young women locked inside and left for dead.
As they passed a campground sign the ranger in the passenger seat pulled the crudely drawn map from his shirt pocket, a fax they’d received not ten minutes ago. He matched up the line drawn on the map with a trail he saw ahead. “There,” he pointed. “That’s it.” The SUV made a sharp turn that sent him sloshing against the door while the driver barely shifted his weight. They turned on an offshoot where a sign that read “No Vehicles Beyond This Point” sat crooked on an old post protesting the trespass and a few of the park’s smaller inhabitants scurried out of the way of the charging Ford. A Gila monster sat flicking its tongue on a rock, curiously watching the great green and white beast roar past him.
They followed a trail along McKittrick Canyon just south of the New Mexico border. There lay the only natural source of water in the park in the form of a small creek on the Eastern side of the massif. After about a mile and a half they came to a ridge they followed until it ducked down into another miniature canyon. There, they saw the small pull-behind trailer, old and discolored, not much bigger than the discount economy size available at any local U-haul. The sun was glinting off the less worn parts of its metallic exterior and rust was eating at its joints. The SUV rolled to a halt, its catalytic converter crackling as though desperate for breath after the race it’d just run. The two rangers exited quickly, yet apprehensively. They’d found a dead hiker several months back and both knew now it took some roots under their feet when greeting death out in the desert heat. The combination of sight and smell the desert could render remains in just a short time could easily bowl over the unprepared.
And death’s handiwork there was. Before they even approached the trailer they saw their first victim. A man’s body lay stretched out on the ground, blood soaking his chest and iridescent green-bellied flies buzzing the newly dead flesh. The passenger approached but didn’t have to go far, “Oh, yeah, this one’s done,” he announced, seeing the man’s open eyes staring unnaturally at the blazing sun, a few flies licking the wetness of his pupils.
The driver took his toothpick out of his mouth and tucked it away. Shit, he muttered. It wasn’t a good sign for the rest of them. He headed to the back of the trailer, but there was a massive padlock securing the door. “Hey!” he called. “Anyone in there?” he asked loudly in Spanish. He rapped on the side of the trailer but heard nothing. Then he put his hand on the trailer door and was nearly burned by the heat. Chinga madre! he cursed. “Too late,” he told the other. “Like a hot grill.” He imagined what lay inside. Bodies littering the floor of the trailer like a remnant of the holocaust ovens, charred grotesquely like a cannibal’s memorial weekend barbecue celebration. He turned and headed back to the suv to call it in. As he did the other ranger strolled to the trailer and palmed the padlock, feeling its weight and heat.
“Can you believe this?” he asked. “What a terrible way to go. “ As he spoke he thought he heard a faint clunk from within the trailer. Then, from a small hole in the rust near the bottom, a finger poked out. It was painted in crimson from its tip down to where it disappeared within the crevice, and as it poked out the rusty edges of metal cut against it like tiny teeth. The ranger noticed that some of what he thought had been rust around the hole was instead dried blood, someone’s efforts to expand the tiny little opening with their fingers. Then a voice, if it could be called such, called out weakly.
“Hey!” he yelled excitedly. “Hey! They’re still alive,” he called to the other. “I got a finger over here.” He called to the people inside, “Hold on, we’re going to get you out!” He bent down quickly and touched the finger. It immediately curved and tried to grip him and he heard the faint sounds of someone trying to talk, though he could not make out the words. “I think maybe there’s some bolt cutters in the truck,” he told his partner.
“No, bolt cutters no good. Lock’s too thick.” The driver was now doing his best to run to the truck in an odd sort of gait from a hip that’d been a bit off most all his life, although he’d never bothered to get a medical opinion on the matter.
The other stayed holding to the finger and tried his best to say something helpful, “We’re going to get you out, just hold on.”
The driver returned from the Explorer with a shotgun. Besides buckshot, they had a box of deer slugs in the glove box, which he had loaded. He walked back towards the lock with a determined grimace, pushing the shuttle of the gun to place with its distinctive clicking.
“You think that’s a smart idea?” asked the other ranger.
He shrugged. “Better move on out of there.” In a loud voice he called out to those inside the trailer in Spanish, “Stand away from the door! I’m going to shoot the lock.” There was no response, but the finger retreated and he heard the faint sound of movement. He angled his shotgun down in such a way that it would only catch the lock and the very right edge of the door. Then he pulled the trigger and the shotgun let off a blast, which resounded off the rocks around them. In the distance the Gila monster retreated to a shadowy crevice. The lock thudded in its place but the ring of the loop unclasped, freeing the latch. He put down the shotgun and grabbed the handle of the doors, which was also burning hot, and swung them open.
A wave of heat poured out as though cracking open a broiler, followed by the sickening stench of urine, vomit, and skin that had begun to burn slowly against the metal. The ranger with the shotgun held his arm up to his nose in an effort to block the odor. His younger peer came around his side and his heart froze
a moment with what he saw. “Christ.”
Inside the trailer were six young women all lying next to each other. Their clothes had been stripped off in an apparent effort to cool themselves and spread out on the floor of the trailer in an attempt to provide some protection from the surface heat. The rangers could see some of them not only had heat blisters on their arms and faces, but burn marks on their arms from prolonged exposure to the metal. The walls of the trailer were covered in dings and dents and along the bottom edges where tiny pinpricks of light marking holes where the rust had eaten through the container were painted in blood. They had struggled against their prison before succumbing to the heat. The inside of the trailer looked like a trap in which the prey had flung itself against the walls over and over, beating itself with every effort of escape.
Two were undoubtedly dead, their faces sunken in and eyes staring forward in similar fashion as the corpse on the ground outside . . . the death stare looking beyond the mortal world. Three others lay completely motionless and the rangers didn’t know if they were alive or dead. The sixth and final, the only one conscious, peered at the rangers, her nude body withered and a greenish discoloration, drained of an unnatural amount of fluid. She had the skin appearance of an old woman and the gaunt and lethargic bend of an anorexic that had starved herself to the brink. Her arms were wrapped around one of the other girls. Her tortured hands, swollen and splayed awkwardly revealing dozens of cuts, rested on the other’s motionless chest. Her cracked and bleeding lips quivered as she tried to say something, “Water,” she managed to beg in her native tongue. The cooler outside air brushed against her face and she held her head up to its breeze as her eyes rolled back and she lost consciousness.
He sat in the parked car staring at the photograph in his hand, his right thumb circling the face. He’d been this way for several minutes now. Finally, he tucked it inside his shirt pocket and picked the gun up off the passenger seat. He opened the door and began walking down the darkened street, the gun held in his hand, tucked inside his sport’s coat pocket. He turned the corner and proceeded a few more blocks toward the neon sign. There in front of its red glow he waited in shadow.
The young men inside ordered another round, a pile of shot glasses already stacked on the bar. A couple in the corner watched them apprehensively until one of the men noticed them looking on, “You got a problem, puto?” he asked the man. The onlooker quickly looked away. “That’s what I thought. You look over here again and I’m going to come over there and cut your eyes out, ese. Maybe after I’ll take your hot girl right there for a ride, eh?” The couple quickly got up and left, leaving money on the table for their drinks with plenty of change to spare. The other men laughed at them.
“Later, puto,” one called after them.
“I’ll see you around, chica,” said the first man to the departing woman. The man outside watched the couple leave from his shadowy alcove. “Let’s get out of this shithole,” said the first man to the rest. “We can go to Maricel’s place and have her call up some friends. I want to get my dick wet.”
“Yeeaahh,” agreed the other as they all shuffled out without paying. The bartender knew better than to say anything.
They swaggered out into the night with hearty laughs, getting into a gray Chrysler 300, which stuck out like a sore thumb on the impoverished street in the darker side of Chetumal, Mexico. Its over-sized chrome wheels reflected the dilapidated storefronts condescendingly. As the driver put the key in the ignition, one of the others pointed out a man walking towards the car on the sidewalk. He stood some feet away but under the open sky’s light they could see something was distinctly off about the man. He was staring at the trio with a look of profound hatred. He wasn’t an intimidating size or build, but his gaze was so cold it was enough to falter the three men’s bravado. He stopped and stared at them. “Who the fuck is this guy?” one of them asked. They sat momentarily quieted by his unnerving demeanor but the moment passed quickly. They were not the type to be easily intimidated, particularly when there were three of them and one of anyone else. The driver began to roll down the window to shout to the man a threatening question of his intent there on the street, staring at them so brazenly, but what happened next happened quickly and the driver had just enough time to realize his fear was justified when he equally realized he’d discovered this fact too late. He opened his mouth to yell Oh, shit, but like a constipated marm the shit never came out.
Bullets did. The man on the street calmly raised his right arm; the barrel of a gun leveling itself with the man whose head was now halfway out of the window and whose lips were just in the O shape preparing for his last exclamation, when POP! His forehead caved in like Gallagher was in town and the bullet made a messy exit to the back seat where it found the rear passenger’s third rib. Before the other two had time to flee or reach guns of their own they had stashed in interesting places, the man opened fire again, his index finger pulling the trigger, releasing, and pulling again in a steady rhythm. He fired ten rounds, seven of which hit their mark of flesh, and those that were astray were not much so and would not have been so but for the flailing inside the Chrysler. Seconds later the men lay motionless in the car, blood splatter painted on the windows in a piece Pollack would have claimed proud. The man with the gun stood staring in anger, gun still raised, his hand shaking, but only slightly. He looked around to see who else was on the street and seen the massacre, but there was no one. The few people in the bar had heard the shots and didn’t dare come out to see what had happened. The bartender was inside, ducked down behind his counter, quickly dialing for the police with a twenty year old shotgun on his lap. A man in a nearby apartment had heard the shots and ran to close his window blinds, not even peeking at who was outside.
The man on the sidewalk lowered his weapon and looked down at the gun in his hand, pondering its meaning in this world. He’d been worried about how he’d feel afterward . . . about whether or not he could live with himself becoming something so similar to that which he claimed foe. Much to his relief, he felt right, though. There was no remorse. Perhaps that’d come tomorrow. Perhaps not. But for that moment he just felt right. Hell, who was he kidding? As he walked the darkened streets, disappearing back into the night, he had to admit killing them felt really fucking good.
Kelly slumped into the couch with her book bag and exhaled deeply. Kendra heard her from the kitchen and poked her head out. Just as she figured Kelly looked whipped.
“Test not go so well?”
She blew her platinum blond bangs out of her emerald-esque eyes. “He asked about shit we never talked about in class. I have my notebook right here,” she explained, as she unzipped her backpack and pulled out a large yellow binder, waving it as though it were the final rule of law on the matter. “Half the stuff he was asking about was stuff he specifically skipped. That’s just such crap.”
“Are you going to say anything?” Kendra knew Kelly was the type to say something.
“Oh, I asked him after the test.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said it was all out of the outline and just because he didn’t talk about it in class doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be on the test.”
Kendra went back into the kitchen and unscrewed the zinfandel. They’d given up trying to buy the stuff with a cork. By this point in their lives of educational co-habitation on a budget, they didn’t give a damn whether the wine was corked, screwed, or came out of a plastic baggy in a cardboard box for that matter. She brought Kelly a tall glass and said with as much empathy as she could muster. “Yeah, they’re dicks like that sometimes.”
She took the wine and leaned back in defeat, “I bombed it.”
“Oh, you always think you bombed it and you always end up with an A or B, so stop stressing.”
“No, I really think I bombed it. I literally don’t remember seeing half that stuff. I mean, I read it . . . some of it, at least . . . but Jesus! Who remembers the vague stuff from one chapter that he never
mentions in class. I went looking for one question afterward and it came from a footnote . . . a freaking footnote . . . on some chapter from like the third week. Who’s going to remember that?”
“Nobody,” said Kendra. “That’s the point. They always try to throw that stuff in there that nobody ever saw so it’s not too easy. They can’t have everyone acing their tests or they’ll get canned for being soft. So don’t worry about it. I guarantee you most of the class definitely didn’t read the assignments and if he didn’t talk about it they probably never saw it, unlike you who at least maybe saw it before but don’t remember it all now.” She lifted her own glass. “Here. Here’s to your last midterm and the start of our kick ass spring break. No more worrying about tests, no more cramming until two in the morning, and no more stressing about stuff that’s already behind us. It’s time to kick back, relax, and enjoy!”
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