Final Target

by John Gilstrap

  “Caregiver One, this is very important. Please ans—” The voice stopped very abruptly.

  As if someone had turned off the radio.

  Tomás’s hand shot to the pocket of his shorts where he’d put the flashlight Scorpion had given him. He clicked it on in time to see Gloria rolling over on her side, facing away from him.

  “Gloria!” he shouted. He’d wanted to startle her, and he had. He’d startled a lot of them, in fact. He rose to his feet and walked over to her. “Where is the radio?”

  “Go to sleep, Tomás,” she said.

  “Give it to me.”

  “I don’t have a radio,” she said.

  “You do,” he insisted. “I saw you turn it off.” That part was a lie, but she couldn’t know that for sure.

  Other kids had arisen, too, and were gathering around.

  Angela said, “Gloria, are you hiding the radio?”

  “Go back to sleep,” Gloria said. “All of you.”

  Tomás felt a flash of anger as he reached down and grabbed a handful of Gloria’s hair. She yelled as he lifted her by it.

  “How dare you!” she yelled. The rest of the children seemed unnerved. It was almost as if there were a vibration in the air. No one knew what to do, or even what they should do.

  “Scorpion told us that the only reason he would use the radio was if there was an emergency,” Tomás said.

  “I heard the radio, too,” Santiago said. “It was a lady’s voice. She was speaking English.”

  “She said, ‘Caregiver One,’” Tomás pressed. “That’s you. Now, give me the radio.”

  Gloria leapt to her feet. In the wash of the flashlight, her eyes looked wild. “This foolishness has to stop,” she said. “And it has to stop now.”

  “We’re going to America,” said a voice from the shadows.

  “Don’t be a fool!” Gloria snapped. “You are children. There are too many of us. If we try to cross the jungle, then we will all die.”

  “Damn you, Gloria. Give me the radio!” Tomás shouted.

  She moved away, taking two steps back.

  “You have no right,” Santiago said.

  Tomás balled his fist and swung at Gloria. She was half a head taller than he, but his fist caught the edge of her jaw.

  Her response came instantly: a backhand across his face that spun him sideways.

  “Stop it!” Angela yelled. “We cannot do this. We cannot fight among ourselves.”

  “She’s going to ruin everything!” Tomás yelled. “She’s going to get us all killed!”

  “I’m trying to save your lives!” Gloria insisted.

  “We’re already dead!” Tomás said. “We’ve been dead ever since we went to that awful place you called a school. We were all dead as soon as we allowed ourselves to become slaves to Alejandro Azul.”

  “He provides for you,” Gloria said.

  “He killed our families!” Santiago said. “How can you even think a kind thought about that murderer?”

  In the weird light of the flashlight, Gloria looked somehow inhuman. Her eyes were cast in shadow as her mouth and nose were brightly lit. She took another step back, and for an instant, it looked as if she was preparing to run. But she stopped.

  “Suppose I don’t want to go to America?” she said.

  “Then don’t,” Tomás replied without dropping a beat. “Stay here. Stay here and die. But give me the radio.”

  “Where will the little ones go?” Gloria asked. “Who will take care of them?”

  “People who won’t burn other people alive,” Tomás said. “Scorpion said that he would only call if there was a change in plans. I need to know what that change is. Now, give me the radio. Please.”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing,” Gloria said.

  “And I think I do.”

  After a long hesitation, Gloria’s shoulders sagged. Even in the dim light, it looked like the posture of surrender. Tomás watched her carefully as she eased her hand into the front pocket of her cutoff denim shorts. When her hand emerged, the little black radio was clutched in her fist.

  “Thank you,” Tomás said.

  As he reached for the radio, Gloria smiled, then threw it down on the cave’s floor, where it shattered against a rock.

  * * *

  “Why can’t they just call us so we can get this over with?” Jesse thought aloud.

  Davey sat in a thinly padded dining-room chair, which he’d leaned against the wall. With his feet up and his ankles crossed on the scratched and worn dining table, he’d created what looked to be a perfectly balanced rocker. For all Jesse knew, his old man was asleep. How could he do that?

  It had been hours since they’d arrived, and all that time, Jesse hadn’t been able to settle down. He’d cooked up some canned spaghetti he’d found in one of the aqua-colored metal cabinets in the kitchen, but he’d been unable to summon an appetite. Just as well, he supposed, since Davey scarfed down both portions.

  “I told you, you should have joined the military,” Davey said without opening his eyes. His fingers were laced together across his chest, and he looked as comfortable as Jesse had ever seen him. “One of the most important skills you learn is to wait. I figure that was Uncle Sam’s way of inspiring you to fight. There comes a point where even dying would be better than the boredom of the wait. At least dying is interesting.”

  “I hope speeches like that were not how you inspired your men,” Jesse said.

  “My men didn’t need to be inspired,” Davey said. “They were too busy being scared of me.” He opened his eyes and scowled. “How come you were never scared of me?”

  Jesse rolled his eyes and chuckled. “I’m not sure this is the best time to explore parenting issues,” he said.

  “You got someplace else to be?”

  “I just don’t think we need to be distracted.”

  “So, that pacing thing you’re doing,” Davey said, making a little swirling motion with his finger. “That’s workin’ good for you, is it?”

  Jesse sighed. “There’s not a lot to be afraid of when there are no expectations put on you.”

  “I had expectations of you,” Davey said.

  Even as Jesse felt himself being drawn into the well, he tried to pull back. “You did not,” he said. “You had expectations of the families you pushed me off to. You wanted them to make sure I went to school and didn’t do stupid stuff. You wanted them to make sure I got fed. But the only expectation of me was to be there when you got home, and to be a good son for the time you were there.”

  The phone rang with the sound of chirping birds, and it startled Jesse. “Hello?”

  The other end was silent. He knew the line was open, but whoever was on the other end wasn’t saying anything.

  “That’s not how you were supposed to answer,” Davey said. He’d closed his eyes again.

  “Oh, yeah,” Jesse said. “Torpedo.”

  “Nice to talk to you again,” said Mother Hen’s friendly and familiar voice. “Are you ready to continue your adventure?”

  Jesse pressed the button to put the call on speaker so Davey could hear it, too. “We’re both here, and we’re both ready,” he said.

  “Are you ready to copy down some information?”

  Jesse hovered a pen over the wire-ringed notebook that had been left for them on the dining table. “Let ’er rip.”

  “I’m going to give you the pickup locations both as addresses and as grid points,” she said, and then she did. “Time is really of the essence here,” she went on. “No dawdling. Once you pick up your package, you need to move without delay to the exfil site. Things are moving more quickly than we had anticipated.”

  “That means that things are going to shit, am I right?” Davey asked in a voice loud enough to be picked up.

  A beat. “Something like that, yes,” Mother Hen said.

  “And if things go south for us, is there a slingshot or a sharp stick we can use to defend ourselves?”

  Anoth
er beat. “I presume from your question that you have not yet looked in the back of your vehicle.”

  Jesse clicked off and led Davey out of the main body of the house—if that was even what you could call it—into the garage. Not surprisingly, the Toyota hadn’t moved.

  “I thought you said you searched the car,” Davey said.

  “You watched me do it,” Jesse replied.

  Then they got it in unison. “The trunk!”

  Jesse lifted the keys from where they lay on the driver’s seat and handed them to his father. “I’ll let you open it, Davey.”

  “In case it’s booby-trapped?” Davey asked.

  “Yep.”

  Jesse stayed with him as he moved to the rear, slipped the key into the lock, and turned it.

  “Well, how about that?” Davey asked no one in particular as the lid rose. He hooked a black ballistic vest with his finger and lifted it for Jesse to see. “This means that they definitely expect us to get shot at.” He reached back into the trunk and retrieved a black rifle that looked a lot like the ones that the television newsies back home wanted to outlaw. “But at least we can shoot back.”

  Jesse’s stomach flopped. Just how dangerous was this mission going to be?

  “Are you missing the scrap yard yet?” Davey asked with a chuckle.

  “No,” Jesse replied. His answer came easily and honestly. “And I don’t miss jail, either.” What he didn’t say, in part because he couldn’t gather and organize the thought in an articulable form at that moment, was that he felt 100 percent alive for the first time in too many years.

  “Do you think we need those now?” Jesse asked.

  “I hope we don’t need them at all,” Davey replied. “But I don’t think we’ve arrived to the shit-hits-the-fan moment quite yet. I expect that will come later.”

  “Just so you know, I don’t think I can shoot anyone,” Jesse said. “You can take them.”

  “There’s two of each,” Davey said, and he returned the items to the trunk. When he straightened, he regarded his son for the better part of ten seconds. Then he grinned. “You know, kid, I’d be disappointed as shit if you thought you could shoot somebody. Now, let me tell you something. Most of the fiercest warriors I ever met said the same thing, until some zipperhead took a shot at him.” He smacked Jesse’s shoulder and closed the trunk. “Now, let’s go steal a boat.”

  * * *

  Tomás felt rage at a magnitude he hadn’t experienced since he watched the slaughter of his family. He stared at the shattered radio for a few seconds, and then he turned and grabbed his rifle. He knew that there was already a round in the chamber, so when he thumbed the safety to the fire position and leveled the rifle at Gloria’s face, he knew that he would kill her.

  “No!” The others yelled it at once, in a unison chorus. They all spread out.

  For her part, Gloria just stared, as if daring him to shoot. Or perhaps as if begging him to shoot. At this range, he couldn’t miss. He inserted his finger into the trigger guard, and he felt the metal of the trigger against the flesh of his fingertip.

  It was difficult to tell in the darkness, but he didn’t think that the others had snatched up their guns to shoot him, so that had to mean that they supported his decision to shoot Gloria, right? All it would take would be a few pounds of pressure.

  He’d begun to press the trigger when Angela’s face appeared in front of the muzzle. “Please don’t shoot me,” she said.

  Tomás’s heart skipped at the sight of her, and he broke his aim, pointing the muzzle at the ceiling. “Are you crazy?” he shouted.

  “You don’t want to do this,” Angela said. “Gloria has done nothing to you. You can’t kill her.”

  “She killed us all,” Tomás said. “That radio was our only contact with Scorpion.”

  “He said he was coming back for us,” Angela said. Her tone was soothing, her voice soft.

  Tomás knew she was doing that deliberately to calm him down, and on some level he was grateful. He rocked the lever back to safe. “He told us that he would contact us via radio if there was a change in the plan,” he said. “That means he’s not coming back.”

  “You don’t know that,” said Santiago.

  “Maybe it was just changing the time of the pickup,” Angela said.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Tomás said. “Was he afraid that we might have someplace else to go?”

  “What’s ridiculous,” Gloria said, “is the thought of you doing anything—”

  “Quiet, Gloria,” Tomás said. “They’re not coming back. They’re going to the secondary pickup point.”

  “Where is that?” Angela asked.

  “South Road, at the water tower,” Tomás said as he pulled his folded, wet map from the back pocket of his shorts.

  “You’ll never make that trip. Not at night,” Gloria said.

  Tomás ignored her, and he noted silently that the other kids he could see did the same. He dropped to his knees and spread the map out on the rocky floor of the cave. He set his flashlight on the floor next to it so that the beam spilled across it like a brilliant white triangle.

  “They told me before they left,” Tomás explained. “They knew I know how to read a map, and they told me where we would have to go if, for some reason, they couldn’t make it all the way back here. That’s why they left the radio behind in the first place. In case they needed to tell us of the change in plans.” He shined the light in Gloria’s face. “You were there, too. Tell them.”

  “I never heard any such thing,” Gloria said. She didn’t even bother to look away from the blinding light.

  “She’s lying,” Tomás said. “I don’t know why, but she is.”

  “Why should we believe you?” asked Leo, the youngest of the group.

  Tomás directed the light at him. “Okay, Leo, here’s the truth,” Tomás said. “I don’t care if you don’t believe me. I’m not trying to sell you on anything except maybe having the chance to live longer.”

  “You just want to go to the United States,” said Renata, the youngest of the girls, who apparently felt empowered by the words of another kid of her age.

  “Yes, I do,” Tomás said. “More than anything else. And that doesn’t change anything.” He went back to his map. He found the mark that showed where they were among the caves, and then he found the other mark made by Scorpion that showed the secondary exfil location. Those were the words Scorpion had used.

  “We can do this,” Tomás said. “It’s only a little over two kilometers. South-southwest from here.”

  “In the dark,” Gloria said. “That is madness.”

  Tomás folded the map and stood. “We’ll leave you with the candle, Gloria, so you’re not in total darkness.” He turned to the others. “If you have a gun, pick it up and let’s go.”

  “If it’s only two kilometers, why don’t they come and get us?” someone asked from the shadows.

  “That makes it almost five kilometers for them. Twice the distance and twice the time on bad roads. Or maybe they have to hide.” Tomás looked at the others as he slung his M4 across the front of his body, the way that Scorpion and Big Guy carried theirs. “Who’s coming with me?”

  “Don’t be foolish,” Gloria said. “You’re going to get killed if you go with him.”

  Tomás saw the hesitation in the others. They all stood in the dim light, unmoving. This was looking more and more like he was going on a lonely trip.

  “Look,” Tomás said. “Gloria’s right. If you come with me, it will be a dangerous trip. The Jungle Tigers want to kill Scorpion and everybody who’s with him. You all know what staying here means, and I can’t promise you anything except a chance for something different.”

  As he spoke, he scanned his audience with the beam of his flashlight, making sure to keep the halo of light below their eyes so they would not be blinded. “All I know is that if I stay here, I will die young and poor. If I can make it to America, I will have a chance at something better. It migh
t not happen, but at least there’ll be a chance.”

  He let the words hang. Finally, he said, “Is anyone coming with me?”

  Angela stepped forward. “I am,” she said.

  Sophia was next, followed by Santiago, Diego, and Renata, and finally by Leo. Each of them carried a rifle, either in hand or slung.

  “Do you all know about the safety switch?” Tomás asked. He held his M4 in such a way that he could shine his flashlight on the selector switch and demonstrate its operation. “Make sure it is always set to safe unless you’re ready to fire.”

  “Big Guy already taught us,” Renata said.

  “That was before I was in charge,” Tomás said.

  Each of them demonstrated the use of the selector while Tomás watched.

  “I’m scared,” Leo said.

  Tomás made a point of smiling when he said, “You stay with Miss Gloria. She’ll take good care of you.”

  Gloria seemed appreciative. “I wish I could talk you out of this,” she said.

  “No,” Leo said. “I don’t want to stay. I want to go to America, too.”

  And that was unanimous. Tomás’s army of children was complete. “Good-bye, Gloria,” Tomás said.

  She took a step forward. “I will come along, then.”

  Tomás froze her in place with a forefinger thrust out inches from her nose. “No, you won’t,” Tomás said. “You’ll stay here with your candle and your broken radio and whatever Alejandro Azul has in store for you. But listen to this, you bitch. You don’t ever want to see me again. Ever.”

  He turned to the other children. “Come,” he said. “She’s done with us.”

  Tomás led the way without looking back. If they followed, they followed. He’d barely started his climb up the rocky steps when he felt a hand on his ankle. He looked down to see Angela staring up at him.

  “I’m with you every step,” she said.

  CHAPTER 30

  “I gnacio Flores is on the telephone for you,” Orlando Azul said to his cousin. He held Alejandro’s cell phone tightly in both hands, as if making a special effort to prevent his words from being overheard. The phone was one that rarely rang. An old-school flip phone, it was Alejandro Azul’s most private line, the number known by only a handful of people.