by M C Rowley
I heard a gunshot.
Some of the kids screamed. Some laughed, hysterically.
I went to get up. There was no way a kid was getting a bullet for helping me. But the Barca boy pushed me. I looked back and his eyes met mine. They were serious and black. I nodded. And he nodded back.
I will save you from this, I thought. I will.
I turned back and kept crawling.
Another gunshot sounded.
I hurried, and through the little limbs I saw the walls of plaza buildings. And to the left, a passageway. I looked back at Barca Boy, and he smiled and nodded.
I picked up the pace and made it to the edge. I could hear adult voices hovering above the children; they were hunting me.
Rolling, I caught a glimpse of the passageway and I moved closer. Then more gunshots. And the PA system again, though I failed to make out its message.
I crawled until my elbows stung. And eventually I made it to the passageway entrance. I rolled to the side and out of sight of the plaza, then rose.
Gathering my wits, I glanced down the passageway and was met with blackness. The streetlights had dropped out and the street was a tunnel leading to a deep black hole.
I jogged into it.
Behind me the kids started screaming and laughing and making raucous noises. I sprinted.
I kept my gaze on the end of the passageway, a square of black. And the fading light from the plaza showing the way. And all of a sudden, the end came into view. Maybe twenty meters in front of me.
The exit.
And it was blocked.
By a cop.
Chapter Eleven
I froze.
The cop stood rigid.
His gun wasn’t drawn.
I looked back, and now the plaza from which I’d come was black.
I turned back to the cop, and he mumbled something I couldn’t hear.
He walked forward out of the shadows, and the dim light fell on his face, carving out his features.
It was Jairo.
My son.
He was haggard, though not as much as the last time I’d seen him. His beard was longer, but his hair was cropped short. He looked like me, which was what had struck me the first time I’d seen him. He looked respectable in the cop uniform. The crisp and thick blue cotton shirt, and the pants and the boots.
I wanted to hug him and I walked to him and he turned and ran. I followed him.
We crossed the street to an old, beaten-up Nissan Tsuru. Jairo got in and I followed suit.
The inside was sparse and old. The carpets had worn to a slick plastic-like finish and it smelled of old cigarettes. A little Virgin of Guadalupe swung from the rearview mirror.
“Let’s go.”
Jairo had a screwdriver jammed into the hole where the key should have been. He twisted it and the engine roared to life.
“Get behind,” he said. “And stay down.”
I did as my son ordered.
The back seats were relatively unused, although the floor where I huddled down was strewn with trash. Jairo slammed his foot down on the accelerator and the car jolted and we moved.
“Stay the fuck down,” he said. In English, with a thick accent.
I nodded, not that he could see it.
For the first five minutes, I guessed we were meandering through the streets of the town, up inclinations, down slopes, round curves.
Suddenly, there was a change of pace. I felt the gearbox argue back for a second as the accelerator forced the pistons into overdrive and we jolted forward. My head collided with the back of the passenger seat.
Then I heard the sirens behind us.
The car tilted and swerved and rocked on the ancient suspension as—I guessed—we reached the highway.
It was very dark. I realized that Jairo was driving without headlights, because there were no reflections, no illuminations except the faint glimmer of red and blue from behind.
“Get up,” Jairo shouted over the roar of the engine. I got up and clambered into the front seat.
We were gunning it down the narrow and unforgiving mountain road I had been on with the cops before my capture/rescue. The old motor was struggling under the strain Jairo was subjecting it to and we were jolted from left to right, front to back.
I turned and saw the cops behind us were losing the race. They were in a truck, from what I could make out from the headlights. Probably the standard Toyota the Municipals favored. We took another turn and the police truck came into view. Three guys in the back, guns raised. Three more in the cabin. We had the advantage.
I looked forward and saw the task Jairo was dealing with. No lights, just the black outlines of the banks at either side.
I looked at my son. His eyes were downcast and dark. He looked like a guy I would have crossed the street to avoid a year ago. His jaw clenched as he gripped the wheel like it held the secret of life.
“Here,” he said, chucking a pistol into my lap. “Shoot them.”
“I…never shot a gun. I don’t…”
“Shut up and do it.”
I looked down and picked up the black pistol. A Beretta? I couldn’t tell.
I said, “I’m serious. I don’t have a clue.”
Jairo huffed and grabbed the pistol back. He cocked it, and without taking his eyes off the road, threw it back to me.
“Solo apachuralo,” he said.
Just squeeze.
Simple.
He shouted, “Now!”
I didn’t ask anything more. I wound the window down and the warm night air rushed into the car. Going against every instinct in my body, I held the window ledge and hauled myself upward, and out. The wind was strong and my eyes immediately started streaming water. I looked back and saw the cop truck thundering along, about fifty meters behind, swerving slightly on the narrow track. I could make out the three guys standing, and the two figures in the front seats.
I couldn’t hold the gun with two hands. The wind would have pulled me out and onto the tarmac zooming past. So I gripped the top of the window with my left hand and held the pistol up with my right. I begged my hand to keep still, so I could place my line of vision down the shaft and shoot true. But that was ridiculous. Instead, my arm made a circle shape with a circumference of about fifty centimeters. It was pathetic. My finger gripped the trigger, but I couldn’t do it.
I breathed out. The sound of the two cars, theirs behind and ours underneath me, shattered what would have been the silence of the mountains, filling it with the roar of pistons and the squeal of fan belts and tires.
I tried to aim again. Willing my hand to keep still. But it was like writing a text message while blind drunk. Everything swirled and nothing centered.
“Damn it,” I said.
Then Jairo yelled from inside, mad as hell. “What are you waiting for?”
“Damn.”
I tried again and the gun swayed. The car hit a hole in the road, or something like a rock, and jolted up, and my left arm slammed into the window.
And the gun slipped from my grip and dropped to the whizzing blacktop below.
“Shit.”
Jairo heard me. He must have heard the gun bounce off the ground too. “Get down, you idiot,” he said. “Just get in.”
I followed his orders, like a naughty schoolboy. This kid, telling me off. For not shooting a gun? Damn it.
“Sorry,” I said. But Jairo ignored me.
Then bullets started hitting the back of our ride.
First, a rapid-fire burst. Twenty shots or maybe more. Then, many more. The back window shattered and the noise got louder. I held my head down and Jairo crouched at the wheel like a geriatric in a Rover.
“Not far now,” he said in Spanish. “I have an idea.”
The shots from behind continued. I thought about the gas tank. Would it explode like it did in movies? Surely not.
Suddenly, the bends in the road became tighter and Jairo began to brake with the gears, slamming the old gearshift into
second, and third, and back to second.
The shots from behind stopped, and I gripped the window part of the door as we rocketed along the jungle road, increasing the distance from the cop car with every curve.
“Get ready,” Jairo shouted above the roar of the engine and the wind. “Follow my lead.”
“What?” But there was no time. Jairo pulled over sharply, seemingly into the trees and undergrowth. But the ground was firm and flat. He killed the engine and slapped his hand down on my knee as I started to get out.
“Stop. Wait.”
I did.
I heard the cop car’s engine roaring behind us. Then the squeal of brakes and the unmistakable slam and crunch of metal hitting trees and dirt.
The same trap our SUV had succumbed to a little while ago.
We listened to the bang and crash and then silence. I could smell gasoline and burnt rubber.
“Let’s go,” said Jairo and got out of the car.
I followed, and we walked back out onto the road. The cop car was gone. Jairo turned left and we started down the bank of the sharp turn, and sure enough, I saw the yellow fire burning down below.
“Quick,” he said, jumping ahead of me down into the lower part. Then I recognized the area. It was the crash site where Luciana and I had gone down. The SUV had been taken away, but even in the dark, I recognized the clearing. We made it to the lower part and flat ground and walked to the burning cop car. The back was empty now, and a body lay right in our path. Jairo stooped down, undid the cop’s pistol, stood back up, and shot him in the head.
I shouted, “No!”
“Shut up,” said Jairo, before walking around the truck, finding another guy crawling and groaning, and shooting another round into this guy’s head. Then to the cab. Bang! Bang! Two more shots.
“Jairo,” I said. “Please, that’s not…”
But my son was possessed. He stalked to the other side, and I guessed he’d found his last target. Bang! Then all we could hear was the smoldering flames of the wreckage.
Jairo began rooting through the truck, throwing guns and handcuffs to the ground.
“Help me strip them,” he said.
“What? Why?”
But his stare told me to stay quiet and follow his order.
As we began tearing the shirt off the first dead cop, I looked at my son, his face illuminated in the orange light of the flames.
“Where are we going?”
“The Badland,” he said. “There’s someone you need to see.”
Chapter Twelve
I asked, “see who?”
But Jairo just stomped along the path ahead of me, the bundle of cop uniforms wrapped around at least five assault rifles over his right shoulder, swinging with his strides.
“Who?”
But he held his finger up in the air. I got the message. My own bundle, though significantly lighter than his, still warranted a good amount of attention while walking this land. The jungle path was beaten, sure, but vines and roots often rose up two feet in height. At least the moon was out and we could see pretty well.
“How far then?”
I got the finger once more.
We reached the edge of a canyon, with a crude rope bridge crossing it that resembled the losing entry in a Cub Scouts’ venture badge competition.
“We’re not crossing on that,” I said.
But Jairo didn’t care. “Hurry up,” he said.
“What is this place?”
“They call it La Tierra Mala,” he said.
The Badland.
“Like the national park?”
That was lost on Jairo. Instead, he stormed across the bridge. It spanned about a hundred meters, I reckoned, and the creaking sound did nothing to calm my nerves, so I kept talking as we walked.
“I was there before,” I said. “Back there where they crashed.”
Jairo said nothing, just kept walking. We were halfway across.
“We crashed too. And you knew it, didn’t you?”
Silence. We were only ten meters away from the other side.
“Didn’t you? What is this, Jairo? You think I don’t want answers? Using kids as a human shield back there in the town. Then you blow five cops’ brains out. You think I’m okay with this? You think I accept this? I’m your father!”
Jairo turned and dropped his bundle on the grass bank. He had reached the end. He squared up and walked to me. We were equal in height, but he was a lot more beefed-up. His face came right up to mine. His breath smelled metallic. He said nothing, just stared me down like a boxer at the weigh-in.
I stood my ground. But he made me feel uneasy, it was undeniable. He was like a phantom reflection in the mirror, like when you stared at yourself for too long as a kid and your features turned obscure and devil-like. His eyes burned into mine. I blinked and he turned back.
We left the bridge and landed on hard ground. Jairo rummaged in a bush to the side of the poles and drew out a machete. In two swings, he cut the rope bridge and it collapsed into the canyon below.
Then, silence.
We walked into the Badland. It was a village, with about fifty shacks and houses centered around a dirt path, from what I could make out. No one was around. Then came a shout.
“Jairo!”
We turned. A stocky man with one bad eye and a thick black-and-grey goatee beard approached us. I knew him.
The guy from the crash site.
“Jairo,” I said. “This is bad. Let’s go.”
But Jairo grinned—not at me, but at the approaching man—and hugged him.
The goatee man glanced at me, his face friendly for having seen Jairo. It was the first time I had seen my son smile.
“Jairo,” I said. “We have to go. These people are bad. I met him.”
“I told you there is someone you need to meet.”
“Him? You must be joking.”
Jairo’s smile dropped. “Not him. Follow me.”
We walked, me behind them, to a small shack made of concrete blocks. We entered a dark room where a laptop sat on a plastic party table, the kind they rented for parties and weddings. Jairo opened it up and tapped away for a few minutes.
I waited until Jairo beckoned me over.
I looked at the screen. It was a Skype call connecting.
Then the screen transformed into a live-feed VOIP call.
I was face to face with Eleanor.
Chapter Thirteen
“I’ll leave you two alone awhile,” said Jairo, stepping out of the door with the goatee man.
I barely heard him.
I could feel tears building up and I fought them back. I had to appear strong.
“Are you okay? Where are you? What’s happening?”
My wife smiled. She was in what looked like an austere motel room: dark-blue wallpaper with white framing, and cheap-curtained windows. The Wi-Fi connection wasn’t perfect, it kept jumping and stuttering, I guessed due to the small dongle this laptop was using. But to see her face filled me with hope and love.
“El,” I said. “Where are you?”
“Best I don’t say, Scotty. It’s not safe.”
“But—”
“Look, there isn’t too much time here. This connection is fine, but the longer we’re online, the longer they have to locate us. I’m stateside. That’s all I can say for now.”
“Stateside? Damn,” I said. Exhaustion hit me and I sat down on the plastic chair next to the table, looking at Eleanor´s face, wanting to touch her and kiss her.
“There’s so much to tell you,” said Eleanor. “I forgive you. I know what you tried to do, keeping Jairo quiet from me. It’s done now. He’s alive. And that’s the only thing that matters. You’re together too. Just like he promised me. He’s a real man, Scotty. A real man.”
I nodded. “He saved me,” I said.
She smiled again.
God, I missed her. Finding out a hope you’d thought extinguished still burned. I still had a chance to make it
. She was alive. That was all that counted. And seeing her brought back all of my intentions and motivation. I felt a new energy inside of me. I’d do whatever she said I had to do.
“Did Jairo tell you yet?”
“Tell me what?”
“Jairo whispered it to me back in Lujano. Before he escaped.”
“Whispered what?”
“We’re grandparents, Scotty.”
For a second, I left my body. The words didn’t sound like they were meant for me. Some sort of accident.
“What?”
“You have to get here, to the U.S. I don’t know how. Jairo too. But that’s what it all comes down to.”
“Wait. What?”
She beamed her smile again. “Sorry. It’s too much to take in. Jairo has a daughter. She’s here in the States somewhere.”
“Jesus, I didn’t—”
“I know,” she said. “Jairo’s girlfriend is called Vanessa. We don’t know what the girl is called. They left Mexico five years ago. Jairo sent them away, to be safe from the cartel.”
“I didn’t even think of it.”
Eleanor smiled, but then frowned. “Scotty, what happened to you?”
“Huh?”
“You look like dog shit.”
“Thanks,” I said, chuckling for the first time in what felt like years.
“I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just, you look like…I don’t know. Real bad.”
“Things here are out of control,” I said. “I was captured. By cops. At least I think they were cops. They drugged me. How long’s it been?”
I had forgotten to ask.
“Since when?”
“Since you left Mexico, since you—”
I didn’t need to finish the sentence. Eleanor had killed a man the last time I’d seen her, as well as finding out her abducted son was still alive and finally meeting him. Not exactly easy to forget. I had been in prison for four weeks. And we’d flown to Oaxaca the same day I escaped.
“Six weeks.”
