by Jeremy Brown
I pulled my knees into my chest and rolled toward him over my right shoulder.
The lookout came around with a long meat cleaver in one hand.
I rose, closed the distance before he could wind up and kicked him out the window. The candle went with him, leaving me in darkness. He hit the hard-packed road and didn’t bounce. The half-dozen men headed for the back of the building dodged away, pointed up at me, shouted, and ran for the front door.
I whirled around, looking for the top of the stairs so I could face them one at a time and found Marcela standing behind me.
“What the hell?”
“I’m not hiding in the jungle while you get butchered. How long until Rubin gets here?”
I listened for gunfire, bullhorns, authority. Heard feet stomping up rickety stairs.
“A while.”
“We can’t stay here,” she said.
“Nope.”
The building had no interior wall panels—just the soggy particle board tacked to the outside of crooked studs. I stuck my head out the window and glanced right. The next structure downhill had two levels as well, but the slope of the mountain put its flat roof level with our floor.
Wood splintered somewhere on the staircase. A man cursed. Metal clanged. Footsteps got closer.
I put a foot waist-high into the wall on the downhill side, sent a chunk of wood flying. Again, higher. Marcela joined me and kicked a large section, which hung like a loose tooth for a moment and then dropped. We squeezed between the studs, jumped to the next house, and kept going.
The roof was made of something spongy covered in tarpaper. It felt like running on a waterbed.
A man yelled behind us.
The next house was covered by a ragged tarp, sagging against the erratic framing beneath it like mummified skin over a twisted skeleton. We were both moving too fast to stop.
Someone landed on the roof behind us as we jumped.
Marcela spread her weight over four points of contact, her body making no sound when she lit upon the tarp. I crashed spread-eagle between two pipes, caught myself with my left arm and both knees against the steel tubing. The tarp purred along the frame, coming apart like a zipper.
Behind us, a man on the sloshy roof worked to keep his balance while he cocked an arm back, ready to throw a knife as big as his face.
“Drop!”
I shoved Marcela into the flapping tarp and followed, pulled my feet off the framing and used my left hand like a clamp on the pipe as I dropped so I wouldn’t land on her.
The pain of yanking my elbow straight made me scream, and I fell on her anyway. We landed in a tangle on a floor crowded with sour-smelling blankets and clothes.
“Up, up. They know we’re in here.”
We stood up into a web of rough hemp rope strung back and forth across the room. Sheets hung from it to create rippling walls. It was impossible to gauge the size or shape of the room. Red candles burned in the windows facing the street, so at least we had a shitty compass.
A man yelled from the uphill roof.
“Where is Rubin?” Marcela said.
“Not here. Not yet. Come on, we gotta move.”
I ripped the sheet next to us down.
Eye Patch was there, already swinging his machete.
I recoiled and felt the tip of the machete pluck the front of my shirt as it whickered past. The weight of the swing carried Eye Patch’s right arm across his body and I dove in behind it, elbowing him in his left eye hard enough to tilt him off his feet and ragdoll him into a pile of mismatched shoes.
Two more men stepped around him.
One had a short wooden club and the other had a meat hook.
They were both smiling.
That made three of us.
Four if you count Marcela’s grimace as a smile, which I do when it isn’t aimed at me.
She came from their right with a dank sheet and threw it in their faces. I ducked under a strand of clothesline, gauged the bulges of the man on the right, and punched where I figured his windpipe would be. He squawked in confirmation so I kicked him in the groin and smacked his screaming face away.
Marcela had the guy with the wooden club in a clinch, her right shoulder shoved into his right armpit so he couldn’t swing. He tried to shake her off once, then dropped the club from his right hand into his free left and cocked back for a nasty blow to her kidneys.
I snatched his wrist with my right hand and ripped his arm straight, pulling him and Marcela into a free fall, then dislocated his elbow over my knee. When she sprang away I stomped his neck and face until he stopped complaining.
Marcela pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Where is the one with the patch?”
I checked the pile of shoes.
Vacant.
“No!” Her eyes popped at something behind me.
I turned in quicksand and watched Eye Patch bring the machete down with both hands. I noticed his left eye was swollen shut, that whole side of his face puffed up like a sweaty cinnamon roll, and realized he was swinging blind.
It was a damn good guess—the blade was just a sliver as it came toward my forehead.
I dropped. Begged gravity to speed up for just a sec and pull me to the ground faster than usual. Marcela’s fingers scrabbled at my arm, trying to haul me out of the arc of the blade, but it was too late.
It came down, held firm in both of Eye Patch’s hands, his full weight behind the straight arms full of corded muscles until it hit the clothesline, hung frozen for a beat, then catapulted back over his head.
He staggered, his face a twisted mess of confusion and rage.
I grabbed the clothesline with both hands, ignoring the pain in my elbow, and lifted my feet of the floor. I planted them in his chest and shot him backward as the rope tore free of its anchors, clearly designed to hold a middleweight at best.
Eye Patch bounced off a wall and dropped the machete. He staggered forward, reached into his waistband, and pulled the Mac-10 out, no suppressor needed. He yelled something garbled and pulled the trigger, spraying the walls, roof, shoes, and two men at his feet.
I was behind him, curled over Marcela. I recalled Carrasco saying something about no guns but calling a time-out seemed petty.
The Mac-10 clicked.
My ears rang but I heard muffled voices on the uphill roof yelling, scrambling away. And I still had the clothesline in my hands.
I wound it around Eye Patch’s neck, once for each time I saw him at the Arcoverde Academy and each time he threatened to hurt Marcela, her family, her students. Added a half-dozen more for all the good times we’d had then shoved him out the window overlooking the street.
More anchors snapped loose, but eventually the weight was distributed evenly and the rest of the clothesline held. It trembled and jerked in time with the heels drumming against sheet metal somewhere near the first level.
Marcela blinked and took her hands away from her ears.
Men yelled on the tarpaper roof. Voices answered from below.
“We’re trapped,” she said.
“That’s their problem.”
I grabbed her hand, stepped to the window Eye Patch dangled from, and jumped.
The road had been just wide enough to let Carrasco’s Suburban squeak through with its mirrors folded back. The building across from us yawed into the street, cutting the distance to five feet.
Easy jump.
It was a one-story jumble of stacked cinderblocks with a sloped roof made of lumpy thatched grass. The slope ran downhill. In a heavy rain it would act like a waterslide, and as if to prove this the building adjacent was a washed-out pile of de-barked logs and frayed tarps.
Marcela touched down like a cat on the thatch. I did my best not to cave the roof in. We slid down the grass and dropped into the debris. Somehow nobody twisted an ankle.
Men ran around and cursed inside the building we’d left.
The tarpaper roof above it was empty.
Eye Patch hung against t
he wall of the building, his neck twice its usual length.
We ran away from the scene, away from the road, further into the twisted maze of the Axila da Serpente. Red candles danced from the windows as we passed. We didn’t worry about left or right—just tried to get distance between us and the hunters we knew were somewhere behind us.
We followed a wall made of ribbed sheet metal and came to a wide path that had been a road before the shanties and lean-tos crept inward from its edges like plaque in an artery, congesting any flow to single-file.
The cramped area was still.
It didn’t feel silent.
It felt coiled.
I peeked left around the corner—uphill—to see how far we’d gone. The Black House loomed, almost close enough to touch. We hadn’t even gone a Mayberry block.
Marcela leaned close to my ear. “What are we doing?”
“Hiding. Waiting.”
“For Rubin?”
I nodded.
“He is coming?”
Somewhere close, metal scraped against stone.
I pulled Marcela across the path through a doorway covered with a floral shower curtain. A man stood to our left, bent over a red candle to light the crumpled cigarette in his mouth. He leered at Marcela and squinted at me while reaching for the aluminum bat leaning near the doorway.
Where the hell were the guys who’d tapped the Suburban glass with just knuckles?
I smashed his face into the candle, cupped the back of his head and held it still so I could crush some knees into it. His legs gave out. I slammed his head against the windowsill on the way down. He fell into the corner. I hit him with the bat—awkward right-handed swings—until it splashed instead of thumped, then dropped the bat onto him and inched the shower curtain aside. I didn’t see anyone, but they were out there.
“Woody.”
“Huh.” I stepped around Marcela, looking for another exit. She caught my arm and pulled me around.
“What is this? Who are you?”
“What?”
She tilted her head toward the man in the corner but didn’t look at him. “He was out after the first knee. He—”
“Would have woken up pissed off with a good idea where we might be. He and the rest would kill me and drag you back to Carrasco. I had to put them down.”
She grabbed my face, looked into my eyes. “I know what this is. The times when I say I wish I’d known you longer, from when you were younger, so we could be together then and now. You tell me no, I would not have loved you then. I didn’t believe you. But this is what you were like then, isn’t it? Before Gil found you.”
I didn’t answer.
“But you were alone then. You aren’t anymore.”
“What do you think I’m fighting to protect?”
She nodded, tears in her eyes, and glanced at the mess in the corner. “But this . . . the men back there.”
I kissed her forehead and pulled her close.
Sad for her. Miserable.
But not sorry.
Because Rubin wasn’t coming, and Carrasco wasn’t the only one with a demon running around inside, chewing on the wiring.
We slipped out a window opposite the shower curtain into an alley so narrow I couldn’t turn around. No one had bothered to light any red candles. It smelled like wet shit and slimy fruit. Our shoes began to sink.
I had my left shoulder aimed downhill and started to slide, had to sidestep to keep from falling. Marcela had room to twirl and could have faced forward but the footing was better sideways.
Our feet slurped in and out of the muck. Weak starlight gave up somewhere in the ivy of wires and limp laundry hanging above us, leaving the bottom of the alley a well of dark blue shapes.
Waist-high lumps of garbage blocked the path ahead.
I reached a toe out, probing for solidity.
The lumps stood up.
Two men, waiting.
Quiet.
Professional.
They chose this spot knowing it was too narrow to run away.
Too tight for any weapons longer than a knife.
I realized it was also too cramped to turn and get my right arm forward.
They were both lean enough to square their shoulders, and they came forward with a strategy. One returned to a crouch, arms in front to absorb any knees or kicks. The other stood tall and reached over his buddy’s shoulders. They were like a locomotive of clutching hands in a black, stinking tunnel, and they were going to drive me back, wrap me up and take me down into the sludge.
After that it would probably get all stabby and chokey.
I shuffled uphill to control the distance.
Marcela pulled on my right arm.
Our feet slipped and the men followed. The only sounds they made were quick snorts of air.
There’s a reason most of my scars are on the front.
I’m just not good at retreating.
My left foot slid out and I dropped to my right knee. I shoved Marcela uphill, barely registered the sound of her running away.
The crouching man lunged.
I leaned back to make his body a blockade for the guy behind him, lifted my crooked left arm and caught his right thumb coming in and bent it flat. He hissed. His left hand found my face. Rough, calloused fingers scurried toward my eyes. I bit one hard enough to make it squirt.
With the broken thumb and gristly finger, I had both of his hands occupied.
He bit down on my left knuckles to get me to let go.
I did, then used that hand to fishhook his cheek and slam his head into the wall on the right. He sagged for a fraction and drove forward, forcing his shredded finger into the back of my throat.
I fell back.
The second guy reached down and grabbed my ears, pulled my head forward.
I started to choke on finger and blood.
They were too close to bring my foot up and push them away. I got a knee between me and the crouching one, tried to buck him but he brushed the knee off and shoved his gushing finger deeper.
The second man wrapped both hands behind my head and pulled.
I gagged and choked and willed my left arm to work, tried to find the eyeballs of the crouching man. He pinned my wrist between his head and shoulder, used the fingers of his right hand to cinch it there.
My eyes welled and I tasted copper and bile.
Like dying ought to taste.
My body jolted in spasm, some hard-wired response to suffocation designed to shake me free of whatever pinned me down, send me to the surface of flowing rapids, roll me out of the quicksand.
It didn’t work.
The two men snorted and grunted and watched me dying.
Some people don’t like the sound of aluminum bats. I happen to think it’s beautiful, especially when the bat is brought straight down in a two-handed swing onto the skull of a man focused on killing me.
Marcela had gone back for the bat, and now she put all of her hundred-plus-a-sandwich pounds behind it. It bounced off the standing guy’s head. His arms went stiff and his hands fell away.
She hit him again. It sounded squishier than the first blow.
He tilted back and disappeared.
The crouching man pulled his finger out of my throat, held both hands above his face for protection. I grabbed the front of his shirt and held him still for Marcela.
She smashed the bat through his hands into his upturned face.
Once was enough.
He sagged over my arm. I let him go.
Marcela pulled me out from under him, helped me up.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I spat blood and calluses. “Don’t apologize to them.”
“I’m not. I’m apologizing to you, for saying you didn’t have to do what you did to those men before. After these two . . . I see it now.”
“Oh. Accepted.”
“I don’t like it down here. The roofs were better.”
“Agreed.”
We stepped on the
bodies in search of higher ground.
The alley dumped into a roundish courtyard the size of a parking space and lined with mismatched lawn chairs. I didn’t want to meet anyone who spent a moment there relaxing.
Alleys led left and right. The ground was level, a plateau somewhere on the face of the mountain. We tried left—away from the road, I was almost sort of certain, but maybe not—and hit a dead-end within ten steps. There was nothing to climb that wouldn’t topple over.
The alley to the right took us along a hard dirt path between concrete walls adorned with graffiti and bullet holes. We dodged through a rank of fifty-five-gallon drums filled with stagnant rainwater and empty plastic bottles. A chest-high wall of paper concrete bags had been stacked and soaked in place to form a barricade against something. The paper was brittle and flaked under our hands as we climbed over.
The path ended on the other side of the barricade in a cramped space with high cinderblock walls. Empty black doorways led left, straight, right.
A man shouted somewhere ahead, or above. It could have been behind.
Marcela said, “Which way?”
I went through the door on the right and stepped out of the opening so I wouldn’t be a big fat silhouette to club.
The air was stale, dusty.
I tried the doorway straight ahead.
A slight breeze hit my face, carrying a scent so faint it might have come from the molecules already lodged in my nose.
I pulled Marcela close. “What do you smell?”
She inhaled. “Smoke. Candles.”
We took the door on the left. It was pitch-black inside. Marcela gripped the back of my shirt. Our shoes crunched grit against uneven concrete. Air pushed from somewhere ahead. I found a wall and felt along it to the right, expecting to touch sweaty, waiting flesh instead of cinderblock.
My fingers curled around a sharp corner.
A doorway.
Wind brushed my knuckles.
We went through the gap and found gray light spilling through another doorway on the right at the end of a short hallway. Our footsteps were much too loud as we approached. I turned the corner in a crouch, hands up and ready.
Marcela stepped next to me, searching for threats. When she saw the far side of the room she pulled up with a gasp.
