“Sure,” Ramón said, then fought to inhale. “You know what? Ramón?”
“What?”
Ramón wheezed out a laugh.
“You don’t like yourself very much.”
Time took the strangely powerless and dreamlike slowness that accompanies moments of horror and trauma. Ramón took pleasure in tracking the reactions as they made their way across the man’s face; surprise followed by confusion, confusion by embarrassment, embarrassment by a rage that towered over Ramón like summer thunderheads dwarfed the mountains, and all of it in less than two beats of his racing heart. The blade drew back, prepared for the strike that would open Ramón’s throat. As he raised his arms against it, Ramón thought of the marks on bones and skin that came from dying men’s attempts to fend off steel with flesh; this was how those marks were made and there was nothing more he could do now than show whatever imagined coroner ever looked over his mortal remains that he’d put up Hell’s own fight.
Ramón was screaming, pure animal rage drowning out fear and the hopelessness of his effort, when the loose vine reared up from the water like a pale serpent; wires sparking and hissing in the place where its head would have been.
The man jumped back. The killing stroke became an awkward parry as the sahael lunged at him. Ramón rolled until he was almost at the raft’s edge, then looked up.
The sahael had wrapped itself twice around his twin’s leg, once around his belly, and was pressing its maw toward the man’s neck. Ramón’s twin had both hands gripping the sahael, struggling to hold it away from himself. The muscles in the man’s arms were bulging and quivering; Ramón half expected to hear the bones snap under the strain. It only took a moment to realize that if the man had both hands on his new attacker, he must have dropped the knife.
Yes, there. In the ruins of the lean-to, the blade caught the flash of lightning, and before the thunder could crackle and detonate, Ramón was scrambling forward, hand outstretched. The worn leather grip felt warm in his palm.
The man was shrieking something, the same syllables over and over. It took Ramón a moment to realize that he was saying kill it kill it kill it kill it. He didn’t pause to think, he simply moved, his body knowing what it intended. He lunged forward, the knife in his right hand, and punched it hard into the man’s belly. Then twice more, to be sure. They were pushed together like lovers before Ramón pulled himself away, the man’s bearded cheek rasping against his own, the man’s breath panting against his face, rich with the earthy smell of decay. For a second, he could feel the man’s heart hammering against his own breast. Then he stepped back. The man’s face had gone white, his eyes as round as coins. That same look of surprise on his face, the look he’d seen on the European’s face; this can’t be happening to me, not to me. The sahael, as if repelled by the blood, dropped from Ramón’s twin to land in a coil at their feet.
“Pinche puto,” the man said and dropped to his knees. The raft shuddered. Sheeting rain mixed with the blood pouring down the man’s face, belly, and legs. Ramón stepped back and squatted. The sahael shifted, as if considering each of them in turn, but it made no move to attack. “You’re not me,” the man gasped. “You’re never going to be me! You’re a fucking monster.”
Ramón shrugged, not arguing. “You got anything else you want to say? Talk quick.”
His twin blinked as if he was crying, but who could see tears in all the rain?
“I don’t want to die!” the other whispered. “Please Jesus, I don’t want to die!”
“No one does,” Ramón said gently.
His twin’s face shifted, hardened. He gathered himself, raised himself up a bit, and spat full in Ramón’s face.
“Fuck you, asshole!” the other rasped. “Tell them I died like a man!”
“Better you than me, cabrón,” Ramón said, ignoring the spittle running down his face.
Chapter 24
Ramón’s twin sank down, his eyes focused on the angels, or on whatever it was dying men saw; something Ramón couldn’t see, anyway. His mouth went slack, and blood rushed through his lips and down over his chin.
Was there the faintest of tugs as the other died, as whatever bond was between them broke? Or was it just his imagination? It was impossible to say.
Ramón rolled the body to the edge of the raft and pushed it into the water. His twin’s corpse bobbed once, twice, and then slid beneath the water. He wiped the dead man’s spit from his face with the back of his palm.
The storm was pushing the little raft one way and then another, and Ramón couldn’t say how much of his nausea was from the unpredictable spinning and shudders of the craft, how much from the death of his other self, and how much from the loss of his own blood. The sahael snaked across the raft, its pale flesh reminding Ramón of a worm now more than a snake. Its wires sparked, but did not turn to him.
“We got a problem, you and me?” he asked, but the alien thing didn’t respond. He hadn’t known that Maneck could send the sahael out to operate on its own; or perhaps Maneck was controlling it from a distance somehow. Either way, it was more versatile than he’d thought. Maneck must have launched it after them as soon as he’d freed the chupacabra from it.
Ramón let out a long sigh and considered his wounds. The cut across his side was serious, but it hadn’t gone so deep that he had to worry about a collapsed lung. That was good. His leg, he discovered, had also been pierced at some point. He remembered something from the beginning of the fight. It was a little hard to recall the details. The wound bled freely, but it was superficial. He’d be fine.
He could feel the adrenaline dissipating. His hands were shaking, the nausea growing worse. He was surprised to find himself weeping, and more surprised than that to find the tears had their source not in exhaustion or fear or even the release that came after a bad fight. The sorrow that possessed him was profound. He mourned his twin; the man he had once been. His brother and more than brother was gone, and gone because he himself had killed him.
Perhaps it had been fated to end this way; the colony had room for only one of them. And so either he or his twin had had to die. His dreams of slipping away, becoming a new man had been just that. Dreams. And now, like the body of the man he’d killed, they slipped away. He was Ramón Espejo. He had always been Ramón Espejo. He had never had a real hope of being anyone else.
He unwrapped the sodden robe from his arm slowly. His awareness of the pain was growing. His pierced side was the most pressing issue. He could hold the robe against it, maybe stanch the bleeding. He wondered whether it would help if he wrung the cloth out first. He tried to guess how far he was from Fiddler’s Jump and medical help. And what, he asked himself, would they find when they looked at him? Had Maneck and his people left any surprises for the doctors?
Even awash in his grief and uncertainty and pain, some part of Ramón’s mind must have anticipated the attack. It was no more than a flicker in the corner of his vision; the sahael lashed out at him, thrusting spearlike. He didn’t think. The blade was simply where it needed to be at the instant it needed to be there, the human-made steel impaling the alien flesh just inches below the wires at the thing’s head. Ramón’s heart didn’t race. He didn’t even flinch. He was too tired for that.
The sahael let out a long, high whine. A spark blackened the tip of the knife where it protruded through the thing’s thin body. Snakelike, the sahael thrashed, pulling Ramón one way and then the other with its throes. He drove the blade’s tip into a branch, pinning the sahael to the wood. The flesh below the blade was pale and thrashing violently. The wires and mucous membrane that had once burrowed into Ramón’s neck were lolling like a dead thing.
“If you get back,” Ramón said, then forgot what he was doing. His flesh felt as heavy as waterlogged timber. A few breaths later, he remembered. “I did Maneck’s job for him, but I’m Ramón Espejo, not someone’s goddamn dog. You get back, you tell them that. You and all the rest of them can go fuck yourselves.”
If t
he sahael understood him, it gave no sign. Ramón nodded and muttered a string of perfunctory obscenities as he jerked the knife free and shoved the snakelike body off the raft. It sank into the water; only the head was visible as it bobbed away through the rain, first dim, then grayed, then gone. Ramón sat for a moment, the raindrops tapping his back and shoulders. A roll of thunder roused him.
“Sorry, monster,” he said to the river. “It’s just…what it is.”
There was too much to do. He had to pull himself together. He was cold. He was seriously injured and losing blood. He’d lost the oar and with it what little steering power he’d had. They’d never gotten any firewood onto the raft and he didn’t have anything left to light a fire with anyway, although he’d need to dry off and warm up once the storm passed. His mind whirled back to the cataract and the queer peace that had settled over him when he’d been stuck on the rock. The thought related somehow to the dream of being Maneck and his trip from Earth with the Enye. He had a sense of something profound coming clear, like recognizing a face once known and then forgotten. When he realized he’d fallen asleep and forced his eyes to open again, the rain had stopped, and a wide gold-and-green sunset was lighting the clouds from below. He heard the chiming call of a flock of flapjacks somewhere far above him.
He had to get an oar. Something to steer with in case there was another waterfall or rapids. But he’d hear the roar of it if there was one, and his twin owed him a watch anyway. Let the pendejo stay up and keep them safe. Serve the bastard right after he’d blown Ramón off back in the forest. He had wrapped himself in the ruins of the iceroot leaves, the wide fronds reflecting his own body’s heat back against him, before he noticed the flaw in that plan, and by then he was too comfortable to care whether he died.
Days passed in fever. Reality and dream, past and future, knotted together. Ramón found himself possessed by the memory of things that could never have happened—flying like a sparrow over the rooftops of Mexico City with a slat of the alien yunea in his teeth, Elena weeping like a baby about his death and then fucking Martín Casaus on his grave, trekking through the bush with the raft strapped to his forehead, Maneck and the pale alien in the pit applauding and throwing a celebratory party for him—all hail Ramón Espejo, hero of monsters!—both of them wearing silly cone-shaped party hats and blowing noisemakers. His consciousness vibrated, split, and reformed like a bubble rising through turbulent water. In his rare moments of lucidity, he drank the fresh, clear water of the river and tended as best he could to his wounds. The cut on his ribs was scabbing over, but his leg had the hot, angry look of infection. He would have considered reopening the wound in case there was some foreign body—wood or cloth or Christ alone knew what—that was keeping him from healing, but sometime during his fever dreams, he’d lost the knife—maybe it had washed over the side—and he no longer had anything he could use to operate. One time, when he woke in mid-afternoon, he felt so strong and well, he imagined he might be able to catch a fish to eat. But just going to the raft’s edge to drink had exhausted him.
One night Little Girl sailed overhead, but the moon had Elena’s face, peering down at him disapprovingly. I told you a chupacabra would get you! the moon said.
On another night—or was it later the same night?—he saw La Llorona, the Crying Woman, walking the riverbank, luminescent in the darkness, wringing her hands and wailing over all the children who had been lost, her grief endless and inconsolable.
Another time, he had caught up on a sandbar and spent the better part of a day wondering how he might get the raft loose in his weakened state before realizing that he was wearing clothes—his shirt, his field jacket—and was therefore still asleep and dreaming. He woke to find the raft still well in the middle of the wide, now placid river.
Most unnerving, though, were the voices in the water. Maneck, his twin, the European, Lianna. Even when he was fully awake, he could hear them in the clicking and murmuring of the water, like a conversation in a nearby room, whose words he could almost make out. Once he thought his twin was screaming, Madre de Dios, help me! Help me! Please Jesus, I don’t want to die!
The worst was when he heard Maneck laughing.
The small, still part of his mind that could sometimes watch the rest and evaluate it understood all of this. The hallucinations, the burning thirst strong enough to motivate even a man lost in the ruin of his own mind, the swelling and reddening leg. Ramón was in trouble, and there was nothing he could do to save himself. He was too disorganized in his thoughts to manage even the simplest of prayers.
Twice, he felt himself drifting off into a strange twilight sleep. Both times he managed to will himself back to awareness, death retreating perhaps halfway to shore. After all, Ramón Espejo was a tough sonofabitch, and he was Ramón Espejo. Still, when the third time came—as it inevitably would—he didn’t think he could pull himself back again.
The Enye ships remained his only companions. No longer hawks. Carrion crows and vultures, they hung in the sky, watching him. Waiting for him to die.
When he heard unfamiliar voices gabbling—high-pitched and excited as monkeys—he thought at first that this was some new phase of his deterioration. It wasn’t enough that he imagined voices he knew; now the whole São Paulo colony would escort him down to Hell, babbling in tongues. The fishing boat cutting through the water, moving slow to keep its wake from swamping his raft, was a new dream. The rustproof paint, white and gray but decorated with a rough image of the Virgin, was a nice touch. He wouldn’t have thought his mind capable of such lovely detail. He was trying to make the Virgin wink at him when the raft tilted beneath him. A man knelt at his side, his skin as black as tar, his eyes wide with concern.
A Yaqui was too much to hope for, Ramón thought, but I always thought Jesus would at least look like a Mexican.
“He’s alive!” the man shouted; Spanish had not been his first language, and whoever taught it to him had had a distinct Jamaican accent. “Call Esteban! Hurry! And get me a line!”
Ramón blinked, tried to sit up, and failed. There was a hand on his shoulder, gently pushing him down.
“It’s okay, muchacho,” the black man said. “It’s okay. We’ve got you. Esteban’s the best doctor on the river. We’ll get you taken care of. Just don’t try to move.”
The raft thudded again, shifting on the breast of the water. Something else happened, time skipping like he’d dropped acid, and he was on a stretcher with his robe lying over him like a blanket, rising up the side of the boat. The painted Virgin at his right winked as he went past.
The deck stank of fish guts and hot copper. Ramón craned his head, trying to make out something, anything, that could tell him for certain that this was real and not another artifact of a dying brain. He wet his lips with a sluggish tongue. A woman—fiftyish, gray-haired, with an expression that said nothing could surprise her—sat on the deck beside him. She took him by the wrist and he tried to grasp her. She turned his wooden fingers aside, holding him firmly still as she took his pulse. Overhead, the Enye ships blinked in and out of existence. The woman made a disapproving sound and leaned forward.
It occurred to him for the first time that he’d reached Fiddler’s Jump. His first reaction was relief so profound it approached religious awe. His second was an unfocused, suspicious anger that they might steal his raft.
“Hey!” the woman said again. He didn’t know how often she’d said it, only that this wasn’t the first. “Do you know where you are?”
He opened his mouth, frowning. He had known. Just a moment ago. But it was gone.
“Do you know who you are?”
That, at least, was worth a chuckle. She seemed pleased by his reaction.
“I am Ramón Espejo,” he said. “And, hand to God, that’s all I can tell you.”
Part Four
Chapter 25
Ramón Espejo awoke floating in a sea of darkness.
The tiny lights—green and orange, red and gold—that blinked or flick
ered around him illuminated nothing. Ramón tried to sit up, but his body rebelled. Slowly, he became aware of the machines around him, the pain in his flesh. For a muzzy, half-sleeping moment, he was certain that he was back in the strange caverns beneath the mountain, back in the vat where he’d been born, swimming again in that measureless midnight ocean. He must have cried out, because he heard the soft, fast sound of human footsteps, and a cheap white LED light blinked on. He tried to lift his arm against the sudden brightness, but he found himself tangled in the thin tubes that were penetrating his flesh like a half-dozen sahaels. And then there were hands on his wrists—human hands—guiding him back down to the bed.
“It’s okay, Señor Espejo. It’s all right.”
The man had to be near fifty, short gray hair in tight curls and a smile that looked like the aftermath of sorrow. He wore a nurse’s smock. Ramón squinted, trying to see him better. Trying to see the room better.
“You know where you are, sir?”
“Fiddler’s Jump,” Ramón said, surprised by the gravel in his voice.
“Good guess,” the nurse said. “They brought you down from there about a week ago. You want another try? You know what this building is?”
“Hospital,” Ramón said.
The nurse turned to look at him more directly. It was as if he’d said something interesting.
“You know why you’re here?”
“I got fucked up,” Ramón said. “I was on a raft. I was prospecting up north. Things went bad on me.”
“That’s pretty good. Up to now you’ve been saying that you were swimming under water, hiding from baby killers. You keep this up, I’m telling the doctors that you’re oriented.”
“Diegotown. I’m in Diegotown?”
“Have been for days,” the nurse said. Ramón shook his head, vaguely surprised to find an oxygen tube stuck under his nose and hissing softly. He reached up and started to pull it off.
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