by M C Rowley
He was going to watch me burn alive.
The fire surrounded the SUV completely and the temperature was the hottest I’d ever experienced, turning the interior into an oven. My skin sweltered and I started to smell the rank stench of burning flesh. It was the driver’s corpse, close to the hood. The fire was loud too, and even if the stranger outside had been shouting something I wouldn’t have heard him.
I was done.
I rested my head back on the seat and watched the orange outside flare and spit and squeal. It was a pathetic end. Only a month back, I had my wife and our long-lost son together in the same space, and I’d allowed them both to slip away. I had been an idiot.
My mind drifted to school. Back in England. Learning about heat and temperatures. I tried to recall the temperature a human could withstand. I remembered the hottest recorded had been fifty-something in the Sahara Desert. Was it that hot here? Probably more. The hairs on my arms were singeing from the atmosphere alone. And my breathing was becoming labored. The smoke was getting thicker and tasted acrid. Wasn’t that the danger in house fires? The smoke?
Not that it mattered. Suffocated or burned alive: not exactly a great choice.
I closed my eyes and it all turned to black.
I came round halfway through the smashed window. Smoke filled my lungs and I puked. What felt like a hundred hands were grabbing and pulling me. The fire below burned me and everything was red. I heard voices, but they spoke quickly and I couldn’t make out their words.
Then I hit dirt and they dragged me, over branches and plants. My neck felt too weak to even crane my head up, so I looked down while my mystery saviors pulled me by the arms, my feet and stomach dragging, like they’d just culled me for lunch. I heard the fire’s ferocious sound fade slightly as we moved away from it, and then the explosion came.
The SUV must have finally yielded to the heat and pressure of the inferno, its fuel tank breached. The sound ripped all hearing away from my ears and ringing started in both. I shook my head and tried to focus on the ground sliding underneath me; it was a green blur.
We continued like that for a few minutes, until suddenly my arms were dropped. I lay still. The voices were mumbling around me in a language I didn’t recognize. I checked myself. My legs, my stomach, chest, arms, fingers. Everything still worked. I felt sick, from the smoke inhalation, I guessed, but other than that I was unharmed.
I opened my eyes and saw a tight ring of people standing over me, staring down at me like I was some strange bird creature that had fallen from the sky. They were dressed casually in old t-shirts and ripped checked shirts well past their due-by date.
One of the men crouched down to me and said, “Estás bien,” before getting back up. He turned to one of the men and spoke to him in the same dialect as before. Zapotec? Mixteca? I didn’t have a clue.
My skin began to flare up in pain and my senses cleared. The voices became more distinct, lucid, and then intimidating.
The man who had crouched down wore a thick goatee beard that had lines of white in it. Thick stubble covered the rest of the lower half of his face. One of his eyes appeared dead, if that was the right word.
Goatee Beard pointed in my direction and nodded to me to get up. I shook my head, and he nodded again, more vehemently. The others’ voices got louder and he looked more pissed-off. I breathed deeply and rose a little, propped up on my elbows.
The man pointed to the smoldering SUV wreckage and then to a white Nissan Tsuru at the side, smashed up to the point it was a write-off. Then he pointed back at me and made the universal gesture for “money” by rubbing his fingers together; according to his visualization, the wad he was implying was about two inches thick.
“No,” I said.
His friends were animated. Excited, and angry. Not a good mix.
“Sorry.” I held my hands up in innocence. “Sorry. No money.”
The goatee guy and the others began repeating the game of charades: Burning SUV—smashed Tsuru—money!
I said, “sorry” many times, but it was no use. After ten minutes, one of them sort of kicked me. Not hard, but it set the others off. They all began nudging me with their feet. Not kicking, but poking.
I gathered my strength and shuffled again so that I was sitting up straight. I rocked forward until I was on my knees. The people stopped prodding me, and one of them held her arm out to help me stand.
I stood. I felt in good shape, considering the circumstances, at least physically. I looked around, past the people, but Luciana was gone. We were in the middle of the jungle. I guessed the road we had flown off was somewhere close by, but I couldn’t say where exactly. Everything was green, except for the smoldering SUV. The dampness and humidity of the atmosphere had dealt with the inferno like they were extinguishing a match. The power of nature, and here it was nature that was boss.
I looked back at the man with the goatee and held my hands out.
“Dinero,” he said. Money. And he pointed at the smashed Tsuru.
His companions once again became animated and started lightly pushing my arms.
“Dinero,” the man said.
I checked the pockets of my pants, now stained and torn down the side. They were empty. Goatee Beard got agitated and slammed his own hand into my pocket, as if I were lying. His mistrust made sense: How could a white guy in an SUV not have any cash? I spun as he plunged his hand inside the pocket again and my movement twisted his arm back. I pivoted and steadied myself.
The group was now a horseshoe shape around me.
Goatee Beard was unimpressed.
I hadn’t realized it, but the crowd was growing. I counted more than thirty people who’d come from nowhere to join the commotion.
Goatee Beard backhanded my pants pockets and grunted. I turned them inside out. I had nothing. The bag had burned in the wreckage, or Luciana had taken it.
I shook my head. The crowd got louder and more irritated. Goatee Beard shouted at a few of the young men amongst them and gestured to the SUV. They walked past me and went to a passenger door. One of them opened it, using a rag to touch the hot metal, and leant in to where I had almost burned alive. The other young man opened the driver’s door, and out spilled the half-charred corpse of the driver. His torso dropped down, hiding his face, and hung there, caught by the seatbelt. The young man clambered over him and into the cab. I prayed there was some cash there to appease them.
Goatee pushed me again and the crowd followed his lead, pulling me and yelling at me. An older lady grabbed my wrist and cracked her fist onto my jaw. She could barely reach, but landed the blow well. For her age, I was impressed by her strength.
And that got them going.
The tipping point for the rest. Mob rule.
Someone took out my legs and I hit dirt. A kick landed on my ribcage, another on the back of my neck.
“¡Para, para!” I shouted.
Stop, stop!
But this was clearly their land, and their rules.
I absorbed the blows at first, but they became too much and the pain started to sear into my nervous system. I curled up and it went dark from the shadows the mob was producing.
I took hit after hit after hit.
And then, bang. A gun.
The hitting stopped.
Chapter Seven
The kicking ceased and everyone shut up. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the pain—or rather, avoiding it. I could feel the swelling in my legs, arms, and sides already. They hadn’t kicked my head; I guessed they wanted something out of me. The waves of agony rose and jolted back down, rose and jolted, over and over.
I almost didn’t notice how quiet it had gone. I kept my head down, pushed against the foliage and dirt. I heard the giant tree trunks above creak in the wind, and the hum of insects. Thousands of insects. The smell of rotting leaves was pungent. Pain rolled around in my torso. I breathed and waited.
Then, I heard footsteps. The people were walking away from me. Whoever had shot the gun
had achieved the desired effect. The steps got quieter and quieter, and I waited until they had gone.
And yet I could tell I wasn’t alone. My predicament hit me. The people in the jungle had not recognized me. But maybe these newcomers would. I was wanted in Mexico for killing a state governor and escaping prison with a notorious cartel leader.
Not ideal.
Then came new footsteps. I heard them coming toward me and, like a child, I clenched my eyes shut, as if they would go away. As if this whole situation would go away, and I could hold Eleanor. And return our son to her. I did well to recall that was exactly what I was trying to do. Here. In the jungle. Look for Jairo again.
I opened my eyes, shifted my weight to the left side, and rolled over. Three officers in Policia Municipal uniforms looked down at me, guns out, fingers on triggers.
They were two men and one woman, all dressed in the starched and creased dark-blue uniforms with the hanging straps and holders all over the place, and big black boots laced to halfway up the shin. All three had their hair slicked back tight and wore shades.
The woman spoke.
“¿Quien eres, señor?”
Who are you?
I almost said my real name, but if nothing else the last few months had taught me to always be alert with the authorities. I recalled the name Luciana had given me.
“Andrew Cochran,” I said.
“¿Qué?”
I repeated the name and the man on the right smirked.
“Súbete,” he said.
Get up.
I launched into an explanation, between gasps for air, of the truck and the dead driver and the crowd.
“Accidente,” I said. “Accidente.”
But the cops didn’t seem to give a hoot. They helped me up and listened, but made no comment. When we started walking away from the crash site, I looked back at the driver’s cadaver hanging out of the door and gestured to the woman cop.
“Ellos lo agarrarán,” she said.
They’ll pick him up.
The pain in my body as I walked was too much for me to concentrate on a reply. We stomped through the undergrowth, back to the road down which Luciana, our driver, and I had been flying only an hour or so before. We clambered up through the hole that the SUV had left until our heels hit tarmac.
I looked up and down and saw no squad car. Only an old black Chevy Tornado truck.
Helped by the cops, I walked up to it. To my surprise, the woman pulled out some keys and unlocked the door.
“¿Este?”
This?
Getting into unmarked cars with police in Mexico was generally considered a no-no. But the fact these cops were holding me up and hadn’t recognized me left me with no choice.
As we climbed in, I had the sensation of being watched, by hundreds of eyes. One of the cops was looking out of the window, jerking his head left and right. The woman cop started the engine and we peeled away from the edge of the track and onto the blacktop.
We drove for an hour, until the jungle thinned and towns starting passing by. I didn’t bother asking any questions. I guessed they were to come, and frankly, I needed the time to recuperate from the kicking. I checked my body. Nothing broken; I was sure. I had a fair few bruised bones. The cops stayed silent the whole trip, and only when we took a sharp right into what looked like cobbled streets and the largest built-up area we’d seen did they start chatting.
We drove through the town slowly. The streets were lined with one-story breeze-block walls, and litter lined the sidewalks. Graffiti was everywhere, and fresh too, the black unfaded yet by the sun, the colors glistening. We passed small shops and they had been looted. Windows were smashed and doors kicked in.
“¿Que pasó aquí?”
What happened here?
It was as if the town had been ransacked and ruined by vandals. Even the church at the center of the main strip was closed up, its doors crossed with two-by-fours nailed into the old wood.
“What happened?”
The cops ignored me again at first, but then one of the men turned.
“Here,” he said. “And everywhere else.”
“Where are we going?”
“Somewhere safe,” he said.
As he said it, the truck swung into a smaller side street. We drove past three doors and stopped at the fourth, a little blue metal door. It, and the walls, were covered in tags and crude anti-government slogans. Fuck the Feds, said one in infantile scrawl. Another simply showed an X.
“Where are we?”
The cop smiled at me for the first time. “Somewhere safe,” he said again.
We walked into a small abode, a tiny yard surrounded by little rooms. An old lady sat in the corner working on a bucket of corn kernels. Two kids peered out from one room, intrigued by the gringo. Hanging everywhere were clothes. Kids’ clothes, underwear, and four Municipal Police uniforms.
I stopped. “Thank you,” I said. “I’m fine now. I should go.”
But the woman cop looked at me. “No, no. You stay.”
And she opened the door to one of the rooms and there was a single bed.
“Rest,” she said. “Dangerous outside. Have water.”
I glanced at her gun, holstered, and nodded.
I drank the water.
I walked into the room and sat down.
It was getting dark. “Why dangerous?” I asked.
She turned to me. “Almost nightfall. They come at night.”
I went to ask “Who?” but she walked out before I could. I lay down and closed my eyes. I didn’t dare sleep, but simply being horizontal eased the pain a great deal. The bed was padded and soft and was the first decent mattress I’d used in over six weeks.
I felt the familiar sensation of my world being displaced and slipping away from me. Eleanor somewhere here in the jungle? I couldn’t except that. Jairo? God only knew. And Luciana.
Luciana.
I’d forgotten the phone she’d given me. It hadn’t been in my pocket when the people had accosted me in the jungle. I’d checked all the pockets in front of the leader. And it hadn’t been in the SUV. I remembered putting it in my pocket.
I had to get back to the crash site. To find out what went wrong. To get help.
I stood. It was time to ask questions. I wasn’t being held by force, so why should I be here? I’d say thank you, and then farewell.
But as soon as I’d taken a solitary step, one of the male cops slid into the doorway, right hand resting on his holstered gun.
There was a lady next to him.
Everything went blurry and I squinted my eyes to focus my vision.
She was beautiful, with long, thick, black hair.
I recognized her.
It was Luciana.
The guy cop’s face looked strange. He wasn’t angry; it was more of a screwed-up, twisted expression, something like pity? Was that what I saw?
And in the same exact second, the scene framing him and Luciana swirled into a circle of mixed colors, a perfect circle. I lost focus and I saw the floor coming up at me fast. I felt the pain. Heard the thump, its thud dulled, the crack softened.
But then I felt no more.
Chapter Eight
I awoke and saw a face. A familiar face. One I’d seen recently. I heard no sounds. My body felt like a dead weight.
The face belonged to the woman cop from the jungle.
My arm wouldn’t budge; I felt nothing where my arm should have been. Fear washed over my neck and face like needles. But that’s all I could feel. My face and my neck. Nothing else.
You?
But my voice didn’t come out.
What had they done?
The cop was smiling at me, and I couldn’t move my face.
And it all went black.
I awoke to the meow of a cat outside. It was nighttime, and my guts rumbled with hunger. I could feel people around me. I went to speak but my throat seemed to close in on itself, so dried out that I couldn’t enunciate a single so
und. The room spun around me. I pushed my mind to remember what had happened, but I couldn’t. Then the smell hit me. Urine. And shit.
How long had I been there?
I wriggled, but my body didn’t respond. It was like the Kafka story: I had awoken in a cocoon, trapped inside a now-brittle layer of dried skin. Everything worked on the inside, but the motor-neuron messages weren’t making it out of my nervous system. And I felt tired. So tired.
And it all went black.
Light flooded my eyes.
“¡Despertó…despertó!”
The voice was loud and in my ear. My senses returned for a split-second. I felt my legs! My arms! Relief flooded my body and I went to get up, but no. Something was wrong.
Tied down?
My muscles felt like they had been sapped of water. Like dead flesh.
“Echatelo,” said the voice.
I felt a needle plunge into my arm.
I was awake again, and walking. This was a dream. I knew it. The way the edge of where I was faded into gray clouds. I was in a dream and I knew it, and yet I didn’t wake up.
Eleanor grabbed my right hand, and I turned and saw her for the first time since Reynolds had taken her.
“Where are you?”
She smiled at me. But I was pissed at her.
“Where are you, El?”
“Shush,” she said, putting a finger to her closed lips. She looked stunning. She was wearing a little black dress and her long hair had been curled and put up.
“Please,” I said. “It’s dangerous. Código X.”
She smiled again and looked forward. I followed her gaze and there, in front of us, was Jairo. He was dressed in tatters. He was holding a machete that dripped blood.
Daylight—bright, white, and ferocious—burned my eyes. I had opened them too quickly. I shut them. But it wasn’t all black. I was awake again. I checked my body for the return of sensation, but nothing. Paralyzed still.
My eyelids slid upward like some corny ’70s movie swipe. The light faded and things came into focus. This room was different. The ceiling. It was painted.
