by The Behrg
Grey grabbed the other open bottle from Kenny, taking half the beer down in a single swallow. “Oh, gawd, tastes like drain water from a carwash.”
“They say it’s an acquired taste,” Kenny said.
“Who? Carwash attendants?”
Malcolm laughed in the middle of a swallow, beer fizzing and dripping from his nose. He squinted in pain. The stuff was bad enough going down, Grey couldn’t imagine it coming back up.
Kenny set one foot on a crate containing some of the supplies they had brought for victims of the quake. “You should see, I went by where the grocery store’s at, shelves are empty. These cervezas cost me ten bucks, way more than it should have.”
“That’s ‘cause you’re a gringo who doesn’t speak a lick of Spanish,” Grey said, finishing the rest of his beer. Dirty water or not, he needed the buzz.
“No, what I’m sayin’ is what we brought? It won’t make a dent,” Kenny continued. “And these people’ll rip us apart wanting more. They’re savages. And they look at us like we’re millionaires.”
Comparatively speaking they probably were, Grey thought, even when you removed Donavon from the equation.
He stretched out, leaning against a large duffel bag, his feet extending out into the dirt. Despite the hard object pressing into the middle of his back, it felt great to lie down. “Good thing we’re not really here to help them then,” he said, unable to keep from yawning.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean all this goodwill crap and care packages? It’s just for show. The truth, I don’t think Faye even cares about these people. If we don’t find a place to stay? It’s fine by me. Just ups the time-table, maybe gets us home sooner.”
“Yeah, makes sense,” Malcolm said.
Always the yes-man, Grey thought. “You catch where the pilot was staying?”
“I look like I speak Venezuelan?” Kenny asked, following his words with an obnoxious burp. “Hey Mal, if you got a ten I’ll get us another round.”
Grey must have dozed, though not long; Faye and Donavon’s approaching steps enough to bring him back.
“Any luck?” he asked, eyes still shut.
The voice that answered was not the one he had been expecting.
“Oye, amigos, que tienes aqui?”
Grey quickly sat up. Three men in uniforms stood together, their faces in shadow. Light from a nearby porch glinted off the submachine guns hanging at their sides.
Shit.
“Whas in the bags, amigos? Drogas?”
Before Grey could open his mouth he heard Kenny begin to blubber. “We … we brought uh blankets and emergency packs for the uh, for the earthquake?”
“For de uh, uh, earthquake?” one of the soldiers said, mocking him. The others laughed.
“We’re here to help,” Grey interjected. “All this – it’s food; blankets.”
“Cervezas?” one of the faceless men in shadows asked.
“No, no, food. Supplies. Help.” Grey wasn’t sure how much they were understanding.
One of the soldiers said something in Spanish. Where the hell was Faye?
The soldier in the middle, much larger than his companions, stepped forward. He wore a dark fedora and seemed to be in charge. “We have enough peoples begging on the street,” he said in a thick accent.
“No, no, we’re not begging,” Kenny said, “we’re just here to help! We’re friendlies!”
Grey wanted to slap his forehead with an open palm.
“Jour with Red Cross?” the large man asked.
“No,” Grey replied, “but we’re like Red Cross.”
“Jou are with de others? De Americans?” the man asked.
“Yes! A woman and a man – have you seen them?”
“De, uh, woman, she is asking queshions about a man. Why she is looking for him?”
“What? No, she’s just looking for a place for us to stay,” Grey said.
The large man snorted and again said something in Spanish. The men on either side of him brought their weapons up.
“Jou need to come with us.”
“Wait, no – the rest of our group, they won’t know where we’ve gone!”
“Don’t worry, we have a place for jou to stay,” the man said. “But jou will come with us now.”
Grey looked at Kenny and Malcolm, both staring back at him with uncertainty. How the hell had he become the leader here? “What about our stuff?”
“We will take care of jour tings,” the man said. “Don’t worry, everyting is going to be a-okay.”
The large man’s laugh sent a shiver through Grey’s entire body. As the two younger soldiers stepped forward, herding them away from their gear, Grey realized, not for the first time, that he really hated this country.
Verse XIII.
Morley’s footsteps reverberated through the underground warehouse that had been dubbed the Freezer by all who knew about it. The nickname came not from its temperature, which was abnormally cool compared to the rest of the Facility, but because of what was kept within its walls. Housed there, you might say.
No one was allowed into the Freezer without Morley present, yet often times he would find himself here alone, sharing a meal amongst friends. Silent, incapacitated friends.
The best kind.
His stomach grumbled and he realized he hadn’t stopped for dinner again. It was impossible to remember everything he was supposed to do. No matter, food could wait. Dugan had called in with reports of a new playmate. Morley had a bed to prepare.
His thin LED flashlight lit his path just to the point where his feet made contact with the tiled floor. It provided no comfort against the darkness enveloping him on all sides. His flesh broke out in goose bumps beneath his lab coat as his steps echoed back to him with a steady clop – clop. He reminded himself it was just the cold causing the arrector pili muscles to contract at the base of each hair on his arms, making them stand erect. A very natural reaction.
Aren’t all erections, he thought with a smile.
Down each aisle, the flooring curved slightly inward to a line of drains that ran across the Freezer’s floor, a recent addition he had added to make clean-up easier.
He turned down Aisle E, humming along to an old patriotic song he hadn’t heard since grade school. This Land is Your Land. He wasn’t sure why the song had popped into his head but found it soothing and more than fitting.
“From the Amazon forests to the floating islands,” he sang. Shadows on either side of him loomed like great sentient beings intent on his demise.
He arrived at E-Seventeen and pressed the remote clicker he had snagged from the entrance. A bright spotlight shone down on an empty hospital bed with stained, rust-colored sheets. Shiny steel shelving was visible behind it, a rolling metal tray next to the bed with several instruments atop.
Morley moved to the shelves, sliding open the bottom one and pulling out a thick inflatable polyurethane bag which he hung on a rolling metal rack.
“From the sweeping grasslands to the empty chasms …”
A sharp rattle sounded an aisle over, Morley’s heart leaping to his throat. He listened intently, peering out just beyond the radius of light.
It came again – the sound of chains clinking against railing.
Morley’s breathing slowly returned to normal. For a moment he had forgotten his place in the world, a lion frightened at the sudden and unexpected movement of a gazelle.
He moved past the empty bed, slipping between the faux walls separating one aisle from the next. Another bright light shot down from overhead with the click of a button, reflecting off the forehead of a middle-aged woman.
She lay in the bed, eyes open but unseeing. IV’s slipped from her neck and wrists into the hanging bags of poison at her side, a concentrate of synthetic opioids, halothane, and ketamine. She was nude, her dark native skin and thick unwashed hair giving her the look of a witch rather than a native Indian.
Morley hovered beside her, unable to take his eyes aw
ay. Her breasts sagged along with her belly but he liked the fact that her eyes were open.
“From Mount Roraima to the Cruz cenotes …”
No upper lip hair. That was a plus.
The scraping sound came again, reminding Morley of his task. He brought up two fingers, kissing them, then pressed them against the dry and cracked lips of the bound native woman on the bed.
To be continued, he thought.
He moved on, following the sound of that lightly grating metal. His heart continued to pound but not from fright. The woman native had gotten him aroused. There would be plenty of time to make acquaintances.
Her eyes were open! he thought.
He clicked on the second button on the remote, the entire Freezer coming alight like the glow of a rising dawn. This was a button Morley rarely used, preferring to keep his work in the dark, but his appointment with the open-eyed native had given him a sense of urgency.
Row upon row of hospital beds now had lights shining down on their occupants – naked native women and men; some dead, in various stages of decay, others unconscious yet alive, with missing limbs or gaping holes and hideous scars. Wires and tubes ran from bodies to machines like intersecting webs.
He located the culprit of the noise, a dangling arm caught on an IV line. The metal ring strapped to the native’s arm wiggled ever so slightly with the tubing’s pull, creating the sound.
No boogie monsters here.
Except for me, he thought.
In a loud tenor voice he belted to an unhearing audience, his voice echoing in the giant hall. “This land was made for you and me!”
Verse XIV.
Three young soldiers carried crates, boxes and luggage from the town square to a dark brown jeep that was running. Faye rushed toward them.
“Hey, those are our things!”
Donavon kept his sigh to himself, content to watch Faye attempt the impossible. He had no idea he’d be spending his time down here just trying to keep her from stepping on the wrong person’s foot. Sometimes he wondered if she truly had a death wish.
She had been abrasive to most of the people they had met, seeking a place to stay. Donavon couldn’t blame them for shutting their doors to the visiting gringos. How many Americans would open their homes to a host of strangers visiting from another country? He knew the answer wasn’t many.
While Faye could put on the charm like few women Donavon had met, her composure broke down when she didn’t get her way.
“What are you doing? … Set those down!”
The soldiers moved around her like a small stream skimming past a newly lodged rock. The engine of the jeep revved.
“Faye,” Donavon said.
She ignored him, instead latching onto one of the soldier’s arms. She spoke something to him in Spanish. He responded with a sneer.
“Faye?”
“Are you just gonna let them take our things?” she asked, turning on him.
“They could be bringing it to wherever the film crew’s at. Like the kids that helped with the luggage. You consider that?”
“And have you considered why the others aren’t here?”
“Not everyone’s out to get you, Faye. People are a lot better than you give them credit for.”
She spun back, snatching a box away from a surprised soldier with a crew cut. The other two uniforms raised their weapons, pointing them right at her. Heavy automatic-looking rifles, similar to guns Donavon had used in a film or two.
Though these were probably not loaded with blanks.
“Hold on,” he said, walking forward slowly, palms out. He knew his presence was intimidating; he had at least a foot and a half on the tallest of these guys. But if anyone was going to diffuse the situation, it would have to be him.
The soldier’s gun in the rear gravitated toward him.
“We brought this stuff for you. It’s okay,” he said. “Here, we’ll help you load it.”
Donavon picked up one of the wooden crates from the ground and moved to follow the soldier. The man in the back with high cheekbones and a forced squint, despite the cover of night, rattled off something quickly in Spanish.
“What’d he say?”
Faye’s jawbones set as she ground her teeth. “He asked if we would like to join our friends.”
“See? I’m telling you, you get a lot more with honey than you do with a flyswatter.”
“In prison.”
“What?”
“We can join our friends in prison.”
With one of the men standing his ground, rifle pointed at both of them, they watched in silence as the rest of their gear was loaded. The soldiers even took the crate Donavon had been holding. Before they left, one of them demanded Faye’s backpack and Donavon’s laptop bag. He slipped a movie script from the bag, its pages curling upward, then waved off the bluish-grey exhaust spilling from the jeep as it jolted forward, leaving them in the dark.
Faye glared at him almost as if the entire charade with the soldiers had been his fault. Her skin was shiny from the sweat and dirt of their travels which made him wonder how bad he looked. Even at night his clothes stuck to him from the humidity, the air stifling.
“Okay, so that didn’t quite go as planned.”
“You think?”
“Why don’t we try the church?”
“I’d rather sleep outside.” Faye stepped off the square onto the dirt road and began walking. A rambler’s walk; the tired shuffle of a person with nowhere to go.
“There’s gotta be a consulate or whatever-you-call-it around where we can get help,” Donavon said, joining her.
“In Venezuela? I doubt there’s even one in Caracas let alone the middle of freaking nowhere. The United States is not their number one ally.”
They walked in silence, the buzzing of insects louder than ungrounded electrical lines. A gate rattled shut, a stout woman in a light-colored mumu watching as they passed in front of her home. After a few more houses, Donavon gave up waving to the local residents.
He regretted not letting his agent book the trip for them though he was sure if he had brought it up, David Sedall would have told him no.
Not just no, but absolutely you’ve-got-to-be-shitting-me-for-even-asking no. Especially considering he was leaving the country.
“Do you want to look guilty?”
“I am guilty.”
“No one’s guilty in this country, especially not celebrities. You get a get-out-of-jail card every time you pass ‘Go’ my friend. In fact, you’re overdue for something like this to happen, some shit storm to clog up the tabloid drains for a week.”
And what a shit storm he had walked into.
Or driven into.
The conversation in his head continued as if he had simply paused a DVR recording and had now hit play.
“I had to get out, had to get away; the fact that one of my girlfriends was leaving the country seemed like the perfect opportunity.”
“This is why you don’t make decisions without consulting with me first. Like driving home from Lure at two a.m. with half a bottle of scotch and a quarter mile of marching dust in you? Those are the times you’re supposed to call me first so I can talk you down, keep the mosquitos from biting. I’m not just your agent Donny, I’m your friend. Probably the only real one you have.”
The fact that his only real friend was an imaginary version of his agent was not lost on Donavon. And considering that friend called him by the name he despised more than any other – Donny – really brought some questions into play.
“I killed them.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I couldn’t see through her windshield it was so splattered with blood.”
“It was the cracks – the splinters in the glass that kept you from seeing in. And besides, she could have veered out of your way – she wasn’t paying attention! Probably on her phone.”
“They’ll nail me to the wall with this, after last year’s DUI.”
“Only if you
let them.”
“But if I’m involved in a cause – the face of this global eco-revolution, it could change their opinions … get them to see I’m doing good in the world. Make them love me. Make them forget.”
“It’s a stretch but … it could work.”
“They’ll see my passion for saving humanity. The trees, forests; children. The future.”
“It could change your entire public image. Push you to A-list status. Where people flock to theaters for you and you alone.”
“That’s why I left the country, not to hide but to shine, spotlights beaming down on –”
Donavon plowed into a man who had stepped into the road from a shadowed alley, sending the man tumbling. He hit the dirt and rolled, shouting out in pain.
Not again.
Donavon stood frozen, remembering that night, that windshield, the dark smoke seeping from the sides of the engine.
The drips falling from the edge of the car door, bent inward at a sharp angle. Dropping to the black pavement with a
Plop.
Plop.
At times he could convince himself it was just oil.
Oil spilling out of the driver’s side door.
The man Donavon had bowled over stuck a carved wooden cane to the ground like a skier’s pole, using it to raise himself up. The handle of the cane was decorated with a snarling wolf’s mouth, its ends plated in gold.
“Are you okay?”
It took Donavon a moment to realize Faye was asking him, not the older gentleman. “Fine,” he answered. “You came out of nowhere, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to knock you over.” He looked back at Faye. “Can you translate?”
“Don’t think I need to.”
The older man stood, dusting off his slacks with a gloved hand. His grey hair sprouted from the top of his head like wild weeds, barely covering the bare earth beneath. He had a large nose and crooked teeth and eyes so bloodshot Donavon could barely spot the whites.
