by Pastor, Juan
He gets out one of the cartridges and hands it to me. It is very large, longer than my longest finger, and shiny like gold. On the base of the case in numbers and letters encircling the primer is engraved 12.7 HXP99. The bullet has a green and white tip.
"It's kind of pretty, isn't it? I ask.
"Yes, it is." He says. "Would you like to see the gun?"
"Yes." I say.
He hands me the gun. It is very heavy.
"Have you ever seen one like it before?" He asks. "No. Of course you haven't."
"Actually, I have." I say. "When we were making our way through Mexico, Rosaria and me, I saw Mexican Special Forces soldiers with them."
"Are you sure?" Sin asks.
"Very sure." I say. "It looked just like this one."
"That's a little scary." Sin says. "This is a Barrett M82. This one was used in Afghanistan. What the hell are Mexicans doing with them?"
"I don't know." I say. "Probably the same thing you're doing with one."
"I doubt it." Sin says. "Did it have a scope like this one?"
"Is that the sighting device on top?"
"Yes." He says. "This one has a 6‐24 power, with a 72 millimeter objective lens."
"The sighting device on the Mexican ones wasn't quite as big." I say. "Although, I remember one of them had a shorter, but much fatter scope."
"Are you sure?"
"Very sure." I say.
"Good God." Sin says. "That was a day/night optic. I'd hate to have anyone aiming one of these things at me at night."
"You'd rather they aimed it at you during the day?"
"Good point."
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We load the gun and the bullets..., the cartridges, two small boxes of them, into the jeep. I get in. Sin gets in behind the wheel. We drive for a long time. We drive until the scenery starts looking very familiar. Then we stop. We are very far from the wall. I estimate we are just over one and a half kilometers away.
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Sin lays the folded blanket on the desert floor. He folds the bipod back and down from the rifle, and spreads the legs. He sets the rifle on the blanket. The bipod legs and the pistol grip of the rifle make three dents, in the formation of a narrow triangle, on the blanket. He lies down behind it, makes an adjustment to the scope, and looks through the scope toward the wall. He sits up, extends the legs of the tripod, and sets the rifle back down on the blanket. He looks through the scope again. He moves the rifle slightly. He looks through the scope again. He makes some adjustments to two little knobs protruding from the scope. He stands up.
"Lay down." He says. "And look through the scope."
I lie down, and look through the scope. Everything swims, as if it is underwater.
"It's the mirage." He says. "It's from the heat radiating off the sand. I've got it cranked to 24. One of those men is most likely the one that shot at you and Rosaria."
"I thought you said we were going target shooting?" I ask.
"We are." Sin says. "But I want to watch you watch the men. We've got time. Try to see if you can determine who the shooter is."
"How will I determine that?"
"Watch the way they act, the way they look. Try to figure out what they are saying when they talk. Which one looks like he could shoot at unarmed girls?"
"And then I'm supposed to shoot at him?"
"Do you want to shoot at him?"
"I don't know."
"Take all the time you want." Sin says. "We've got til sunset."
"Why sunset?"
"It's more dramatic killing someone at sunset."
Sin smiles his yellow‐toothed smile.
"After sunset, it gets dark." He says. "And I don't have a nightscope."
"So we're going to lay here til sunset? I ask.
"We're going to lay here in the sun as long as you need."
"As long as I need for what?" I ask.
"As long as you need to make some decisions." Sin says. "Maybe you can confer with Rosaria, or the Virgen Maria."
"And what if I don't come to a conclusion?" I ask.
"Then I will help you." Sin says.
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So I lay there and watch the men. I have something to eat. I have something to drink. I have something to drink many times. Sin eats nothing and drinks nothing. Every once in a while he puts a little pinch of something that looks like ground up tobacco in his mouth. I never see him spit. I’d have to spit once in a while if I had tobacco in my mouth. I watch one of the men go down the ladder of the tower, and go to his truck. He retrieves something, I can't tell what. He leaves the door open. I can see a little bit of the front of the truck. It has a big chrome grill, and a ram's head.
The sun is getting lower. The color of the desert is starting to change, and shadows are growing longer. Sin gets something out of his pocket. He holds it up. It is a mirror. He moves the mirror around, the mirror side facing away from him. We hear a crack, and I see a small puff of sand a long long way away from us. There is a man in the tower holding a rifle, and it is pointing toward us. The rifle looks nothing like the one we have. It looks like a fancy hunting rifle.
"Do you see who fired the shot?" Sin asks.
"Yes." I say. "It is the same man who went to the truck."
"Probably went to get some more ammunition." Sin says. "So what do you want to do?"
"I don't want to shoot at him, if that's what you are asking."
"But you would like to hurt him a little bit, wouldn't you? Sin asks.
Sin lifts the rifle, and inserts a magazine filled with many of the bullets... cartridges, like the one he showed me. I can see the green and white tipped bullet of the cartridge on top. He sets the rifle back down, and looks through the scope. He adjusts the placement of the rifle. Then he moves away from the rifle.
"Look through the scope." He says. "What do you see?"
"I see the truck." I say.
"Do you see the little shiny circle on the side of the bed?" He asks.
"Yes."
"That is a chrome gas cap." He says. "Just below the gas cap is the gas tank. I've maxed out the scope, so it will still shoot a little lower than where you're aiming. There isn't any wind, so don't worry about it. There is a match trigger I had installed, an Anzio. It's set for two and a half pounds, so it won't take much pressure to fire the gun. Aim at the gas cap."
"I can't." I say. "I can't hold the rifle steady."
"You're holding it a lot steadier than you think." He said. "Your tremors are being magnified twenty‐four times. It is impossible to hold a rifle perfectly steady. Let me see if they still want to play."
Sin held up the mirror again. There was another crack of the rifle at the watchtower.
"Okay." He says. "Keep the crosshairs as near as you can to the gas cap. Breathe in slowly. Breathe out slowly, Breathe in a half breath slowly. Relax. Don't pull the trigger. Just slowly apply pressure to the trig..."
Blammmmmm!
There is a large explosion as the incendiary round rips through the gas tank. The truck bursts into flames. All of the men are shooting towards us, but none of their shots come even close.
"Let me take over." Sin says.
"You're not going to kill them..."
"Target practice, remember?" Sin says.
Then he starts to sing to himself.
"Blame it on Mexico if you need a reason."
He fires one shot. I can see a bright burst at one of the watchtower legs.
"Say too much guitar music, tequila, salt and lime."
A second shot. Another bright burst.
"Blame it on Mexico, but she's the reason."
A third shot. The tower begins to topple over.
"That I fell in love again for the last time."
A fourth shot. The tower collapses.
"You like George Strait?" He asks. He looks at me,
and smiles.
"I forgot to tell you to keep your cheek firmly on the stock, and your eye as far away from the scope as possible, without seeing a black ring in the scope."
I can feel my cheek stinging a little. I wipe my hand across my eye, and there is blood on my hand.
"You're going to have a heck of a shiner tomorrow." He says. "But congratulations. You're now officially a terrorist, and you didn't even have to kill anyone."
The One Who Crushes The Serpent
"To women who have known close siege and stern privation, monotony can be a pleasant thing…."
‐ Honor Harris, in Daphne du Maurier’s The King’s General
It has been too exciting a day and I can not sleep. The
Virgen Maria appears to me first.
"How do you feel?" She asks. "Don't you feel good
right now?"
"Not really." I tell her.
"Oh come on. Didn't it feel good to give those bad men
some of their own medicine?" She asks.
"Is that what you call it, medicine?" I ask. "Isn't
medicine supposed to cure the illness, not make it worse?
"Good for you." Rosaria says.
She is sitting on my bed right next to me.
"Sin could have started teaching you about the
medicine." Rosaria continues. "But he decides to take you out with a gun instead. He is a very bitter man. Has he told you yet about his clinic, and how the bad men destroyed it with their guns and their halcón‐negro helicopters?"
"He had a clinic?" I ask.
"Yes." She says. "He used to cure sickness."
"What type of clinic was it?" I ask. "What did he cure?"
"He used to cure everything. At least everything he
knew how to cure." Rosaria says. "Mostly he cured cancer."
"They destroyed his clinic because he was a con man."
The Virgen Maria says. "He was using untested drugs on patients."
"He was curing people. He wasn't interested in getting rich." Rosaria says. "That's why the powerful men had his clinic destroyed. They lied about him. They treated him like he was the cosa de fundamento of a drug cartel."
"Where did he get the drugs?" I ask.
"He developed them." She says. "From microbes in the caves."
"She is lieing." The Virgen Maria says. "Cures for cancer in caves. This is ridiculous."
"It is not ridiculous." Rosaria says. "I can prove it. He is asleep now. At the foot of his bed there is an old wooden trunk. In that trunk he keeps all his notebooks. Go in there quietly, and take out one of the notebooks. Read it. When you are done reading it, return it, and take out another one and read it. Don't let him catch you, or he will be very angry."
"I am leaving now." The Virgen Maria says. "I see this sorceress is winning you over. When you decide you really want to cure the evils in the world, call me. You aren't going to make this world a better place with microbes from caves."
"What if I can't understand what is in the notebooks?" I ask Rosaria.
"Then you can ask me for my help." Rosaria says.
"What caves does he get these microbes from?" I ask Rosaria.
"That is all in his notebooks." She says. Some he gets from the Cueva de Villa Luz in Southern Mexico. Some he gets at Lechuguilla in the Guadalupe Mountains of New Mexico. But he gets them other places."
"Did you say Guadalupe?" I ask Rosaria.
"Yes." Rosaria says.
"Like Our Lady of Guadalupe?" I ask.
"Yes." Rosaria says. "What's really interesting is that Guadalupe is just the Spanish word for the Hahuatl word Coātlaxopeuh, which the Virgen Maria addressed herself to Juan Diego as in 1531. Do you know what it means?"
"No."
"The one who crushes the serpent." Rosaria says.
"So she was pretty militant even back then?" I say.
"Yes, she was."
"Did the Spanish know that the Virgen Maria was being served back to them in a new light, as a revolutionary?" I ask.
"I think it was lost on them, because they built a basilica in her honor." Rosaria said.
"That is too much." I say.
"Isn't it?" Rosaria asks. "But, personally, I think there is more than one way to crush the serpent. And it will never be done with guns."
"Rosaria, how do you know these things?" I ask.
"Because I see things now you wouldn't believe."
Extremophiles
Journals. I open one.
Of all the antibiotics currently in use in the medical field today, 99% come from microorganisms, mostly bacteria and fungi in soils.
The chest is filled with journals, and from what I can see every one of these journals is filled with Sin's notes. I retrieve one, close the chest, and retreat quietly to my room.
Soil dwelling microorganisms are beginning to be depleted, and many forms of bacteria are developing resistance to antibiotics because we are actually speeding up the evolution thru gene mutation and natural selection of the hardiest organisms. This makes it important to explore more exotic or extreme environs.
The more I read, the more interesting I find the reading.
There is the possibility that there is actually more biomass inside the earth than on the earth's surface. A good place to start looking would be in caves.
"Or on other planets." I think. "But, then again, caves would be easier, or, at least, closer."
Within a cave, considering the isolation, and the severely restricted resources, there would be competition. And it would be more serious and deadly than the competition on earth's surface.
I flip to much further along in the journal.
From a single microbe sample, I was able to produce 40 antibiotic compounds, 37 of which I believe to be very viable, as they had immediate executional effect on every target strain of bacterium I introduced them to. To understand how radical this is, one has to realize that just under 100 antibiotics have ever been ID'd in nature, on the entire surface of the earth, during the entire chronology of bacterial research.
This is staggering.
The flip side of this is that almost every virgin bacterium I exposed to a known antibiotic was resistant to that antibiotic. One particular virgin bacterium was resistant to 15 known antibiotics. Another exhibited a type of resistance I had never observed before, that of a bacterium secreting a particular compound that broke down the antibiotic so that it could be ingested by the bacterium. One can only hope that this bacterium is not, on some subtle biochemical level, ingesting the antibiotic to study it in some way. The thought of this is a little scary.
Scary indeed. Flip a few pages more.
I have now tested over 90 different strains of bacteria, some with multiple exposures to a variety of antibiotics, and a variety of classes of antibiotics, including synthetic, and some just recently approved by the FDA. Over two‐thirds of these 90 strains were completely unaffected by any of the antibiotics. Which leads me to the conclusion that bacteria not only develop resistance over time through mutation and natural selection of the stronger, but that there are strains that are so strong that they are resistant even to first contact with the most effective known antibiotics.
A few pages more.
Competition for nutrients is a life or death struggle in a cave. All microbes live in a near‐starvation environment. So microbes can either attach themselves to some surface, and hope trickling water brings something their way, or they can scavenge, or they can learn to cheat a little bit and develop chemical weapons to defend themselves, or to conquer other microbial forms. These chemical weapons we call toxins.
Just as we learned that small doses of very deadly poisons can cure certain diseases, certain toxins can be used the same way. You have to realize how poisons or cancer chemotherapy works. Chemotherapy is killing both the cancer cells and you. It's just that it, hopefully, is killing the cancer cells so much faster than it is killing you. I think the trick is to pick certain microbial toxins that cert
ain cancers have never been exposed to, and would be inherently very vulnerable to, but at the same time toxins that would have almost no effect on healthy tissue.
A little bit more, and then time to hide the journal and get some sleep.
Why are there higher incidences of cancer in healthy affluent populations? Why did people who used to work in cotton processing factories have such low rates of lung cancer, where the exposure to cotton dust would have been at extremely high levels? Why do dairy farmers who always have traces of dried cow dung dust in their lungs have such a low incidence of lung cancer?
