The Chaos

by Sergio Gomez

  Jackpot.

  He grabbed one and came out of the shipping unit. Paul was still holding the kid at bay by pretending he was speaking to a scared-stiff Alejandro that wasn’t actually there. At this point of his show he was pretending to be angry with Alejandro.

  “Come on, buddy, you’re going to get us killed. Just come out already.” Paul said, and his acting stumbled a little when he saw Alejandro step back out.

  Alejandro nodded to him and showed him the grenade in his hands.

  “Alright, I’ll come out now.” Alejandro said; loud enough to be heard by their assailant but also pathetic enough to convince him he was scared shitless.

  Again he took a deep breath, and pulled the pin on the grenade, then stuck it in his left pocket. If his timing was off, his leg was as good as gone, but the boy would shoot them dead anyway, so he wouldn’t have much of a life to woe the loss of a limb.

  He marched out, head hung low, and the gun dangling from his hand to show it was no threat.

  “The rats are out of their hole, the rats are out of their hole,” the boy said, and dear God there was actual enjoyment coming out of him. “Drop that gun and kick it on over.”

  Alejandro crouched down and dropped the gun on the floor, and as he got up he fished into his left pocket and grabbed the grenade.

  “Hey, I don’t see no piss on his—“

  But he was cut off as he realized what was happening. Alejandro hurled the grenade into the air like a major league pitcher.

  As the grenade came launching towards his face, Terrance lifted the rifle and pulled the trigger. The shots were wild, no aim behind where he was shooting. Alejandro and Paul jumped behind a shipping container for cover.

  Terrance tried to swat the grenade out of the air with the front of the rifle, but he missed. He felt the hot grenade pelt him on the side of the cheek, and he had just enough time for one last thought before his body exploded all over the basement walls, Oh shit! See you in a bit Tobes.

  They were both panting and both had their heads leaning against the container.

  “You okay?” Alejandro asked Paul.

  He was all but crying, but he found his composure and nodded his head. “Yeah, I’m fine, you?”

  Alejandro gave him a thumbs-up.

  “You think the explosion got Will?” Paul asked.

  Alejandro shrugged and then got up.

  He shimmied to the edge of the unit and peered around the corner. He had no gun, he had lost it at some point when they jumped for cover, and he felt strange without it, naked somehow.

  Looking around the corner he saw the black spot on the ground where most of the explosion had hit, and surrounding it was blood, tissue, and chunks of meat that used to make up the gun toting boy and all of his insides.

  “You got him right?” Paul asked.

  “Yeah,” Alejandro said, looking at the gelatinous remains. “I’m going to go look for Will.”

  Paul leaned his head back on the storage unit and closed his eyes. Alejandro wasn’t sure if he fainted or what, but he wasn’t worried about him right now.

  He walked over to where they had seen Will writhing on the floor. Stepping over the human mess, he held his breath to prevent the smell of burning flesh from invading his nostrils.

  He had to walk past Howard’s body, and he checked on it just in case, but the four bullet wounds bleeding in his stomach suggested he was a goner. There wasn’t much else to his corpse. Alejandro grabbed his wrist to see if there was any trace of a pulse. There wasn’t, so he moved on.

  Up ahead he saw that where Will had been lying moments before the gun toting boy showed up there was nothing. His heart dropped, thinking that Will had been exploded by the grenade, although that physically didn’t make sense since Howard’s body had been closer to the explosion.

  So he looked farther into the basement and saw Will in one of the corners. He was mostly in shadows, but his boots and the bottom of his pants stuck out enough for Alejandro to identify it was Will.

  Alejandro raced over to him. He was flat on his back, but still breathing.

  “Will, Will!” Alejandro said, kneeling down next to him. “You’re alive!”

  He was in a daze, eyes barely open, like his eyelids weighed a million pounds and he was using all of his energy to keep them open. “Yeah…just…barely…amigo…is…Howard….”

  “Yeah…unfortunately.”

  “Not…the…first time…a comrade…dies on me…but…damn…”

  Alejandro put his hand flat on his chest. “Alright, take it easy man.”

  “I…ain’t going to walk, am I?” His eyes closed.

  “We’ll see when we get back to base.”

  Will opened his eyes and grinned. “Aw, shit…don’t lie…to me, amigo.”

  “It might not be as bad as you think, just try to keep your head positive.”

  “Oh…you are…a good man, Alejandro…you are.”

  Except he had just blown a kid up with a grenade, how good was he, really?

  “Take it easy, Will, we’ll get you back to base.”

  Will ignored him. “I can’t…move…my legs…I’m worth shit…to the cause…to Howard’s cause…I’m fuckin’ useless.”

  “Stop, Will, stop.” Alejandro grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him a little. “Listen to me!”

  “No…you…listen to me…partner…” His eyes closed again. “Take the pistol…on my leg…and end this shit…for me…I don’t want to be…no fuckin’ half person…That’s not how Will Roberts rolls…you hear me?”

  “I’m not going to do that, get yourself together, man. There’s still hope, there’s always hope.”

  “Not for me…man, I’m punching my ticket here…Good luck, amigo…You’re a good guy.”

  Alejandro felt his breathing slow down underneath his palm. He tried pushing down to help his lungs, but it was pointless. A few seconds later the breathing stopped and Will Roberts joined the count of the dead.

  Alejandro felt a hand clamp down on his shoulder and he knew even before looking up that it was Paul.

  “Not quite the death he would’ve wanted,” he said it with a cool voice, but Alejandro could see he was fighting back tears. “A Marine who survived three tours in Afghanistan getting bested by some punk and a metal shelf.”

  Alejandro wasn’t sure how to respond. Everything that could be said had already been said.

  Paul rubbed his eyes with two fingers.

  Alejandro stood up and put his hand on Paul’s shoulder now. “Let’s finish up here. It’s what they’d both want.”

  Paul nodded and they both turned and headed back to the dynamite and saran wrap. With only two of them, the task was going to be twice as hard, but it would get done in due time.

  9

  The dynamite was lodged into the gaps between the boulders in the wall. Alejandro stood in front of the three sticks that would be the catalysts for the big boom that took down this obstruction with a lighter in his hand. They had finished up half an hour ago at the Naval Base and had spent the last fifteen minutes setting the dynamite up.

  A part of him felt guilty in destroying something that had been built with such ingenuity and craftsmanship. There had been almost no gaps between the boulders, it was a thing of beauty how Los Noches had fit the boulders together so well, like a jigsaw puzzle.

  Either way, the wall (or this part of it at least) had to go down. They had a task to do.

  Alejandro flicked the lighter on and lit the ends of the three dynamites, then sprinted the opposite way, toward the SUV. When he got to the vehicle he dove through the passenger door. Paul’s foot slammed down on the accelerator even before Alejandro had the door shut. The tires screeched and the mommy's car took off like a sports car.

  Behind them the dynamite exploded. The first three blew a hole in the wall that started a chain reaction, and seconds later the other fifty sticks were blowing up. The boulders cracked and burst open, launching debris everywhere. The ground shook li
ke plates colliding as chunks of boulder crashed down from the sky.

  The SUV was well out of the range of where the dynamite had gone off, but even still some of the smoke and clouts of dirt engulfed it in a cloud of smog. Pebbles hit the roof like sleet, but besides that the abandoned cars on the highway shielded it from any serious damage.

  Paul kept driving, though, winding through the hazards on the highway, until they were out of the cloud of dirt, out in the clean air again. He drove for another mile, and then made a quick U-turn.

  He put the car in park and together they looked out into the distance at their handy work. No more explosions were going off, and much like the silence that follows a firework show, the sudden silence was heavy. Neither Paul nor Alejandro wanted to be the first to speak and disrupt it, so neither said anything. They just sat in the car, watching the last rock bits shooting through the air, watching the cloud settle.

  When it was finally thin enough that they could see through it to the other side, they saw that their plan had worked. A hole had been blown through the wall and it was big enough to drive through.

  “What do you think?” Paul asked, grinning.

  “I think we did good,” Alejandro said, and also smiled. “I think our fallen brethren would be proud.”

  “Yeah…I sure hope so. I really do, Alejandro, I really do.”

  “What say we celebrate this small victory by returning to base,”—now he was using that word, “and eating a big meal and drinking a couple of beers.”

  “I’d say that’s a great idea.” Paul said, and put the SUV in drive.

  10

  Alejandro knew returning to the base wasn’t going to be all festivities and celebrations because someone had to break it to Boris that his father wasn’t coming back. Despite Paul knowing Boris longer than Alejandro did, Alejandro was the captain of this ship now and it was on him to be the bearer of bad news. He wasn’t exactly sure when that honor had been passed to him, or when he had accepted it really, but he didn’t mind it.

  Alejandro was standing in front of Boris’ room, the door was ajar and he could see a pair of dirty socks at the end of the mattress, the left foot shaking to the rhythm of music. Alejandro knocked.

  “Come on in Howie, I learned my lesson to lock the door when—” The words got stuck when Boris saw Alejandro come through. He took the headphones off his head and sat up. “Um, hello, can I help you?”

  “Mind if I sit down?” Alejandro asked, already halfway sitting on the mattress across from Boris’s, the one that Howard would never sleep in again.

  Boris’s face went red, then white as he watched Alejandro walk into the room. “What the hell is going on? Where’s Howie? Where’s my dad?”

  The smell of Howard’s cigarettes and after shave puffed out from the mattress as Alejandro’s weight came down on it.

  “I don’t know how else to tell you this, Boris, but your father isn’t coming back.”

  “What the fuck do you mean?” Boris was posturing up, almost looking threatening, as threatening as a scrawny baby-faced twenty-seventy year old can look. “You tellin’ me that kook finally lost his fucking rocker and decided to go out on his own? Is that it?”

  Alejandro looked at him, dead in the eyes, and his heart broke, because he could see it written all over his face. The boy knew what he meant, that his father was dead, he knew it in his heart, but Alejandro knew he was trying to lie to delude himself, trying not to believe what he knew. “I’m sorry, Boris.”

  “What? Fuckin’ say it, say it! Where is Howie? Tell me, I can fuckin’ handle it! I can fuckin’ handle it, I’m a grown man, I’m a fuckin’—” but he broke out in sobs.

  Alejandro threw his arms around him and cradled him, the way he would Charlie. “I’m sorry, mijo, I’m sorry.”

  “I told that old geezer not to fuckin’ go, I fuckin’ told him,” He buried his head in Alejandro’s shoulder and began to cry uncontrollably, convulsing.

  He was babbling and spittle collected on Alejandro’s shoulder, he could feel its wetness seeping through the fabric, but he didn’t care. He continued to hold him because he knew the kid needed this comfort more than ever.

  And it was his responsibility, after all. He was the man behind the rudder. He was the captain of this ship now. And this was his burden to shoulder.

  *

  He left Boris on his mattress, curled into fetal position and still crying, but in better shape than when it had first started. Boris didn’t need to say anything, his body language communicated that he wanted to be left alone and Alejandro left the room.

  His next stop was the most important, the talk with Charlie.

  But first he went down to the basement where Paul had shown him where the spare weapons were. He went down to the basement and took two pistols. One he put into the holster at his hip, the other he carried in his hand.

  Alejandro went back upstairs to the room he and Charlie shared. He pushed past the door and took in a deep breath that made Charlie glance up at him for a second before diverting his attention back to the word search in his hands. His brows furrowed closer together as his frustration with being stumped by the puzzle increased.

  “Que pasa, loco?” Alejandro said, sitting down on the floor next to him. He pointed to where the word RIFT was on the page.

  Charlie scowled. “Dad, you’re ruining the fun!”

  “Sorry, looked like you needed a hand.” Alejandro put the gun between them and said, “Got you a present.”

  Charlie looked at it like it was a snake getting ready to pounce. “Huh?”

  “I told you I’d give you your own when we find another, so here it is. Take it, it’s yours.”

  Charlie picked it up and inspected it the way he used to inspect the toy cars his dad would bring home on paydays. The gun was a revolver. He had seen it plenty of times on television, but in his hands the silver was ominous, sinister even.

  “I don’t think I’ll win Father of the Year handing my twelve year old son a revolver,” Alejandro chuckled.

  “You win it in my eyes every year,” Charlie said, and smiled at him.

  Alejandro handed him a box of bullets for the gun. “Don’t load it unless I tell you you can, okay?”

  Charlie looked down at the gun in his hands, and then put it to the side next to the word search book.

  “Thanks dad,” and because he wanted to hide the indifference in the tone of his voice he quickly asked, “How’d the wall stuff go?”

  Alejandro sighed. “Well, that’s another thing I came to talk to you about.”

  “Someone died, huh?”

  It hurt Alejandro that his son asked that question with the casualness one uses when asking if people bailed out on a skiing trip. “Yeah, Charlie. Howard and Will, they both died.”

  “Boris must be sad. Really sad.”

  “Yeah,” Alejandro said.

  “So what happens now? Do we leave everyone behind and go our separate ways?”

  “No, we’re going to go through with what Howard had in mind.”

  “Oh.”

  Silence.

  Then Charlie said, “I’m going.”

  “What?”

  “I want to go with you when you go across the wall. I want to see what’s past it and I want to fight alongside you.”

  “Charlie this isn’t a comic book—”

  “I know, Dad, but I want to do it. If you die on the other side of the wall and don’t come back, I’ll kill myself anyway. I’ll put a bullet through my head, I swear I will.”

  Alejandro’s eyes filled with tears and his hands clenched into fists. “Charlie, stop this.”

  “Claire wants to go to. We talked about it. She said she would do the same if her dad didn’t come back.”

  Alejandro couldn’t bring himself to respond.

  “I know how dangerous it’ll be, Dad. We’ve been through a lot already and we survived. I know you don’t want to put me in danger, but I think just being alive in this world is danger
enough, don’t you think?”

  Alejandro thought about taking the gun and bullets back, but he knew there would be no point. They would find the weapons anyway if Claire didn’t already know where they were and kill themselves if that’s what they meant to do.

  “You stay by my side at all times, Charlie. You hear me? And you follow my orders without a question, you hear?”

  “Yes.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  “You promise what?”

  “I promise I’ll follow your orders without a question.”

  They sat in silence for a little while longer until Alejandro got up and headed for the door. Charlie opened his word search book and went back to the puzzle. It was an abrupt and awkward ending to the conversation, but Alejandro wasn’t sure there was a proper way to end it.

  At the door way Alejandro stopped, and still keeping his back to Charlie, to hide the tears flowing down his eyes, he said, “I love you, mijo.”

  “I love you, too, Pa.”

  11

  This was going to be the first run through the rock wall. Alejandro was in the driver’s seat, Paul was in the passenger seat with the rifle Alejandro had gotten from the brothers, Boris was in the backseat with a pair of binoculars, and Felicia was next to him with a pistol.

  The windows were rolled down so that everyone could shoot on sight, and this strategic gesture invited the blast of heat from the outside in, turning the truck into a sweatbox. The sun had gotten things cooking and the temperatures had climbed up since earlier that day when they had blown up the wall up.

  Alejandro brought the truck to a rolling stop when they got to the wall. The way there seemed to be a crude path of gravel and black dust leading to the other side it looked more like a missile had gone through it than a bunch of dynamite.

  “Well, here we go,” Alejandro said. “Everyone ready?”

  “It’s like some fucked up road trip.” Felicia said behind him.